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This gracefully written and well thought-out study deals with a neglected collection of poems by Spenser, which was issued in 1591 at the height of his career. While there has been a good deal written in recent years on two of the poems in the collection, ‘Mother Hubberd’s Tale’ and ‘Muiopotmos’, Brown innovatively addresses the collection in its entirety. He urges us to see it as a planned whole with a consistent design on the reader: he fully acknowledges, and even brings out further, the heterogeneity of the collection, but he examines it nevertheless as a sustained reflection on the nature of poetry and the auspices for writing in a modern world, distancing itself from the traditions of the immediate past. The strength of this work lies both in the originality of its project and in the precision and enterprise of the close reading that informs its argument. Interest in the concern of Spenser’s poetry with the nature of poetry is in the current critical mainstream, but here the attentiveness is both unusually focused and unusually sustained. Brown garners more than would be expected from the translations in the Complaints, while at the same time including striking and individual chapters on the better known ‘Mother Hubberd’s Tale’ and ‘Muiopotmos’; he advances understanding of these extremely subtle texts and fully justifies his wider approach to the collection as a whole. Arguing that Spenser’s relationship to literary tradition is more complex than is often thought, Brown suggests that Spenser was a self-conscious innovator whose gradual move away from traditional poetics is exhibited by the different texts in the Complaints. He further suggests that the Complaints are a ‘poetics in practice’, which progress from traditional ideas of poetry to a new poetry that emerges through Spenser’s transformation of traditional complaint.
John Manning's The Emblem charts the rise and evolution of the emblem from its earliest manifestations to its emergence as a genre in its own right in the sixteenth century, and through its various reinventions to the present day.
First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Through a reading of the texts of Lyly, Raleigh, Chapman, Spenser and Shakespeare, Berry explores the themes of sexuality and politics, classical myth and Neopatonic mysticism which became associated with Elizabeth I.
Beginning with the origins of mnemonic strategies in epic tales, Helfer examines how the art of memory speaks to debates about poetry and its place in culture from Plato to Spenser's present day.
A new biography of Catherine de' Medici, the most powerful woman in sixteenth-century Europe, whose author uses neglected primary sources to recreate the life and times of a remarkable – and remarkably traduced – woman. History is rarely kind to women of power, but few have had their reputations quite so brutally shredded as Catherine de' Medici, Italian-born queen of France and influential mother of three successive French kings during that country's long sequence of sectarian wars in the second half of the sixteenth century. Thanks to the malign efforts of propagandists motivated by religious hatred, history tends to remember Catherine as a schemer who used witchcraft and poison to eradicate her rivals, as a spendthrift dilettante who wasted ruinous sums of money on building and embellishment of monuments and palaces, and most sinister of all, as instigator of the St Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572, in which thousands of innocent Protestants were slaughtered by Catholic mobs. Mary Hollingsworth delves into contemporary archives to discover deeper truths behind these persistent myths. The correspondence of diplomats and Catherine's own letters reveal a woman who worked tirelessly to find a way for Catholics and Protestants to coexist in peace (a goal for which she continued to strive until the end of her life), who was well-informed on both literary and scientific matters, and whose patronage of the arts helped bring into being glorious châteaux and gardens, priceless work of art, and magnificent festivities combining theatre, music and ballet, which display the grandeur of the French court.
In her famous speech to rouse the English troops staking out Tilbury at the mouth of the Thames during the Spanish Armada's campaign, Queen Elizabeth I is said to have proclaimed, "I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king." Whether or not the transcription is accurate, the persistent attribution of this provocative statement to England's most studied and celebrated queen illustrates some of the contradictions and cultural anxieties that dominated the collective consciousness of England during a reign that lasted from 1558 until 1603. In The Heart and Stomach of a King, Carole Levin explores the myriad ways the unmarried, childless Elizabeth represented herself and the ways members of her court, foreign ambassadors, and subjects represented and responded to her as a public figure. In particular, Levin interrogates the gender constructions, role expectations, and beliefs about sexuality that influenced her public persona and the way she was perceived as a female Protestant ruler. With a new introduction that situates the book within the emerging genre of cultural biography, the second edition of The Heart and Stomach of a King offers insight into the continued fascination with Elizabeth I and her reign.
In The Chastity Plot, Lisabeth During tells the story of the rise, fall, and transformation of the ideal of chastity. From its role in the practice of asceticism to its associations with sovereignty, violence, and the purity of nature, it has been loved, honored, and despised. Obsession with chastity has played a powerful and disturbing role in our moral imagination. It has enforced patriarchy’s double standards, complicated sexual relations, and imbedded in Western culture a myth of gender that has been long contested by feminists. Still not yet fully understood, the chastity plot remains with us, and the metaphysics of purity continue to haunt literature, religion, and philosophy. Idealized and unattainable, sexual renunciation has shaped social institutions, political power, ethical norms, and clerical abuses. It has led to destruction and passion, to seductive fantasies that inspired saints and provoked libertines. As During shows, it should not be underestimated. Examining literature, religion, psychoanalysis, and cultural history from antiquity through the middle ages and into modernity, During provides a sweeping history of chastity and insight into its subversive potential. Instead of simply asking what chastity is, During considers what chastity can do, why we should care, and how it might provide a productive disruption, generating new ways of thinking about sex, integrity, and freedom.
Repeatedly Shakespeare dramatizes one who prays when no one is listening, interested, or even there. This study reads the scenario parallel to early modern anxieties surrounding prayer itself, suggesting a vision of religious syncretism Shakespeare imagines for his world.