Didactic Literature in England 1500–1800

Didactic Literature in England 1500–1800

Author: Sara Pennell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 1351944320

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Ranging from music to astronomy, gardening to the Bible, this essay collection is the first multi-disciplinary volume to examine a kind of text that was a staple of early modern English publishing: the how-to book. It tackles a wide range of subjects - grammars, music books, gardening manuals, teach-yourself book-keeping - while highlighting the commonalities of diverse texts as didactic works, and situating this material in wider intellectual and material contexts. An introductory essay explores the uses of didactic texts in early modern culture, evaluates their relationships with other literary forms, and establishes the significance of such texts within the cultural history of the period. There follow contributions by an international group of scholars from a broad range of disciplines, including the history of science, literature, lingustics, and musicology. The volume addresses the important issue of how texts that tend to be regarded today as 'non-literary' functioned within early modern literature. It also evaluates relationships between textual prescription and actual practices, and the early modern conception of experience as opposed to knowledge, that presently concern social and cultural historians and historians of science. Drawing attention to non-fictional, didactic texts as opposed to the imaginative and political writings that have been its focus until now, Didactic Literature in England 1500-1800 adds a new dimension to the study of reading, readership and publishing. All in all, it constitutes a substantial contribution to histories of knowledge, of educational processes and practices, and to the history of the book in early modern England.


The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530-1700

The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530-1700

Author: Kevin Killeen

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2015-08-27

Total Pages: 951

ISBN-13: 0191510599

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The Bible was, by any measure, the most important book in early modern England. It preoccupied the scholarship of the era, and suffused the idioms of literature and speech. Political ideas rode on its interpretation and deployed its terms. It was intricately related to the project of natural philosophy. And it was central to daily life at all levels of society from parliamentarian to preacher, from the 'boy that driveth the plough', famously invoked by Tyndale, to women across the social scale. It circulated in texts ranging from elaborate folios to cheap catechisms; it was mediated in numerous forms, as pictures, songs, and embroideries, and as proverbs, commonplaces, and quotations. Bringing together leading scholars from a range of fields, The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, 1530-1700 explores how the scriptures served as a generative motor for ideas, and a resource for creative and political thought, as well as for domestic and devotional life. Sections tackle the knotty issues of translation, the rich range of early modern biblical scholarship, Bible dissemination and circulation, the changing political uses of the Bible, literary appropriations and responses, and the reception of the text across a range of contexts and media. Where existing scholarship focuses, typically, on Tyndale and the King James Bible of 1611, The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in England, 1530-1700 goes further, tracing the vibrant and shifting landscape of biblical culture in the two centuries following the Reformation.


The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England

The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England

Author: Kathleen Miller

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-07-06

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1137510579

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This book is about the literary culture that emerged during and in the aftermath of the Great Plague of London (1665). Textual transmission impacted upon and simultaneously was impacted by the events of the plague. This book examines the role of print and manuscript cultures on representations of the disease through micro-histories and case studies of writing from that time, interpreting the place of these media and the construction of authorship during the outbreak. The macabre history of plague in early modern England largely ended with the Great Plague of London, and the miscellany of plague writings that responded to the epidemic forms the subject of this book.


The Plague Epic in Early Modern England

The Plague Epic in Early Modern England

Author: Rebecca Totaro

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-02-24

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 1317021304

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The Plague Epic in Early Modern England: Heroic Measures, 1603-1721 presents together, for the first time, modernized versions of ten of the most poignant of plague poems in the English language - each composed in heroic verse and responding to the urgent need to justify the ways of God in times of social, religious, and political upheaval. Showcasing unusual combinations of passion and restraint, heart-rending lamentation and nation-building fervor, these poems function as literary memorials to the plague-time fallen. In an extended introduction, Rebecca Totaro makes the case that these poems belong to a distinct literary genre that she calls the 'plague epic.' Because the poems are formally and thematically related to Milton's great epics Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, this volume represents a rare discovery of previously unidentified sources of great value for Milton studies and scholarly research into the epic, didactic verse, cultural studies of the seventeenth century, illness as metaphor, and interdisciplinary approaches to illness, natural disaster, trauma, and memory.


The Child Reader, 1700-1840

The Child Reader, 1700-1840

Author: M. O. Grenby

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-02-17

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0521196442

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This book is a major study of child readers and their reading habits in the period when children's literature first became established.


Household Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England

Household Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England

Author: Anne Stobart

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-09-08

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1472580370

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How did 17th-century families in England perceive their health care needs? What household resources were available for medical self-help? To what extent did households make up remedies based on medicinal recipes? Drawing on previously unpublished household papers ranging from recipes to accounts and letters, this original account shows how health and illness were managed on a day-to-day basis in a variety of 17th-century households. It reveals the extent of self-help used by families, explores their favourite remedies and analyses differences in approaches to medical matters. Anne Stobart illuminates cultures of health care amongst women and men, showing how 'kitchin physick' related to the business of medicine, which became increasingly commercial and professional in the 18th century.


