Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

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Author :
Publisher : Rodopi
ISBN 13 : 9042018054
Total Pages : 207 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (42 download)

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Book Synopsis Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England by : Susanne Rupp

Download or read book Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England written by Susanne Rupp and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2005 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Communities have often shaped themselves around cultural spaces set apart and declared sacred. For this purpose, churches, priests or scholars no less than writers frequently participate in giving sacred figures a local habitation and, sometimes, voice or name. But whatever sites, rites, images or narratives have thus been constructed, they also raise some complex questions: how can the sacred be presented and yet guarded, claimed yet concealed, staged in public and at the same time kept exclusive? Such questions are pursued here in a variety of English texts historically employed to manifest and manage versions of the sacred. But since their performances inhabit social space, this often functions as a theatrical arena which is also used to stage modes of dissent, difference, sacrifice and sacrilege. In this way, all aspects of social life - the family, the nation, the idea of kingship, gender identities, courtly ideals, love making or smoking - may become sacralized and buttress claims for power by recourse to a repertoire of religious symbolic forms. Through critical readings of central texts and authors - such as Sir Gawain, Foxe, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, or Vaughan - as well as less canonical examples - the Croxton play, Buchanan, Lanyer, Wroth, or the tobacco pamphlets - the twelve contributions all engage with the crucial question how, and to what end, performances of the sacred affect, or effect, cultural transformation.

Demonic Possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe

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Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192591010
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (925 download)

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Book Synopsis Demonic Possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe by : Sari Katajala-Peltomaa

Download or read book Demonic Possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe written by Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-19 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonic possession was a spiritual state that often had physical symptoms; however, in Demonic Possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe, Sari Katajala-Peltomaa argues that demonic possession was a social phenomenon which should be understood with regard to the community and culture. She focuses on significant case studies from canonization processes (c. 1240-1450) which show how each set of sources formed its own specific context, in which demonic presence derived from different motivations, reasonings, and methods of categorization. The chosen perspective is that of lived religion, which is both a thematic approach and a methodology: a focus on rituals, symbols, and gestures, as well as sensitivity to nuances and careful contextualizing of the cases are constitutive elements of the argumentation. The analysis contests the hierarchy between the 'learned' and the 'popular' within religion, as well as the existence of a strict polarity between individual and collective religious participation. Demonic presence disclosed negotiations over authority and agency; it shows how the personal affected the communal, and vice versa, and how they were eventually transformed into discourses and institutions of the Church; that is, definitions of the miraculous and the diabolical. Geographically, the volume covers Western Europe, comparing Northern and Southern material and customs. The structure follows the logic of the phenomenon, beginning with the background reasons offered as a cause of demonic possession, continuing with communities' responses and emotions, including construction of sacred caregiving methods. Finally, the ways in which demonic presence contributed to wider societal debates in the fields of politics and spirituality are discussed. Alterity and inversion of identity, gender, and various forms of corporeality and the interplay between the sacred and diabolical are themes that run all through the volume.

Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 042951414X
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (295 download)

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Book Synopsis Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe by : Nadia Thérèse van Pelt

Download or read book Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe written by Nadia Thérèse van Pelt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-28 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe moves away from the customary conceptual framework that artificially separates ‘medieval’ from ‘early modern’ drama to explore the role of drama and spectacle in England, France, the Low Countries, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and the German-speaking areas that now constitute Austria and Germany. This book investigates the ranges of dramatic and performative techniques and strategies that playmakers across Europe used to adapt their work to the changing contexts in which they performed, and to the changing or expanding audiences that they faced. It considers the different views expressed through drama and spectacle on shared historical events, how communities coped with similar issues and why they ritually recycled these themes through reinvented or alternative forms that replaced or existed alongside their predecessors. A wide variety of genres of play are discussed throughout, including visitatio sepulchri (visit to the tomb) plays; Easter and Passion plays and morality plays; the French civic mystère; Italian sacre rappresentazioni performed by choirboys in the context of the church; Bürgertheater from the Swiss Confederacy; drama performed for the purpose of royal entertainment and propaganda; May and summer games; and the commercial, professional theatre of Shakespeare and Lope de Vega. Examining the strength of drama in relation to the larger cultural forces to which it adapted, and demonstrating the use of social, political, economic, and artistic networks to educate and support the social structures of communities, Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe offers a broader understanding of a shared European past across the traditional chronological divide of 1500. It is ideal for students of social history, and the history of medieval and early modern drama or literature.

