Although pervasive in Spenser's art, the role of rhetoric has not been adequately addressed by critics. This disregard of the importance of rhetoric in The Faerie Queene, Dixon argues, obscures Spenser's larger rhetorical method and the structural dynamic it generates. Dixon identifies Britomart's evolution in Books III-V as the poem's centre and elucidates the rhetorical strategies that invest Spenser's "argument" for justice. Building on Kenneth Burke's conception of courtship in rhetoric as "the use of suasive devices for the transcending of social estrangement," Dixon interprets The Faerie Queene as a narrative of courtship in purpose as well as content, arguing that its tales of questing knights compose an artifact of suasive devices whereby Spenser courts a meeting of minds with his audience on the subject of justice.

The Prince, a political treatise by the Florentine public servant and political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli, is widely regarded as the most important exploration of politics - and in particular the politics of power - ever written. In Garments of Court and Palace, Philip Bobbitt, a preeminent and original interpreter of modern statecraft, presents a vivid portrait of Machiavelli's Italy and demonstrates how The Prince articulates a new idea of government that emerged during the Renaissance. Bobbitt argues that when The Prince is read alongside the Discourses, modern readers can see clearly how Machiavelli prophesied the end of the feudal era and the birth of a recognizably modern polity. As this book shows, publication of The Prince in 1532 represents nothing less than a revolutionary moment in our understanding of the place of the law and war in the creation and maintenance of the modern state.

Northrop Frye's Canadian Literary Criticism examines the impact of Frye's criticism on Canadian literary scholarship as well as the response of Frye's peers to his articulation of a 'Canadian' criticism.

Elizabethan English culture is saturated with tales and figures from Ovid s Metamorphoses. While most of these narratives interrogate metamorphosis and transformation, many tales - such as those of Philomela, Hecuba, or Orpheus - also highlight heightened states of emotion, especially in powerless or seemingly powerless characters. When these tales are translated and retold in the new cultural context of Renaissance England, a distinct politics of Ovidian emotion emerges. Through intertextual readings in diverse cultural contexts, Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan England reveals the ways these representations helped redefine emotions and the political efficacy of emotional expression in sixteenth-century England.

This book offers the first full-length study of early modern contentment, the emotional and ethical principle that became the gold standard of English Protestant psychology and an abiding concern of English Renaissance literature. Theorists and literary critics have equated contentedness with passivity, stagnation, and resignation. However, this book excavates an early modern understanding of contentment as dynamic, protective, and productive. While this concept has roots in classical and medieval philosophy, contentment became newly significant because of the English Reformation. Reformers explored contentedness as a means to preserve the self and prepare the individual to endure and engage the outside world. Their efforts existed alongside representations and revisions of contentment by authors including Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. By examining Renaissance models of contentment, this book explores alternatives to Calvinist despair, resists scholarly emphasis on negative emotions, and reaffirms the value of formal concerns to studies of literature, religion, and affect.

Modern readers and writers find it natural to contrast the agency of realistic fictional characters to the constrained range of action typical of literary personifications. Yet no commentator before the eighteenth century suggests that prosopopoeia signals a form of reduced agency. Andrew Escobedo argues that premodern writers, including Spenser, Marlowe, and Milton, understood personification as a literary expression of will, an essentially energetic figure that depicted passion or concept transforming into action. As the will emerged as an isolatable faculty in the Christian Middle Ages, it was seen not only as the instrument of human agency but also as perversely independent of other human capacities, for example, intellect and moral character. Renaissance accounts of the will conceived of volition both as the means to self-creation and the faculty by which we lose control of ourselves. After offering a brief history of the will that isolates the distinctive features of the faculty in medieval and Renaissance thought, Escobedo makes his case through an examination of several personified figures in Renaissance literature: Conscience in the Tudor interludes, Despair in Doctor Faustus and book I of The Faerie Queen, Love in books III and IV of The Faerie Queen, and Sin in Paradise Lost. These examples demonstrate that literary personification did not amount to a dim reflection of “realistic” fictional character, but rather that it provided a literary means to explore the numerous conundrums posed by the premodern notion of the human will. This book will be of great interest to faculty and graduate students interested in medieval studies and Renaissance literature.

Saints and heroes were often central characters in Middle English biblical plays, although scholarship has tended to focus more on the villainous than the virtuous. In this study, Chester Scoville examines how medieval playwrights portrayed saints and how they used them to convey feelings of social virtue, devotion, compassion and community in the audience. Although looking also at performance practices, costume, gesture and scenert, the main emphasis is on language and rhetoric in biblical drama and the position of saints lying between the earthly and ultimate community. Four `role models' are jeld up for close examination: Thomas the Doubter, Mary Magdalene, Jospeh and Paul.

This book analyzes Shakespeare’s use of biblical allusions and evocation of doctrinal topics in Hamlet, Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, Richard II, and The Merchant of Venice. It identifies references to theological and doctrinal commonplaces such as sin, grace, confession, damnation, and the Fall in these plays, affirming that Shakespeare’s literary imagination is very much influenced by his familiarity with the Bible and also with matters of church doctrine. This theological and doctrinal subject matter also derives its significance from genres as diverse as travel narratives, sermons, political treatises, and royal proclamations. This study looks at how Shakespeare’s deployment of religious topics interacts with ideas circulating via other cultural texts and genres in society. It also analyzes how religion enables Shakespeare’s engagement with cultural debates and political developments in England: absolutism and law; radical political theory; morality and law; and conceptions of nationhood.

This book addresses the current demand to apply findings in neuroscience to a broad spectrum of psychotherapy practices. It offers clear formulations for what has long been missing in how psychotherapists present their work: research-based descriptions of specific memory functions and attention to the role that synaptic plasticity and neural integration play in making lasting psychological change possible. The book provides a detailed perspective on how patients integrate into their own narratives what transpires in their treatment and how the clinician's memory guides the different phases of the process of healing. Long-neglected in psychotherapeutic formulations, findings about memory-in particular, episodic and autobiographical memory-have a direct bearing on what happens in treatments. Whether the information is about the recent past, such as what happened between sessions, or about traumatic childhood experiences, the patient's disclosures are in the service of a more complete narrative about self. At the same time, the therapist's ways of remembering what occurs in each therapeutic relationship will guide much of the healing process for the patient.

New interpretations of Petrarch and Milton in an ambitious and revisionist history of epic tradition