Often viewed as theologically conservative, many theatrical works of late medieval and early Tudor England nevertheless exploited the performative nature of drama to flirt with unsanctioned ...expressions of desire, allowing queer identities and themes to emerge. Early plays faced vexing challenges in depicting sexuality, but modes of queerness, including queer scopophilia, queer dialogue, queer characters, and queer performances, fractured prevailing restraints. Many of these plays were produced within male homosocial environments, and thus homosociality served as a narrative precondition of their storylines.
Building from these foundations, On the Queerness of Early English Drama investigates occluded depictions of sexuality in late medieval and early Tudor dramas. Tison Pugh explores a range of topics, including the unstable genders of the York Corpus Christi Plays, the morally instructive humour of excremental allegory in Mankind , the confused relationship of sodomy and chastity in John Bale’s historical interludes, and the camp artifice and queer carnival of Sir David Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis . Pugh concludes with Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi , pondering the afterlife of medieval drama and its continued utility in probing cultural constructions of gender and sexuality
Prayer divided seventeenth-century England. Anglican Conformists such as Lancelot Andrewes and Jeremy Taylor upheld set forms of prayer in the Book of Common Prayer, a book designed to unite the ...nation in worship. Puritan Reformers and Dissenters such as John Milton and John Bunyan rejected the prayer book and advocated for extemporaneous or free prayer. In 1645, the mainly Puritan Long Parliament proscribed the Book of Common Prayer and dismantled the Anglican Church in the midst of civil war. This led Anglican poets and liturgists to defend their tradition with energy and erudition in print. In 1662, with monarchy restored, the mainly Anglican Cavalier Parliament reinstated the Church and its prayer book to impose religious uniformity. This galvanized English Nonconformity and Dissent and gave rise to a vibrant literary counter-tradition.
Addressing this fascinating history, David Gay examines competing claims to spiritual gifts and graces in polemical texts and their influence on prayer and poetry. Amid the contention of differing voices, the disputed connection of poetry and prayer, imagination and religion, emerges as a central tension in early modern literature and culture.
This book offers a new assessment of early Christianity in south-west Britain from the fourth to the tenth centuries, a rich period which includes the transition from Roman to native British to Saxon ...models of church. The book will be based on evidence from archaeological excavations, early texts and recent critical scholarship and cover Wessex, Devon and Cornwall. In the south-west, Wessex provides the greatest evidence of Roman Christianity. The fifth-century Dorset villas of Frampton and Hinton St Mary, with their complex baptistery mosaics, indicate the presence of sophisticated Christian house churches. The fact that these two Roman villas are only 15 miles apart suggests a network of small Christian communities in this region. The author uses evidence from St Patrick’s fifth-century ‘Confessions’ to describe how members of a villa house church lived. Wessex was slowly Christianised: in Gloucestershire, the pagan healing sanctuary at Chedworth provides evidence of later use as a Christian baptistery; at Bradford on Avon in Wiltshire, a baptistery was dug into the mosaic floor of an imposing villa, which may by then have been owned by a bishop. In Somerset a number of recently excavated sites demonstrate the transition from a pagan temple to a Christian church. Beside the pagan temple at Lamyatt, later female burials suggest, unusually, a small monastic group of women. Wells cathedral grew beside the site of a Roman villa’s funeral chapel. In Street, a large oval enclosure indicates the probable site of a ‘Celtic’ monastery. Early Christian cemeteries have been excavated at Shepton Mallet and elsewhere. Lundy Island, off the Devon coast, provides evidence of a Celtic monastery, with its inscribed stones that commemorate early monks. At Exeter, a Saxon anthology includes numerous riddles, one of which describes in detail the production of an illuminated manuscript in a south-western monastery. Oliver Padel’s meticulous documentation of Cornish place-names has demonstrated that, of all the Celtic regions, Cornwall has by far the highest number of dedications to a single, otherwise unknown individual, typically consisting of a small church and a farm by the sea. These small monastic ‘cells’ have hitherto received little attention as a model of church in early British Christianity, and the latter part of the text focuses on various aspects of this model, as lived out in coastal and in upland settlements, on islands, and in relation to larger Breton monasteries. Study of 60 Breton sites has demonstrated possible connections between larger Breton monasteries and smaller Cornish cells.
