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"Danes England History."
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The Empire of Cnut the Great
Drawing on a wide range of types of evidence this book offers a fresh impression of the 'empire' built by King Cnut (1016-1035) in England and Scandinavia, and offers insights into contemporary developments in the conceptions of this new dominion.
eBook
Danes in Wessex: the Scandinavian impact on southern England, c.800-c.1100
There have been many studies of the Scandinavians in Britain, but this is the first collection of essays to be devoted solely to their engagement with Wessex. New work on the early Middle Ages, not least the excavations of mass graves associated with the Viking Age in Dorset and Oxford, drew attention to the gaps in our understanding of the wider impact of Scandinavians in areas of Britain not traditionally associated with them. Here, a multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary approach to the problems of their study is presented. While there may not have been the same degree of impact, discernable particularly in place-names and archaeology, as in those areas of Britain which had substantial influxes of Scandinavian settlers, Wessex was a major theatre of the Viking wars in the reigns of Alfred and Æthelred Unræd. Two major topics, the Viking wars and the Danish landowning elite, figure strongly in this collection but are shown not to be the sole reasons for the presence of Danes, or items associated with them, in Wessex. Multi-disciplinary approaches evoke Vikings and Danes not just through the written record, but through their impact on real and imaginary landscapes and via the objects they owned or produced. The papers raise wider questions too, such as when did aggressive Vikings morph into more acceptable Danes, and what issues of identity were there for natives and incomers in a province whose founders were believed to have also come from North Sea areas, if not from parts of Denmark itself? Readers can continue for themselves aspects of these broader debates that will be stimulated by this fascinating and significant series of studies by both established scholars and new researchers.
eBook
Danes in Wessex
There have been many studies of the Scandinavians in Britain, but this is the first collection of essays to be devoted solely to their engagement with Wessex. New work on the early Middle Ages, not least the excavations of mass graves associated with the Viking Age in Dorset and Oxford, drew attention to the gaps in our understanding of the wider impact of Scandinavians in areas of Britain not traditionally associated with them. Here, a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to the problems of their study is presented. While there may not have been the same degree of impact, discernible particularly in place-names and archaeology, as in those areas of Britain which had substantial influxes of Scandinavian settlers, Wessex was a major theater of the Viking wars in the reigns of Alfred and Æthelred Unræd. Two major topics, the Viking wars and the Danish landowning elite, figure strongly in this collection but are shown not to be the sole reasons for the presence of Danes, or items associated with them, in Wessex. Multidisciplinary approaches evoke Vikings and Danes not just through the written record, but through their impact on real and imaginary landscapes and via the objects they owned or produced. The papers raise wider questions too, such as when did aggressive Vikings morph into more acceptable Danes, and what issues of identity were there for natives and incomers in a province whose founders were believed to have also come from North Sea areas, if not from parts of Denmark itself? Readers can continue for themselves aspects of these broader debates that will be stimulated by this fascinating and significant series of studies by both established scholars and new researchers.
eBook
Voice in Motion
Voice in Motionexplores the human voice as a literary, historical, and performative motif in early modern English drama and culture, where the voice was frequently represented as struggling, even failing, to work. In a compelling and original argument, Gina Bloom demonstrates that early modern ideas about the efficacy of spoken communication spring from an understanding of the voice's materiality. Voices can be cracked by the bodies that produce them, scattered by winds when transmitted as breath through their acoustic environment, stopped by clogged ears meant to receive them, and displaced by echoic resonances. The early modern theater underscored the voice's volatility through the use of pubescent boy actors, whose vocal organs were especially vulnerable to malfunction. Reading plays by Shakespeare, Marston, and their contemporaries alongside a wide range of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century texts-including anatomy books, acoustic science treatises, Protestant sermons, music manuals, and even translations of Ovid-Bloom maintains that cultural representations and theatrical enactments of the voice as \"unruly matter\" undermined early modern hierarchies of gender. The uncontrollable physical voice creates anxiety for men, whose masculinity is contingent on their capacity to discipline their voices and the voices of their subordinates. By contrast, for women the voice is most effective not when it is owned and mastered but when it is relinquished to the environment beyond. There, the voice's fragile material form assumes its full destabilizing potential and becomes a surprising source of female power. Indeed, Bloom goes further to query the boundary between the production and reception of vocal sound, suggesting provocatively that it is through active listening, not just speaking, that women on and off the stage reshape their world. Bringing together performance theory, theater history, theories of embodiment, and sound studies, this book makes a significant contribution to gender studies and feminist theory by challenging traditional conceptions of the links among voice, body, and self.
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Religion Around Shakespeare
For years scholars and others have been trying to out Shakespeare as an ardent Calvinist, a crypto-Catholic, a puritan-baiter, a secularist, or a devotee of some hybrid faith. In Religion Around Shakespeare, Peter Kaufman sets aside such speculation in favor of considering the historic and religious context surrounding his work. Employing extensive archival research, he aims to assist literary historians who probe the religious discourses, characters, and events that seem to have found places in Shakespeare’s plays and to aid general readers or playgoers developing an interest in the plays’ and playwright’s religious contexts: Catholic, conformist, and reformist. Kaufman argues that sermons preached around Shakespeare and conflicts that left their marks on literature, law, municipal chronicles, and vestry minutes enlivened the world in which (and with which) he worked and can enrich our understanding of the playwright and his work. Religion Around Shakespeare is the inaugural book in the Religion Around series. Books in this series examine the religious forces surrounding cultural icons from all facets of world history and contemporary culture. By bringing religious background into the foreground, these studies will help to give readers a more complex understanding and greater appreciation for individual subjects, their work, and their lasting influence.
