In the early modern period, England radically expanded its participation in an economy that itself was becoming increasingly global. Yet less than twenty years after the highly profitable English East India Company made its first voyage, England was suffering from an economic depression, blamed largely on the shortage of coin necessary to exploit those very same profitable routes. How could there be profit in the face of so much loss, and loss i ...
A ForeWord magazine Book of the Year for 2007 Charismatic, highly intelligent, and splendidly talented, Fanny Kemble (1809-93) was a Victorian celebrity, known on both sides of the Atlantic as an actress and member of the famous Kemble theatrical dynasty, as a fierce opponent of slavery despite her marriage to a wealthy slave owner, as a brilliantly successful solo performer of Shakespeare, and as the author of journals about her career and l ...
The new history of the book has constituted a vibrant academic field in recent years, and theories of print culture have moved to the center of much scholarly discourse. One might think typography would be a basic element in the construction of these theories, yet if only we would pay careful attention to detail, Joseph A. Dane argues, we would find something else entirely: that a careful consideration of typography serves not as a material supp ...
Medieval courtiers defined themselves in ceremonies and rituals. Tournaments, Maying, interludes, charivaris, and masking invited the English and French nobility to assert their identities in gesture and costume as well as in speech. These events presumed that performance makes a self, in contrast to the modern belief that identity precedes social performance and, indeed, that performance falsifies the true, inner self. Susan Crane resists the l ...
It is widely acknowledged that the unhuman plays a significant role in the definition of humanity in contemporary thought. It appears in the thematization of «the Other» in philosophical, psychoanalytic, anthropological, and postcolonial studies, and shows up in the «antihumanism» associated with figures such as Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. One might trace its genealogy, as Freud did, to the Copernican, Darwinian, and psychoanalytic revolut ...
A sinner-saint who embraced then renounced sexual and worldly pleasures; a woman who, through her attachment to Jesus, embodied both erotic and sacred power; a symbol of penance and an exemplar of contemplative and passionate devotion: perhaps no figure stood closer to the center of late medieval debates about the sources of spiritual authority and women's contribution to salvation history than did Mary Magdalene, and perhaps nowhere in lat ...
Alliterative Revivals is the first full-length study of the sophisticated historical consciousness of late medieval alliterative romance. Drawing from historicism, feminism, performance studies, and postcolonial theory, Christine Chism argues that these poems animate British history by reviving and acknowledging potentially threatening figures from the medieval past—pagan judges, primeval giants, Greek knights, Jewish forefathers, Eg ...
Virginia Burrus explores one of the strongest and most disturbing aspects of the Christian tradition, its excessive preoccupation with shame. While Christianity has frequently been implicated in the conversion of ancient Mediterranean cultures from shame- to guilt-based and, thus, in the emergence of the modern West's emphasis on guilt, Burrus seeks to recuperate the importance of shame for Christian culture. Focusing on late antiquity, she ...
