Showing 1-20 of 21 items.

The Age of Subtlety

Nature and Rhetorical Conceits in Early Modern Europe

University of Delaware Press

The Age of Subtlety is the first book-length study to examine the seventeenth-century craze for rhetorical conceits in connection with scientific and technological debates. Focusing on Italy and Spain, it argues that these intricate and challenging metaphors became embodiments of a competition between natural and human ingenuity, as well as sites to reflect on the consequences of telescopic and microscopic vision, the boundaries between natural and artificial, and the generation of life. 

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Redreaming the Renaissance

Essays on History and Literature in Honor of Guido Ruggiero

University of Delaware Press

Redreaming the Renaissance offers twelve essays that build on the pathbreaking work of Guido Ruggiero in blending history and literature. Within this volume, contributors take interdisciplinary approaches to examining not only belles lettres but also other forms of artful expression, bringing their fields into conversation and reflecting on the methodology needed to sustain and enrich this conversation. 
 

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Ordering Customs

Ethnographic Thought in Early Modern Venice

University of Delaware Press

Ordering Customs is an intellectual and cultural history of the production and circulation of ethnographic knowledge in early modern Venice. It examines how a range of figures—diplomats, bureaucrats, printers, readers, and ordinary Venetians—produced, used, and circulated information about customs from the sixteenth through the early seventeenth centuries.
 

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The Waxing of the Middle Ages

Revisiting Late Medieval France

University of Delaware Press

Johan Huizinga’s much-loved and much-contested Autumn of the Middle Ages, first published in 1919 and in print ever since, encouraged an image of the Late French Middle Ages as a flamboyant but empty period of decline and nostalgia. This collection sets out to provide a rich, complex, and diverse study showing that this often maligned and frequently ignored period is crucial in its own right.

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The Waxing of the Middle Ages

Revisiting Late Medieval France

University of Delaware Press

Johan Huizinga’s much-loved and much-contested Autumn of the Middle Ages, first published in 1919 and in print ever since, encouraged an image of the Late French Middle Ages as a flamboyant but empty period of decline and nostalgia. This collection sets out to provide a rich, complex, and diverse study showing that this often maligned and frequently ignored period is crucial in its own right.

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Gendering the Renaissance

Text and Context in Early Modern Italy

University of Delaware Press

The essays in Gendering the Renaissance offer a nuanced picture of gender in early modern Italian literature and culture through overlapping lenses that bring into focus myriad issues, from race and religion to schooling and storytelling. Read in dialogue with one another, these interventions provide a multifaceted view of currents in gender studies and early modern Italy.

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Storytelling in Sixteenth-Century France

Negotiating Shifting Forms

University of Delaware Press

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 narratives categories. Through studies of storytelling in tapestries, stone, and music as well as in historical, professional, and literary writing that addressed both erudite and common readers, the contributors evoke a society in transition.

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Storytelling in Sixteenth-Century France

Negotiating Shifting Forms

University of Delaware Press

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 narratives categories. Through studies of storytelling in tapestries, stone, and music as well as in historical, professional, and literary writing that addressed both erudite and common readers, the contributors evoke a society in transition.

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England's Asian Renaissance

University of Delaware Press

England's Asian Renaissance examines the often-subtle ways in which Asian cultures inflected the literature of early modern England, with an eye toward patterns of cross-cultural fertilization, mediation, and convergence. The collection moves away from hegemonic narratives of English cultural and political sovereignty to underscore the radically mobile nature of early modern culture.     

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Performative Polemic

Anti-Absolutist Pamphlets and their Readers in Late Seventeenth-Century France

University of Delaware Press

Performative Polemic offers a literary history of the French-language pamphlets that denounced absolutism during Louis XIV’s personal reign (1661-1715). The book employs performativity as a conceptual framework to trace the evolution of anti-absolutist pamphlets from legalistic texts indicting the French crown to satirical narratives that transformed the Sun King into a laughable object of derision.   

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Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation

University of Delaware Press

The enduring "black legend" of the Italian Counter-Reformation, which has held sway in both scholarly and popular culture, maintains that the Council of Trent ushered in a cultural dark age in Italy, snuffing out the spectacular creative production of the Renaissance. As a result, the decades following Trent have been mostly overlooked in Italian literary studies, in particular.

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Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation

University of Delaware Press

The enduring "black legend" of the Italian Counter-Reformation, which has held sway in both scholarly and popular culture, maintains that the Council of Trent ushered in a cultural dark age in Italy, snuffing out the spectacular creative production of the Renaissance. As a result, the decades following Trent have been mostly overlooked in Italian literary studies, in particular.

