Author: Nicky Hallett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351143026
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
Presenting a remarkable set of previously unpublished papers, this book concerns the bewitchment, possession and exorcism of two seventeenth-century nuns living in exile in an English convent in the Spanish Netherlands. The two women left behind an extensive set of personal writing that reveals unprecedented detail about their devotional lives and spiritual states before, during and after exorcism. Unlike other similar cases, here the women write for themselves; for the first time in 350 years this book allows their voices - and their silences - to resound in all their vibrancy. An extensive introduction discusses the politics of piety and possession at a time when exorcism had become increasingly contentious, amidst conflicting claims for rival church reform. The book includes both autobiographical and biographical material, written by the nuns and about them, and casting new light on processes of female self-writing at just the time when the 'modern subject' is often said to have emerged.
Author: Erika Gasser
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479871133
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
Stories of witchcraft and demonic possession from early modern England through the last official trials in colonial New England Those possessed by the devil in early modern England usually exhibited a common set of symptoms: fits, vomiting, visions, contortions, speaking in tongues, and an antipathy to prayer. However, it was a matter of interpretation, and sometimes public opinion, if these symptoms were visited upon the victim, or if they came from within. Both early modern England and colonial New England had cases that blurred the line between witchcraft and demonic possession, most famously, the Salem witch trials. While historians acknowledge some similarities in witch trials between the two regions, such as the fact that an overwhelming majority of witches were women, the histories of these cases primarily focus on local contexts and specifics. In so doing, they overlook the ways in which manhood factored into possession and witchcraft cases. Vexed with Devils is a cultural history of witchcraft-possession phenomena that centers on the role of men and patriarchal power. Erika Gasser reveals that witchcraft trials had as much to do with who had power in the community, to impose judgement or to subvert order, as they did with religious belief. She argues that the gendered dynamics of possession and witchcraft demonstrated that contested meanings of manhood played a critical role in the struggle to maintain authority. While all men were not capable of accessing power in the same ways, many of the people involved—those who acted as if they were possessed, men accused of being witches, and men who wrote possession propaganda—invoked manhood as they struggled to advocate for themselves during these perilous times. Gasser ultimately concludes that the decline of possession and witchcraft cases was not merely a product of change over time, but rather an indication of the ways in which patriarchal power endured throughout and beyond the colonial period. Vexed with Devils reexamines an unnerving time and offers a surprising new perspective on our own, using stories and voices which emerge from the records in ways that continue to fascinate and unsettle us.
Author: Caroline Bowden
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040244564
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351
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Book Description
Between 1600 and 1800 around 4,000 Catholic women left England for a life of exile in the convents of France, Flanders, Portugal and America. These closed communities offered religious contemplation and safety, but also provided an environment of concentrated female intellectualism. The nuns’ writings from this time form a unique resource.
Author: Caroline Bowden
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040250076
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 467
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Book Description
Between 1600 and 1800 around 4,000 Catholic women left England for a life of exile in the convents of France, Flanders, Portugal and America. These closed communities offered religious contemplation and safety, but also provided an environment of concentrated female intellectualism. The nuns’ writings from this time form a unique resource.
Author: Sarah C. E. Ross
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316712532
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
This collection of new essays is a comprehensive exploration of the theoretical and practical issues surrounding the editing of texts by early modern women. The chapters consider the latest developments in the field and address a wide range of topics, including the 'ideologies' of editing, genre and gender, feminism, editing for student or general readers, print publishing, and new and possible future developments in editing early modern writing, including digital publishing. The works of writers such as Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Wroth, Anne Halkett, Katherine Philips and Katherine Austen are examined, and the issues discussed are related to the ways editing in general has evolved in recent years. This book offers readers an original overview of the central issues in this growing field and will interest students and scholars of early modern literature and drama, textual studies, the history of editing, gender studies and book history.
Author: Nicky Hallett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317104048
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 333
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Book Description
Nicky Hallett has uncovered a major new source of material by and about English nuns living in exile in the Low Countries during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This volume presents the women's voices in unmediated form, direct in all their vibrancy, with an extensive introduction that provides historical and cultural contexts for an understanding of the Lives, their sources and their authors. Lives of Spirit draws upon several remarkable sets of papers compiled in enclosed convents between 1619 and 1794. These documents show that religious women developed an astute system of auto/biographical practice within a protean political situation, and that, even in exile and from within enclosure, they sought to shape a distinctive contribution to devotional change within a reforming church. This volume reveals how the women's Lives challenge, as well as affirm, notions of gendered spirituality, refiguring traditions of female life-writing that extend from Catherine of Siena (1347 - 80) through the work of the Carmelite reformer, Teresa of Avila (1515 - 82), into the later modern period. The newness of the material in this book allows a radical reappraisal of the self-representation of religious women and of paradigms of life-writing in, and beyond, the early modern period. This book is of significant interest to scholars interested in early modern women's writing, female spirituality, and auto/biography more widely as a genre.
