Interiority

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Preiss
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Modern Theatre ◽  
History Of ◽  
Negative Space ◽  
Revenge Plays ◽  
Plot Structure ◽  
Complex Characters ◽  
The Way

This chapter traces the history of theatrical interiority and shows when and why early modern theatre became invested in it. More specifically, it examines the way the enclosure of the theatres made possible not only a newly commercialized drama but also characterization and plot-structure that depended on an implied but unrevealed depth. The chapter first considers the analogy between round amphitheatres and ‘round’, complex characters before discussing the culture of the money box to establish the link between early modern theatrical economics and its aesthetics. It then looks at the play’s resistance to closure, its messiness and overcomplication, and the ‘interiority’ of its characters and how characters in later revenge plays construct interiority as negative space. It argues that characters are not people so much as playhouses, propagating the illusion of depth after depth has run out, and explains how ‘interiority’ in the early modern theatre begins as merely its exterior reinscribed—its circle reduced into the body of the actor until it became a point, elemental and ‘inviolate’.

Shakespeare Afoot

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kerrigan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

That Shakespeare adds a limp to the received characterization of Richard III is only the most conspicuous instance of his interest in how actors walked, ran, danced, and wandered. His attention to actors’ footwork, as an originating condition of performance, can be traced from Richard III through A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It into Macbeth, which is preoccupied with the topic and activity all the way to the protagonist’s melancholy conclusion that ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player | That struts and frets his hour upon the stage’. Drawing on classical and early modern accounts of how people walk and should walk, on ideas about time and prosody, and the experience of disability, this chapter cites episodes in the history of performance to show how actors, including Alleyn, Garrick, and Olivier, have worked with the opportunities to dramatize footwork that are provided by Shakespeare’s plays.

Staging Romance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Publicover
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Early Modern Theatre ◽  
Spatial Grammar ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter explores the mostly overlooked history of romance on the early modern stage. Analysing the geographies of two little-known plays, Clyomon and Clamydes (1580s?) and Guy of Warwick (early 1590s?), it argues that, in its imaginative openness and its flexible staging of space, the early modern theatre was the ideal environment in which to stage romance’s extravagant spatial and ethnographical imaginings. Further, the chapter demonstrates how a theatrical tradition of clowning enabled these late-Elizabethan dramas to contest the values of the very romance-worlds they had established. It closes with a fresh reading of Francis Beaumont’s parody of romance, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, arguing that the play satirizes dramatic romance’s spatial grammar as well as its narrative strategies.

Wicked Mysteries and Notorious Conjurors: Magic, Rape, and Violence in Two Early Modern Pamphlets

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 533-551
Author(s):  
Laura Levine
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Body ◽  
Evil Spirits ◽  
The Way

Toward the end of the 1628 pamphlet A Briefe Description of the Notorious Life of Iohn Lambe, the pamphleteer describes the violence a crowd inflicts on John Lambe, a cunning man who dabbled in the dark arts. This violence, ultimately fatal, seems to be a response to Lambe's rape of an eleven-year-old child, a rape which he is convicted of but ultimately pardoned for. Earlier in his career, however, Lambe is indicted for using magic to disable the body of a gentleman as well as for invoking evil spirits. What connection exists between the charges against Lambe as a witch and magician and the charges against him as a rapist? This essay argues that long before Lambe gives those around him a basis for violence, he triggers anxieties about what he is, and that these anxieties play a role in the violence against him. The text of A Briefe Description demonstrates the way mechanisms of justice ultimately repeat—reenact and perform—versions of the crimes they seek to examine.

The Missing Piece

Divine Bodies ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Candida R. Moss
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Scholarship ◽  
The Way

The resurrection of the body is a key place to think about who we are and which facets of ourselves are integral to ourselves. The introduction to this book places the resurrection of the body within the context of ancient anxieties about the self: What makes us who we are? It also reviews the history of scholarship on this question and traces the way that ideas about resurrection have been divorced from broader thinking about the self.

scholarly journals Néhány megjegyzés Heltai imádságos könyvének utóéletéről

2013 ◽  
Vol 52 (3-4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mihály Balázs
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Comparative Research ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Prayer Book ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Considerable Length ◽  
The Way

Although in recent years there has been an upsurge in the research of the history of early modern spirituality, this research has paid hardly any attention to the Unitarian denomination. The reasons for this lie beyond the scope of the present study: between the late 16th century and the late 18th century the denomination had to refrain from the use of printing, and thus, the manuscript versions of prayer texts were threatened by loss and destruction. It is a unique paradox, however, that the first edited protestant Hungarian prayer book of considerable length was published precisely by this denomination in 1570/1571. The first part of the paper explores the concept of the prayer book based on Johann Habermann’s famous Gebetbüchlein, and compares it to the greatest achievements of the same sort within this period, the Catholic Péter Pázmány’s and the Calvinist Albert Szenci Molnár’s works. This section is followed by a survey of the vivid reception of Heltai’s work, with particular focus on the way the Unitarian author’s work was used in the Lutheran community of Lőcse. The concluding part argues that building on the foundations of this tradition, as well as on the heritage of Calvinist prayer culture, an unparalleled Unitarian prayer literature developed in the 17th-18th centuries, which deserves the attention of comparative research.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Laura Kounine
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
Current State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western Germany ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Witch ◽  
Witch Hunts

This Introduction sets out the intentions of this book: to use the rich witch-trial records from the early modern duchy of Württemberg in south-western Germany to explore the central themes of emotions, gender, and selfhood. It provides an overview of the key historiographical debates on witchcraft persecutions in the early modern period, and suggests new questions that need to be asked. It also provides a methodological and theoretical framework in which to address these questions, and provides an overview of the current state of the field of the history of emotions, and, by drawing on psychological approaches to listening to self-narratives, it suggests ways in which historical studies of emotions can be pushed further by incorporating the body and subjective states. It also sets out the legal, political, and religious framework of the Lutheran duchy of Württemberg, in order to put the witch-hunts in this region into context.

