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English mythography in its European context, 1500-1650
Greco-Roman mythology and its reception are at the heart of the European Renaissance, and mythographies-texts that collected and explained ancient myths-were considered indispensable companions to any reader of literature. Despite the importance of this genre, English mythographies have not gained sustained critical attention, largely because they have been wrongly considered mere copies of their European counterparts. This volume focuses on the English mythographies written between 1577 and 1647 by Stephen Batman, Abraham Fraunce, Francis Bacon, Henry Reynolds, and Alexander Ross: it places their texts into a wider, European context to reveal their unique English take on the genre and also unfolds the significant role myth played in the broader culture of the period, influencing not only literary life, natural philosophy and poetics, but also religious conflicts and Civil War politics. In doing so it demonstrates, for the first time, the considerable explanatory value classical mythology holds for the study of the English Renaissance and its literary culture in particular, and how early modern England answered a question we still find fascinating today: what is myth?
Book
Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance
Becoming Christian argues that romance narratives of Jews and Muslims converting to Christianity register theological formations of race in post-Reformation England. The medieval motif of infidel conversion came under scrutiny as Protestant theology radically reconfigured how individuals acquire religious identities. Whereas Catholicism had asserted that Christian identity begins with baptism, numerous theologians in the Church of England denied the necessity of baptism and instead treated Christian identity as a racial characteristic passed from parents to their children. The church thereby developed a theology that both transformed a nation into a Christian race and created skepticism about the possibility of conversion. Race became a matter of salvation and damnation. Britton intervenes in critical debates about the intersections of race and religion, as well as in discussions of the social implications of romance. Examining English translations of Calvin, treatises on the sacraments, catechisms, and sermons alongside works by Edmund Spenser, John Harrington, William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, and Phillip Massinger, Becoming Christian demonstrates how a theology of race altered a nation's imagination and literary landscape.
eBook
Shades of Difference
Was there such a thing as a modern notion of race in the English Renaissance, and, if so, was skin color its necessary marker? In fact, early modern texts described human beings of various national origins-including English-as turning white, brown, tawny, black, green, or red for any number of reasons, from the effects of the sun's rays or imbalance of the bodily humors to sexual desire or the application of makeup. It is in this cultural environment that the seventeenth-centuryLondon Gazetteused the term \"black\" to describe both dark-skinned African runaways and dark-haired Britons, such as Scots, who are now unquestioningly conceived of as \"white.\" InShades of Difference, Sujata Iyengar explores the cultural mythologies of skin color in a period during which colonial expansion and the slave trade introduced Britons to more dark-skinned persons than at any other time in their history. Looking to texts as divergent as sixteenth-century Elizabethan erotic verse, seventeenth-century lyrics, and Restoration prose romances, Iyengar considers the construction of race during the early modern period without oversimplifying the emergence of race as a color-coded classification or a black/white opposition. Rather, \"race,\" embodiment, and skin color are examined in their multiple contexts-historical, geographical, and literary. Iyengar engages works that have not previously been incorporated into discussions of the formation of race, such as Marlowe's \"Hero and Leander\" and Shakespeare's \"Venus and Adonis.\" By rethinking the emerging early modern connections between the notions of race, skin color, and gender,Shades of Differencefurthers an ongoing discussion with originality and impeccable scholarship.
eBook
Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare
Selected byChoicemagazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2009 The New Historicism of the 1980s and early 1990s was preoccupied with the fashioning of early modern subjects. But, Jonathan Gil Harris notes, the pronounced tendency now is to engage with objects. From textiles to stage beards to furniture, objects are read by literary critics as closely as literature used to be. For a growing number of Renaissance and Shakespeare scholars, the play is no longer the thing: the thing is the thing. Curiously, the current wave of \"thing studies\" has largely avoided posing questions of time. How do we understand time through a thing? What is the time of a thing? InUntimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, Harris challenges the ways we conventionally understand physical objects and their relation to history. Turning to Renaissance theories of matter, Harris considers the profound untimeliness of things, focusing particularly on Shakespeare's stage materials. He reveals that many \"Renaissance\" objects were actually survivals from an older time-the medieval monastic properties that, post-Reformation, were recycled as stage props in the public playhouses, or the old Roman walls of London, still visible in Shakespeare's time. Then, as now, old objects were inherited, recycled, repurposed; they were polytemporal or palimpsested. By treating matter as dynamic and temporally hybrid, Harris addresses objects in their futurity, not just in their encapsulation of the past.Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeareis a bold study that puts thematériel-the explosive, world-changing potential-back into a \"material culture\" that has been too often understood as inert stuff.
eBook
Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature
Water and cognition seem unrelated things, the one a physical environment and the other an intellectual process. The essays in this book show how bringing these two modes together revitalizes our understanding of both. Water and especially oceanic spaces have been central to recent trends in the environmental humanities and premodern ecocriticism. Cognition, including ideas about the “extended mind” and distributed cognition, has also been important in early modern literary and cultural studies over the past few decades. This book aims to think “water” and “cognition” as distinct critical modes and also to combine them in what we term “watery thinking.” Water and Cognition brings together cognitive science and ecocriticism to ask how the environment influences how humans think, and how they think about thinking. The collection explores how water — as element, as environment, and as part of our bodies — affects the way early modern and contemporary discourses understand cognition.
eBook
Blotted Lines
Blotted Lines rebuffs
centuries of mythologization about the creative process-the idea
that William Shakespeare \"never blotted out line\"-to argue that by
studying how early modern writers faced the challenges of writing
poetry, instructors today can empower their students' approaches to
critical writing. Adhaar Noor Desai offers deeply
researched accounts of how poetic labor intersected with early
modern rhetorical theory, material culture, and social
networks.
Tracing the productive struggles of such writers as George
Gascoigne, Philip Sidney, John Davies of Hereford, Lady Anne
Southwell, and Shakespeare across their manuscripts, Desai
identifies in their work instances of discomposition: frustration,
hesitation, self-doubt, and insecurity. Inspired to unmake their
poems so that they might remake them, these poets welcomed
discomposition because it catalyzed ongoing thinking and learning.
Blotted Lines brings literary scholarship into
conversation with modern composition studies, challenging early
modern literary studies to treat writing as both noun and verb and
foregrounding the ways poetry and criticism alike can model for
students the cultivation of patience, collaboration, and risk in
their writing.
eBook