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However, the essays in this volume also suggest that there is something ironic and unsettling about the immense popularity of a holiday whose main images are of death, evil, and the grotesque. Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life is a unique contribution that questions our concepts of religiosity and spirituality while contributing to our understanding of Halloween as a rich and diverse reflection of our society's past, present, and future identity.
In the time of the Troubles, when bombs blew through the night and soldiers prowled down the roads, Henry Glassie came to the Irish borderland to learn how country people endure through history. He settled into the farming community of Ballymenone, beside Lough Erne in the County Fermanagh, and listened to the old people. For a decade he heard and recorded the stories and songs in which they outlined their culture, recounted their history, and pictured their world. In their view, their world was one of love, defeat, and uncertainty, demanding the virtues of endurance: faith, bravery, and wit. Glassie's task in this book is to set the scene, to sketch the backdrop and clear the stage, so that...
"A beautifully written exploration of a vanishing holiday ritual that can be traced back to the dramas of the sixteenth century and beyond." --Philadelphia Inquirer
Comprehensive and engaging, this colourful study covers the whole sweep of ritual history from the earliest written records to the present day. From May Day revels and Midsummer fires, to Harvest Home and Hallowe'en, to the twelve days of Christmas, Ronald Hutton takes us on a fascinating journey through the ritual year in Britain. He challenges many common assumptions about the customs of the past, and debunks many myths surrounding festivals of the present, to illuminate the history of the calendar year we live by today.
Profiles of artists and performers from around the world form the basis of this innovative volume that explores the many ways individuals engage with, carry on, revive, and create tradition. Leading scholars in folklore studies consider how the field has addressed the connections between performer and tradition and examine theoretical issues involved in fieldwork and the analysis and dissemination of scholarship in the context of relationships with the performers. Honoring Henry Glassie and his remarkable contributions to the field of folklore, these vivid case studies exemplify the best of performer-centered ethnography.
Carnival and Literature in Early Modern England explores the elite and popular festive materials appropriated by authors during the English Renaissance in a wide range of dramatic and non-dramatic texts. Although historical records of rural, urban, and courtly seasonal customs in early modern England exist only in fragmentary form, Jennifer Vaught traces the sustained impact of festivals and rituals on the plays and poetry of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English writers. She focuses on the diverse ways in which Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, Dekker, Jonson, Milton and Herrick incorporated the carnivalesque in their works. Further, she demonstrates how these early modern texts were used...
Exploring the personications of time by which Western civilization has ordered its attitudes toward both earthly existence and eternity, Patriarchs of Time traces the lineage of time's gods from the deities of ancient Mesopotamia and Persia through the pantheons of Greece and Rome, the Christian Father Time, and the brief reign of the Newtonian Watchmaker God to the consumerist Santa Claus who holds sway over the year's end celebrations of our own day. Each of these patriarchs, Samuel L. Macey shows, has embodied dualisms that re ect the dilemma in the Western mind between the joys and woes of our brief time on earth and the promise of eternal life or eternal punishment in the hereafter. Santa Claus is today, effectively, the sole inheritor of Saturn's old midwinter festival, but Macey suggests that it remains to be seen whether he will fully manifest the dualism that has always characterized the West's patriarchs of time, and whether our present consumerist saturnalia will regain the spiritual message of hope and eternal life that has always been a part of time's dominion.
In this collection of essays, a range of established and early-career scholars explore a variety of different perspectives on Oliver Cromwell's involvement with Ireland, in particular his military campaign of 1649-1650. In England and Wales Cromwell is regarded as a figure of national importance; in Ireland his reputation remains highly controversial. The essays gathered together here provide a fresh take on his Irish campaign, reassessing the backdrop and context of the prevailing siege warfare strategy and offering new insights into other major players such as Henry Ireton and the Marquis of Ormond. Other topics include, but are not limited to, the Cromwellian land settlement, deportation of prisoners and popular memory of Cromwell in Ireland. CONTRIBUTORS: Martyn Bennett, Heidi J. Coburn, Sarah Covington, John Cunningham, Eamon Darcy, David Farr, Padraig Lenihan, Alan Marshall, Nick Poyntz, Tom Reilly, James Scott Wheeler