Speech, Print and Decorum in Britain, 1600--1750

Speech, Print and Decorum in Britain, 1600--1750

Author: Elspeth Jajdelska

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-10

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1317051335

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Filling an important gap in the history of print and reading, Elspeth Jajdelska offers a new account of the changing relationship between speech, rank and writing from 1600 to 1750. Jajdelska draws on anthropological findings to shed light on the different ways that speech was understood to relate to writing across the period, bringing together status and speech, literary and verbal decorum, readership, the material text and performance. Jajdelska's ambitious array of sources includes letters, diaries, paratexts and genres from cookery books to philosophical discourses. She looks at authors ranging from John Donne to Jonathan Swift, alongside the writings of anonymous merchants, apothecaries and romance authors. Jajdelska argues that Renaissance readers were likely to approach written and printed documents less as utterances in their own right and more as representations of past speech or as scripts for future speech. In the latter part of the seventeenth century, however, some readers were treating books as proxies for the author's speech, rather than as representations of it. These adjustments in the way speech and print were understood had implications for changes in decorum as the inhibitions placed on lower-ranking authors in the Renaissance gave way to increasingly open social networks at the start of the eighteenth century. As a result, authors from the lower ranks could now publish on topics formerly reserved for the more privileged. While this apparently egalitarian development did not result in imagined communities that transcended class, readers of all ranks did encounter new models of reading and writing and were empowered to engage legitimately in the gentlemanly criticism that had once been the reserve of the cultural elites. Shortlisted for the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) book prize 2018


Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy

Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy

Author: Deborah L Krohn

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 1317134559

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Though Bartolomeo Scappi's Opera (1570), the first illustrated cookbook, is well known to historians of food, up to now there has been no study of its illustrations, unique in printed books through the early seventeenth century. In Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy, Krohn both treats the illustrations in Scappi's cookbook as visual evidence for a lost material reality; and through the illustrations, including several newly-discovered hand-colored examples, connects Scappi's Opera with other types of late Renaissance illustrated books. What emerges from both of these approaches is a new way of thinking about the place of cookbooks in the history of knowledge. Krohn argues that with the increasing professionalization of many skills and trades, Scappi was at the vanguard of a new way of looking not just at the kitchen-as workshop or laboratory-but at the ways in which artisanal knowledge was visualized and disseminated by a range of craftsmen, from engineers to architects. The recipes in Scappi's Opera belong on the one hand to a genre of cookery books, household manuals, and courtesy books that was well established by the middle of the sixteenth century, but the illustrations suggest connections to an entirely different and emergent world of knowledge. It is through study of the illustrations that these connections are discerned, explained, and interpreted. As one of the most important cookbooks for early modern Europe, the time is ripe for a focused study of Scappi's Opera in the various contexts in which Krohn frames it: book history, antiquarianism, and visual studies.


The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England

The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England

Author: Andrew Hadfield

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-23

Total Pages: 586

ISBN-13: 1317042069

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The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of current research on popular culture in the early modern era. For the first time a detailed yet wide-ranging consideration of the breadth and scope of early modern popular culture in England is collected in one volume, highlighting the interplay of 'low' and 'high' modes of cultural production (while also questioning the validity of such terminology). The authors examine how popular culture impacted upon people's everyday lives during the period, helping to define how individuals and groups experienced the world. Issues as disparate as popular reading cultures, games, food and drink, time, textiles, religious belief and superstition, and the function of festivals and rituals are discussed. This research companion will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early modern history and culture.


Describing Women's Clothing in Eighteenth-Century England

Describing Women's Clothing in Eighteenth-Century England

Author: Elizabeth Spencer

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2024-03-12

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1837650349

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Uncovers sources from the parish pauper to the gentlewoman to consider relationships with clothing across the social hierarchy in the long eighteenth century.Descriptions of women's clothing increasingly circulated across textual genres and beyond in eighteenth-century England. This book explores the significance of these descriptions across a range of sources including wills, newspapers, accounts, court records, and the records of the old poor law.Attention has rested on women literate and wealthy enough to leave behind textual or material traces, but this book ranges from the parish pauper to the gentlewoman to consider descriptive languages, rhetorical strategies, and relationships with clothing across the social hierarchy. It explores how women described their own clothing, but also looks at how it was described by overseers, family members, retailers, and even strangers. It shows that we must look beyond isolated descriptions to how, why, and who was describing clothing to understand its role. Chapters uncover themes of material obligation, expectation, and entitlement.This book also contributes to our understanding of the material literacy of eighteenth-century consumers. It traces the role of textual description in this dissemination of knowledge about clothing, but also alerts us to what was happening beyond the written word, drawing attention to the communication of multisensory information. Above all, it demonstrates that there remains much still to be unpicked from textual sources.ncover themes of material obligation, expectation, and entitlement.This book also contributes to our understanding of the material literacy of eighteenth-century consumers. It traces the role of textual description in this dissemination of knowledge about clothing, but also alerts us to what was happening beyond the written word, drawing attention to the communication of multisensory information. Above all, it demonstrates that there remains much still to be unpicked from textual sources.ncover themes of material obligation, expectation, and entitlement.This book also contributes to our understanding of the material literacy of eighteenth-century consumers. It traces the role of textual description in this dissemination of knowledge about clothing, but also alerts us to what was happening beyond the written word, drawing attention to the communication of multisensory information. Above all, it demonstrates that there remains much still to be unpicked from textual sources.ncover themes of material obligation, expectation, and entitlement.This book also contributes to our understanding of the material literacy of eighteenth-century consumers. It traces the role of textual description in this dissemination of knowledge about clothing, but also alerts us to what was happening beyond the written word, drawing attention to the communication of multisensory information. Above all, it demonstrates that there remains much still to be unpicked from textual sources.