The Mercurian Monarch

The Mercurian Monarch PDF Author: Douglas Brooks-Davies
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719009549
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description

The Mercurian Monarch

The Mercurian Monarch PDF Author: Douglas Brooks-Davies
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719009549
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description


Thinking with Demons

Thinking with Demons PDF Author: Stuart Clark
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780198208082
Category : Demonology
Languages : en
Pages : 850

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Book Description
This major work offers a new interpretation of the witchcraft beliefs of European intellectuals between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, showing how these beliefs fitted rationally with other beliefs of the period and how far the nature of rationality is dependent on its historical context.

Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts

Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts PDF Author: Vaughan Hart
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134876793
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Spanning from the inauguration of James I in 1603 to the execution of Charles I in 1649, the Stuart court saw the emergence of a full expression of Renaissance culture in Britain. Hart examines the influence of magic on Renaissance art and how in its role as an element of royal propaganda, art was used to represent the power of the monarch and reflect his apparent command over the hidden forces of nature. Court artists sought to represent magic as an expression of the Stuart Kings' divine right, and later of their policy of Absolutism, through masques, sermons, heraldry, gardens, architecture and processions. As such, magic of the kind enshrined in Neoplatonic philosophy and the court art which expressed its cosmology, played their part in the complex causes of the Civil War and the destruction of the Stuart image which followed in its wake.

Pope's Dunciad and the Queen of Night

Pope's Dunciad and the Queen of Night PDF Author: Douglas Brooks-Davies
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719017353
Category : Alchemy in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Alchemy, Paracelsianism, and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale

Alchemy, Paracelsianism, and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale PDF Author: Martina Zamparo
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303105167X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
This book explores the role of alchemy, Paracelsianism, and Hermetic philosophy in one of Shakespeare’s last plays, The Winter’s Tale. A perusal of the vast literary and iconographic repertory of Renaissance alchemy reveals that this late play is imbued with several topoi, myths, and emblematic symbols coming from coeval alchemical, Paracelsian, and Hermetic sources. It also discusses the alchemical significance of water and time in the play’s circular and regenerative pattern and the healing role of women. All the major symbols of alchemy are present in Shakespeare’s play: the intertwined serpents of the caduceus, the chemical wedding, the filius philosophorum, and the so-called rex chymicus. This book also provides an in-depth survey of late Renaissance alchemy, Paracelsian medicine, and Hermetic culture in the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages. Importantly, it contends that The Winter’s Tale, in symbolically retracing the healing pattern of the rota alchemica and in emphasising the Hermetic principles of unity and concord, glorifies King James’s conciliatory attitude.

Devil Theatre

Devil Theatre PDF Author: Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 9781843841142
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
The so-called "Devil Theatre" is here set against its context of non-dramatic texts on possession and exorcism, providing many new insights. Representations of demonic possession and exorcism rituals abound in English Renaissance drama, an area which this book seeks to illuminate by comparison with non-dramatic works. The author investigates stage images of possessionin relation to a range of early modern demonological, theological and medical prose texts on the subject, looking specifically at how the theatre responded to these texts. He argues that the stage appropriated debates over demonicpossession to explore the competing roles of the inner life and the body in early modern definitions of selfhood. The theatre also employed the contemporary controversy over possession and exorcism to investigate the politics ofreligion, and to consider the nature of monarchic power. Moreover, because demonic possession cases and exorcism rituals were frequently dismissed by conformist writers as a piece of theatre, they offered an opportunity to reflecton the nature of drama and role-playing. JAN FRANS VAN DIJKHUIZEN is lecturer and research fellow at the University of Leiden.

Shakespeare's Monarchies

Shakespeare's Monarchies PDF Author: Constance Jordan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501744437
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Constance Jordan looks at how Shakespeare, through his romances, contributed to the cultural debates over the nature of monarchy in Jacobean England. Stressing the differences between absolutist and constitutionalist principles of rule, Jordan reveals Shakespeare's investment in the idea that a head of state should be responsive to law, and not be governed by his unbridled will. Conflicts within royal courts which occur in the romances show wives, daughters, and servants resisting tyrannical husbands, fathers, masters, and monarchs by relying on the authority of conscience. These loyal subjects demonstrated to Shakespeare's diverse audiences that the vitality of the body politic, its dynastic future, and its material productivity depend on a cooperative union of ruler and subject. Drawing on representations of servitude and slavery in the humanist and political literature of the period, Jordan shows that Shakespeare's abusive rulers suffer as much as they impose on their subjects. Shakespeare's Monarchies recognizes the romances as politically inflected texts and confirms Shakespeare's involvement in the public discourse of the period.

Renaissance Papers 2021

Renaissance Papers 2021 PDF Author: Jim Pearce
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 164014143X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
Essays on a wide range of topics including the role of early modern chess in upholding Aristotelian virtue; readings of Sidney, Wroth, Spenser, and Shakespeare; and several topics involving the New World.

Shakespeare, Alchemy and the Creative Imagination

Shakespeare, Alchemy and the Creative Imagination PDF Author: Margaret Healy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107782759
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Shakespeare's sonnets and A Lover's Complaint constitute a rich tapestry of rhetorical play about Renaissance love in all its guises. A significant strand of this spiritual alchemy is working the 'metal' of the mind through meditation on love, memory work and intense imagination. Healy demonstrates how this process of anguished soul work - construed as essential to inspired poetic making - is woven into these poems, accounting for their most enigmatic imagery and urgency of tone. The esoteric philosophy of late Renaissance Neoplatonic alchemy, which embraced bawdy sexual symbolism and was highly fashionable in European intellectual circles, facilitated Shakespeare's poetry. Arguing that Shakespeare's incorporation of alchemical textures throughout his late works is indicative of an artistic stance promoting religious toleration and unity, this book sets out a crucial new framework for interpreting the 1609 poems and transforms our understanding of Shakespeare's art.

Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland

Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland PDF Author: Murray G. H. Pittock
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521030277
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Redefinition of the Augustan age as a 'four nations' history using popular literary sources.