Author: John S. Mebane
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 344
Book Description
Studies Renaissance occultism and discusses how it influenced the work of popular artists and writers from the Renaissance, including Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare.
Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age
Author: John S. Mebane
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 344
Book Description
Studies Renaissance occultism and discusses how it influenced the work of popular artists and writers from the Renaissance, including Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare.
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 344
Book Description
Studies Renaissance occultism and discusses how it influenced the work of popular artists and writers from the Renaissance, including Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare.
A Magical World
Author: Derek K Wilson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1681777061
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234
Book Description
Spanning some of the most vibrant and fascinating eras in European history, Cambridge historian Derek Wilson reveals a society filled with an ardent desire for knowledge and astounding discoveries—and the fantastic discoveries that flowered from it. Thinkers were drew from surprising intellectual traditions: some from folk religion, which in its turn had deep roots in a pagan past; others referred to spirits or tapped into stores of ancient wisdom and herbal remedies. This was the world of wise women, witches, necromancers, potions and incantations. Even the mighty Catholic Church, which permeated all elements of life, had its own "magical" traditions.In 1663, the Royal Society in London received its charter. Just three years later, the French Academy of Sciences was founded, and other European capitals rapidly followed suit. In 1725, the word "science" was at last defined as "a branch of study concerned either with a connected body of demonstrated truths or with observed facts systematically classified." Yet just nine years before, the last witch had been executed in Britain. Fascinating and thought-provoking, A Magical World is a reminder of humanity's paradoxical nature—our passionate pursuit of knowledge alongside deep-rooted fears, superstitions, and traditions.
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1681777061
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234
Book Description
Spanning some of the most vibrant and fascinating eras in European history, Cambridge historian Derek Wilson reveals a society filled with an ardent desire for knowledge and astounding discoveries—and the fantastic discoveries that flowered from it. Thinkers were drew from surprising intellectual traditions: some from folk religion, which in its turn had deep roots in a pagan past; others referred to spirits or tapped into stores of ancient wisdom and herbal remedies. This was the world of wise women, witches, necromancers, potions and incantations. Even the mighty Catholic Church, which permeated all elements of life, had its own "magical" traditions.In 1663, the Royal Society in London received its charter. Just three years later, the French Academy of Sciences was founded, and other European capitals rapidly followed suit. In 1725, the word "science" was at last defined as "a branch of study concerned either with a connected body of demonstrated truths or with observed facts systematically classified." Yet just nine years before, the last witch had been executed in Britain. Fascinating and thought-provoking, A Magical World is a reminder of humanity's paradoxical nature—our passionate pursuit of knowledge alongside deep-rooted fears, superstitions, and traditions.
The Alchemical Actor
Author: Jane Gilmer
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004449426
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 262
Book Description
The Alchemical Actor offers an imagination for new and future theatre inspired by the manifesto of Antonin Artaud. The alchemical four elements – earth, water, air and fire and the four alchemical stages – nigredo, albedo, citrino and rubedo serve as initiatory steps towards the performance of transmutational consciousness. The depth psychological work of Carl G. Jung, the theatre techniques of Michael Chekhov and Rudolf Steiner infuse ‘this’ Great Work. Jane Gilmer leads the reader through alchemical imaginations beyond material cognition towards gold-making heart-thinking - key to new and future theatre.
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004449426
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 262
Book Description
The Alchemical Actor offers an imagination for new and future theatre inspired by the manifesto of Antonin Artaud. The alchemical four elements – earth, water, air and fire and the four alchemical stages – nigredo, albedo, citrino and rubedo serve as initiatory steps towards the performance of transmutational consciousness. The depth psychological work of Carl G. Jung, the theatre techniques of Michael Chekhov and Rudolf Steiner infuse ‘this’ Great Work. Jane Gilmer leads the reader through alchemical imaginations beyond material cognition towards gold-making heart-thinking - key to new and future theatre.
