Written by an international group of highly regarded scholars and rooted in the field of intermedial approaches to literary studies, this volume explores the complex aesthetic process of "picturing" in early modern English literature. The essays in this volume offer a comprehensive and varied picture of the relationship between visual and verbal in the early modern period, while also contributing to the understanding of the literary context in which Shakespeare wrote. Using different methodological approaches and taking into account a great variety of texts, including Elizabethan sonnet sequences, metaphysical poetry, famous as well as anonymous plays, and court masques, the book opens new perspectives on the literary modes of "picturing" and on the relationship between this creative act and the tense artistic, religious and political background of early modern Europe. The first section explores different modes of looking at works of art and their relation with technological innovations and religious controversies, while the chapters in the second part highlight the multifaceted connections between European visual arts and English literary production. The third section explores the functions performed by portraits on the page and the stage, delving into the complex question of the relationship between visual and verbal representation. Finally, the chapters in the fourth section re-appraise early modern reflections on the relationship between word and image and on their respective power in light of early-seventeenth-century visual culture, with particular reference to the masque genre.

Dissent and Authority in Early Modern Ireland: The English Problem from Bale to Shakespeare examines the problems that beset the Tudor administration of Ireland through a range of selected 16th century English narratives. This book is primarily concerned with the period between 1541 and 1603. This bracket provides a framework that charts early modern Irish history from the constitutional change of the island from lordship to kingdom to the end of the conquest in 1603. The mounting impetus to bring Ireland to a "complete" conquest during these years has, quite naturally, led critics to associate England's reform strategies with Irish Otherness. The preoccupation with this discourse of difference is also perceived as the "Irish Problem," a blanket term broadly used to describe just about every aspect of Irishness incompatible with the English imperialist ideologies. The term stresses everything that is "wrong" with the Irish nation-Ireland was a problem to be resolved. This book takes a different approach towards the "Irish Problem." Instead of rehashing the English government's complaints of the recalcitrant Irish and the long struggle to impose royal authority in Ireland, I posit that the "Irish Problem" was very much shaped and developed by a larger "English Problem," namely English dissent within the English government. The discussions in this book focuse on the ways in which English writers articulated their knowledge and anxieties of the "English Problem" in sixteenth-century literary and historical narratives. This book reappraises the limitations of the "Irish Problem," and argues that the crown's failure to control dissent within its own ranks was as detrimental to the conquest as the "Irish Problem," if not more so, and finally, it attempts to demonstrate how dissent translate into governance and conquest in early modern Ireland.

Frances Sheridan's Eugenia and Adelaide is an astonishing first novel of parental tyranny, infidelity, kidnap, blackmail, and violence played out over two volumes against the backdrop of continental Europe. The friendship of Eugenia and Adelaide endures in spite of their separation at the beginning of the novel and remains central to a complex yet coherently drawn web of intriguing tales situated in palatial apartments and remote moss-covered castles. Drawing upon the tragic and comic possibilities of disguise familiar to her from Shakespearean and Restoration drama, and influenced by the romantic entanglements of early prose fiction, Sheridan adopts a sometimes satirical approach to extraordinary events at the same time that she demonstrates a sincere and convincing commitment to the ingenious art of storytelling. Sheridan completed the novel in 1739 when she was just fifteen-years old and Eugenia and Adelaide would prove instrumental to the establishing of Sheridan's literary reputation as one of the most successful novelists and dramatists of the mid-eighteenth century. This is the first modern edition of Eugenia and Adelaide to be published since the original posthumous publication of 1791 and presents a unique opportunity to explore Sheridan's contribution to our current understandings of the history of women's writing, and of reading tastes and practices in the long eighteenth century.

