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How can multicultural governance respond to our increasingly complex migratory world?
To the readers who ask themselves: 'What is science?', this volume provides an answer from an early modern perspective, whereby science included such various intellectual pursuits as history, poetry, occultism and philosophy.
The first comprehensive history of Byzantine warfare in the tenth century.
With the recent turn to science studies and interdisciplinary research in Shakespearean scholarship, Shakespeare and Science: A Dictionary, provides a pedagogical resource for students and scholars. In charting Shakespeare's engagement with natural philosophical discourse, this edition shapes the future of Shakespearean scholarship and pedagogy significantly, appealing to students entering the field and current scholars in interdisciplinary research on the topic alongside the non-professional reader seeking to understand Shakespeare's language and early modern scientific practices. Shakespeare's works respond to early modern culture's rapidly burgeoning interest in how new astronomical theories, understandings of motion and change, and the cataloging of objects, vegetation, and animals in the natural world could provide new knowledge. To cite a famous example, Hamlet's letter to Ophelia plays with the differences between the Ptolemaic and Copernican notions of the earth's movement: “Doubt that the sun doth move” may either be, in the Ptolemaic view, an earnest plea or, in the Copernican system, a purposeful equivocation. The Dictionary contextualizes such moments and scientific terms that Shakespeare employs, creatively and critically, throughout his poetry and drama. The focus is on Shakespeare's multiform uses of language, rendering accessible to students of Shakespeare such terms as “firmament,” “planetary influence,” and “retrograde.”
A fascinating insight into court entertainment - encompassing dance, music and performance - in the age of Shakespeare.
As a figurehead for the literary humanities, and a dramatist whose plays feature fairies, ghosts, and spirits, Shakespeare may not be the first author that comes to mind when thinking about science. Tom Rutter shows, however, that in his plays and poetry Shakespeare made detailed use of the knowledge and theories of the cosmos, the natural world, and human biology that were available to him. These range from astronomical and anatomical ideas derived from medieval scholars, Islamic philosophers, and ancient Greek and Roman authorities, through to the challenges issued to those earlier models by more recent figures such as Copernicus and Vesalius. Shakespeare's treatment of these materials was informed by the poetic and dramatic media in which he worked; the dialogic nature of drama enabled an approach that could be provisional, exploratory, and tolerant of uncertainty and contradiction. Shakespeare made the early modern playhouse a venue for the production of scientific understanding through performance, illusion, and the creative use of space. As well as surveying current scholarship that contextualizes Shakespeare's work in relation to histories of meteorology, matter theory, humoral physiology, racialization, mathematics, and more, Shakespeare and Science offers detailed original readings of a variety of texts including the Histories, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest, the Sonnets, and Lucrece. It also makes extensive reference to works by Shakespeare's near-contemporaries such as Robert Recorde, William Fulke, Juan Huarte, and Thomas Elyot. Its four chapters focus on astronomy and meteorology, matter, the body, and mathematics. Rutter's overall approach is informed by recent studies that interrogate 'science' as a concept, and that question both the boundary between literature and science and the idea of a seventeenth-century 'scientific revolution'.
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.
While our physical surroundings fashion our identities, we, in turn, fashion the natural elements in which or with which we live. This complex interaction between the human and the non-human already resonated in Shakespeare's plays and poems. As details of the early modern supra- and infra-celestial landscape feature in his works, this dictionary brings to the fore Shakespeare's responsiveness to and acute perception of his 'environment' and it covers the most significant uses of words related to this concept. In doing so, it also examines the epistemological changes that were taking place at the turn of the 17th century in a society which increasingly tried to master nature and its elements. For this reason, the intersections between the natural and the supernatural receive special emphasis. All in all, this dictionary offers a wide variety of resources that takes stock of the 'green criticism' that recently emerged in Shakespeare studies and provides a clear and complete overview of the idea, imagery and language of environment in the canon.
The Tempest: Critical Tradition increases our knowledge of how Shakespeare's plays were received and understood by critics, editors and general readers. The volume offers, in separate sections, both critical opinions about the play across the centuries and an evaluation of their positions within and their impact on the reception of the play. The volume features criticism from key literary figures, such as Ben Jonson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Dryden, John Ruskin and Edward Malone. The chronological arrangement of the text-excerpts engages the readers in a direct and unbiased dialogue, whereas the introduction offers a critical evaluation from a current stance, including modern theories and methods. Thus the volume makes a major contribution to our understanding of the play and of the traditions of Shakespearean criticism surrounding it as they have developed from century to century.
Shakespeare / Nature sets new agendas for the study of nature in Shakespeare's work. Offering a rich exploration of the intersections between the human and non-human worlds, the chapters focus on the contested and persuasive language of nature, both as organic matter and cultural conditioning. Rooted in close textual analysis and historical acuity, this collection addresses Shakespeare's works through the many ways in which 'nature' performs, as a cultural category, a moral marker and a set of essential conditions through which the human may pass, as well as affect. Addressing the complex conditions of the play worlds, the chapters explore the assorted forms through which Shakespeare's nature makes sense of its narratives and supports, upholds or contests its story-telling. Over the course of the collection, the contributors examine plays including Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew, Othello, Love's Labour's Lost, Hamlet, Timon of Athens and many more. They discuss them through the various lenses of philosophy, historicism, psychoanalysis, gender studies, cosmography, geography, sexuality, linguistics, environmentalism, feminism and robotics, to provide new and nuanced readings of the intersectional terms of both meaning and matter. Approaching 'nature' in all its multiplicity, this collection sets out to examine the divergent and complex ways in which the human and non-human worlds intersect and the development of a language of symbiosis that attempts to both control and create the terms of human authority. It offers an entirely new approach to the subject of nature, bringing together disparate methods that have previously been pursued independently to offer a shared investment in the intersections between the human and non-human worlds and how these discourses shape and condition the emotional, organic, cultural and psychological landscapes of Shakespeare's play worlds.