A barrister becomes a detective when his friend disappears at an English manor in this classic Victorian novel. Beautiful Lucy Graham charms every man she meets, including wealthy widower Sir Michael ...Audley. After they marry, he refurbishes his mansion to create a little palace for his new wife, where her future seems bright. Her past, however, is shrouded in darkness, and she'll do whatever it takes to keep it hidden. Then Sir Michael's nephew, Robert, a London barrister, comes for a visit with his good friend George Talboys for a week of fishing. But when George mysteriously vanishes, there's no time to relax. Increasingly suspicious of his new aunt, Robert searches for clues, determined to find his friend and discover exactly who Lady Audley really is. One of the most popular examples of the "sensation novel" craze that swept England during the nineteenth century, Lady Audley's Secret is said to reflect themes from a real-life crime of the era, the notorious Constance Kent case.
This engaging collection of over 60 primary document selections sheds light on the personalities, issues, events, and ideas that defined and shaped life in England during the years of Shakespeare's ...life and career. Documents of Shakespeare's England contains more than 60 primary document selections that will help readers understand all aspects of life in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. The book is divided into 12 topical sections, such as Politics and Parliament, London Life, and Queen and Court, which offer five document selections each. Each document is preceded by a detailed introduction that puts the selection into historical context and explains why it is important. A general introduction and chronology help readers understand Shakespeare's England in broad terms and see connections, causes, and consequences. Bibliographies of current and useful print and electronic information resources accompany each document, and a general bibliography lists seminal works on Shakespeare's England. This is an engaging and accurate introduction to the England of William Shakespeare told in the words of those who experienced it.
This book, the first to apply Popular Memory Theory to the Irish Diaspora, opens new lines of critical enquiry within scholarship on the Irish in modern Britain. Combining innovative use of migrant ...life histories with cultural representations of the post-war Irish experience, it interrogates the interaction between lived experience, personal memory and cultural myth to further understanding of the work of memory in the production of migrant subjectivities. Shedding new light on the collective fantasies of post-war migrants, as well as the personal dynamics of subjective change,Life history illuminates how migrants' 'recompose' the self in response to the transition between cultures and places. This book will be essential reading for academics and students researching modern British and Irish social and cultural history, ethnic and migration studies, oral history and memory studies, cultural studies and human geographyThis book, the first to apply Popular Memory Theory to the Irish Diaspora, opens new lines of critical enquiry within scholarship on the Irish in modern Britain. Combining innovative use of migrant life histories with cultural representations of the post-war Irish experience, it interrogates the interaction between lived experience, personal memory and cultural myth to further understanding of the work of memory in the production of migrant subjectivities. Shedding new light on the collective fantasies of post-war migrants, as well as the personal dynamics of subjective change,Life history illuminates how migrants' 'recompose' the self in response to the transition between cultures and places. This book will be essential reading for academics and students researching modern British and Irish social and cultural history, ethnic and migration studies, oral history and memory studies, cultural studies and human geography
A recovery of the revealing poetic and political commentary produced by the Imperial poet laureate Nicolaus Mameranus for the court of Mary Tudor during the visit of her husband, Philip II of Spain, ...in 1557.
A survey of the life, historical and political impacts, and textual sources associated with the early medieval English missionary and church reformer Boniface, who was active in the eighth century in ...what is today Germany, France, and the Netherlands.
The making of the United Kingdom in 1707 is still a matter of significant political and historical controversy. Allan Macinnes here offers a major interpretation that sets the Act of Union within a ...broad European and colonial context and provides a comprehensive picture of its transatlantic and transoceanic ramifications that ranged from the balance of power to the balance of trade. He reexamines English motivations from a colonial as well as a military perspective and assesses the imperial significance of the creation of the United Kingdom. He also explores afresh the commitment of some determined Scots to secure Union for political, religious and opportunist reasons and shows that rather than an act of statesmanship, the resultant Treaty of Union was the outcome of politically inept negotiations by the Scots. Union and Empire will be a major contribution to the history of Britain, empire and early modern state formation.
From the 1890s onwards, social reformers, volunteer lawyers, and
politicians increasingly came to see access to affordable or free
legal advice as a critical part of helping working-class people
...uphold their rights with landlords, employers, and retailers - and,
from the 1940s, with the welfare state. Whilst a state scheme was
launched in 1949, it was never fully implemented and help from a
lawyer remained out of the reach of many people. Lawyers for
the poor is the first full-length study of the development of
voluntary action and mutual schemes to make the law more
accessible, and the pressure put on the legal profession and
governments to bring in further reforms. It offers new insights of
the role of access to the law in shaping ideas about citizenship
and civil rights in the twentieth century.
