Solomonic Iconography in Early Stuart England


Book Description

Solomon was the most prominant figure in English Jacobean symbolism - symbolising the struggle between aspiration and scepticism - a struggle with manifestations in almost every aspect of that culture. This book shows the ways in which the images were used, both consistantly and inconsistantly.




Visions of the Courtly Body


Book Description

In 1603, the beginning of the Stuart reign, painting was of minor importance at the English court, where the elaborately designed masques of Inigo Jones served as the prime medium of royal representation. Only two decades later, their most celebrated performer, George Villiers, the First Duke of Buckingham had assembled one of the largest and most significant collections of painting in early seventeenth-century Europe. His career as the personal and political favourite of two succeeding monarchs – James I and Charles I – coincides with the commission of a number of highly ambitious portraits from the hands of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck that displayed his body in spectacular manner. As the first comprehensive study of Buckingham’s patronage of the visual arts, this book is concerned with the question of how the painted image of the courtier transferred strategies of social distinction that had originated in the masque to the language of painting. Establishing a new grammar in the competing rhetorics of bodily self-fashioning, this recast notion of portraiture contributed to an epistemological change in perceptions of visual representation at the early modern English court, in the course of which painting advanced to the central art form in the aesthetics of kingship.




Solomon


Book Description

Looks at the life and legacy of King Solomon, describing his temple, the nature of his wisdom, and his biblical writings.




The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon's Thought


Book Description

"Presents close analysis of eight of Francis Bacon's texts in order to investigate the relation of his religious views to his instauration. Attempts to correct the persistent misconception of Bacon as a secular modern who dismissed religion in order to promote the human advancement of knowledge"--Provided by publisher.




Shakespearean Temporalities


Book Description

Shakespearean Temporalities addresses a critical neglect in Early Modern Performance and Shakespeare Studies, revising widely prevailing and long-standing assumptions about the performance and reception of history on the early modern stage. Demonstrating that theatre, at the turn of the seventeenth century, thrived on an intense fascination with perceived tensions between (medieval) past and (early modern) present, this volume uncovers a dimension of historical drama that has been largely neglected due to a strong focus on nationhood and a predilection for ‘topical’ readings. It moreover reassesses genre conventions by venturing beyond the threshold of the supposed "death of the history play," in 1603. Closely analysing a broad range of Shakespeare’s historical drama, it explores the dramatic techniques that allow the theatre to perform historical distance. An experience of historical contingency through an immersion in a world ontologically related yet temporally removed is thus revealed as a major appeal of historical drama and a striking aspect of Shakespeare’s history plays. With a focus on performance, the experience of playgoers, and the dynamics that resulted from the collective production of dramatic historiography by competing companies, the book offers the first analysis of what can be referred to as Shakespeare’s dramaturgy of historical temporality.




The Routledge History of Monarchy


Book Description

The Routledge History of Monarchy draws together current research across the field of royal studies, providing a rich understanding of the history of monarchy from a variety of geographical, cultural and temporal contexts. Divided into four parts, this book presents a wide range of case studies relating to different aspects of monarchy throughout a variety of times and places, and uses these case studies to highlight different perspectives of monarchy and enhance understanding of rulership and sovereignty in terms of both concept and practice. Including case studies chosen by specialists in a diverse array of subjects, such as history, art, literature, and gender studies, it offers an extensive global and interdisciplinary approach to the history of monarchy, providing a thorough insight into the workings of monarchies within Europe and beyond, and comparing different cultural concepts of monarchy within a variety of frameworks, including social and religious contexts. Opening up the discussion of important questions surrounding fundamental issues of monarchy and rulership, The Routledge History of Monarchy is the ideal book for students and academics of royal studies, monarchy, or political history.




The King James Bible After Four Hundred Years


Book Description

Leading scholars chart the complex, multifaceted cultural impact of the King James Bible over its 400 years.




Statesmen, Diplomats, and the Press-essays on 18th Century Britain


Book Description

The eleven essays in this volume entail three broad themes, first, the dynamics of national policy making during the Hanoverian period: secondly, the role of diplomats in the formulation as well as execution of foreign policy: thirdly, the political impact of the press. Cabinets regularly led by dukes who engaged in arcane maneuvers such as forcing the Closet spread a musty scent of the antique over eighteenth-century politics. Yet the era was also the forcing ground of modern society and no period in British history now has so exciting or controversial a historiography. Globalization, industrialization, the rise of nationalism, imperialism, the emergence of a free press, and numerous other vital themes reverberate among what was once seen as a time veiled in cobwebs. Karl Schweizer's essays illuminate a number of the most important issues currently under scrutiny by historians. Many of his pieces are focused around the crucial decades of the mid-century when the monarchy, parliamentary government, the shaping of public opinion, the conduct of war, and diplomacy were all being tested and reshaped. Not only does his work illuminate these problems in new ways, but also his masterly




Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England, 1558-1625


Book Description

The Bible had a profound impact on early modern culture, and bible-reading shaped the period's drama, poetry, and life-writings, as well as sermons and biblical commentaries. This volume provides an account of the how the Bible was read and applied in early modern England. It maps the connection between these readings and various forms of writing and argues that literary writings bear the hallmarks of the period's dominant exegetical practices, and do interpretative work. Tracing the impact of biblical reading across a range of genres and writers, the discussion demonstrates that literary reimaginings of, and allusions to, the Bible were common, varied, and ideologically evocative. The book explores how a series of popularly interpreted biblical narratives were recapitulated in the work of a diverse selection of writers, some of whom remain relatively unknown. In early modern England, the figures of Solomon, Job, and Christ's mother, Mary, and the books of Song of Songs and Revelation, are enmeshed in different ways with contemporary concerns, and their usage illustrates how the Bible's narratives could be turned to a fascinating array of debates. In showing the multifarious contexts in which biblical narratives were deployed, this book argues that Protestant interpretative practices contribute to, and problematize, literary constructions of a range of theological, political, and social debates.




Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England


Book Description

In recent years new schools of historiography and criticism have recast the political and cultural histories of Elizabethan and early Stuart England. However, for all the benefits of their insights, most revisionist historians have too narrowly focussed on high politics to the neglect of values and ideology, and New Historicist literary scholars have displayed an insufficient grasp of chronology and historical context. The contributors to this pioneering volume, richly fusing these approaches, apply a revisionist close attention to moments to the wide range of texts - verbal and visual - that critics have begun to read as representations of power and politics. Excitingly broadening the range of areas and evidence for the study of politics, these outstanding essays demonstrate how the study of high culture - classical translations, court portraits royal palaces, the conduct of chivalric ceremony - and low culture - cheap pamphlets and scurrilous verses - enable us to reconstruct the languages through which contemporaries interpreted their political environment. The volume posits a reconsideration of the traditional antithetical concepts - court and country, verbal and visual, critical and complimentary, elite and popular; examines the constructions of a moral and social order enacted in a wide variety of cultural practices; and demonstrates how common vocabularies could in changed circumstances be combined and deployed to sustain quite different ideological positions. This book opens a new agenda for the study of the politics of culture and the culture of politics in early modern England. -- Publisher's website.