eBook PDF Download Digital Library
Author: Frank Walsh Brownlow
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Published: 1993
Total Pages: 452
ISBN-13: 9780874134360
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Part 1 of this book provides an annotated edition of Samuel Harsnett's famous attack on the practice of exorcism, which had a profound influence upon Shakespeare's conception and writing of King Lear. Part 2 explores the context of Shakespeare's reading of Harsnett's book.
Author: Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen
Publisher: DS Brewer
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 238
ISBN-13: 9781843841142
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The so-called "Devil Theatre" is here set against its context of non-dramatic texts on possession and exorcism, providing many new insights. Representations of demonic possession and exorcism rituals abound in English Renaissance drama, an area which this book seeks to illuminate by comparison with non-dramatic works. The author investigates stage images of possessionin relation to a range of early modern demonological, theological and medical prose texts on the subject, looking specifically at how the theatre responded to these texts. He argues that the stage appropriated debates over demonicpossession to explore the competing roles of the inner life and the body in early modern definitions of selfhood. The theatre also employed the contemporary controversy over possession and exorcism to investigate the politics ofreligion, and to consider the nature of monarchic power. Moreover, because demonic possession cases and exorcism rituals were frequently dismissed by conformist writers as a piece of theatre, they offered an opportunity to reflecton the nature of drama and role-playing. JAN FRANS VAN DIJKHUIZEN is lecturer and research fellow at the University of Leiden.
Author: Gillian Woods
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-06-20
Total Pages: 252
ISBN-13: 0199671265
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Shakespeare's Unreformed Fictions asks why Catholicism had such an imaginative hold on Shakespearean drama, even though the on-going Reformation outlawed its practice. Concentrating on dramatic impact, and integrating literary analysis with fresh historical research, Gillian Woods offers a new and engaging answer to this important question.
Author: Brendan C. Walsh
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-07-30
Total Pages: 286
ISBN-13: 100009684X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In 1598, the English clergyman John Darrell was brought before the High Commission at Lambeth Palace to face charges of fraud and counterfeiting. The ecclesiastical authorities alleged that he had "taught 4. to counterfeite" demonic possession over a ten-year period, fashioning himself into a miracle worker. Coming to the attention of the public through his dramatic and successful role as an exorcist in the late sixteenth century, Darrell became a symbol of Puritan spirituality and the subject of fierce ecclesiastical persecution. The High Commission of John Darrell became a flashpoint for theological and demonological debate, functioning as a catalyst for spiritual reform in the early seventeenth-century English Church. John Darrell has long been maligned by scholars; a historiographical perception that this book challenges. The English Exorcist is the first study to provide an in-depth scholarly treatment of Darrell’s exorcism ministry and his demonology. It shines new light on the corpus of theological treatises that emerged from the Darrell Controversy, thereby illustrating the profound impact of Darrell’s exorcism ministry on early modern Reformed English Protestant demonology. The book establishes an intellectual biography of this figure and sketches out the full compelling story of the Darrell Controversy.
Author: K. Uszkalo
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2016-01-18
Total Pages: 263
ISBN-13: 1137498226
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Narratives of possession have survived in early English medical and philosophical treatises. Using ideas derived from cognitive science, this study moves through the stages of possession and exorcism to describe how the social, religious, and medical were internalized to create the varied manifestations of demon possession in early modern England.
Author: Patrick Collinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2013-01-03
Total Pages: 251
ISBN-13: 1107023343
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A major study of the Elizabethan Puritan movement, as seen through the eyes of its most determined opponent, Richard Bancroft.
Author: Kaara L. Peterson
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-04-22
Total Pages: 230
ISBN-13: 1317078225
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Mining a series of previously uncharted conversations springing up in 16th- and 17th-century popular medicine and culture, this study explores early modern England's significant and sustained interest in the hysterical diseases of women. Kaara L. Peterson assembles a fascinating collection of medical materials to support her discussion of contemporary debates about varieties of uterine pathologies and the implications of these debates for our understanding of drama's representation of hysterica passio cases in particular, among other hysterical maladies. An important aspect of the author's approach is to restore, with all its nuances, the debates created by early modern medical writers over attempts to define the boundaries and resonances of hysterical ailments, which Peterson argues have been largely erased or elided by historicist criticism, including scholarship overly focused on melancholy. One of the main goals of the book is to stress the centrality of gendered concepts of disease for the period and to reveal a whole catalog of early modern literary strategies for representing women's illnesses. Among the medical works discussed are Edward Jorden's central text A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603) and contemporary plays, including Shakespeare's Pericles, Othello, King Lear, and The Winter's Tale; Webster's The Duchess of Malfi; and Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois.
