Shakespeare, Lee Oser argues, is a Christian literary artist who
criticizes and challenges Christians, but who does so on Christian
grounds. Stressing Shakespeare's theological sensitivity, Oser
...places Shakespeare's work in the "radical middle," the dialectical
opening between the sacred and the secular where great writing can
flourish. According to Oser, the radical middle was and remains a
site of cultural originality, as expressed through mimetic works of
art intended for a catholic (small "c") audience. It describes the
conceptual space where Shakespeare was free to engage theological
questions, and where his Christian skepticism could serve his
literary purposes. Oser reviews the rival cases for a Protestant
Shakespeare and for a Catholic Shakespeare, but leaves the issue
open, focusing, instead, on how Shakespeare exploits artistic
resources that are specific to Christianity, including the
classical-Christian rhetorical tradition. The scope of the book
ranges from an introductory survey of the critical field as it now
stands, to individual chapters on A Midsummer Night's Dream,
The Merchant of Venice, the Henriad, Hamlet , and King
Lear . Writing with a deep sense of literary history, Oser
holds that mainstream literary criticism has created a false
picture of Shakespeare by secularizing him and misconstruing the
nature of his art. Through careful study of the plays, Oser
recovers a Shakespeare who is less vulnerable to the winds of
academic and political fashion, and who is a friend to the enduring
project of humanistic education. Christian Humanism in Shakespeare:
A Study in Religion and Literature is both eminently readable and a
work of consequence.
Comprehensive guidance to support those involved in primary education in developing the curriculum to meet the requirements of the new Ofsted (2019) framework.
Henry Daniel, fourteenth-century medical writer, Dominican friar, and contemporary of Chaucer, is one of the most neglected figures to whom we can attribute a substantial body of extant works in ...Middle English. His Liber Uricrisiarum , the earliest known medical text in Middle English, synthesizes authoritative traditions into a new diagnostic encyclopedia characterized by its stylistic verve and intellectual scope.
Drawing on expertise from a range of scholars, this volume examines Daniel’s capacious works and demonstrates their significance to many scholarly conversations, including the history of late medieval medicine. It explains the background for Daniel’s uroscopic and herbal work, describes all known versions of the Liber Uricrisiarum and traces revisions over time, analyses Daniel’s representations of his own medical practice, and demonstrates his influence on later medical and literary writers.
Both a companion to the recently published reading edition of the Liber Uricrisiarum and a work of original scholarship in its own right, this collection promotes a wider understanding of Daniel’s texts and prompts new discoveries about their importance.
Dining out used to be considered exceptional; however, the Food Standards Authority reported that in 2014, one meal in six was eaten away from home in Britain. Previously considered a necessary ...substitute for an inability to obtain a meal in a family home, dining out has become a popular recreational activity for a majority of the population, offering pleasure as well as refreshment. Based on a major mixed-methods research project on dining out in England, this book offers a unique comparison of the social differences between London, Bristol and Preston from 1995 to 2015, charting the dynamic relationship between eating in and eating out. Addressing topics such as the changing domestic divisions of labour around food preparation, the variety of culinary experience for different sections of the population, and class differences in taste and the pleasures and satisfactions associated with dining out, the authors explore how the practice has evolved across the three cities.Dining out used to be considered exceptional; however, the Food Standards Authority reported that in 2014, one meal in six was eaten away from home in Britain. Previously considered a necessary substitute for an inability to obtain a meal in a family home, dining out has become a popular recreational activity for a majority of the population, offering pleasure as well as refreshment. Based on a major mixed-methods research project on dining out in England, this book offers a unique comparison of the social differences between London, Bristol and Preston from 1995 to 2015, charting the dynamic relationship between eating in and eating out. Addressing topics such as the changing domestic divisions of labour around food preparation, the variety of culinary experience for different sections of the population, and class differences in taste and the pleasures and satisfactions associated with dining out, the authors explore how the practice has evolved across the three cities.