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Dynamic Matter
Dynamic Matter investigates the life histories of
Renaissance objects. Eschewing the critical tendency to study how
objects relate to human needs and desires, this work foregrounds
the objects themselves, demonstrating their potential to transform
their environments as they travel across time and space.
Integrating early modern material theories with recent critical
approaches in Actor-Network Theory and object-oriented ontology,
this volume extends Aristotle's theory of dynameos -which
conceptualizes matter as potentiality-and applies it to objects
featured in early modern texts such as Edmund Spenser's The
Faerie Queene , Robert Hooke's Micrographia , and
William Shakespeare's The Tempest . Individual chapters
explore the dynameos of matter by examining its
manifestations in particular forms: combs are inscribed with words
and brushed through human hair; feathers are incorporated into
garments and artwork; Prince Rupert's glasswork drops explode; a
whale becomes animated by the power of a magical bracelet; and
books are drowned. These case studies highlight the potentiality
matter itself possesses and that which it activates in other
matter.
A theorization of objects grounded in Renaissance materialist
thought, Dynamic Matter examines the richness of things
themselves; the larger, multiple, and changing networks in which
things circulate; and the networks created by these transformative
objects.
In addition to the editor, the contributors to this volume
include Anna Riehl Bertolet, Erika Mary Boeckeler, Naomi Howell,
Emily E. F. Philbrick, Josie Schoel, Maria Shmygol, Edward McLean
Test, Abbie Weinberg, and Sarah F. Williams.
eBook
Virgin Whore
InVirgin Whore, Emma Maggie Solberg uncovers a surprisingly prevalent theme in late English medieval literature and culture: the celebration of the Virgin Mary's sexuality. Although history is narrated as a progressive loss of innocence, the Madonna has grown purer with each passing century. Looking to a period before the idea of her purity and virginity had ossified, Solberg uncovers depictions and interpretations of Mary, discernible in jokes and insults, icons and rituals, prayers and revelations, allegories and typologies-and in late medieval vernacular biblical drama.
More unmistakable than any cultural artifact from late medieval England, these biblical plays do not exclusively interpret Mary and her virginity as fragile. In a collection of plays known as the N-Town manuscript, Mary is represented not only as virgin and mother but as virgin and promiscuous adulteress, dallying with the Trinity, the archangel Gabriel, and mortals in kaleidoscopic erotic combinations. Mary's \"virginity\" signifies invulnerability rather than fragility, redemption rather than renunciation, and merciful license rather than ascetic discipline. Taking the ancient slander that Mary conceived Jesus in sin as cause for joyful laughter, the N-Town plays make a virtue of those accusations: through bawdy yet divine comedy, she redeems and exalts the crime.
By revealing the presence of this promiscuous Virgin in early English drama and late medieval literature and culture-in dirty jokes told by Boccaccio and Chaucer, Malory's Arthurian romances, and the double entendres of the allegorical Mystic Hunt of the Unicorn-Solberg provides a new understanding of Marian traditions.
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Outlaw Rhetoric
A central feature of English Renaissance humanism was its reverence for classical Latin as the one true form of eloquent expression. Yet sixteenth-century writers increasingly came to believe that England needed an equally distinguished vernacular language to serve its burgeoning national community. Thus, one of the main cultural projects of Renaissance rhetoricians was that of producing a \"common\" vernacular eloquence, mindful of its classical origins yet self-consciously English in character. The process of vernacularization began during Henry VIII's reign and continued, with fits and starts, late into the seventeenth century. However, as Jenny C. Mann shows inOutlaw Rhetoric, this project was beset with problems and conflicts from the start.
Outlaw Rhetoricexamines the substantial and largely unexplored archive of vernacular rhetorical guides produced in England between 1500 and 1700. Writers of these guides drew on classical training as they translated Greek and Latin figures of speech into an everyday English that could serve the ends of literary and national invention. In the process, however, they confronted aspects of rhetoric that run counter to its civilizing impulse. For instance, Mann finds repeated references to Robin Hood, indicating an ongoing concern that vernacular rhetoric is \"outlaw\" to the classical tradition because it is common, popular, and ephemeral. As this book shows, however, such allusions hint at a growing acceptance of the nonclassical along with a new esteem for literary production that can be identified as native to England. Working across a range of genres, Mann demonstrates the effects of this tension between classical rhetoric and English outlawry in works by Spenser, Shakespeare, Sidney, Jonson, and Cavendish. In so doing she reveals the political stakes of the vernacular rhetorical project in the age of Shakespeare.
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Victorian Science and Imagery
The nineteenth century was a period of science and imagery: when
scientific theories and discoveries challenged longstanding
boundaries between animal, plant, and human, and when art and
visual culture produced new notions about the place of the human in
the natural world. Just as scientists relied on graphic
representation to conceptualize their ideas, artists moved
seamlessly between scientific debate and creative expression to
support or contradict popular scientific theories-such as Darwin's
theory of evolution and sexual selection-deliberately drawing on
concepts in ways that allowed them to refute popular claims or
disrupt conventional knowledges. Focusing on the close kinship
between the arts and sciences during the Victorian period, the art
historians contributing to this volume reveal the unique ways in
which nineteenth-century British and American visual culture
participated in making science, and in which science informed art
at a crucial moment in the history of the development of the modern
world. Together, they explore topics in geology, meteorology,
medicine, anatomy, evolution, and zoology, as well as a range of
media from photography to oil painting. They remind us that science
and art are not tightly compartmentalized, separate influences.
Rather, these are fields that share forms, manifest as waves,
layers, lines, or geometries; that invest in the idea of the
evolution of form; and that generate surprisingly kindred
responses, such as pain, pleasure, empathy, and sympathy.
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