Performances of Mourning in Shakespearean Theatre and Early Modern Culture

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Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230627404
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (36 download)

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Book Synopsis Performances of Mourning in Shakespearean Theatre and Early Modern Culture by : T. Döring

Download or read book Performances of Mourning in Shakespearean Theatre and Early Modern Culture written by T. Döring and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-07-11 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study takes a look at a controversial question: what do the acts and shows of grief performed in early modern drama tell us about the religious culture of the world in which they were historically staged? Drawing on performance studies, it provides detailed readings of play texts to explore the politics, pathologies and parodies of mourning.

Equine Medicine and Popular Romance in Late Medieval England

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Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004538402
Total Pages : 185 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (45 download)

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Book Synopsis Equine Medicine and Popular Romance in Late Medieval England by : Francine McGregor

Download or read book Equine Medicine and Popular Romance in Late Medieval England written by Francine McGregor and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-03-13 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Equine Medicine and Popular Romance in Late Medieval England explores a seldom-studied trove of English veterinary manuals, illuminating how the daily care of horses they describe reshapes our understanding of equine representation in the popular romance of late medieval England. A saint removes a horse’s leg the more easily to shoe him; a wild horse transforms spur wounds into the self-healing practice of bleeding; a messenger calculates time through his horse’s body. Such are the rich and conflicted visions of horse/human connection in the period. Exploring this imagined relation, Francine McGregor reveals a cultural undercurrent in which medieval England is so reliant on equine bodies that human anxieties, desires, and very orientation in daily life are often figured through them. This book illuminates the complex and contradictory yearnings shaping medieval perceptions of the horse, the self, and the identities born of their affinity.

John Donne's Performances

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Author :
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 1847797865
Total Pages : 436 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (477 download)

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Book Synopsis John Donne's Performances by : Margret Fetzer

Download or read book John Donne's Performances written by Margret Fetzer and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since their rediscovery in the 1920s, John Donne's writings have been praised for their energy, vigour and drama – yet so far, no attempt has been made to approach and define systematically these major characteristics of his work. Drawing on J. L. Austin's speech act theory, Margret Fetzer's comparative reading of Donne's poetry and prose eschews questions of personal or religious sincerity and instead recreates an image of John Donne as a man of many performances. No matter if engaged in the writing of a sermon or a piece of erotic poetry, Donne placed enormous trust in what words could do. Questions as to how saying something may actually bring about that very thing, or how playing the part of someone else affects an actor's identity, are central to Donne's oeuvre – and moreover highly relevant in the cultural and theological contexts of the early modern period in general. In treating both canonical and lesser known Donne texts, John Donne's Performances hopes to make a significant contribution not only to Donne criticism and research into early modern culture: by using concepts of performance and performativity as its major theoretical backdrop, it aims to establish an interdisciplinary link with the field of performance studies.

Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351736396
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (517 download)

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Book Synopsis Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion by : Naya Tsentourou

Download or read book Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion written by Naya Tsentourou and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-08 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Miton and Early Modern Devotional Culture analyses the representation of public and private prayer in John Milton’s poetry and prose, paying particular attention to the ways seventeenth-century prayer is imagined as embodied in sounds, gestures, postures, and emotional responses. Naya Tsentourou demonstrates Milton’s profound engagement with prayer, and how this is driven by a consistent and ardent effort to experience one’s address to God as inclusive of body and spirit and as loaded with affective potential. The book aims to become the first interdisciplinary study to show how Milton participates in and challenges early modern debates about authentic and insincere worship in public, set and spontaneous prayers in private, and gesture and voice in devotion.

The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama

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Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191651508
Total Pages : 710 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (916 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama by : Thomas Betteridge

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama written by Thomas Betteridge and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-19 with total page 710 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook to Tudor Drama is the authoritative secondary text on Tudor drama. It both integrates recent important research across different disciplines and periods and sets a new agenda for the future study of Tudor drama, questioning a number of the central assumptions of previous studies. Balancing the interests and concerns of scholars in theatre history, drama, and literary studies, its scope reflects the broad reach of Tudor drama as a subject, inviting readers to see the Tudor century as a whole, rather than made up of artificial and misleading divisions between 'medieval' and 'renaissance', religious and secular, pre- and post-Shakespeare. The contributors, both the established leaders in their fields and the brightest young scholars, attend to the contexts, intellectual, theatrical and historical within which drama was written, produced and staged in this period, and ask us to consider afresh this most vital and complex of periods in theatre history. The book is divided into four sections: Religious Drama; Interludes and Comedies, Entertainments, Masques, and Royal Entries; and Histories and political dramas.

