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No figure has had a more global impact than Alexander the Great, whose legends have encircled the globe and been translated into a dizzying multitude of languages, from Indo-European and Semitic to Turkic and Austronesian. Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia examines parallel traditions of the Alexander Romance in Britain and Southeast Asia, demonstrating how rival Alexanders - one Christian, the other Islamic - became central figures in their respective literatures. In the early modern age of exploration, both Britain and Southeast Asia turned to literary imitations of Alexander to imagine their own empires and international relations, defining themselves as peripheries again...
The collection is in honor of Mary Waldron, a founder member of the Women's Studies Group, whose distinguished scholarship is exemplified in the first chapter, and whose generous encouragement of other specialists in feminist studies in the long eighteenth century.
The Reformation of the Heart: Gender and Radical Theology in the English Revolution offers fresh insight into the relationship between radical theology and gender radicalism in the English Revolution. It addresses together two themes which have long fascinated historians of the period: the intellectual formation of religious radicalism, and the prominence of women as prophets and preachers in radical sects. Sarah Apetrei explores the remarkable ideas and reforming visions of a levelling and highly mystical network in the period of civil conflict, the regicide, and its aftermath—a network which linked military chaplains with inspired women and congregations across England. Drawing on both p...
This original interpretation of the lives and social interactions of Quaker women in the British Atlantic between 1650 and 1750 highlights the unique ways in which adherence to the movement shaped women's lives, as well as the ways in which female Friends transformed seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious and political culture.
This book argues that new groups and radically new concepts of group identity emerged throughout the world during the Renaissance.
The Persian Empire in English Renaissance Writing, 1549-1622 studies the conception of Persia in the literary, political and pedagogic writings of Renaissance England and Britain. It argues that writers of all kinds debated the means and merits of English empire through their intellectual engagement with the ancient Persian empire.
Storytelling in Sixteenth-Century France is an innovative, interdisciplinary examination of parallels between the early modern era and the world in which we live today. Readers are invited to look to the past to see how then, as now, people turned to storytelling to integrate and adapt to rapid social change, to reinforce or restructure community, to sell new ideas, and to refashion the past. This collection explores different modalities of storytelling in sixteenth-century France and emphasizes shared techniques and themes rather than attempting to define narrow kinds of narrative categories. Through studies of storytelling in tapestries, stone, and music as well as distinct genres of historical, professional, and literary writing (addressing both erudite and more common readers), the contributors to this collection evoke a society in transition, wherein traditional techniques and materials were manipulated to express new realities. Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Intensely persecuted during the English Interregnum, early Quakers left a detailed record of the suffering they endured for their faith. Margaret Fell, Letters, and the Making of Quakerism is the first book to connect the suffering experience with the communication network that drew the faithful together to create a new religious community. This study explores the ways in which early Quaker leaders, particularly Margaret Fell, helped shape a stable organization that allowed for the transition from movement to church to occur. Fell’s role was essential to this process because she developed and maintained the epistolary exchange that was the basis of the early religious community. Her efforts allowed for others to travel and spread the faith while she served as nucleus of the community’s communication network by determining how and where to share news. Memory of the early years of Quakerism were based on the letters Fell preserved. Marjon Ames analyzes not only how Fell’s efforts shaped the inchoate faith, but also how subsequent generations memorialized their founding members.
In the Renaissance period the body emerges as the repository of social and cultural forces and a privileged metaphor for political practices and legal codification. Due to its ambivalent expressive force, it represents the seat and the means for the performance of normative identity and at the same time of alterity. The essays of the collection address the manifold articulations of this topic, demonstrating how the inscription of the body within the discursive spheres of gender identity, sexuality, law, and politics align its materiality with discourses whose effects are themselves material. The aesthetic and performative dimension of law inform the debates on the juridical constitution of authority, as well as its reflection on the formation and the moulding of individual subjectivity. Moreover, the inherently theatrical elements of the law find an analogy in the popular theatre, where juridical practices are represented, challenged, occasionally subverted or created. The works analyzed in the volume, in their ample spectre of topics and contexts aim at demonstrating how in the Renaissance period the body was the privileged focus of the social, legal and cultural imagination.
Offering a new understanding of canonical Romanticism, Daniela Garofalo suggests that representations of erotic love in the period have been largely misunderstood. Commonly understood as a means for transcending political and economic realities, love, for several canonical Romantic writers, offers, instead, a contestation of those realities. Garofalo argues that Romantic writers show that the desire for transcendence through love mimics the desire for commodity consumption and depends on the same dynamic of delayed fulfillment that was advocated by thinkers such as Adam Smith. As writers such as William Blake, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, John Keats, and Emily Brontë engaged with the perio...