The nineteenth century was a period of science and imagery: when
scientific theories and discoveries challenged longstanding
boundaries between animal, plant, and human, and when art and
visual ...culture produced new notions about the place of the human in
the natural world. Just as scientists relied on graphic
representation to conceptualize their ideas, artists moved
seamlessly between scientific debate and creative expression to
support or contradict popular scientific theories-such as Darwin's
theory of evolution and sexual selection-deliberately drawing on
concepts in ways that allowed them to refute popular claims or
disrupt conventional knowledges. Focusing on the close kinship
between the arts and sciences during the Victorian period, the art
historians contributing to this volume reveal the unique ways in
which nineteenth-century British and American visual culture
participated in making science, and in which science informed art
at a crucial moment in the history of the development of the modern
world. Together, they explore topics in geology, meteorology,
medicine, anatomy, evolution, and zoology, as well as a range of
media from photography to oil painting. They remind us that science
and art are not tightly compartmentalized, separate influences.
Rather, these are fields that share forms, manifest as waves,
layers, lines, or geometries; that invest in the idea of the
evolution of form; and that generate surprisingly kindred
responses, such as pain, pleasure, empathy, and sympathy.
Religion and life cycles in early modern England assembles
scholars working in the fields of history, English literature and
art history to further our understanding of the intersection
between ...religion and the life course in the period c .
1550-1800. Featuring chapters on Catholic, Protestant and Jewish
communities, it encourages cross-confessional comparison between
life stages and rites of passage that were of religious
significance to all faiths in early modern England. The book
considers biological processes such as birth and death, aspects of
the social life cycle including schooling, coming of age and
marriage and understandings of religious transition points such as
spiritual awakenings and conversion. Through this inclusive and
interdisciplinary approach, it seeks to show that the life cycle
was not something fixed or predetermined and that early modern
individuals experienced multiple, overlapping life cycles.
Since her death in 2011, the legendary Surrealist Leonora Carrington has been reconstructed and reinvented many times over. In this book, Gabriel Weisz Carrington draws on remembered conversations ...and events to demythologise his mother, revealing the woman and the artist behind the iconic persona.
He travels between Leonora’s native England and adopted homeland of Mexico, making stops in New York and Paris and meeting some of the remarkable figures she associated with, from Max Ernst and André Breton to Remedios Varo and Alejandro Jodorowsky. At the same time, he strives to depict a complex and very real Surrealist creator, exploring Leonora not simply in relation to her romantic partners or social milieus but as the artist she always was.
A textured portrait emerges from conversations, memories, stories and Leonora’s engagement with the books that she read.
Was there such a thing as a modern notion of race in the English Renaissance, and, if so, was skin color its necessary marker? In fact, early modern texts described human beings of various national ...origins-including English-as turning white, brown, tawny, black, green, or red for any number of reasons, from the effects of the sun's rays or imbalance of the bodily humors to sexual desire or the application of makeup. It is in this cultural environment that the seventeenth-centuryLondon Gazetteused the term "black" to describe both dark-skinned African runaways and dark-haired Britons, such as Scots, who are now unquestioningly conceived of as "white." InShades of Difference, Sujata Iyengar explores the cultural mythologies of skin color in a period during which colonial expansion and the slave trade introduced Britons to more dark-skinned persons than at any other time in their history. Looking to texts as divergent as sixteenth-century Elizabethan erotic verse, seventeenth-century lyrics, and Restoration prose romances, Iyengar considers the construction of race during the early modern period without oversimplifying the emergence of race as a color-coded classification or a black/white opposition. Rather, "race," embodiment, and skin color are examined in their multiple contexts-historical, geographical, and literary. Iyengar engages works that have not previously been incorporated into discussions of the formation of race, such as Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" and Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis." By rethinking the emerging early modern connections between the notions of race, skin color, and gender,Shades of Differencefurthers an ongoing discussion with originality and impeccable scholarship.
In the late 1790s, British Prime Minister William Pitt created a crisis of representation when he pressured the British Parliament to relieve the Bank of England from its obligations to convert paper ...notes into coin. Paper quickly became associated with a form of limitless reproduction that threatened to dematerialize solid bodies and replace them with insubstantial shadows.
Media Critique in the Age of Gillray centres on printed images and graphic satires which view paper as the foundation for the contemporary world. Through a focus on printed, visual imagery from practitioners such as James Gillray, William Blake, John Thomas Smith, and Henry Fuseli, the book addresses challenges posed by reproductive technologies to traditional concepts of subjective agency.
Joseph Monteyne shows that the late eighteenth-century paper age’s baseless fabric set the stage for contemporary digital media’s weightless production. Engagingly written and abundantly illustrated, Media Critique in the Age of Gillray highlights the fact that graphic culture has been overlooked as an important sphere for the production of critical and self-reflective discourses around media transformations and the visual turn in British culture.
