The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558-1660

The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558-1660

Author: Simon Smith

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 9780719091582

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Considering a wide range of early modern texts, performances and artworks, the essays in this collection demonstrate how attention to the senses illuminates the literature, art and culture of early modern England. The volume responds to burgeoning interest in the senses from both literary scholars and cultural historians, arguing that early modern ideas about the senses resonate significantly through texts, performances and artworks of the period, even as these art forms themselves provide invaluable suggestions about the place of the senses in early modern culture. Examining canonical and less familiar literary works alongside early modern texts ranging from medical treatises to conduct manuals via puritan polemic and popular ballads, the collection offers a new view of the senses in early modern England. This book offers dedicated essays on each of the five senses, each relating works of art to particular cultural moments, whilst elsewhere the volume considers the senses collectively in various cultural contexts. It also pursues the sensory experiences that early modern subjects encountered through the very acts of engaging with texts, performances and artworks. Authors discussed at length include George Chapman, Sir John Davies, John Donne, Robert Herrick, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare and Mary Wroth; art forms including drama, poetry, prose, music, dance, pomanders and painting are all the subject of at least one dedicated chapter. This book will appeal to scholars of early modern literature and culture, to those working in sensory studies, and to anyone interested in the art and life of early modern England.


The sense of early modern writing

The sense of early modern writing

Author: Mark Robson

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2018-09-30

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1526130637

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In The sense of Early Modern writing, Mark Robson pursues the relation between the concept of the ‘early modern’ and modernity, tracing the complex interactions of post-Romantic, philosophical aesthetics and early modern rhetoric and poetics. The book therefore questions the status of what we now think of as literary texts in a period prior to the emergence of literature as a category. In this way, Robson argues for an attention to the classical notion of aisthesis, that is, for the crucial dimension of perception and response in reading and thinking -- and its rhetorical determination -- to be taken into account. Robson’s theoretically-informed approach, drawing in particular on the work of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, fundamentally challenges the idea that critical theory is of little relevance in the reading of early modern texts. The sense of Early Modern writing includes readings of both familiar and unfamiliar texts by Shakespeare, Sidney, Jonson, Hester Pulter and others, and considers topics such as ears, eyes, tongues, hands and voices, in order to ask: How should we read early modern texts? The book will therefore be of interest to all students and researchers in early modern or Renaissance studies, as well as to those thinking through the theories and histories of literature, aesthetics and rhetoric.


The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England

The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England

Author: Annette Kern-Stähler

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2016-05-02

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9004315497

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The essays collected in The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England examine the interrelationships between sense perception and secular and Christian cultures in England from the medieval into the early modern periods. They address canonical texts and writers in the fields of poetry, drama, homiletics, martyrology and early scientific writing, and they espouse methods associated with the fields of corpus linguistics, disability studies, translation studies, art history and archaeology, as well as approaches derived from traditional literary studies. Together, these papers constitute a major contribution to the growing field of sensorial research that will be of interest to historians of perception and cognition as well as to historians with more generalist interests in medieval and early modern England. Contributors include: Dieter Bitterli, Beatrix Busse, Rory Critten, Javier Díaz-Vera, Tobias Gabel, Jens Martin Gurr, Katherine Hindley, Farah Karim-Cooper, Annette Kern-Stähler, Richard Newhauser, Sean Otto, Virginia Richter, Elizabeth Robertson, and Kathrin Scheuchzer


The Pen's Triumph

The Pen's Triumph

Author: Edward Cocker

Publisher: Andesite Press

Published: 2017-08-21

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13: 9781375772983

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This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.


Plague Writing in Early Modern England

Plague Writing in Early Modern England

Author: Ernest B. Gilman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-08-01

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 0226294110

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During the seventeenth century, England was beset by three epidemics of the bubonic plague, each outbreak claiming between a quarter and a third of the population of London and other urban centers. Surveying a wide range of responses to these epidemics—sermons, medical tracts, pious exhortations, satirical pamphlets, and political commentary—Plague Writing in Early Modern England brings to life the many and complex ways Londoners made sense of such unspeakable devastation. Ernest B. Gilman argues that the plague writing of the period attempted unsuccessfully to rationalize the catastrophic and that its failure to account for the plague as an instrument of divine justice fundamentally threatened the core of Christian belief. Gilman also trains his critical eye on the works of Jonson, Donne, Pepys, and Defoe, which, he posits, can be more fully understood when put into the context of this century-long project to “write out” the plague. Ultimately, Plague Writing in Early Modern England is more than a compendium of artifacts of a bygone era; it holds up a distant mirror to reflect our own condition in the age of AIDS, super viruses, multidrug resistant tuberculosis, and the hovering threat of a global flu pandemic.