Magical Epistemologies
Author: Anannya Dasgupta
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000417530
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 157
Book Description
This book began with a simple question: when readers such as us encounter the term magic or figures of magicians in early modern texts, dramatic or otherwise, how do we read them? In the twenty-first century we have recourse to an array of genres and vocabulary from magical realism to fantasy fiction that does not, however, work to read a historical figure like John Dee or a fictional one he inspired in Shakespeare's Prospero. Between longings to transcend human limitation and the actual work of producing, translating, and organizing knowledge, figures such as Dee invite us to re-examine our ways of reading magic only as metaphor. If not metaphor then what else? As we parse the term magic, it reveals a rich context of use that connects various aspects of social, cultural, religious, economic, legal and medical lives of the early moderns. Magic makes its presence felt not only as a forms of knowledge but in methods of knowing in the Renaissance. The arc of dramatists and texts that this book draws between Doctor Faustus, The Tempest, The Alchemist and Comus: A Masque at Ludlow Castle offers a sustained examination of the epistemologies of magic in the context of early modern knowledge formation. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000417530
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 157
Book Description
This book began with a simple question: when readers such as us encounter the term magic or figures of magicians in early modern texts, dramatic or otherwise, how do we read them? In the twenty-first century we have recourse to an array of genres and vocabulary from magical realism to fantasy fiction that does not, however, work to read a historical figure like John Dee or a fictional one he inspired in Shakespeare's Prospero. Between longings to transcend human limitation and the actual work of producing, translating, and organizing knowledge, figures such as Dee invite us to re-examine our ways of reading magic only as metaphor. If not metaphor then what else? As we parse the term magic, it reveals a rich context of use that connects various aspects of social, cultural, religious, economic, legal and medical lives of the early moderns. Magic makes its presence felt not only as a forms of knowledge but in methods of knowing in the Renaissance. The arc of dramatists and texts that this book draws between Doctor Faustus, The Tempest, The Alchemist and Comus: A Masque at Ludlow Castle offers a sustained examination of the epistemologies of magic in the context of early modern knowledge formation. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
Ben Jonson
Author: Ben Jonson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317897927
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 711
Book Description
This edition of Ben Jonson's four middle comedies places the works in the popular history and culture of the times, 1605-1614, and surveys the influences, both classical and contemporary, on Jonson as a playwright. On-the-page annotations recreate the audiences perception of the plays as performances by commenting on the stage-directions, the self-conscious theatricality of characters and scenes, and the vivid colloquialisms of early modern London that give the dialogue a heightened dimension of realism. Brief introductions to each play discuss the local settings, sources, theatre history and further readings. The general introduction includes a biography of Jonson, a chronology of the plays and masques, and separate essays on each play, dealing particularly with Jonson's satirical treatments of trends and shams of the day, whether political, social, commercial, or spiritual.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317897927
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 711
Book Description
This edition of Ben Jonson's four middle comedies places the works in the popular history and culture of the times, 1605-1614, and surveys the influences, both classical and contemporary, on Jonson as a playwright. On-the-page annotations recreate the audiences perception of the plays as performances by commenting on the stage-directions, the self-conscious theatricality of characters and scenes, and the vivid colloquialisms of early modern London that give the dialogue a heightened dimension of realism. Brief introductions to each play discuss the local settings, sources, theatre history and further readings. The general introduction includes a biography of Jonson, a chronology of the plays and masques, and separate essays on each play, dealing particularly with Jonson's satirical treatments of trends and shams of the day, whether political, social, commercial, or spiritual.
Humanism, Capitalism, and Rhetoric in Early Modern England
Author: Lynette Hunter
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501514075
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 225
Book Description
This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to concepts of the self associated with the development of humanism in England, and to strategies for both inclusion and exclusion in structuring the early modern nation state. It addresses writings about rhetoric and behavior from 1495–1660, beginning with Erasmus’ work on sermo or the conversational rhetoric between friends, which considers the reader as an ‘absent audience’, and following the transference of this stance to a politics whose broadening democratic constituency needed a legitimate structure for governance-at-a-distance. Unusually, the book brings together the impact on behavior of these new concepts about rhetoric, with the growth of the publishing industry, and the emergence of capitalism and of modern medicine. It explores the effects on the formation of the ‘subject’ and political legitimation of the early liberal nation state. It also lays new ground for scholarship concerned with what is left out of both selfhood and politics by that state, studying examples of a parallel development of the ‘self’ defined by friendship not only from educated male writers, but also from women writers and writers concerned with socially ‘middling’ and laboring people and the poor.