Author: Slavko Kacunko
Publisher: via tolino media
ISBN: 3752147725
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 855
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Book Description
After Taste is an inquiry into a field of study dedicated to the reconsideration, reconstruction and rehabilitation of the concept of Taste. Taste is the category, whose systematic, historical and actual dimensions have traditionally been located in a variety of disciplines. The actuality and potential of the study is based on a variety of collected facts from readings and experiences, which materialize in the following features: One concept (figurative Taste), two thinking traditions (analytic and synthetic/continental) and three interrelated dimensions (systematic, historic and actual) are presented in three parts or volumes. As such, the study presents a salient comprehensive companion for wider readership of humanities approaching conceptions of Taste for the first time. Moreover, After Taste is intended for anyone who hopes to make a further contribution to the subject. Since its appearance and apparently short triumph some 250 years ago, the concept of non-literary Taste remained the linchpin of aesthetic theory and practice, but also a category outreaching aesthetics. Taste as the personal unity of the production, theory and criticism of art and literature, which was still largely taken as a given in the eighteenth century, has meanwhile given way to a highly-differentiated art world, in which aesthetic discourse is placed in such a way that it can seemingly no longer have a conceptual or linguistic effect on general opinion making. After Taste fills the gaps of systematic research by a comprehensive tracing of the emergence of the doctrines, discourses and disciplinary dimensions of Taste up to the peak of its systematic and historical trajectory in the eighteenth century and onwards into the present day. The guiding goal is a post-disciplinary rehabilitation of the contested category as a preparation for its productive usage in emerging academic and popular contexts. It shows how the category of Taste became the foundation, legitimation and the catalyst for the emerging division of labour, faculties and disciplines, confirming the hypothesis of the immense impact and actuality of Taste in the contemporary world.
Author: Alexandra Walsham
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317169239
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 530
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Book Description
The survival and revival of Roman Catholicism in post-Reformation Britain remains the subject of lively debate. This volume examines key aspects of the evolution and experience of the Catholic communities of these Protestant kingdoms during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rejecting an earlier preoccupation with recusants and martyrs, it highlights the importance of those who exhibited varying degrees of conformity with the ecclesiastical establishment and explores the moral and political dilemmas that confronted the clergy and laity. It reassesses the significance of the Counter Reformation mission as an evangelical enterprise; analyses its communication strategies and its impact on popular piety; and illuminates how Catholic ritual life creatively adapted itself to a climate of repression. Reacting sharply against the insularity of many previous accounts, this book investigates developments in the British Isles in relation to wider international initiatives for the renewal of the Catholic faith in Europe and for its plantation overseas. It emphasises the reciprocal interaction between Catholicism and anti-Catholicism throughout the period and casts fresh light on the nature of interconfessional relations in a pluralistic society. It argues that persecution and suffering paradoxically both constrained and facilitated the resurgence of the Church of Rome. They presented challenges and fostered internal frictions, but they also catalysed the process of religious identity formation and imbued English, Welsh and Scottish Catholicism with peculiar dynamism. Prefaced by an extensive new historiographical overview, this collection brings together a selection of Alexandra Walsham's essays written over the last fifteen years, fully revised and updated to reflect recent research in this flourishing field. Collectively these make a major contribution to our understanding of minority Catholicism and the Counter Reformation in the era after the Council of Trent.
Author: Micheline White
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131714290X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
Contributing to the growing interest in early modern women and religion, this essay collection advances scholarship by introducing readers to recently recovered or little-studied texts and by offering new paradigms for the analysis of women's religious literary activities. Contributors underscore the fact that women had complex, multi-dimensional relationships to the religio-political order, acting as activists for specific causes but also departing from confessional norms in creative ways and engaging in intra-as well as extra-confessional conflict. The volume thus includes essays that reflect on the complex dynamics of religious culture itself and that illuminate the importance of women's engagement with Catholicism throughout the period. The collection also highlights the vitality of neglected intertextual genres such as prayers, meditations, and translations, and it focuses attention on diverse forms of textual production such as literary writing, patronage, epistolary exchanges, public reading, and epitaphs. Collectively, English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500-1625 offers a comprehensive treatment of the historical, literary, and methodological issues preoccupying scholars of women and religious writing.
Author: Katharine Hodgkin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351871579
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
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.
