Subject And Object In Renaissance Culture

Download or read book Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture written by Margreta de Grazia and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-02-23 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of original essays brings together some of the most prominent figures in new historicist and cultural materialist approaches to the early modern period, and offers a new focus on the literature and culture of the Renaissance. Traditionally, Renaissance studies have concentrated on the human subject. The essays collected here bring objects - purses, clothes, tapestries, houses, maps, feathers, communion wafers, tools, pages, skulls - back into view. As a result, the much-vaunted early modern subject ceases to look autonomous and sovereign, but is instead caught up in a vast and uneven world of objects which he and she makes, owns, values, imagines, and represents. This book puts things back into relation with people; in the process, it elicits new critical readings, and new cultural configurations.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Objects in the Renaissance written by James Symonds and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-08-31 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Cultural History of Objects in the Renaissance covers the period 1400 to 1600. The Renaissance was a cultural movement, a time of re-awakening when classical knowledge was rediscovered, leading to an efflorescence in philosophy, art, and literature. The period fostered an emerging sense of individualism across European cultures. This sense was expressed through a fascination with materiality and the natural world, and a growing attachment to things. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Objects examines how objects have been created, used, interpreted and set loose in the world over the last 2500 years. Over this time, the West has developed particular attitudes to the material world, at the centre of which is the idea of the object. The themes covered in each volume are objecthood; technology; economic objects; everyday objects; art; architecture; bodily objects; object worlds. James Symonds is Professor at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Volume 3 in the Cultural History of Objects set. General Editors: Dan Hicks and William Whyte

Download or read book Pens and Needles written by Susan Frye and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-11-29 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Renaissance woman, whether privileged or of the artisan or the middle class, was trained in the expressive arts of needlework and painting, which were often given precedence over writing. Pens and Needles is the first book to examine all these forms as interrelated products of self-fashioning and communication. Because early modern people saw verbal and visual texts as closely related, Susan Frye discusses the connections between the many forms of women's textualities, including notes in samplers, alphabets both stitched and penned, initials, ciphers, and extensive texts like needlework pictures, self-portraits, poetry, and pamphlets, as well as commissioned artwork, architecture, and interior design. She examines works on paper and cloth by such famous figures as Elizabeth I, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Bess of Hardwick, as well as the output of journeywomen needleworkers and miniaturists Levina Teerlinc and Esther Inglis, and their lesser-known sisters in the English colonies of the New World. Frye shows how traditional women's work was a way for women to communicate with one another and to shape their own identities within familial, intellectual, religious, and historical traditions. Pens and Needles offers insights into women's lives and into such literary texts as Shakespeare's Othello and Cymbeline and Mary Sidney Wroth's Urania.

Download or read book The Corpse as Text written by Thea Tomaini and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2017 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1700 and 1900, the subject of disinterment (exhumation) attracted the attention of antiquaries, who constructed a comprehensive memory of the past by 'reading' corpses as documents describing an idealised past. Between 1700 and 1900, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were stereotyped, idealised, and held as a standard by which the present time could be measured. Various figures in politics, academia, and the church pointed to historical persons such as Henry VIII, Shakespeare, Charles I, and Oliver Cromwell as icons whose lives, deaths and corpses illustrated the victories of English Protestantism, the values of Monarchism (or Republicanism), and the superiority of the English culture and its language. In particular, the subject of disinterment (exhumation) attracted the attention of antiquaries. They constructed a comprehensive memory of the past by 'reading' corpses as documents describing an idealised past. These 'texts' accompanied and enhanced the traditional texts of chronicle, literature, and epitaph. This study explores the cooperation of ideology and aesthetic, the paradox of allure and revulsion, and the uncanny attraction to death. In each case there is a desire for the dead to speak in a contemporary voice; each historical personage becomes symbolic of larger aspects of the contemporary culture. The discourse of the noble body in death is reconfigured to validate English nationalist ideals and to establish the past as a Golden Era of unimpeachable superiority. It was not enough simply to study the lives and deaths of historical figures. Itwas necessary to disinter the corpses, engage physically with the dead, and experience the discourse of validation. THEA TOMAINI is Associate Professor of English (Teaching) at the University of Southern California.

Download or read book Feeling Things written by Stephanie Downes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary essay collection investigates the various interactions of people, feelings, and things throughout premodern Europe. It focuses on the period before mass production, when limited literacy often prioritised material methods of communication. The subject of materiality has been of increasing significance in recent historical inquiry, alongside growing emphasis on the relationships between objects, emotions, and affect in archaeological and sociological research. The historical intersections between materiality and emotions, however, have remained under-theorised, particularly with respect to artefacts that have continuing resonance over extended periods of time or across cultural and geographical space. Feeling Things addresses the need to develop an appropriate cross-disciplinary theoretical framework for the analysis of objects and emotions in European history, with special attention to the need to track the shifting emotional valencies of objects from the past to the present, and from one place and cultural context to another. The collection draws together an international group of historians, art historians, curators, and literary scholars working on a variety of cultural, literary, visual, and material sources. Objects considered include books, letters, prosthetics, religious relics, shoes, stone, and textiles. Many of these have been preserved in international galleries, museums, and archives, while others have remained in their original locations, even as their contexts have changed over time. The chapters consider the ways in which emotions such as despair, fear, grief, hope, love, and wonder become inscribed in and ascribed to these items, producing 'emotional objects' of significance and agency. Such objects can be harnessed to create, affirm, or express individual relationships, as, for example, in religious devotion and practice, or in the construction of cultural, communal, and national identities.

Download or read book A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies written by John Lee and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-08-14 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a detailed map of contemporary critical theory in Renaissance and Early Modern English literary studies beyond Shakespeare A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies is a groundbreaking guide to the contemporary engagement with critical theory within the larger disciplinary area of Renaissance and Early Modern studies. Comprising commissioned contributions from leading international scholars, it provides an overview of literary theory, beyond Shakespeare, focusing on most major figures, as well as some lesser-known writers of the period. This book represents an important first step in bridging the divide between the abundance of titles which explore applications of theory in Shakespeare studies, and the relative lack of such texts concerning English Literary Renaissance studies as a whole, which includes major figures such as Marlowe, Jonson, Donne, and Milton. The tripartite structure offers a map of the critical landscape so that students can appreciate the breadth of the work being done, along with an exploration of the ways in which the treatments of or approaches to key issues have changed over time. Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies is must-reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of early modern and Renaissance English literature, as well as their instructors and advisors. Divided into three main sections, “Conditions of Subjectivity,” “Spaces, Places, and Forms,” and “Practices and Theories,” A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies: Provides an overview of theoretical work and the theoretical-informed competencies which are central to the teaching of English Renaissance literary studies beyond Shakespeare Provides a map of the critical landscape of the field to provide students with an opportunity to appreciate the breadth of the work done Features newly-commissioned essays in representative subject areas to offer a clear picture of the contemporary theoretically-engaged work in the field Explores the ways in which the treatments of or approaches to key issues have changed over time Offers examples of the ways in which the practice of a theoretically-engaged criticism may enrich the personal and professional lives of critics, and the culture in which such critical practice takes place

Download or read book Music and the Cultures of Print written by Kate van Orden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explores the cultures that coalesced around printed music in previous centuries. It focuses on the unique modes through which print organized the presentation of musical texts, the conception of written compositions, and the ways in which music was disseminated and performed. In highlighting the tensions that exist between musical print and performance this volume raises not only the question of how older scores can be read today, but also how music expressed its meanings to listeners in the past.