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion

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Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199672806
Total Pages : 849 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (996 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion by : Andrew Hiscock

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion written by Andrew Hiscock and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 849 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering Handbook offers a comprehensive consideration of the dynamic relationship between English literature and religion in the early modern period. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the most turbulent times in the history of the British church - and, perhaps as a result, produced some of the greatest devotional poetry, sermons, polemics, and epics of literature in English. The early-modern interaction of rhetoric and faith is addressed in thirty-nine chapters of original research, divided into five sections. The first analyses the changes within the church from the Reformation to the establishment of the Church of England, the phenomenon of puritanism and the rise of non-conformity. The second section discusses ten genres in which faith was explored, including poetry, prophecy, drama, sermons, satire, and autobiographical writings. The middle section focuses on selected individual authors, among them Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, Lucy Hutchinson, and John Milton. Since authors never write in isolation, the fourth section examines a range of communities in which writers interpreted their faith: lay and religious households, sectarian groups including the Quakers, clusters of religious exiles, Jewish and Islamic communities, and those who settled in the new world. Finally, the fifth section considers some key topics and debates in early modern religious literature, ranging from ideas of authority and the relationship of body and soul, to death, judgment, and eternity. The Handbook is framed by a succinct introduction, a chronology of religious and literary landmarks, a guide for new researchers in this field, and a full bibliography of primary and secondary texts relating to early modern English literature and religion.

Shakespeare / Space

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350282987
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis Shakespeare / Space by : Isabel Karremann

Download or read book Shakespeare / Space written by Isabel Karremann and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-02-22 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare / Space explores new approaches to the enactment of 'space' in and through Shakespeare's plays, as well as to the material, cognitive and virtual spaces in which they are enacted. With contributions from 14 leading and emergent experts in their fields, the collection forges innovative connections between spatial studies and cultural geography, cognitive studies, memory studies, phenomenology and the history of the emotions, gender and race studies, rhetoric and language, translation studies, theatre history and performance studies. Each chapter offers methodological reflections on intersections such as space/mobility, space/emotion, space/supernatural, space/language, space/race and space/digital, whose critical purchase is demonstrated in close readings of plays like King Lear, The Comedy of Errors, Othello and Shakespeare's history plays. They testify to the importance of space for our understanding of Shakespeare's creative and theatrical practice, and at the same time enlarge our understanding of space as a critical concept in the humanities. It will prove useful to students, scholars, teachers and theatre practitioners of Shakespeare and early modern studies.

Representing Religious Pluralization in Early Modern Europe

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Author :
Publisher : LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN 13 : 3825810461
Total Pages : 363 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (258 download)

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Book Synopsis Representing Religious Pluralization in Early Modern Europe by : Andreas Höfele

Download or read book Representing Religious Pluralization in Early Modern Europe written by Andreas Höfele and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2007 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The title of this volume indicates more than a referential relationship: Representing Religious Pluralization entails not just the various ways in which the historical processes of pluralization were reflected in texts and other cultural artefacts, but also, crucially, the cultural work that spawned these processes. Reflecting, driving, shaping and subverting religious systems, representation becomes a divisive force in Reformation Europe as religious pluralization erupts in a contest over how to conceive, to symbolize and to perform religious belief. The essays in this book offer a broad range of perspectives on the pluralizing effects of cultural representation as well as on the various attempts at containing them.

Blood and Home in Early Modern Drama

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317961951
Total Pages : 198 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (179 download)

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Book Synopsis Blood and Home in Early Modern Drama by : Ariane M. Balizet

Download or read book Blood and Home in Early Modern Drama written by Ariane M. Balizet and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-24 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, the author argues that blood was, crucially, a means by which dramatists negotiated shifting contours of domesticity in 16th and 17th century England. Early modern English drama vividly addressed contemporary debates over an expanding idea of "the domestic," which encompassed the domus as well as sex, parenthood, household order, the relationship between home and state, and the connections between family honor and national identity. The author contends that the domestic ideology expressed by theatrical depictions of marriage and household order is one built on the simultaneous familiarity and violence inherent to blood. The theatrical relation between blood and home is far more intricate than the idealized language of the familial bloodline; the home was itself a bloody place, with domestic bloodstains signifying a range of experiences including religious worship, sex, murder, birth, healing, and holy justice. Focusing on four bleeding figures—the Bleeding Bride, Bleeding Husband, Bleeding Child, and Bleeding Patient—the author argues that the household blood of the early modern stage not only expressed the violence and conflict occasioned by domestic ideology, but also established the home as a site that alternately reified and challenged patriarchal authority.

