Astrology, Almanacs, and the Early Modern English Calendar
Astrology, Almanacs, and the Early Modern English Calendar

Author: Phebe Jensen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-11-22

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 1317034961

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Astrology, Almanacs, and the Early Modern English Calendar is a handbook designed to help modern readers unlock the vast cultural, religious, and scientific material contained in early modern calendars and almanacs. It outlines the basic cosmological, astrological, and medical theories that undergirded calendars, traces the medieval evolution of the calendar into its early modern format against the background of the English Reformation, and presents a history of the English almanac in the context of the rise of the printing industry in England. The book includes a primer on deciphering early modern printed almanacs, as well as an illustrated guide to the rich visual and verbal iconography of seasons, months, and days of the week, gathered from material culture, farming manuals, almanacs, and continental prints. As a practical guide to English calendars and the social, mathematical, and scientific practices that inform them, Astrology, Almanacs,and the Early Modern English Calendar is an indispensable tool for historians, cultural critics, and literary scholars working with the primary material of the period, especially those with interests in astrology, popular science, popular print, the book as material artifact, and the history of time-reckoning.

Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play
Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play

Author: Marissa Nicosia

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-01-19

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0198872658

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Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660 argues that dramatic narratives about monarchy and succession codified speculative futures in the early modern English cultural imaginary. This book considers chronicle plays--plays written for the public stage and play pamphlets composed when the playhouses were closed during the civil wars--in order to examine the formal and material ways that playwrights imagined futures in dramatic works that were purportedly about the past. Through close readings of William Shakespeare's 1&2 Henry IV, Richard III, Shakespeare's and John Fletcher's All is True, Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me, John Ford's Perkin Warbeck, and the anonymous play pamphlets The Leveller's Levelled, 1 & 2 Craftie Cromwell, Charles I, and Cromwell's Conspiracy, the volume shows that imaginative treatments of history in plays that are usually associated with the past also had purchase on the future. While plays about the nation's past retell history, these plays are not restricted by their subject matter to merely document what happened: Playwrights projected possible futures in their accounts of verifiable historical events.

Waste Paper in Early Modern England
Waste Paper in Early Modern England

Author: Anna Reynolds

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-02-27

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0198882726

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The ubiquity of waste paper in early modern England has long been misunderstood. Though insults and modesty tropes that refer to waste paper are widespread, these have often been dismissed as nothing more than rhetorical flourishes. Paired with the common misconception that paper would have been too valuable to 'waste' in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these tropes have been read as scatological flights of fancy. Waste Paper in Early Modern England argues that such commonplaces are in fact indicative of everyday, material experience - of an author's, reader's, housewife's, or city-dweller's immersion in an environment brimming with repurposed scraps and sheets. It demonstrates that waste paper makes visible a radically different understanding of waste matter in the early modern period than in our own. More than a rhetorical aside, repurposed pages were both materially and figuratively useful. Drawing on a range of literary, pictorial, and bibliographical sources, Waste Paper in Early Modern England reveals how layers of meaning accreted around paper fragments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and how, because of the widespread sensitivity to the life cycle of paper and books, wasted pages prompted meaningful imaginative work. The book's five chapters recount how, in this period, the biography of waste paper provided a thing to think with concerning matter and temporality - a potent and flexible emblem for the troublesome passage of books and all other sorts of bodies through time.

Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Enlightenment
Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Enlightenment

Author: Michael R. Lynn

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-03-17

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1000557456

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Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Enlightenment argues for the centrality of magical practices and ideas throughout the long eighteenth century. Although the hunt for witches in Europe declined precipitously after 1650, and the intellectual justification for natural magic came under fire by 1700, belief in magic among the general population did not come to a sudden stop. The philosophes continued to take aim at magical practices, alongside religion, as examples of superstitions that an enlightened age needed to put behind them. In addition to a continuity of beliefs and practices, the eighteenth century also saw improvement and innovation in magical ideas, the understanding of ghosts, and attitudes toward witchcraft. The volume takes a broad geographical approach and includes essays focusing on Great Britain (England and Ireland), France, Germany, and Hungary. It also takes a wide approach to the subject and includes essays on astrology, alchemy, witchcraft, cunning folk, ghosts, treasure hunters, and purveyors of magic. With a broad chronological scope that ranges from the end of the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, this volume is useful for undergraduates, postgraduates, scholars, and those with a general interest in magic, witchcraft, and spirits in the Enlightenment.

Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calender (1579)
Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calender (1579)

Author: Kenneth Borris

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2022-03-08

Total Pages: 482

ISBN-13: 1526133474

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Spenser’s extraordinary Shepheardes Calender as first printed in 1579 is arguably the seminal book of the Elizabethan literary renaissance. This volume reassesses it as a material text in relation to book history, and provides the first clearly detailed facsimile of the 1579 Calender available as a book. The editor reconsiders the original book’s development, production, design, and particular characteristics, and demonstrates both its correlations with diverse precursors in print and its significant departures. Numerous illustrations of archival sources facilitate comparison. By reinvestigating the 1579 Calender’s twelve pictures, he shows that Spenser himself probably designed them, that they involve complex symbolism, and that this book’s meaning is thus profoundly verbal-visual. An analyzed facsimile is an essential new resource for study of Spenser’s Calender, Spenser, Elizabethan print and poetics, and early modern English literary history.

Autobiography in Early Modern England
Autobiography in Early Modern England

Author: Adam Smyth

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-08-05

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0521761727

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Explores life-writing forms - almanacs, financial accounts, commonplace books and parish registers - which emerged during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Edmund Spenser
Edmund Spenser

Author: Andrew Hadfield

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2012-06-28

Total Pages: 3216

ISBN-13: 0191650218

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Edmund Spenser's innovative poetic works have a central place in the canon of English literature. Yet he is remembered as a morally flawed, self-interested sycophant; complicit in England's ruthless colonisation of Ireland; in Karl Marx's words, 'Elizabeth's arse-kissing poet'-- a man on the make who aspired to be at court and who was prepared to exploit the Irish to get what he wanted. In his vibrant and vivid book, the first biography of the poet for 60 years, Andrew Hadfield finds a more complex and subtle Spenser. How did a man who seemed destined to become a priest or a don become embroiled in politics? If he was intent on social climbing, why was he so astonishingly rude to the good and the great - Lord Burghley, the earl of Leicester, Sir Walter Ralegh, Elizabeth I and James VI? Why was he more at home with 'the middling sort' -- writers, publishers and printers, bureaucrats, soldiers, academics, secretaries, and clergymen -- than with the mighty and the powerful? How did the appalling slaughter he witnessed in Ireland impact on his imaginative powers? How did his marriage and family life shape his work? Spenser's brilliant writing has always challenged our preconceptions. So too, Hadfield shows, does the contradictory relationship between his between life and his art.

The Cosmic Calendar
The Cosmic Calendar

Author: Christopher Renstrom

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2020-10-20

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0525541098

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Go from astrology-curious to cosmically empowered with this expert guide to decoding the stars for everyday life Timing is everything--and astrology is a personalized calendar designed just for you. Go beyond the memes and clichés to discover how to use this ancient system to get in sync with the stars--to become the fully empowered, energized, and happy human you are uniquely meant to be. With fascinating, funny, and spot-on insights--and without jargon or technical details--popular astrologer and columnist Christopher Renstrom illuminates the "time stamp" the stars gave you when you were born, giving you actionable insights to help you work with the stars, not against them, to live your best life every day. You'll discover: How the signs and seasons of the year work together to tell us when to take action What the planets and the four elements reveal about our personalities and preferences The best time to start a new relationship, quit your job, and finally get your finances in order--based on your unique astrological profile If you're ready to go beyond the basics--but not into the weeds--level up with The Cosmic Calendar.

Astrology and Numerology in Medieval and Early Modern Catalonia
Astrology and Numerology in Medieval and Early Modern Catalonia

Author: John Scott Lucas

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2003-09-01

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9047402545

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The Tractat de prenostication de la vida natural dels hòmens, a late fifteenth-century Catalan incunable, draws on a rich tradition of astrological magic, geomancy, Pythagorean numerology, and Hebrew gematria. This practical manual offers a method of determining the birth sign based on calculations performed on the subject’s name and his or her mother’s name. The critical edition includes a literary, historical, and linguistic study; an English translation; and a Catalan-English glossary. The Tractat reveals Catalan sources for prognostication, a unique expression of medieval syncretism, the mingling of traditions, and the development of new ideas. It is a rare find for Hispanists and others interested in astrology, magic, the history of science, and early print culture.