Early Modern Metaphysical Literature illuminates now-obscured aspects of cultural negotiation and denaturalization germane to numerous Metaphysical texts. Examining poetry and prose by Donne, Marvell, Lanyer, Crashaw, and Edward Herbert, this book challenges readers to recognize the provocative strangeness of these writings in their original contexts and today.
This book discusses the ways in which early modern hagiographic sources can be used to study lived religion and everyday life from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. For several decades, saints’ lives, other spiritual biographies, miracle narratives, canonisation processes, iconography, and dramas, have been widely utilised in studies on medieval religious practices and social history. This fruitful material has however been overlooked in studies of the early modern period, despite the fact that it witnessed an unprecedented growth in the volume of hagiographic material. The contributors to this volume address this, and illuminate how early modern hagiographic material can be used for the study of topics such as religious life, the social history of medicine, survival strategies, domestic violence, and the religious experience of slaves.
This book offers a comprehensive study into the perceptions of ancient and medieval Iran in the Byzantine empire, exploring the effects of Persian culture upon Byzantine intellectualism, society and culture. Byzantine Ideas of Persia, 650-1461 focusses on the enduring position of ancient Persia in Byzantine cultural memory, encompassing both in the 'religious' and the 'secular' significance. By analysing a wide range of historical sources – from church literature to belles-lettres – this book examines the intricate relationship between ancient Persia and Byzantine cultural memory, as well as the integration and function of Persian motifs in the Byzantine mentality. Additionally, the author uses these sources to analyse thoroughly the knowledge Byzantines had about contemporary Iranian culture, the presence of ethnic Iranians, and the circulation and usage of the Persian language in Byzantium. Finally, this book concludes with an insightful exploration of the importance and influence of Iranian science on Byzantine scholars. This book will appeal to scholars and studentsin the fields of Byzantine and Iranian History, particularly to those studying the cross-cultural and social influence between the two societies during the Middle Ages. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
This book examines the place of 'saints' and sanctity in a self-consciously modern age, and argues that Protestants were as fascinated by such figures as Catholics were. Long after the mechanisms of canonisation had disappeared, people continued not only to engage with the saints of the past but continued to make their own saints in all but name. Just as strikingly, it claims that devotional practices and language were not the property of orthodox Christians alone. Making and remaking saints in the nineteenth-century Britain explores for the first time how sainthood remained significant in this period both as an enduring institution and as a metaphor that could be transposed into unexpected contexts. Each of the chapters in this volume focuses on the reception of a particular individual or group, and together they will appeal to not only historians of religion, but those concerned with material culture, the cult of history, and with the reshaping of British identities in an age of faith and doubt.