The British and Anglo-Irish Thing-Essay from 1701 to 2021

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Author :
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000962679
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (9 download)

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Book Synopsis The British and Anglo-Irish Thing-Essay from 1701 to 2021 by : Daniel Schneider

Download or read book The British and Anglo-Irish Thing-Essay from 1701 to 2021 written by Daniel Schneider and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-29 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the it-narrative, the thing-poem and thing theatre have been around for some time, the essay – which is often considered literature’s fourth genre – is still lacking its thing-subgenre. Yet, particularly British and Anglo-Irish literature display a long, albeit so far implicit tradition of texts that can be categorised as ‘thing-essays’: Starting with Jonathan Swift’s “Meditation upon a Broomstick” (1701) and continuing until today, these texts draw broader insights from the contemplation of a material item of daily life. This book provides the first theoretical conceptualisation of this genre. Bringing elements from essay studies and the New Materialisms together, it shows why the essay lends itself particularly well to literarisations of the personal relationships that people foster to everyday objects. While the idiosyncrasies of each essay show the versatility of thing-essays, the study also seeks to unearth changing attitudes towards things – and thus towards people’s material surroundings in general – throughout time. In order to account for such synchronic and diachronic differences in thing-essays, this study develops a typology of three modes via which things can be approached essayistically. In the book’s second part, this framework will be employed in close readings and historicisations of 14 thing-essays from 1701 until 2021. Ranging from satire to sentimental writing, from religion to consumerism, from class to gender differences, from feelings of nationality to exoticism, from the French Revolution to Freud and from art to everyday life, the stylistic and thematic broadness of these thing-essays ultimately shows the multifarious connections between human life and materiality.

The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Early Modern Literature

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000454819
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (4 download)

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Book Synopsis The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Early Modern Literature by : Victoria Bladen

Download or read book The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Early Modern Literature written by Victoria Bladen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-10-27 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Early Modern Literature explores the vital motif of the tree of life and what it meant to early modern writers who drew from its long histories in biblical, classical and folkloric contexts, giving rise to a language of trees, an arboreal aesthetics. An ancient symbol of immortality, the tree of life was appropriated by Christian ideology and iconography to express ideas about Christ; however, the concept also migrated beyond religious doctrine. Ideas circulating around the tree of life enabled writers to imagine and articulate ideas of death and rebirth, loss and regeneration, the condition of the political state and personal states of the soul through arboreal metaphors and imagery. The motif could be used to sacralise landscapes, such as the garden, orchard or country estate, blurring the lines between contemporary green spaces and the spiritual and poetic imaginary. Located within the field of environmental humanities, and intersecting with ecocriticism and critical plant studies, this volume outlines a comprehensive history of the tree of life and offers interdisciplinary readings of focus texts by Shakespeare, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Aemilia Lanyer, Andrew Marvell and Ralph Austen. It includes consideration of related ideas and motifs, such as the tree of Jesse and the Green Man, illuminating the rich histories and meanings that emerge when an understanding of the tree of life and arboreal aesthetics are brought to the analysis of early modern literary texts and their representations of green spaces, both physical and metaphysical.

Crying in the Middle Ages

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136664017
Total Pages : 390 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (366 download)

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Book Synopsis Crying in the Middle Ages by : Elina Gertsman

Download or read book Crying in the Middle Ages written by Elina Gertsman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-02-20 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sacred and profane, public and private, emotive and ritualistic, internal and embodied, medieval weeping served as a culturally charged prism for a host of social, visual, cognitive, and linguistic performances. Crying in the Middle Ages addresses the place of tears in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultural discourses, providing a key resource for scholars interested in exploring medieval notions of emotion, gesture, and sensory experience in a variety of cultural contexts. Gertsman brings together essays that establish a series of conversations with one another, foregrounding essential questions about the different ways that crying was seen, heard, perceived, expressed, and transmitted throughout the Middle Ages. In acknowledging the porous nature of visual and verbal evidence, this collection foregrounds the necessity to read language, image, and experience together in order to envision the complex notions of medieval crying.

The early modern English sonnet

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Author :
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 1526144417
Total Pages : 374 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (261 download)

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Book Synopsis The early modern English sonnet by : Laetitia Sansonetti

Download or read book The early modern English sonnet written by Laetitia Sansonetti and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-23 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume updates current assumptions about the early modern English sonnet and its reception and inclusion in poetic collections. It deals both with major (Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser) and minor (Harvey, Barnes) sonneteers, and includes the first modern edition of a 1603 printed miscellany, The Muses Garland.

Croxton Play of the Sacrament

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Author :
Publisher : Medieval Institute Publications
ISBN 13 : 1580444571
Total Pages : 140 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (84 download)

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Book Synopsis Croxton Play of the Sacrament by : John T Sebastian

Download or read book Croxton Play of the Sacrament written by John T Sebastian and published by Medieval Institute Publications. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, which survives in a single sixteenth-century copy, dramatizes the physical abuse by five Muhammad-worshipping Syrian Jews of a Host, the bread consecrated by a priest during the Christian Mass. The text is the work of a playwright possessed of a tremendous theatrical imagination, notwithstanding his choice of subject matter.