Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kent Cartwright
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Stop Time ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Irrational Action ◽  
Extensive Reference

Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment explores the encounter between comedy’s rationalizing dimensions and those extra-rational aspects that elude demystification and exert affective power, an encounter between what is explicable and what is inexplicable. In the context of modernist disenchantment, Shakespeare’s comedies showcase the play of wonder and doubt, leaving behind a sense of residual re-enchantment. The argument thus broadens the perspective of studies that align early modern comedy with developments in science and jurisprudence. As the comic action advances, elements of mystery accrue—uncanny coincidences; magical sympathies; inexplicable repetitions; psychic influences; and wonders, fears, and doubts about the meaning of events—all of whose effects linger after reason has apparently answered the play’s questions, leaving an aura of wonder and wondering. Comic enchantment works through certain devices, tropes, and motifs explored in the chapters: magical clowns who introduce non-realistic stop-time moments that alter the action; structural repetitions that suggest mysteriously converging destinies and opaque but providential outcomes; places with differing characteristics that frame encounters between the regulatory and the protean drives in human existence; desires, thoughts, and utterances that manifest comically monstrous realities, including objects and individuals; characters who return from the dead, facilitated by the desires of the living; play-endings that traffic in harmony and dissonance, yet which can make possible the irrational action of forgiveness. These matters are discussed with extensive reference to Renaissance and modern theories of comedy, and with comparisons to Italian and Tudor comedy.

The Invasion of Plague in Early Modern Italy

2019 ◽  
pp. 23-50
Author(s):  
John Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Preventive Measures ◽  
Northern Italy ◽  
Reggio Emilia ◽  
Health Board ◽  
Mountain Range ◽  
Physical Barrier ◽  
The North ◽  
Early Modern Italy ◽  
The Dead

This chapter discusses the origins and spread of plague in northern Italy. Plague arrived in Italy in 1629 with French and German troops. It is no accident that the initial cases of plague identified in October of 1629 were first in Piedmont in the Val di Susa, west of Turin and near the border with France, and secondly in the Valtellina in Lombardy, subsequently travelling to Lake Como to the north of Milan. Other cities in northern Italy soon became infected and on May 6, 1630, the authorities as far south as Bologna announced the official outbreak of plague. Judging by the rapidity with which plague spread between these northern urban centres, one would have expected the epidemic to have arrived in Tuscany by early May, given that Bologna is only 65 miles north of Florence, but it was delayed by both natural and man-made factors. Tuscany is separated from Reggio-Emilia by the Apennine mountain range, which provided a physical barrier and facilitated the control of traffic coming from the north. The chapter then traces the preventive measures adopted by the health board as the plague approached Tuscany, including cordons sanitaires along frontiers, the removal of the sick to quarantine centres, and the rapid burial of the dead.

Talking with the Dead: Leo Africanus, Esoteric Yeats, and Early Modern Imperialism

ELH ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 1019-1038
Author(s):  
Oliver Hennessey
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Dead

scholarly journals Ana-Ethnographic Representation: Early Modern Pueblo Painters, Scientific Colonialism, and Tactics of Refusal

Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 6
Author(s):  
Sascha T. Scott
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Day Laborers ◽  
Sensitive Material ◽  
Sacred Sites ◽  
Esoteric Knowledge ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Archaeological Excavations

In 1918, San Ildefonso Pueblo artist Crescencio Martinez completed two commissions for the anthropologist Edgar L. Hewett: A set of paintings and a series of tiles. The paintings, called the Crescencio Set, mark a formative moment in the development of a new genre of art, modern Pueblo painting. Before Crescencio and his San Ildefonso peers began creating images of ceremonial and daily life for sale to outsiders, they were hired as day laborers at archaeological excavations. While Pueblo laborers benefited financially from working with anthropologists, they nevertheless understood anthropology as a threat to their communities, as scientists disrupted sacred sites and the dead, collected sensitive material, and pushed informants for esoteric information. In countering this new colonial threat, Pueblo communities deployed long-developed tactics of resistance. Among the most powerful of these tactics is what Audra Simpson calls “refusal”. Many Pueblo laborers refused to share esoteric knowledge with anthropologists, a tactic adopted by those laborers who became artists. Early Pueblo paintings can, thus, be understood as “ana-ethnographic”, a representational mode through which the artists worked both through and against ethnographic norms in order to simultaneously benefit from, manipulate, and resist scientific colonialism. Crescencio’s paintings and tiles are paradigmatically ana-ethnographic. In creating these objects, Crescencio benefited from the ethnographic desire to know and record Pueblo life, and yet he only represented aspects of his culture appropriate for outsider consumption, refusing to share protected knowledge.

