Dreams have been significant in many different cultures, carrying messages about this world and others, posing problems about knowledge, truth, and what it means to be human. This thought-provoking collection of essays explores dreams and visions in early modern Europe, canvassing the place of the dream and dream-theory in texts and in social movements. In topics ranging from the dreams of animals to the visions of Elizabeth I, and from prophetic dreams to ghosts in political writing, this book asks what meanings early modern people found in dreams.

A focus on memory has come to prominence across a wide range of disciplines. History, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and cultural studies have placed memory at the heart of their interrogations of subjectivity, narrative, time and imagination. At the same time, memory has emerged as a central theme and preoccupation in popular literature, film and television, and the emergence of memory as an academic theme cannot be separated from its prominence in the wider culture. This volume represents, explores and interrogates the current developments, engaging directly with the place of memory in culture, and with memory's meaning's and history.

A fascinating case study of the complex psychic relationship between religion and madness in early seventeenth-century England, the narrative presented here is a rare, detailed autobiographical account of one woman's experience of mental disorder. The writer, Dionys Fitzherbert, recounts the course of her affliction and recovery and describes various delusions and confusions, concerned with (among other things) her family and her place within it; her relation to religion; and the status of the body, death and immortality. Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England presents in modern typography an annotated edition of the author's manuscript of this unusual and compelling text. Also included are prefaces to the narrative written by Fitzherbert and others, and letters written shortly after her mental crisis, which develop her account of the episode. The edition will also give a modernized version of the original text. Katharine Hodgkin supplies a substantial introduction that places this autobiography in the context of current scholarship on early modern women, addressing the overarching issues in the field that this text touches upon. In an appendix to the volume, Hodgkin compares the two versions of the text, considering the grounds for the occasional exclusion or substitution of specific words or passages. Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England adds an important new dimension to the field of early modern women studies.

Dreams have been significant in many different cultures, carrying messages about this world and others, posing problems about knowledge, truth, and what it means to be human. This thought-provoking collection of essays explores dreams and visions in early modern Europe, canvassing the place of the dream and dream-theory in texts and in social movements. In topics ranging from the dreams of animals to the visions of Elizabeth I, and from prophetic dreams to ghosts in political writing, this book asks what meanings early modern people found in dreams.

A focus on memory has come to prominence across a wide range of disciplines. History, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and cultural studies have placed memory at the heart of their interrogations of subjectivity, narrative, time and imagination. At the same time, memory has emerged as a central theme and preoccupation in popular literature, film and television, and the emergence of memory as an academic theme cannot be separated from its prominence in the wider culture. This volume represents, explores and interrogates the current developments, engaging directly with the place of memory in culture, and with memory's meaning's and history.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203391535

Contents:
Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone Introduction: Contested Pasts
Part I: Transforming Pasts
1. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone Introduction
2. Alessandro Portelli The Massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine: History, Myth, Ritual and Symbol
3. Anne Heimo and Ulla-Maija Peltonen Memories and Histories, Public and Private: After the Finnish Civil War
4. Graham Carr War, History and the Education of (Canadian) Memory
5. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer 'We Would Never Have Come Without You: Generations of Nostalgia
Part II: Remembering Suffering: Trauma and History
6. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone Introduction
7. Janet Walker The Traumatic Paradox: Autobiographical Documentary and the Psychology of Memory
8. Carrie Hamilton Memories of Violence in Interviews with Basque Nationalist Women
9. Paula Hamilton Sale of the Century? Memory and Historical Consciousness in Australia
10. Christopher Colvin 'Brothers and Sisters, Do Not Be Afraid Of Me': Trauma, History and the Therapeutic Imagination in the New South Africa
Part III: Patterning the National Past
11. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone Introduction
12. Rachel Hughes Nationalism and Memory at the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide Crimes, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
13. Maya Nadkarni The 'Death' of Socialism and the 'Afterlife' of its Monuments: Making and Marketing the Past in Budapest's Statue Park Museum
14. Robert Burgoyne From Contested to Consensual Memory: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum
15. Chris Healy 'Dead Man': Film, Colonialism and Memory
Part IV: And Then Silence
16. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone Introduction
17. Luisa Passerini Memories between Silence and Oblivion

This inter-disciplinary volume demonstrates, from a range of perspectives, the complex cultural work and struggles over meaning that lie at the heart of what we call memory.

In the last decade, a focus on memory in the human sciences has encouraged new approaches to the study of the past. As the humanities and social sciences have put into question their own claims to objectivity, authority and universality, memory has appeared to offer a way of engaging with knowledge of the past as inevitably partial, subjective and local. At the same time, memory and memorial practices have become sites of contestation, and the politics of memory are increasingly prominent.