A Tale of a Fool? explores the life of Gudrun Ketilsdottir, a peasant woman born in Iceland around 1759. Gudrun worked as a farmhand for most of her adult life, and when she died she left behind a partial autobiography, which is believed to be the oldest autobiography of an Icelandic peasant woman. In this autobiography, Gudrun writes openly about her life and provides colourful depictions of the society in which she lived, providing one of the few first-hand accounts that have survived from members of the peasant class at that time. A Tale of a Fool? demonstrates how it is possible to work with this kind of source using the methods of microhistory as a historical tool to study events and individuals of the past. In doing so, it not only provides an illuminating study of the life of a peasant woman in the 18th and 19th centuries but also addresses the question of the methods, priorities and interpretations applied in the collecting, cataloguing and publication of women's writing. Analysing the place of the individual in traditional agrarian societies and highlighting the impact that women have had on the cultural and social history of the period, A Tale of a Fool? is ideal for researchers of microhistory and early modern Iceland/Scandinavia.

Nation-Space in Enlightenment Britain: An Archaeology of Empire is a provocative intervention that extends considerably the parameters of on-going dialogues about British identity during the Enlightenment. Thoughtfully interdisciplinary and with an allegiance to the culture which literary production engenders, this book describes how British identity emerges not despite of but due to its fluid, volatile, and subversive impulses and expressions. The imperial establishment-codified in the logics of the corporation, the academy, the cathedral, the theater, as well the private parlor or garden-derives its power and sustainability from scripting and then championing a solid resistance to precisely those subversive elements which threaten or undermine the foundations of order and liberalism in civil society. Choudhury argues that imperial Britain can best be understood in terms of this culture's investment in spatial alignments which celebrated a radial interface with remote points of commercial interest. The volume contends Daniel Defoe, Arthur Onslow, David Garrick, Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander, Hans Sloane, Francis Barber, Samuel Johnson, Charles Burney, George Frideric Handel were not merely part of a dazzling line-up of the architects of empire. In retrospect, their contributions and various engagements reflect remarkably modern patterns of the corporatization of culture and this culture's dependence on, and thus its collusion with, commerce.

Renaissance humanism takes as one of its subjects for inquiry the category of the human itself. As Intricate Movements: Experimental Thinking and Human Analogies in Sidney and Spenser shows, late sixteenth-century English poets found some remarkably radical ways to interrogate and redefine the status of humans. The recent vogue for posthumanist theory encourages a view of non-human objects and animals in Renaissance literature as pathways to essentially anti-humanist thought. On the contrary, this book argues that Sidney, Spenser, and their contemporaries employ animals, earth, buildings, and fictions as analogies employed toward a better understanding of what makes humans a special category, both ontologically and ethically. Horses and riders are studied by Sidney as a way to understand readers and writers; the 1580 Dover Straits Earthquake provides Spenser and Gabriel Harvey an opportunity to explore human emotion; liturgical spaces are represented by Sidney and Spenser in order to reassess human community; and fictional persons are interrogated by Spenser as models for human interpersonal epistemology. This volume seeks to return critical assessments of the period's engagement with the non-human back to human concerns. Focusing on several early modern analogies between human and non-human entities, Intricate Movements argues Sidney's and Spenser's thinking about the human is both radically experimental and, ultimately, humane.

Fortification and Its Discontents from Shakespeare to Milton gives new coherence to the literature of the early modern Atlantic world by placing it in the context of radical changes to urban space following the Italian War of 1494-1498. The new walled city that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on both sides of the Atlantic provided an outlet for a wide range of humanistic fascinations with urban design, composition, and community organization, but it also promoted centrality of control and subordinated the human environment to military functionality. Examining William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, John Winthrop, and John Milton, this volume shows how the literature of England and New England explores and challenges the new walled city as England struggled to define the sprawling metropolis of London, translate English urban spaces into Ireland and North America, and, later, survive a long civil war.