scholarly journals Households and Plague in Early Modern Italy

2007 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. ◽  
Guido Alfani
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Disease Cluster ◽  
Early Modern Italy ◽  
Contagious Disease ◽  
Family And Household ◽  
The Dead

The remarkable Books of the Dead from early modern Milan and the parish and tax records of Nonantola during the plague of 1630 allow historians to reconstitute the patterns of family and household deaths caused by pestilence. Not only did deaths caused by this highly contagious disease cluster tightly within households; the intervals between household deaths were also extremely short. As much as one-quarter of all plague deaths were multiple household deaths that occurred on the same day. Similar to a deadly influenza, the speed and efficiency with which the late medieval and early modern plagues spread depended on unusually short periods of incubation and infectivity.

Death and Dying

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Covington
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Death And Dying ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Dead

Beliefs and practices relating to death underwent profound transformations in the early modern period and continue to provoke the interest of widely disparate scholars. Once the purview of demographic, medical, and social historians, the subject of death and dying has also been given literary and art historical treatments as well as treatment from a range of other interdisciplinary and theoretical perspectives. As Philippe Ariès once noted, if the historian (and one might add the student) “wishes to arrive at an understanding” of what death meant in the past, he or she must “widen his field of vision” to encompass different historical approaches and methodologies—and even then the subject still eludes. (Ariès 1981, p. 16–17; cited under Attitudes and Mentalities). No study of death’s history can escape the shadow of Ariès, even if his two works relating to the theme of death have been criticized for the selectivity of their sources and sweeping conclusions about collective beliefs. But as with many such ambitious and problematic works—Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias are others whose field-changing books come to mind—the influence has been enormous. Working from the perspective of social history and the Annales school of French historians, Ariès tended to focus primarily on the cultural and attitudinal aspects of death, with most of the books in this article reflecting this approach. But the biomedical and demographic aspects are also important, particularly in the context of an age that witnessed a revolution in professionalized medicine and, according to many scholars, resulted in the medicalization and eventually the “secularization” of death. Historians have also been influenced by the contributions of anthropologists, such as Jack Goody on ritual, Victor Turner on liminality, and Arnold Van Gennep on rites de passage (rituals marking the life cycle), all of whom have deepened understandings of the very different approaches to death that people held in the premodern past. Many practitioners of “historical anthropology” thus explored cultural practices and collectively held symbolic systems, each of which carried extensive implications for the study of funerary rites, burial customs, or rituals of remembrance. Indeed, the anthropologist Robert Hertz made such endeavors possible in his own work on funerary rituals and the psychological connections between the living and the dead or between the individual and the community. Such perspectives were also animated by a related turn in the study of memory, with such notable exponents as Pierre Nora and his “sites of memory”; as a result the use of tradition and commemorative ritual as well as an interest in epigraphs and tomb monuments has been applied to the memorializing of the dead with productive results. Most of the sections in this article select works that reflect these different theoretical approaches as they describe how death in the early modern world was an intimate fact of life and one that was confronted communally and with a common, consolatory language and set of rituals, all of which was a healthier way, perhaps, to face death than the medicalized isolation that often surrounds it in the early 21st century.

The Philosophy of the Myōken: The Ethics of the Dead and Bodhisattvas

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-73
Author(s):  
Fumihiko Sueki ◽  
Anton Luis Sevilla
Keyword(s):  
Human Existence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Religious View ◽  
Japanese Buddhism ◽  
Lotus Sutra ◽  
The World ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Mahāyāna Buddhism ◽  
The Way

AbstractToday, the modern value systems that once held sway have fallen apart, and people throughout the world are wandering in an aimless state. Amidst this, we are pressed to ask, “What kind of a new ethics might we construct?” We need to consider the possibility of an ethics that focuses on the religious view of humankind (previously ignored by modernity), that goes beyond this life, and includes the next life. In this article, I examine the way of being of bodhisattvas in Mahāyāna Buddhism via the Lotus Sutra. According to the Lotus Sutra, human existence is one that necessarily relates with the other, and this relationship is not confined to this life, but continues from past lives to future lives. Here, I refer to this as “bodhisattva as existence.” On this basis, it is possible to think of an ethics of “bodhisattva as praxis” that considers the benefit of others even after death. This view of bodhisattvas in the Lotus Sutra lives on in Japanese Buddhism and can be said to point to a new possibility for ethics today.

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