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501514075
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 225
Book Description
This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to concepts of the self associated with the development of humanism in England, and to strategies for both inclusion and exclusion in structuring the early modern nation state. It addresses writings about rhetoric and behavior from 1495–1660, beginning with Erasmus’ work on sermo or the conversational rhetoric between friends, which considers the reader as an ‘absent audience’, and following the transference of this stance to a politics whose broadening democratic constituency needed a legitimate structure for governance-at-a-distance. Unusually, the book brings together the impact on behavior of these new concepts about rhetoric, with the growth of the publishing industry, and the emergence of capitalism and of modern medicine. It explores the effects on the formation of the ‘subject’ and political legitimation of the early liberal nation state. It also lays new ground for scholarship concerned with what is left out of both selfhood and politics by that state, studying examples of a parallel development of the ‘self’ defined by friendship not only from educated male writers, but also from women writers and writers concerned with socially ‘middling’ and laboring people and the poor.
To Our Bodies Turn We Then
Author: Felecia Wright McDuffie
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0826416772
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 193
Book Description
From his early love poetry to his late religious writing, John Donne speaks of the human body as a book to be read and interpreted. Unlike modern thinkers who understand the body as a purely material phenomenon or post-modern critics who see in it a "text" produced by culture, Donne understands the body as a (scriptural) text written by God. In this study, McDuffie offers a comprehensive interpretation of Donne's reading of the body. In Donne's imaginative universe, the human person lies at the center of the great interconnected web of God's signs and acts. As such, he makes it the touchstone of his own theology. While his anthropology is basically orthodox, the emphasis Donne places on the body and the role it plays in his religious poetics are distinctive. Refusing to restrict God's revelation to the written words of Scripture, Donne turns habitually to the book of the human body as a collection of signs that indicate God's nature, his intent, and the human condition. He also, at times, represents the human body not as a "mere" sign but as sacrament: a seal of the promises of God that conveys his presence and grace. In his reading of the book of the body, Donne discerns the narrative of salvation history: the trajectory proceeding from creation, through fall to redemption and resurrection. He sets the body and salvation history into a dialogical relationship, always reading one in terms of the other. Donne reads in the body God's great love for the material, the ravages of the Fall, God's redemptive action in Christ and in the lives of the saints, and the literal and figurative deaths that serve as gateways to resurrection and eschatological fulfillment.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0826416772
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 193
Book Description
From his early love poetry to his late religious writing, John Donne speaks of the human body as a book to be read and interpreted. Unlike modern thinkers who understand the body as a purely material phenomenon or post-modern critics who see in it a "text" produced by culture, Donne understands the body as a (scriptural) text written by God. In this study, McDuffie offers a comprehensive interpretation of Donne's reading of the body. In Donne's imaginative universe, the human person lies at the center of the great interconnected web of God's signs and acts. As such, he makes it the touchstone of his own theology. While his anthropology is basically orthodox, the emphasis Donne places on the body and the role it plays in his religious poetics are distinctive. Refusing to restrict God's revelation to the written words of Scripture, Donne turns habitually to the book of the human body as a collection of signs that indicate God's nature, his intent, and the human condition. He also, at times, represents the human body not as a "mere" sign but as sacrament: a seal of the promises of God that conveys his presence and grace. In his reading of the book of the body, Donne discerns the narrative of salvation history: the trajectory proceeding from creation, through fall to redemption and resurrection. He sets the body and salvation history into a dialogical relationship, always reading one in terms of the other. Donne reads in the body God's great love for the material, the ravages of the Fall, God's redemptive action in Christ and in the lives of the saints, and the literal and figurative deaths that serve as gateways to resurrection and eschatological fulfillment.