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Milton Among Spaniards

University of Delaware Press

Firmly grounded in literary studies but drawing on religious studies, translation studies, drama, and visual art, Milton among Spaniards is the first book-length exploration of the afterlife of John Milton in Spanish culture, illuminating underexamined Anglo-Hispanic cultural relations. This study calls attention to a series of powerful engagements by Spaniards with Milton’s works and legend, following a general chronology from the eighteenth to the early twenty-first century, tracing the overall story of Milton’s presence from indices of prohibited works during the Inquisition, through the many Spanish translations of Paradise Lost, to the author’s depiction on stage in the nineteenth-century play Milton, and finally to the representation of Paradise Lost by Spanish visual artists.

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The Dark Thread

From Tragical Histories to Gothic Tales

Edited by John D. Lyons
University of Delaware Press

In The Dark Thread, scholars examine a set of important and perennial narrative motifs centered on violence within the family as they have appeared in French, English, Spanish, and American literatures. Over fourteen essays, contributors highlight the connections between works from early modernity and subsequent texts from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, in which incidents such as murder, cannibalism, poisoning, the burial of the living, the failed burial of the dead, and subsequent apparitions of ghosts that haunt the household unite “high” and “low” cultural traditions. This book questions the traditional separation between the highly honored genre of tragedy and the less respected and generally less well-known genres of histoires tragiques, gothic tales and novels, and horror stories.

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The Dark Thread

From Tragical Histories to Gothic Tales

Edited by John D. Lyons
University of Delaware Press

In The Dark Thread, scholars examine a set of important and perennial narrative motifs centered on violence within the family as they have appeared in French, English, Spanish, and American literatures. Over fourteen essays, contributors highlight the connections between works from early modernity and subsequent texts from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, in which incidents such as murder, cannibalism, poisoning, the burial of the living, the failed burial of the dead, and subsequent apparitions of ghosts that haunt the household unite “high” and “low” cultural traditions. This book questions the traditional separation between the highly honored genre of tragedy and the less respected and generally less well-known genres of histoires tragiques, gothic tales and novels, and horror stories.

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Women Warriors in Early Modern Spain

A Tribute to Barbara Mujica

University of Delaware Press

Although scholars often depict early modern Spanish women as victims, history and fiction of the period are filled with examples of women who defended their God-given right to make their own decisions and to define their own identities. The essays in Women Warriors in Early Modern Spain examine many such examples, demonstrating how women battled the status quo, defended certain causes, challenged authority, and broke barriers.

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Women Warriors in Early Modern Spain

A Tribute to Barbara Mujica

University of Delaware Press

Although scholars often depict early modern Spanish women as victims, history and fiction of the period are filled with examples of women who defended their God-given right to make their own decisions and to define their own identities. The essays in Women Warriors in Early Modern Spain examine many such examples, demonstrating how women battled the status quo, defended certain causes, challenged authority, and broke barriers.

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The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic

Images of Hostility from Dante to Tasso

University of Delaware Press

In The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic, Andrea Moudarres examines influential works from the literary canon of the Italian Renaissance, arguing that hostility consistently arises from within political or religious entities. In Dante’s Divina Commedia, Luigi Pulci’s Morgante, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, enmity is portrayed as internal, taking the form of tyranny, betrayal, and civil discord. 

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Retelling the Siege of Jerusalem in Early Modern England

University of Delaware Press

This compelling book explores sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English retellings of the Roman siege of Jerusalem and the way they informed and were informed by religious and political developments. The siege featured prominently in many early modern English sermons, ballads, plays, histories, and pamphlets, functioning as a touchstone for writers who sought to locate their own national drama of civil and religious tumult within a larger biblical and post-biblical context. 

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Advertising the Self in Renaissance France

Authorial Personae and Ideal Readers in Lemaire, Marot, and Rabelais

University of Delaware Press

Advertising the Self in Renaissance France is a study of how authors and readers are represented in printed editions of three major literary figures of the French Renaissance: Jean Lemaire de Belges, Clément Marot, and François Rabelais. Print culture is marked by an anxiety of reception that became much more pronounced with increasingly anonymous and unpredictable readerships in the sixteenth century. To allay this anxiety, authors, as well as editors and printers, turned to self-fashioning in order to sell not only their books, but also particular ways of reading.

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