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Poison's Dark Works in Renaissance England

Author: Miranda Wilson

Publisher: Bucknell University Press

Published: 2013-12-24

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1611485398

Poison's Dark Works in Renaissance England considers the ways sixteenth- and seventeenth-century fears of poisoning prompt new models for understanding the world even as the fictive qualities of poisoning frustrate attempts at certainty. Whether English writers invoke literal poisons, as they do in so many revenge dramas, homicide cases, and medical documents, or whether poisoning appears more metaphorically, as it does in a host of theological, legal, philosophical, popular, and literary works, this particular, “invisible” weapon easily comes to embody the darkest elements of a more general English appetite for imagining the hidden correlations between the seen and the unseen. This book is an inherently interdisciplinary project. This book works from the premise that accounts of poisons and their operations in Renaissance texts are neither incidental nor purely sensational; rather, they do moral, political, and religious work which can best be assessed when we consider poisoning as part of the texture of Renaissance culture. Placing little known or less-studied texts (medical reports, legal accounts, or anonymous pamphlets) alongside those most familiar to scholars and the larger public (such as poetry by Edmund Spenser and plays by William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton) allows us to appreciate the almost gravitational pull exerted by the notion of poison in the Renaissance. Considering a variety of texts, written for disparate audiences, and with diverse purposes, makes apparent the ways this crime functions as both a local problem to be solved and as an apt metaphor for the complications of epistemology.

Poison on the early modern English stage

Author: Lisa Hopkins

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2023-08-29

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1526159910

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Many early modern plays use poison, most famously Hamlet, where the murder of Old Hamlet showcases the range of issues poison mobilises. Its orchard setting is one of a number of sinister uses of plants which comment on both the loss of horticultural knowledge resulting from the Dissolution of the Monasteries and also the many new arrivals in English gardens through travel, trade, and attempts at colonisation. The fact that Old Hamlet was asleep reflects unease about soporifics troubling the distinction between sleep and death; pouring poison into the ear smuggles in the contemporary fear of informers; and it is difficult to prove. This book explores poisoning in early modern plays, the legal and epistemological issues it raises, and the cultural work it performs, which includes questions related to race, religion, nationality, gender, and humans’ relationship to the environment.

Massinger’s Italy

Author: Cristina Paravano

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-08-04

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 1000919838

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Massinger’s Italy: Re-Imagining Italian Culture in the Plays of Philip Massinger offers the first book-length account of the pervasive influence of Italian culture on the canon of Philip Massinger, one of the most successful playwrights of the post-Shakespearean period. This volume explores the relationships between Massinger and Italian literary, dramatic and intellectual culture in the larger context of Anglo-Italian cultural exchanges. The book investigates the influence of Italian culture, considering Massinger’s engagement and appropriation of Italian texts, dramatic and political theories and ideas related to the country and his use of Italy as a setting. Massinger’s Italy offers a fresh and unexpected perspective on the development of Anglo-Italian discourse on the early modern English stage, showing to what extent Massinger contributed to the myth of Italy and to the circulation of Italian culture and shedding light on the complex system of Anglo-Italian interconnections within the corpus of Massinger’s plays as well as with the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Scholars and Poets Talk About Queens

Author: Carole Levin

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-08-18

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1137534907

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Scholars and Poets Talk About Queens is a lively and erudite collection, unusual in an especially appealing way. This collection of essays shows how queens were represented in the Middle Ages and Renaissance through primary accounts, chronicles, and literary representations. The book also contains modern poetry and short plays about these same queens, allowing readers to understand and appreciate them both intellectually and emotionally. Contributors study a wide range of queens including such famous and fascinating women as Queen Elizabeth I, Cleopatra, Hecuba, the Empress Matilda, Mary Stuart, Margaret of Anjou, Catherine of Aragon, and the pirate queen Grace O'Malley. By pairing scholarly essays with contemporary poems about them, the collection demonstrates the continued relevance and immediacy of these powerful and fascinating women.

Agatha Christie and the Guilty Pleasure of Poison

Author: Sylvia A. Pamboukian

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-11-12

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 3031160002

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Agatha Christie and the Guilty Pleasure of Poison examines Christie’s female poisoners in the context of Christie’s own experience in pharmacy and of detective fiction. In doing so, it uncovers an overlooked dynamic in which female poisoners deliver well-deserved comeuppance for gendered and classed wrongdoing ordinarily accepted in everyday life. While critics have long recognized male outlaws, like Robin Hood, who use crime to oppose a corrupt system, this book contends that female outlaws – witches and poisoners – offer a similar heritage of empowered femininity. Far from cozy and formulaic, Agatha Christie’s outlaw poisoners offer readers the surprising pleasures of comeuppance, and they set the stage for contemporary detective fiction writers, more recent films depicting poisoning as empowering, and even poison gardens, which are tourist destinations that offer visitors the guilty pleasure of poison.

