You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
2018 Best Collaborative Project from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women In the last thirty years scholarship has increasingly engaged the topic of women’s alliances in early modern Europe. The Politics of Female Alliance in Early Modern England expands our knowledge of yet another facet of female alliance: the political. Archival discoveries as well as new work on politics and law help shape this work as a timely reevaluation of the nature and extent of women’s political alliances. Grouped into three sections—domestic, court, and kinship alliances—these essays investigate historical documents, drama, and poetry, insisting that female alliances, much like male friendship ...
Interdisciplinary in scope, this collection examines the varied and complex ways in which early modern Europeans imagined, discussed and enacted friendship, a fundamentally elective relationship between individuals otherwise bound in prescribed familial, religious and political associations. The volume is carefully designed to reflect the complexity and multi-faceted nature of early modern friendship, and each chapter comprises a case study of specific contexts, narratives and/or lived friendships. Contributors include scholars of British, French, Italian and Spanish culture, offering literary, historical, religious, and political perspectives. Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 lays the groundwork for a taxonomy of the transformations of friendship discourse in Western Europe and its overlap with emergent views of the psyche and the body, as well as of the relationship of the self to others, classes, social institutions and the state.
The ubiquity of friendship in human culture contributes to the fallacy that ideas about friendship have not changed and remained consistent throughout history. It is only when we begin to inquire into the nature and significance of the concept in specific contexts that we discover how complex it truly is. Covering the vast expanse of Jewish tradition, from ancient Israel to the twenty-first century, this collection of essays traces the history of the beliefs, rituals, and social practices surrounding friendship in Jewish life. Employing diverse methodological approaches, this volume explores the particulars of the many varied forms that friendship has taken in the different regions where Jew...
This book is about the multiple loves of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained: sanctioned loves and outlawed loves, sincere loves and false loves, Christian loves, classical loves, humanist loves, and love as emotion. In showing how these loves motivate the most significant actions of the Paradise epics, it reveals Milton to have made creative use of the tensions between philosophical ideals, social conventions, and the rather messier ways in which love emerges in practice. Love, so central to Milton’s view of Edenic joy and obedience to God, unsettles earthly and heavenly communities and is the origin of Miltonic transgression. Milton’s Loves sheds new light on some of the most prominent concerns of Milton scholarship, including why Milton’s God is so difficult for readers to connect to, Satan’s apparent heroism, Milton’s radical theology, and the nature of Milton’s muse. It is a book that will appeal to students and scholars of Milton and early modern studies more broadly and is structured in a way that will aid easy reference.
Today the friendships that grab people’s imaginations are those that reach across inequalities of class and race. The friendships that seem to have exerted an analogous level of fascination in early modern France were those that defied the assumption, inherited from Aristotle and patristic sources, that friendships between men and women were impossible. Together, the essays in Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France tell the story of the declining intelligibility of classical models of (male) friendship and of the rising prominence of women as potential friends. The revival of Plato’s friendship texts in the sixteenth century challenged Aristotle’s rigid ideal of perfect fr...
From Theocritus’ Idylls to James Cameron’s Avatar, Arcadia remains an enduring presence in world culture and a persistent source of creative inspiration. Why does Arcadia still exercise such a powerful pull on the imagination? This book responds by arguing that in sixteenth-century Europe, a dramatic shift took place in imagining Arcadia. The traditional visions of Arcadia collided and fused with romance, the new experimental form of prose fiction, producing a hybrid, dynamic world of change and transformation. Emphasizing matters of fictional function and world-making over generic classification, Imagining Arcadia in Renaissance Romance analyzes the role of romance as a catalyst in rema...
Authority, Piracy, and Captivity in Colonial Spanish American Writing examines the intricate bond between poetry and history writing that shaped the theory and practice of empire in early colonial Spanish-American society. The book explores from diverse perspectives how epic and heroic poetry served to construe a new Spanish-American elite of original explorers and conquistadors in Juan de Castellanos’s Elegies of Illustrious Men of the Indies. Similarly, this book offers an interpretation of Castellanos’s writings that shows his critical engagement with the reformist project postulated in Alonso de Ercilla’s LaAraucana, and it elucidates the complex poetic discourse Castellanos create...
Cedric C. Brown combines the study of literature and social history in order to recognize the immense importance of friendship bonds to early modern society. Drawing on new archival research, he acknowledges a wide range of types of friendship, from the intimate to the obviously instrumental, and sees these practices as often co-terminous with gift exchange. Failure to recognize the inter-connected range of a friendship spectrum has hitherto limited the adequacy of some modern studies of friendship, often weighted towards the intimate or gendered-related issues. This book focuses both on friendships represented in imaginative works and on lived friendships in many textual and material forms,...
Millennial Cervantes explores some of the most important recent trends in Cervantes scholarship in the twenty-first century. It brings together leading Cervantes scholars of the United States in order to showcase their cutting-edge work within a cultural studies frame that encompasses everything from ekphrasis to philosophy, from sexuality to Cold War political satire, and from the culinary arts to the digital humanities. Millennial Cervantes is divided into three sets of essays--conceptually organized around thematic and methodological lines that move outward in a series of concentric circles. The first group, focused on the concept of "Cervantes in his original contexts," features essays t...
Whether forced by governmental decree, driven by persecution and economic distress, or seeking financial opportunity, the Jews of early modern Europe were extraordinarily mobile, experiencing both displacement and integration into new cultural, legal, and political settings. This, in turn, led to unprecedented modes of social mixing for Jews, especially for those living in urban areas, who frequently encountered Jews from different ethnic backgrounds and cultural orientations. Additionally, Jews formed social, economic, and intellectual bonds with mixed populations of Christians. While not necessarily effacing Jewish loyalties to local places, authorities, and customs, these connections and ...