This volume explores the influence of the lettre de cachet on both Diderot's personal life and his works, beginning with an examination of Diderot's experience as recipient of two such arrest warrants, followed by an analysis of his references to these warrants in three of his fictional works, Le Pere de famille, Jacques le fataliste and Est-il bon? Est-il mechant?. A scrutiny of Diderot's memoire/lettre novel La Religieuse proposes that, on the basis of moral cupidity, or self-gain, Madame Simonin sends her daughter Suzanne two veiled lettres de cachet that demand her confinement to a convent. The exploration of a fascinating real-life case of Henriette-Emilie de Bautru, a young comtesse whose mother confined her to a convent as a result of a lettre de cachet also based on motives of greed, leads to an examination of the similarities between Suzanne and the Comtesse in terms of their illegitimacy, questioning of authority and subsequent rebellion. A consideration of writing and communication in La Religieuse as they relate to this rebellion leads to an investigation of Diderot's admiration of the mystery of female genius and artistic creativity as discussed in his essay Sur les femmes. The works of Julia Kristeva, especially her Post-Scriptum addressed to Diderot at the end of her work Therese mon amour: Therese d'Avila, serve as a theoretical basis for an interpretation of Suzanne's experience as victim of a lettre de cachet and her search for a psychological rebirth of her etre cache.

It has long been accepted that when Samuel Taylor Coleridge rejected the Unitarianism of his youth and returned to the Church of England, he did so while accepting a general Christian orthodoxy. Christopher Corbin clarifies Coleridge's religious identity and argues that while Coleridge's Christian orthodoxy may have been sui generis, it was closely aligned with moderate Anglican Evangelicalism. Approaching religious identity as a kind of culture that includes distinct forms of language and networks of affiliation in addition to beliefs and practices, this book looks for the distinguishable movements present in Coleridge's Britain to more precisely locate his religious identity than can be done by appeals to traditional denominational divisions. Coleridge's search for unity led him to desire and synthesize the "warmth" of heart religion (symbolized as Methodism) with the "light" of rationalism (symbolized as Socinianism), and the evangelicalism in the Church of England, being the most chastened of the movement, offered a fitting place from which this union of warmth and light could emerge. His religious identity not only included many of the defining Anglican Evangelical beliefs, such as an emphasis on original sin and the New Birth, but he also shared common polemical opponents, appropriated evangelical literary genres, developed a spirituality centered on the common evangelical emphases of prayer and introspection, and joined Evangelicals in rejecting baptismal regeneration. When placed in a chronological context, Coleridge's form of Christian orthodoxy developed in conversation with Anglican Evangelicals; moreover, this relationship with Anglican Evangelicalism likely helped facilitate his return to the Church of England. Corbin not only demonstrates the similarities between Coleridge's relationship to a form of evangelicalism with which most people have little familiarity, but also offers greater insight into the complexities and tensions of religious identity in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain as a whole.

In a work that will be of interest to students and scholars of American Literature, Romanticism, Transcendentalism, the History of Ideas,and Religious Studies, Brad Bannon examines Samuel Taylor Coleridge's engagement with the philosophical theology of Jonathan Edwards. A closer look at Coleridge's response to Edwards clarifies the important influence that both thinkers had on seminal works of the nineteenth century, ranging from the antebellum period to the aftermath of the American Civil War-from Poe's fiction and Emerson's essays to Melville's Billy Budd and Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Similarly, Coleridge's early espousal of an abolitionist theology that had evolved from Edwards and been shaped by John Woolman and Olaudah Equiano sheds light on the way that American Romantics later worked to affirm a philosophy of supernatural self-determination. Ultimately, what Coleridge offered the American Romantics was a supernatural modification of Edwards' theological determinism, a compromise that provided Emerson and other nineteenth-century thinkers with an acceptable extension of an essentially Calvinist theology. Indeed, a thoroughgoing skepticism with respect to salvation, as well as a faith in the absolute inscrutability of Providence, led both the Transcendentalists and the Dark Romantics to speculate freely on the possibility of supernatural self-determination while doubting that anything other than God, or nature, could harness the power of causation.

The corporation - an immortal collective bound to act for the common good - was developed in the seventeenth century, but comparatively little attention has been paid to its literary ramifications. This work combines corporate history with literary analysis to demonstrate how corporations, and the literature they engendered, shaped ideas of the public sphere, trust, the morality of trade and exchange, national identity, and salvation. Drawing on a wide range of genres - including corporate publications, letters, and minute books; dramatic works; epic poetry and sermons - this study shows how widely corporate rhetoric spread, and how embedded it was in the early modern social imagination.