The Poison Trials

Author: Alisha Rankin

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-01-22

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 022674499X

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In 1524, Pope Clement VII gave two condemned criminals to his physician to test a promising new antidote. After each convict ate a marzipan cake poisoned with deadly aconite, one of them received the antidote, and lived—the other died in agony. In sixteenth-century Europe, this and more than a dozen other accounts of poison trials were committed to writing. Alisha Rankin tells their little-known story. At a time when poison was widely feared, the urgent need for effective cures provoked intense excitement about new drugs. As doctors created, performed, and evaluated poison trials, they devoted careful attention to method, wrote detailed experimental reports, and engaged with the problem of using human subjects for fatal tests. In reconstructing this history, Rankin reveals how the antidote trials generated extensive engagement with “experimental thinking” long before the great experimental boom of the seventeenth century and investigates how competition with lower-class healers spurred on this trend. The Poison Trials sheds welcome and timely light on the intertwined nature of medical innovations, professional rivalries, and political power.

It All Depends on the Dose

Author: Ole Peter Grell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-05-11

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1315521083

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This is the first volume to take a broad historical sweep of the close relation between medicines and poisons in the Western tradition, and their interconnectedness. They are like two ends of a spectrum, for the same natural material can be medicine or poison, depending on the dose, and poisons can be transformed into medicines, while medicines can turn out to be poisons. The book looks at important moments in the history of the relationship between poisons and medicines in European history, from Roman times, with the Greek physician Galen, through the Renaissance and the maverick physician Paracelsus, to the present, when poisons are actively being turned into beneficial medicines. Chapter 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris

Author: Holly Tucker

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2017-03-21

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0393248844

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“Tucker writes with gusto . . . high drama.”—Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review In the late 1600s, Louis XIV assigns Nicolas de la Reynie to bring order to Paris after the brutal deaths of two magistrates. Reynie, pragmatic and fearless, discovers a network of witches, poisoners, and priests whose reach extends all the way to the king’s court at Versailles. Based on court transcripts and Reynie’s compulsive note-taking, Holly Tucker’s engrossing true-crime narrative makes the characters breathe on the page as she follows the police chief into the dark labyrinths of crime-ridden Paris, the halls of royal palaces, secret courtrooms, and torture chambers.

Portraits in Early Modern English Drama

Author: Emanuel Stelzer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-05-14

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0429791720

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Portraits in Early Modern English Drama studies the complex web of interconnections that grows out of the presentation of portraits as props in early modern English drama. Emanuel Stelzer considers this theory from the Elizabethan age up to the closing of the theatres. This book examines how the dramatic text and the subjectivities of the dramatis personae are shaped and changed through the process of observation and interpretation of pictures in the dramatic actions and dialogues. Unlike any previous study, it confronts when a portrait is clearly meant not to be a miniature. This also has bearings on the effect of the picture on the audience and in terms of genre expectation. Two important questions are interrogated in the book: What were the price and value of these portraits? and What were the strategies deployed by the playing companies to show women’s portraits in a theatre without actresses? This book will be of interest to different areas of research dealing with the history of drama and literature, material and visual culture studies, art history, gender studies, and performance studies.

Fatal Fictions

Author: Alison L. LaCroix

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0190610786

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Writers of fiction have always confronted topics of crime and punishment. This age-old fascination with crime on the part of both authors and readers is not surprising, given that criminal justice touches on so many political and psychological themes essential to literature, and comes equipped with a trial process that contains its own dramatic structure. This volume explores this profound and enduring literary engagement with crime, investigation, and criminal justice. The collected essays explore three themes that connect the world of law with that of fiction. First, defining and punishing crime is one of the fundamental purposes of government, along with the protection of victims by the prevention of crime. And yet criminal punishment remains one of the most abused and terrifying forms of political power. Second, crime is intensely psychological and therefore an important subject by which a writer can develop and explore character. A third connection between criminal justice and fiction involves the inherently dramatic nature of the legal system itself, particularly the trial. Moreover, the ongoing public conversation about crime and punishment suggests that the time is ripe for collaboration between law and literature in this troubled domain. The essays in this collection span a wide array of genres, including tragic drama, science fiction, lyric poetry, autobiography, and mystery novels. The works discussed include works as old as fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy and as recent as contemporary novels, memoirs, and mystery novels. The cumulative result is arresting: there are "killer wives" and crimes against trees; a government bureaucrat who sends political adversaries to their death for treason before falling to the same fate himself; a convicted murderer who doesn't die when hanged; a psychopathogical collector whose quite sane kidnapping victim nevertheless also collects; Justice Thomas' reading and misreading of Bigger Thomas; a man who forgives his son's murderer and one who cannot forgive his wife's non-existent adultery; fictional detectives who draw on historical analysis to solve murders. These essays begin a conversation, and they illustrate the great depth and power of crime in literature.