Princes, Pastors and People traces the many changes in religious life that took place in the turbulent years of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries.
It is designed to make accessible to readers ...much of the most recent research, and to guide them through the major historical controversies of the last twenty-five years:
* the causes of the English Reformation * the popularity of the Elizabethan Protestant Church * the impact of the Laudian innovations of the 1630s * the Puritan attempt to control popular culture and belief.
By adopting a thematic rather than chronological approach, the book is also able to chart the long-term developments across the period in key areas such as doctrinal and liturgical change, the role of the clergy, and the importance of religion in the everyday lives of people.
'This is a book which must be welcomed...it takes into account the remarkable amount of work published in the last twenty years, has a helpful glossary and list of dates.' - Scottish Association of Teachers of History Resources Review 'Aimed chiefly at sixth-formers and undergraduates which offers a straightforward and accessible account of recent writings on the reformation and its origins.' - Times Higher Education Supplement
Tracing the presence and function of big cats—panthers, especially—in multicultural American literature, this study reveals how that particular species group functions as a point of entry for ...disparate American cultures into Foucauldian biopolitical negotiation, that is, acts of forming one’s own or forcing on others socially-constructed subjectivities in the name of achieving social gains. Drawing on biopolitical theory and animal studies methodology, the study performs a comparative reading of American-Indian, Anglo-American, and African-American texts that feature big cats and speak to issues of social ordering. Taking this approach puts these different American cultures’ biopolitical strategies into conversation with one another and reveals how nineteenth-century inter- and intracultural power struggles were in part facilitated by big cat imagery and figurative language. Previous scholarship has regarded much of early American animal imagery as an ideological weapon that upheld the removal of American Indians from their lands, reduced African Americans to the status of chattel slaves, and severely restricted women’s rights; however, moving beyond the recognizable Anglo-American big cat tradition, which largely asserts white male dominance, this study establishes scholarship on the big cat literature of women and ethnic minorities, segments of American society that challenge social exclusion through their own seldom-studied, yet rich, big cat texts. More precisely, this study reveals that women and ethnic minorities in nineteenth-century America used their own big cat literature and oral traditions to construct arguments in favor of their full and equal inclusion in the American social order. By comparing big cat narratives from different U.S. cultures, this study, which departs from the trend of applying biopolitical theory to population control in the strictly genetic sense, shows that the human/nonhuman border, a border that resonates with ancient fables and structures race, gender, and class relations, can be manipulated via narrative into a potent biopolitical tool. Exploring texts that bear this out furthers our understanding of how American cultures position themselves relative to nonhumans, how that positioning informs subject formation processes, and how those processes contribute to the framework of American society.
The threat of unstoppable plagues, such as AIDS and Ebola, is always with us. In Europe, the most devastating plagues were those from the Black Death pandemic in the 1300s to the Great Plague of ...London in 1665. For the last 100 years, it has been accepted that Yersinia pestis, the infective agent of bubonic plague, was responsible for these epidemics. This book combines modern concepts of epidemiology and molecular biology with computer-modelling. Applying these to the analysis of historical epidemics, the authors show that they were not, in fact, outbreaks of bubonic plague. Biology of Plagues offers a completely new interdisciplinary interpretation of the plagues of Europe and establishes them within a geographical, historical and demographic framework. This fascinating detective work will be of interest to readers in the social and biological sciences, and lessons learnt will underline the implications of historical plagues for modern-day epidemiology.
Notwithstanding the degree to which the demons mat remained from his journey afflicted the historical Cabeza de Vaca's personal identity and self perception, the film's interest lies elsewhere: it ...places a heavy emphasis on the psychological and cultural traumas Cabeza de Vaca experienced.
Quack, conjurer, sex fiend, murderer—Simon Forman has been called all these things, and worse, ever since he was implicated (two years after his death) in the Overbury poisoning scandal that rocked ...the court of King James. But as Barbara Traister shows in this fascinating book, Forman's own unpublished manuscripts—considered here in their entirety for the first time—paint a quite different picture of the works and days of this notorious astrological physician of London. Although he received no formal medical education, Forman built a thriving practice. His success rankled the College of Physicians of London, who hounded Forman with fines and jail terms for nearly two decades. In addition to detailing case histories of his medical practice—the first such records known from London—as well as his run-ins with the College, Forman's manuscripts cover a wide variety of other matters, from astrology and alchemy to gardening and the theater. His autobiographical writings are among the earliest English examples of their genre and display an abiding passion for reworking his personal history in the best possible light, even though they show little evidence that Forman ever intended to publish them. Fantastic as many of Forman's manuscripts are, it is their more mundane aspects that make them such a priceless record of what daily life was like for ordinary inhabitants of Shakespeare's London. Forman's descriptions of the stench of a privy, the paralyzed limbs of a child, a lost bitch dog with a velvet collar all offer tantalizing glimpses of a world that seems at once very far away and intimately familiar. Anyone who wants to reclaim that world will enjoy this book.
Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca remains one of the most enigmatic and problematic figures of early American exploration. This thesis undertakes a close analysis of four central documents relating to his ...lesser-known but important governorship of the Rio de la Plata province from 1540 to 1545, and delves into its study with a blend of philological and historiographical approaches. After an initial chapter devoted to the discussion of discursive types and genres, grouped in the broad categories of historiographical, legal and literary, a separate chapter is devoted to each of the larger narratives, namely the Relación general or General Account of 1545, signed and attributed to Cabeza de Vaca, and the Comentarios or Commentaries of 1555, assigned to his notary, Pedro Hernández. The fourth chapter is dedicated to the analysis of the remaining two documents, namely, an unedited letter by Cabeza de Vaca to the emperor Charles V written from the Azores, and an Account by Pedro Hernández, both written in 1545. Using this documentary evidence, this thesis proposes the study of writing at the zenith of conquest and territorial expansion as an integral part of the struggle for power and domination. As new genres and discursive structures emerge, the audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, from the ruling elite to the wider public, are given the tools to understand and shape the new spheres of public life. Writing becomes a powerful tool in the shaping of a new reality, and as such, it must be studied with extreme care, so that a modern reader is able to discern where history ends and fiction or manipulation of history begin. The contact and constant negotiations for power between the two worlds cause a restructuring of the old discursive parameters by which the old continent was measured. New and richer discursive types emerged that will reveal the realities and tensions of the acts of conquest and settlement. The emergence of new political, legal, ideological and economic structures come hand in hand with the development of new narrative structures, shaped by the aspirations of both conquerors and chroniclers.
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