This edited collection, Political Economy, Literature & the Formation of Knowledge, aims to address the genealogy and formation of political economy as a knowledge project from 1720 to 1850. Through individual essays on both literary and political economic writers, this volume defines and analyses the formative moves, both epistemological and representational, which proved foundational to the emergence of political economy as a dominant discourse of modernity. The collection also explores political economy's relation to other discourses and knowledge practices in this period; representation in and of political economy; abstraction and political economy; fictional mediations and interrogations of political economy; and political economy and its 'others', including political economy and affect, and political economy and the aesthetic. Essays presented in this text are at once historical and conceptual in focus, and manifest literary critical disciplinary expertise whilst being of genuinely broad and interdisciplinary interest. Amongst the writers whose work is addressed are: Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, David Hume, Thomas Malthus, Jane Marcet, J. S. Mill, David Ricardo, and Adam Smith. The introduction, by the editors, sets up the conceptual, theoretical and analytical framework explored by each of the essays. The final essay and response bring the concerns of the volume up to date by engaging with current economic and financial realities, by, respectively, showing how an informed and critical history of political economy could transform current economic practices, and by exploring the abundance of recent conceptual art addressing representation and the unpresentable in economic practice.

A sequel to Tomita's A Bibliographical Catalogue of Italian Books Printed in England 1558-1603, this volume provides the data for the succeeding 40 years (during the reign of King James I and Charles I) and contributes to the study of Anglo-Italian relations in literature through entries on 187 Italian books (335 editions) printed in England. The Catalogue starts with the books published immediately after the death of Queen Elizabeth I on 24 March 1603, and ends in 1642 with the closing of English theatres. It also contains 45 Elizabethan books (75 editions), which did not feature in the previous volume. Formatted along the lines of Mary Augusta Scott's Elizabethan Translations from the Italian (1916), and adopting Philip Gaskell's scientific method of bibliographical description, this volume provides reliable and comprehensive information about books and their publication, viewed in a general perspective of Anglo-Italian transactions in Jacobean and part of Caroline England.

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern Stage furthers the debate about the cultural work performed by representations of magic on the early modern English stage. It considers the ways in which performances of magic reflect and feed into a sense of national identity, both in the form of magic contests and in its recurrent linkage to national defence; the extent to which magic can trope other concerns, and what these might be; and how magic is staged and what the representational strategies and techniques might mean. The essays range widely over both canonical plays-Macbeth, The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Doctor Faustus, Bartholomew Fair-and notably less canonical ones such as The Birth of Merlin, Fedele and Fortunio, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, The Devil is an Ass, The Late Lancashire Witches and The Witch of Edmonton, putting the two groups into dialogue with each other and also exploring ways in which they can be profitably related to contemporary cases or accusations of witchcraft. Attending to the representational strategies and self-conscious intertextuality of the plays as well as to their treatment of their subject matter, the essays reveal the plays they discuss as actively intervening in contemporary debates about witchcraft and magic in ways which themselves effect transformation rather than simply discussing it. At the heart of all the essays lies an interest in the transformative power of magic, but collectively they show that the idea of transformation applies not only to the objects or even to the subjects of magic, but that the plays themselves can be seen as working to bring about change in the ways that they challenge contemporary assumptions and stereotypes.

The seventeenth century was a period of immense turmoil. This book explores the methods by which a distinctive iconography was created for each Stuart king, describes the cultural life of the Civil War period and the Cromwellian Protectorate, and analyses the impact of the antiquarian movement which constructed a new sense of national identity. Through this detailed and fascinating discussion of seventeenth-century society, Graham Parry provides a clear insight into the many forces operating on the literature of the period.

Presented in two volumes, The Ashgate Research Companion to The Sidneys, 1500-1700 assesses the current state of scholarship on members of the Sidney family and their impact, as historical and/or literary figures, in the period 1500-1700. Volume 2: Literature, begins with an exploration of the Sidneys' books and manuscripts and how they circulated, followed by an overview of the contributions of family members -Sir Philip Sidney; Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Lady Mary Wroth; Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester; and William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke - in the genres of prose romance, drama, poetry, psalms and prose. These essays outline major controversies and areas for further research, as well as conducting literary analysis.

