Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England
Title | Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England PDF eBook |
Author | William E. Engel |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 311 |
Release | 2022-10-13 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1108910424 |
Drawing together leading scholars of early modern memory studies and death studies, Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England explores and illuminates the interrelationships of these categories of Renaissance knowing and doing, theory and praxis. The collection features an extended Introduction that establishes the rich vein connecting these two fields of study and investigation. Thereafter, the collection is arranged into three subsections, 'The Arts of Remembering Death', 'Grounding the Remembrance of the Dead', and 'The Ends of Commemoration', where contributors analyse how memory and mortality intersected in writings, devotional practice, and visual culture. The book will appeal to scholars of early modern literature and culture, book history, art history, and the history of mnemonics and thanatology, and will prove an indispensable guide for researchers, instructors, and students alike.
Death and Drama in Renaissance England
Title | Death and Drama in Renaissance England PDF eBook |
Author | William E. Engel |
Publisher | Oxford University Press, USA |
Total Pages | 222 |
Release | 2002 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780199257621 |
Table of contents
Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England
Title | Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England PDF eBook |
Author | William E. Engel |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 311 |
Release | 2022-10-31 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1108843395 |
This collection reexamines commemoration and memorialization as generative practices illuminating the hidden life of Renaissance death arts.
The Death Arts in Renaissance England
Title | The Death Arts in Renaissance England PDF eBook |
Author | William E. Engel |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 408 |
Release | 2022-09-08 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1108800394 |
The first-ever critical anthology of the death arts in Renaissance England, this book draws together over 60 extracts and 20 illustrations to establish and analyse how people grappled with mortality in the 16th and 17th centuries. As well as providing a comprehensive resource of annotated and modernized excerpts, this engaging study includes commentary on authors and overall texts, discussions of how each excerpt is constitutive and expressive of the death arts, and suggestions for further reading. The extended Introduction takes into account death's intersections with print, gender, sex, and race, surveying the period's far-reaching preoccupation with, and anticipatory reflection upon, the cessation of life. For researchers, instructors, and students interested in medieval and early modern history and literature, the Reformation, memory studies, book history, and print culture, this indispensable resource provides at once an entry point into the field of early modern death studies and a springboard for further research.
The Memory Arts in Renaissance England
Title | The Memory Arts in Renaissance England PDF eBook |
Author | William E. Engel |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 397 |
Release | 2016-08-18 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 1107086817 |
Anthology of a selection of early modern works on memory.
Memories of War in Early Modern England
Title | Memories of War in Early Modern England PDF eBook |
Author | Susan Harlan |
Publisher | Springer |
Total Pages | 317 |
Release | 2016-09-23 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1137580127 |
This book examines literary depictions of the construction and destruction of the armored male body in combat in relation to early modern English understandings of the past. Bringing together the fields of material culture and militarism, Susan Harlan argues that the notion of “spoiling” – or the sanctioned theft of the arms and armor of the vanquished in battle – provides a way of thinking about England’s relationship to its violent cultural inheritance. She demonstrates how writers reconstituted the spoils of antiquity and the Middle Ages in an imagined military struggle between male bodies. An analysis of scenes of arming and disarming across texts by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare and tributes to Sir Philip Sidney reveals a pervasive militant nostalgia: a cultural fascination with moribund models and technologies of war. Readers will not only gain a better understanding of humanism but also a new way of thinking about violence and cultural production in Renaissance England.
Issues of Death
Title | Issues of Death PDF eBook |
Author | Michael Neill |
Publisher | Clarendon Press |
Total Pages | 420 |
Release | 1997-05-01 |
Genre | Drama |
ISBN | 0191588563 |
Death, like most experiences that we think of as natural, is a product of the human imagination: all animals die, but only human beings suffer Death; and what they suffer is shaped by their own time and culture. Tragedy was one of the principal instruments through which the culture of early modern England imagined the encounter with mortality. The essays in this book approach the theatrical reinvention of Death from three perspectives. Those in Part I explore Death as a trope of apocalypse — a moment of un-veiling or dis-covery that is figured both in the fearful nakedness of the Danse Macabre and in the shameful openings enacted in the new theatres of anatomy. Separate chapters explore the apocalyptic design of two of the periods most powerful tragedies — Shakespeare's Othello, and Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling. In Part 2, Neill explores the psychological and affective consequences of tragedy's fiercely end-driven narrative in a number of plays where a longing for narrative closure is pitched against a particularly intense dread of ending. The imposition of an end is often figured as an act of writerly violence, committed by the author or his dramatic surrogate. Extensive attention is paid to Hamlet as an extreme example of the structural consequences of such anxiety. The function of revenge tragedy as a response to the radical displacement of the dead by the Protestant abolition of purgatory — one of the most painful aspects of the early modern re-imagining of death — is also illustrated with particular clarity. Finally, Part 3 focuses on the way tragedy articulates its challenge to the undifferentiating power of death through conventions and motifs borrowed from the funereal arts. It offers detailed analyses of three plays — Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, and Ford's The Broken Heart. Here, funeral is rewritten as triumph, and death becomes the chosen instrument of an heroic self-fashioning designed to dress the arbitrary abruption of mortal ending in a powerful aesthetic of closure.