Writing New Worlds

Writing New Worlds

Author: Marília dos Santos Lopes

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2016-05-11

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1443894303

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Writing New Worlds analyses the different ways in which travel literature constituted a fundamental pillar in the production of knowledge in the modern era. The impressive frequency of publication and the widespread circulation of translations and editions account for the leading and essential contribution of travel literature for a better understanding and awareness about the dynamics and practices associated with decoding and making sense of the prose of the world. These texts, in some cases accompanied by illustrations, covered a broad and extensive panoply of languages, grammars and ways of seeing, translating and writing new worlds. In drawing special attention to internationally less-studied sources from Portugal and Germany, the book shows how authors, scholars and artists between the 15th and 17th centuries responded to the challenges of modernity, and explores the cultural dynamics involved in grasping and understanding the New.


Sensible Flesh

Sensible Flesh

Author: Elizabeth D. Harvey

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2016-03-11

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 0812293630

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This ground-breaking interdisciplinary collection explores the complex, ambiguous, and contradictory sense of touch in early modern culture. If touch is the sense that mediates between the body of the subject and the world, these essays make apparent the frequently disregarded lexicons of tactility that lie behind and beneath early modern discursive constructions of eroticism, knowledge, and art. For the early moderns, touch was the earliest and most fundamental sense. Frequently aligned with bodily pleasure and sensuality, it was suspect; at the same time, it was associated with the authoritative disciplines of science and medicine, and even with religious knowledge and artistic creativity. The unifying impulse of Sensible Flesh is both analytic and recuperative. It attempts to chart the important history of the sense of touch at a pivotal juncture and to understand how tactility has organized knowledge and defined human subjectivity. The contributors examine in theoretically sophisticated ways both the history of the hierarchical ordering of the senses and the philosophical and cultural consequences that derive from it. The essays consider such topics as New World contact, the eroticism of Renaissance architecture, the Enclosure Acts in England, plague, the clitoris and anatomical authority, Pygmalion, and the language of tactility in early modern theater. In exploring the often repudiated or forgotten sense of touch, the essays insistently reveal both the world of sensation that subtends early modern culture and the corporeal foundations of language and subjectivity.


Writing the Early Modern English Nation

Writing the Early Modern English Nation

Author: Herbert Grabes

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 9789042015258

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While there is overwhelming evidence that nationalism reached its peak in the later nineteenth century, views about when precisely national thinking and sentiment became strong enough to override all other forms of collective unity differ considerably. When one looks for the historical moment when the concept of the nation became a serious - and subsequently victorious - competitor to the monarchic dynasty as the most effective principle of collective unity, one must, at least for England, go back as far as the sixteenth century. The decisive change occurred when a split between the dynastic ruler and "England" could be widely conceived of and intensely felt, a split that established the nation as an autonomous - and more precious - body. Whereas such a differentiation between king and country was still imperceptible under Henry VIII, it was already an historical reality during the reign of Queen Mary. That the most important factors in this radical change were the Reformation and the printing press is by now well known. The particular aim of this volume is to demonstrate the pivotal role of pamphleteering - and the growing importance of public opinion in a steadily widening sense - within the process of the historical emergence of the concept of the nation as a culturally and politically guiding force. When it came to the voicing of dissident opinions, above all under Queen Mary and later during the reign of King James and Charles I, the printed pamphlet proved to be a far superior form of communication. This does not mean that books played no role in the early development and dissemination of the concept of an English nation. Especially the compendious new English histories written at the time did much to support the growth of cultural identity.


Early Modern English Literature

Early Modern English Literature

Author: Jason Scott-Warren

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2005-10-07

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 0745627528

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When we engage with the writings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, we encounter a culture radically unfamiliar to us at the start of the twenty-first century. The past is a foreign country, and so too are many of its texts. This readable and provocative book seeks to enhance our understanding of early modern literature by recovering the contexts in which it was originally produced and consumed. Taking us back to the courts, theatres and marketplaces of early modern England, Jason Scott-Warren reveals the varied ways in which literary texts dovetailed with everyday experience, unlocking the distinctive social practices, economic structures and modes of behaviour that gave them meaning. He shows how the periods most beguiling writings were conditioned by long-forgotten notions of knowledge, nationhood, sexuality and personal identity. Bringing an anthropologists eye to his materials, he offers richly detailed new readings of works from within and beyond the canon, covering a span that stretches from Erasmus and More to Milton and Behn. Resisting any notion of the period as merely transitional a staging post on the road leading from the medieval to the modern world Scott-Warren reveals the distinctiveness of its literary culture, and equips the reader for fresh encounters with its extraordinary textual legacy. Any undergraduate student of the period will find it an essential guide, while scholars will find its fresh approach invigorating.