Through entries on 291 Italian books (451 editions) published in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, covering the years 1558-1603, this catalogue represents a summary of current research and knowledge of diffusion of Italian culture on English literature in this period. It also provides a foundation for new work on Anglo-Italian relations in Elizabethan England. Mary Augusta Scott's 1916 Elizabethan Translations from the Italian forms the basis for the catalogue; Soko Tomita adds 59 new books and eliminates 23 of Scott's original entries. The information here is presented in a user-friendly and uncluttered manner, guided by Philip Gaskell's principles of bibliographical description; the volume includes bibliographical descriptions, tables, graphs, images, and two indices (general and title). In an attempt to restore each book to its original status, each entry is concerned not only with the physical book, but with the human elements guiding it through production: the relationship with the author, editor, translator, publisher, book-seller, and patron are all recounted as important players in the exploration of cultural significance. Renaissance Anglo-Italian relations were marked by both patriotism and xenophobia; this catalogue provides reliable and comprehensive information about books and publication as well as concrete evidence of what elements of Italian culture the English responded to and how Italian culture was acclimatized into Elizabethan England.

1. First book aimed at a student or general market reading Shakespeare through the lens of anthropology - close study of several commonly-studied plays so will fit well on courses 2. Shakespeare is a popular topic in many subjects and this can function as a textbook on anthropology and social studies courses that look at literature 3. This book will appeal beyond the usual Shakespeare and literary studies market to anthropology and social sciences

1. First book aimed at a student or general market reading Shakespeare through the lens of anthropology - close study of several commonly-studied plays so will fit well on courses 2. Shakespeare is a popular topic in many subjects and this can function as a textbook on anthropology and social studies courses that look at literature 3. This book will appeal beyond the usual Shakespeare and literary studies market to anthropology and social sciences

Fools and clowns were widely popular characters employed in early modern drama, prose texts and poems mainly as laughter makers, or also as ludicrous metaphorical embodiments of human failures. Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England: Folly, Law and Medicine, 1500-1640 pays full attention to the intellectual difference of fools, rather than just their performativity: what does their total, partial, or even pretended 'irrationality' entail in terms of non-standard psychology or behaviour, and others' perception of them? Is it possible to offer a close contextualised examination of the meaning of folly in literature as a disability? And how did real people having intellectual disabilities in the Renaissance period influence the representation and subjectivity of literary fools? Alice Equestri answers these and other questions by investigating the wide range of significant connections between the characters and Renaissance legal and medical knowledge as presented in legal records, dictionaries, handbooks, and texts of medicine, natural philosophy, and physiognomy. Furthermore, by bringing early modern folly in closer dialogue with the burgeoning fields of disability studies and disability theory, this study considers multiple sides of the argument in the historical disability experience: intellectual disability as a variation in the person and as a difference which both society and the individual construct or respond to. Early modern literary fools' characterisation then emerges as stemming from either a realistic or also from a symbolical or rhetorical representation of intellectual disability.

Eliza Haywood was one of the most prolific English writers in the Age of the Enlightenment. Her career, from Love in Excess (1719) to her last completed project The Invisible Spy (1755) spanned the gamut of genres: novels, plays, advice manuals, periodicals, propaganda, satire, and translations. Haywood's importance in the development of the novel is now well-known. A Spy on Eliza Haywood links this with her work in the other genres in which she published at least one volume a year throughout her life, demonstrating how she contributed substantially to making women's writing a locus of debate that had to be taken seriously by contemporary readers, as well as now by current scholars of political, moral, and social enquiries into the eighteenth century. Haywood's work is essential to the study of eighteenth-century literature and this collection of essays continues the growing scholarship on this most important of women writers.