Variationen Zur Literatur Im Umbruch
Author: Lynne Tatlock
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789051832563
Category : German literature
Languages : en
Pages : 238
Book Description
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789051832563
Category : German literature
Languages : en
Pages : 238
Book Description
Enchantment and Dis-enchantment in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama
Author: Nandini Das
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317290674
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336
Book Description
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 ‘enchanted’ and ‘disenchanted’ practices of thinking and knowledge-making in the early modern period. If what marvelously stands apart from conceptions of the world’s ordinary functioning might be said to be ‘enchanted’, 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.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317290674
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336
Book Description
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 ‘enchanted’ and ‘disenchanted’ practices of thinking and knowledge-making in the early modern period. If what marvelously stands apart from conceptions of the world’s ordinary functioning might be said to be ‘enchanted’, 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.
The Meaning of Literature
Author: Timothy J. Reiss
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150173301X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 409
Book Description
In this searching and wide-ranging book, Timothy J. Reiss seeks to explain how the concept of literature that we accept today first took shape between the mid-sixteenth century and the early seventeenth, a time of cultural transformation. Drawing on literary, political, and philosophical texts from Central and Western Europe, Reiss maintains that by the early eighteenth century divergent views concerning gender, politics, science, taste, and the role of the writer had consolidated, and literature came to be regarded as an embodiment of universal values. During the second half of the sixteenth century, Reiss asserts, conceptual consensus was breaking down, and many Western Europeans found themselves overwhelmed by a sense of social decay. A key element of this feeling of catastrophe, Reiss points out, was the assumption that thought and letters could not affect worldly reality. Demonstrating that a political discourse replaced the no-longer-viable discourse of theology, he looks closely at the functions that letters served in the reestablishment of order. He traces the development of the idea of literature in texts by Montaigne, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Cervantes, among others; through seventeenth-century writings by such authors as Davenant, Boileau, Dryden, Rymer, Anne Dacier, Astell, and Leibniz; to eighteenth-century works including those of Addison, Pope, Batteux and Hutcheson, Burke, Lessing, Kant, and Wollstonecraft. Reiss follows key strands of the tradition, particularly the concept of the sublime, into the nineteenth century through a reading of Hegel's Aesthetics. The Meaning of Literature will contribute to current debates concerning cultural dominance and multiculturalism. It will be welcomed by anyone interested in literature and in cultural studies, including literary theorists and historians, comparatists, intellectual historians, historical sociologists, and philosophers.
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150173301X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 409
Book Description
In this searching and wide-ranging book, Timothy J. Reiss seeks to explain how the concept of literature that we accept today first took shape between the mid-sixteenth century and the early seventeenth, a time of cultural transformation. Drawing on literary, political, and philosophical texts from Central and Western Europe, Reiss maintains that by the early eighteenth century divergent views concerning gender, politics, science, taste, and the role of the writer had consolidated, and literature came to be regarded as an embodiment of universal values. During the second half of the sixteenth century, Reiss asserts, conceptual consensus was breaking down, and many Western Europeans found themselves overwhelmed by a sense of social decay. A key element of this feeling of catastrophe, Reiss points out, was the assumption that thought and letters could not affect worldly reality. Demonstrating that a political discourse replaced the no-longer-viable discourse of theology, he looks closely at the functions that letters served in the reestablishment of order. He traces the development of the idea of literature in texts by Montaigne, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Cervantes, among others; through seventeenth-century writings by such authors as Davenant, Boileau, Dryden, Rymer, Anne Dacier, Astell, and Leibniz; to eighteenth-century works including those of Addison, Pope, Batteux and Hutcheson, Burke, Lessing, Kant, and Wollstonecraft. Reiss follows key strands of the tradition, particularly the concept of the sublime, into the nineteenth century through a reading of Hegel's Aesthetics. The Meaning of Literature will contribute to current debates concerning cultural dominance and multiculturalism. It will be welcomed by anyone interested in literature and in cultural studies, including literary theorists and historians, comparatists, intellectual historians, historical sociologists, and philosophers.