Author: S. Nagarajan
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Published: 2017-05-11
Total Pages: 485
ISBN-13: 1443893455
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Shakespeare’s King Lear is often called his mightiest play. This comprehensive edition by S. Nagarajan (who edited the evergreen Signet edition of Measure for Measure) presents a lifetime of scholarship on Shakespeare and fifteen years of research specifically on Lear. Accessibly written, this edition serves the reader who has access to well-stocked libraries and lively theatres, as well as the student whose resources are more limited. The play-text is a conflation of the Quarto text and the First Folio text, and the notes provide a generous but discreet selection of alternative readings of lines and contexts. In ten erudite essays, Nagarajan provides a thoroughly researched picture of Shakespeare’s sources for the play, his unique use of language, Elizabethan theatre, history and values of the play, analysis of enigmatic scenes, glimpses into its performance history and other subjects, with special attention to Indian dramatic art theory. This edition is the first to bring together both the best scholarship on Lear to date and perspectives from Indian poetics and philosophy. The result is a text that robustly includes, but goes beyond, Anglophone cultures and Euro-American experiences, making it truly representative of Lear’s global stage.
Author: Stuart Gillespie
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-02-25
Total Pages: 432
ISBN-13: 1474216064
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Shakespeare's Books contains nearly 200 entries covering the full range of literature Shakespeare was acquainted with, including classical, historical, religious and contemporary works. The dictionary covers works whose importance to Shakespeare has emerged more clearly in recent years due to new research, as well as explaining current thinking on long-recognized sources such as Plutarch, Ovid, Holinshed, Ariosto and Montaigne. Entries for all major sources include surveys of the writer's place in Shakespeare's time, detailed discussion of their relation to his work, and full bibliography. These are enhanced by sample passages from early modern England writers, together with reproductions of pages from the original texts. Now available in paperback with a new preface bringing the book up to date, this is an invaluable reference tool.
Author: Philip C. Almond
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2014-09-11
Total Pages: 306
ISBN-13: 0801471869
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"Although the Devil still 'lives' in modern popular culture, for the past 250 years he has become marginal to the dominant concerns of Western intellectual thought. That life could not be thought or imagined without him, that he was a part of the everyday, continually present in nature and history, and active at the depths of our selves, has been all but forgotten. It is the aim of this work to bring modern readers to a deeper appreciation of how, from the early centuries of the Christian period through to the recent beginnings of the modern world, the human story could not be told and human life could not be lived apart from the 'life' of the Devil. With that comes the deeper recognition that, for the better part of the last two thousand years, the battle between good and evil in the hearts and minds of men and women was but the reflection of a cosmic battle between God and Satan, the divine and the diabolic, that was at the heart of history itself."—from The Devil Lucifer, Mephistopheles, Beelzebub; Ha-Satan or the Adversary; Iblis or Shaitan: no matter what name he travels under, the Devil has throughout the ages and across civilizations been a compelling and charismatic presence. In Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, the supposed reign of God has long been challenged by the fiery malice of his opponent, as contending forces of good and evil have between them weighed human souls in the balance. In The Devil, Philip C. Almond explores the figure of evil incarnate from the first centuries of the Christian era. Along the way, he describes the rise of demonology as an intellectual and theological pursuit, the persecution as witches of women believed to consort with the Devil and his minions, and the decline in the belief in Hell and in angels and demons as corporeal beings as a result of the Enlightenment. Almond shows that the Prince of Darkness remains an irresistible subject in history, religion, art, literature, and culture. Almond brilliantly locates the "life" of the Devil within the broader Christian story of which it is inextricably a part; the "demonic paradox" of the Devil as both God's enforcer and his enemy is at the heart of Christianity. Woven throughout the account of the Christian history of the Devil is another complex and complicated history: that of the idea of the Devil in Western thought. Sorcery, witchcraft, possession, even melancholy, have all been laid at the Devil's doorstep. Until the Enlightenment enforced a "disenchantment" with the old archetypes, even rational figures such as Thomas Aquinas were obsessed with the nature of the Devil and the specific characteristics of the orders of demons and angels. It was a significant moment both in the history of demonology and in theology when Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677) denied the Devil's existence; almost four hundred years later, popular fascination with the idea of the Devil has not yet dimmed.
