Bøger i Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture serien

This book explores the work of Cervantes in relation to the ideas about the mind that circulated in early modern Europe and were propelled by thinkers such as Juan Luis Vives, Juan Huarte de San Juan, Oliva Sabuco, Andres Laguna, Andres Velasquez, Marsilio Ficino, Gomez Pereira, and others.

Visiting memory and erotics in the early modern period, this volume brings together two vibrant areas of Renaissance studies: the study of memory and the study of sexuality. Essays explore how memory re-shapes the concerns of queer studies, including the unhistorical, the experience of desire, and the limits of the body, and how the erotic revises the dominant trends of memory studies, from the rhetoric of the medieval memory arts to the formation of collective pasts. Showing that Shakespeare and contemporaries were deeply interested in the interoperability of memory and sexuality, the volume suggests that both undergird the fraught constructions of social identity in early modern England.

This volume addresses dealings with the wondrous, magical, holy, sacred, sainted, numinous, uncanny, auratic, and sacral in the plays of Shakespeare and contemporaries, produced in an era often associated with the irresistible rise of a thinned-out secular rationalism. By starting from the literary text and looking outwards to social, cultural, and historical aspects, it comes to grips with the instabilities of ΓÇÿenchantedΓÇÖ and ΓÇÿdisenchantedΓÇÖ practices of thinking and knowledge-making in the early modern period. If what marvelously stands apart from conceptions of the worldΓÇÖs ordinary functioning might be said to be ΓÇÿenchantedΓÇÖ, is the enchantedness weakened, empowered, or modally altered by its translation to theatre? We have a received historical narrative of disenchantment as a large-scale early modern cultural process, inexorable in character, consisting of the substitution of a rationally understood and controllable world for one containing substantial areas of mystery. Early modern cultural change, however, involves transpositions, recreations, or fresh inventions of the enchanted, and not only its replacement in diminished or denatured form. This collection is centrally concerned with what happens in theatre, as a medium which can give power to experiences of wonder as well as circumscribe and curtail them, addressing plays written for the popular stage that contribute to and reflect significant contemporary reorientations of vision, awareness, and cognitive practice. The volume uses the idea of dis-enchantment/re-enchantment as a central hub to bring multiple perspectives to bear on early modern conceptualizations and theatricalizations of wonder, the sacred, and the supernatural from different vantage points, marking a significant contribution to studies of magic, witchcraft, enchantment, and natural philosophy in Shakespeare and early modern drama.

Broadening the conversation begun in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe (2009), this book examines how the spatial dynamics of public making changed the shape of early modern society. The publics visited in this volume are voluntary groupings of diverse individuals that could coalesce through the performative uptake of shared cultural forms and practices. The contributors argue that such forms of association were social productions of space as well as collective identities. Chapters explore a range of cultural activities such as theatre performances; travel and migration; practices of persuasion; the embodied experiences of lived space; and the central importance of media and material things in the creation of publics and the production of spaces. They assess a multiplicity of publics that produced and occupied a multiplicity of social spaces where collective identity and voice could be created, discovered, asserted, and exercised. Cultural producers and consumers thus challenged dominant ideas about just who could enter the public arena, greatly expanding both the real and imaginary spaces of public life to include hitherto excluded groups of private people. The consequences of this historical reconfiguration of public space remain relevant, especially for contemporary efforts to meaningfully include the views of ordinary people in public life.

Luce Irigaray is one of the most influential and controversial feminist theorists of the 20th century. This text explores the pre-Enlightenment roots of Irigaray's thoughts, as well as the impact that her writing has had on our understanding of classical, medieval and Renaissance culture.

Dreams have been significant in different cultures, carrying messages about this world and others, posing problems about knowledge, truth, and what it means to be human. This book is a collection of essays which explore dreams and visions in early modern Europe, canvassing the place of the dream and dream-theory in texts and in social movements.

This book analyzes how narrative technique developed from the late Middle Ages to the beginning of the eighteenth-century. The contributors address issues such as subjectivity, performance, voice, narrative time, character development and genre, placing their readings of early modern prose texts within the diachronic frame of the overall topic. Individual chapters will treat texts from a variety of genres, offering analyses of individual texts in the context of changes and developments within literary forms. The book in its entirety will cover a period of approximately 350 years, from 1370 to 1720.

Offers a look at how people, things, and fresh forms of knowledge created 'publics' in early modern Europe, and how publics changed the shape of early modern society.

A collection of essays that examines the idea of future in early modern European literature, politics, religion, science, and social life. Investigating how both elite and popular writers represented their access to or control over the future, it proposes fresh insights into one of the defining characteristics of modernity.

A collection that offers readers an encounter with the historical experience of people adapting to a pandemic emergency and the corresponding narrative representation of that crisis, as early modern writers transformed the plague into literature.

Covers the continuities between three forms of romance that have often been separated from one another in critical discourse: early modern prose fiction, the dramatic romances staged in England during the 1570s and 1580s, and Shakespeare's late plays.

Opening up an area overlooked by Renaissance scholarship, this collection of essays historicizes and theorizes 'forgetting' in English literary texts.