In the late fifteenth century, the production of print editions of Claudius Ptolemy's second-century Geography sparked one of the most significant intellectual developments of the era-the production of mathematically-based, north-oriented maps. The production of world maps in England, however, was notably absent during this "Ptolemaic revival." As a result, the impact of Ptolemy's text on English geographical thought has been obscured and minimalized, with scholars speculating a possible English indifference to or isolation from European geographic developments. Tracing English geographical thought through the material culture of literary and popular texts, this study provides evidence for the reception and transmission of Ptolemaic-based geography in England during a critical period of geographic innovation and synthesis, one that laid the foundation for modern geographical representation. With evidence from prose romance, book illustration, theatrical performance, cosmological ceilings, and almanacs, Mirror of the World proposes a new, interdisciplinary literary and cartographic history of the influence of Ptolemaic geography in England, one that reveals the lively integration of geographic concepts through narrative and non-cartographic visual forms.

Shakespeare's Sublime Pathos: Person, Audience, Language breaks new ground in providing a sustained, demystifying treatment of its subject and looking for answers to basic questions regarding the creation, experience, aesthetics and philosophy of Shakespearean sublimity. More specifically, it explores how Shakespeare generates experiences of sublime pathos, for which audiences have been prepared by the sublime ethos described in the companion volume, Shakespeare's Sublime Ethos. To do so, it examines Shakespeare's model of mutualistic character, in which "entangled" language brokers a psychic communion between fictive persons and real-life audiences and readers. In the process, Sublime Critical platitudes regarding Shakespeare's liberating ambiguity and invention of the human are challenged, while the sympathetic imagination is reinstated as the linchpin of the playwright's sublime effects. As the argument develops, the Shakespearean sublime emerges as an emotional state of vulnerable exhilaration leading to an ethically uplifting openness towards others and an epistemologically bracing awareness of human unknowability. Taken together, Shakespeare's Sublime Pathos and Shakespeare's Sublime Ethos show how Shakespearean drama integrates matter and spirit on hierarchical planes of cognition and argue that, ultimately, his is an immanent sublimity of the here-and-now enfolding a transcendence which may be imagined, simulated or evoked, but never achieved.

Shakespeare's Sublime Ethos: Matter, Stage, Form breaks new ground in providing a sustained, demystifying treatment of its subject and looking for answers to basic questions regarding the creation, experience, aesthetics and philosophy of Shakespearean sublimity. More specifically, it explores how Shakespeare generates a sublime mood or ethos which predisposes audiences intellectually and emotionally for the full experience of sublime pathos, explored in the companion volume, Shakespeare's Sublime Pathos. To do so, it examines Shakespeare's invention of sublime matter, his exploitation of the special characteristics of the Elizabethan stage, and his dramaturgical and formal simulacra of absolute space and time. In the process, it considers Shakespeare's conception of the universe and man's place in it and uncovers the epistemological and existential implications of key aspects of his art. As the argument unfolds, a case is made for a transhistorically baroque Shakespeare whose "bastard art" enables the dramatic restoration of an original innocence where ignorance really is bliss. Taken together, Shakespeare's Sublime Ethos and Shakespeare's Sublime Pathos show how Shakespearean drama integrates matter and spirit on hierarchical planes of cognition and argue that, ultimately, his is an immanent sublimity of the here-and-now enfolding a transcendence which may be imagined, simulated or evoked, but never achieved.

Shakespearean Drama, Disability, and the Filmic Stare synthesizes Laura Mulvey's male gaze and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's stare into a new critical lens, the filmic stare, in order to understand and analyze the visual construction of disability in adaptations of Shakespearean drama. The book explores the intersections of adaptation studies, film studies, Shakespeare studies, and disability studies to analyze twentieth and twenty-first century representations of both physical disability and 'madness' in global cinematic film, television film, and digital broadcast cinema in Shakespeare's works. Shakespearean Drama, Disability, and the Filmic Stare argues that the filmic stare does not differentiate between male and female characters with disabilities, or between powerful and powerless figures in disability representation. This multi-disciplinary volume is ideal for disability studies scholars, Shakespeare scholars, and those interested in adaptations of Shakespeare's famous works.