Doctoring the Body and Exciting the Soul: Drugs and consumer culture in medieval and early modern Iran

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 554-617
Author(s):  
RANIN KAZEMI
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Mass Consumption ◽  
History Of ◽  
Urban And Rural Areas

AbstractThis article focuses on the development of early modern consumerism in a part of the Middle East that historians of consumer culture are yet to fully explore. Making use of a wide variety of unexplored and underexplored original sources, the article contends that early modern consumer culture in Iran was grounded deeply in the ever-widening patterns of exchange and use that had developed slowly over the course of the previous centuries. The discussion below takes the growing popular interest in a few key psychoactive substances as a useful barometer of the dynamics of mass consumption, and chronicles how the slow and ever-expanding use of alcohol, opium, and cannabis (or a cannabis-like product) in the medieval period led to the popularity of coffee, tobacco, older drugs, and still other commodities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The aim here is to use the history of drug culture as an entry point to scrutinize the emergence of early modern consumerism among the elites and the non-elites in both urban and rural areas of the Middle East. In doing so, this article reconstructs the cultural and social history of recreational drugs prior to and during the early modern period, and elucidates the socio-economic context that helped bring about a ‘psychoactive revolution’ in the Safavid state (1501–1736).

The Hurt(ful) Body

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Art History ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Dialectical Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theatre Studies

This book offers a cross-disciplinary approach to pain and suffering in the early modern period, based on research in the fields of literary studies, art history, theatre studies, cultural history and the study of emotions. It has a sustained focus on visual sources, textual material and documents about actual events rather than well-known thinkers or ‘masterpieces’ of art history, and a preference for cases and historical contexts over systematic theory-building. The hurt(ful) body brings under discussion visual and performative representations of embodied pain, using an insistently dialectical approach that takes into account the perspective of the hurt body itself, the power and afflictions of its beholder and, finally, the routinising and redeeming of hurt within institutional contexts. The volume’s two-fold approach of the hurt body, defining ‘hurt’ both from the perspective of the victim and the beholder (as well as their combined creation of a gaze), is unique. It establishes a double perspective about the riddle of ‘cruel’ viewing by tracking the shifting cultural meanings of victims’ bodies, and confronting them to the values of audiences, religious and popular institutional settings, and practices of punishment. It encompasses both the victim’s presence as an image or performed event of pain and the conundrum of the look – the transmitted ‘pain’ experienced by the watching audience. This will be done through three rubrics: the early modern performing body, beholder or audience responses, and the operations of institutional power. Because of its interdisciplinary approach of the history of pain and the hurt(ful) body, the book will be of interest for Lecturers and students from different fields, like the history of ideas, the history of the body, urban history, theatre studies, literary studies, art history, emotion studies and performance studies

scholarly journals Soul searching: a brief history of the mind/body debate in the neurosciences

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Dolan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Structure And Function ◽  
The Self ◽  
History Of Neuroscience ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain ◽  
The Way

✓Anatomical and physiological understandings of the structure and function of the brain have worked to establish it as the “seat of the soul.” As an organ of reflection, meditation, and memory, the brain becomes synonymous with what defines the “self” through the existence of consciousness—of mind. Thus, the brain has been associated with a range of transcendent concepts—the soul, spirit, mind, and consciousness—that all relate in fundamental ways to each other both in terms of their perceived location within the brain and because of the way each works ultimately to define the person to whom the brain belongs. In this article, the author provides a brief exploration of how interrelated these categories have been when seen in the context of ancient, Renaissance, early modern, and modern philosophical and medical concerns; how the brain has variously been perceived as home to these intimate states of being; and how practitioners from the neurosciences have reflected on these questions. The author provides novel insights into the interrelationships of philosophy, theology, and medicine by examining these issues through the lens of the history of neuroscience.

scholarly journals Escritura de mujeres, escritura de las diferencias

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Gargallo
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
The Body ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Narrative Poetry ◽  
Literatura Latinoamericana ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

Resumen: Se rastrea la historia contemporánea de la literaturalatinoamericana escrita por mujeres, mostrando temáticas queprofundizan en la diferencia sexual y sus consecuencias parala escritura. Se exploran las consecuencias para la narrativa yla poética de las autoras, de temas como la eroticidad femeninay la especificidad del cuerpo de la mujer, y el lugar que ésteocupa en las historias familiar, nacional y continental. Seindaga asimismo sobre las formas en las cuales sus narracionescontribuyeron al meta-relato del patriarcado latinoamericano.A la vez, en este trabajo se registran las huellas dejadas en lanarrativa y la poética de estas autoras por las resistenciasfemeninas frente al orden patriarcal.Palabras clave: Escritura de mujeres, Diferencia sexual, Feminismo,Literatura latinoamericana, Narrativa, PoéticaAbstract: The contemporary history of Latin American literaturewritten by women is traced, showing the themes that delve intosexual difference and its consequences for writing. Theconsequences of feminine eroticism and the specificity ofwomen’s bodies for the writers’ narratives and poetry areexplored, as well as the place the body occupies in the family,national and continental histories. The way in which theirnarratives contributed to the meta-story of Latin Americanpatriarchy is taken into account. At the same time, this paperrecords the imprints feminine resistance to the patriarchal orderleaves in these authors’ narrative and poetic work.Key words: Women’s writing, sexual difference, feminism,Latina American literatura, narrative, poetry

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