The Early Modern Grotesque: English Sources and Documents 1500-1700 offers readers a large and fully annotated collection of primary source texts addressing the grotesque in the English Renaissance. The sources are arranged chronologically in 120 numbered items with accompanying explanatory Notes. Each Note provides clarification of difficult terms in the source text, locating it in the context of early modern English and Continental discourses on the grotesque. The Notes also direct readers to further English sources and relevant modern scholarship. This volume includes a detailed introduction surveying the vocabulary, form and meaning of the grotesque from its arrival as a word, concept and aesthetic in 16th century England to its early maturity in the 18th century. The Introduction, Items and Notes, complemented by illustrations and a comprehensive bibliography, provide an unprecedented view of the evolving complexity and diversity of the early modern English grotesque. While giving due credit to Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin as masters of grotesque theory, this ground-breaking book aims to provoke new, evidence-based approaches to understanding the specifically English grotesque. The textual archive from 1500-1700 is a rich and intriguing record that offers much to interested readers and researchers in the fields of literary studies, theatre studies and art history.

Grotesque and Caricature: Leonardo to Bernini examines these two genres across Renaissance and Early Modern Italy. Although their origins stem from Antiquity, it were Leonardo da Vinci’s early teste caricate that injected fresh life into the tradition, greatly inspiring generations of artists. Critical among them were his Milanese followers, such as Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, and also Michelangelo and Sebastiano del Piombo as well as, notably, Annibale Carracci, Guercino, and Bernini among others. Their artistic production—drawings, prints, paintings, and sculpture—reveals deep interest in physical, physiognomic, and psychological observations with a penchant for humour and wit. Written by an international group of established and emerging scholars, this volume explores new insights to these complementary artistic genres. Contributors include: Carlo Avilio, Ilaria Bernocchi, Christophe Brouard, Sandra Cheng, Susan Klaiber, Michael W. Kwakkelstein, Tod A. Marder, Rebecca Norris, Lucia Tantardini, Nicholas J. L. Turner, Mary Vaccaro, and Matthias Wivel.

How are we to define what is grotesque, in art or literature? Since the Renaissance the term has been used for anything from the fantastic to the monstrous, and been associated with many artistic genres, from the Gothic to the danse macabre. Shun-Liang Chao's new study adopts a rigorous approach by establishing contradictory physicality and the notion of metaphor as two keys to the construction of a clear identity of the grotesque. With this approach, Chao explores the imagery of Richard Crashaw, Charles Baudelaire, and Rene Magritte as individual exemplars of the grotesque in the Baroque, Romantic, and Surrealist ages, in order to suggest a lineage of this curious aesthetic and to cast light on the functions of the visual and of the verbal in evoking it.

The notions of other peoples, cultures, and natural conditions have always been determined by the epistemology of imagination and fantasy, providing much freedom and creativity, and yet have also created much fear, anxiety, and horror. In this regard, the pre-modern world demonstrates striking parallels with our own insofar as the projections of alterity might be different by degrees, but they are fundamentally the same by content. Dreams, illusions, projections, concepts, hopes, utopias/dystopias, desires, and emotional attachments are as specific and impactful as the physical environment. This volume thus sheds important light on the various lenses used by people in the Middle Ages and the early modern age as to how they came to terms with their perceptions, images, and notions. Previous scholarship focused heavily on the history of mentality and history of emotions, whereas here the history of pre-modern imagination, and fantasy assumes center position. Imaginary things are taken seriously because medieval and early modern writers and artists clearly reveal their great significance in their works and their daily lives. This approach facilitates a new deep-structure analysis of pre-modern culture.

Uses the collections of ephemera popular in the late seventeenth century as a way to understand the reading habits, publishing strategies and thought processes of late Stuart print culture. Cheap' genres of print such as ballads, almanacs and playing cards were part of everyday life in seventeenth-century society - ubiquitous and disposable. Toward the end of the century, however, individuals began to preserve, arrange and display articles of cheap print within carefully curated collections. What motivated this sudden urge to preserve the ephemeral? This book answers that question by analysing the social, political and intellectual factors behind the formation of cheap print collections, how these collections were used by their owners, and what this activity can tell us about 'print culture' in the early modern period. The book's central collector is John Bagford (1650-1715), a shoemaker who became a dealer of prints and other 'curiosities' to important collectors of the time such as Samuel Pepys, Hans Sloane and Robert Harley. Bagford's own rich and largely unstudied collection is afascinating study in its own right and his position at the centre of commercial and intellectual networks opens up a whole world of collecting. This world encompasses later Stuart partisan political culture, when modern parties and the 'public sphere' first emerged; the 'New Science' and 'virtuoso culture' with its milieu of natural philosophers, antiquaries and artisans; the aural and visual landscape of marketplaces, streets and alehouses; and developing practices of record-keeping, life-writing and historical writing during the long eighteenth century.

The essays in Word and Self Estranged in English Texts, 1550-1660, consider diverse historical contexts for writing about 'strangeness'. They draw on current practices of reading to present contrasts and analogies within and between various social understandings. In so doing they reveal an interplay of thematic and stylistic modes that tells us a great deal about how, and why, certain aspects of life and thinking were 'estranged' in sixteenth and seventeenth century thinking. The collection's unique strength is that it makes specific bridges between contemporary perspectives and early modern connotations of strangeness and inhibition. The subjects of these essays are 'strange' to our ways of thinking because of their obvious distance from us in time and culture. And yet, curiously, far from being entirely alien to these texts, some of the most modern thinking-about paradigms, texts, concepts-connects with the early modern in unexpected ways. Milton meets the contemporary 'competent reader', Wittgenstein meets Robert Cawdrey, Shakespeare embraces the teenager, and Marvell matches wits with French mathematician René Thom. Additionally, the early modern texts posit their own 'others', or sites of estrangement-Moorishness, Persian art, even the human body-with which they perform their own astonishing maneuvers of estrangement and alignment. In reading Renaissance works from our own time and inviting them to reflect upon our own time, Word and Self Estranged in English Texts, 1550-1660 offers a vital reinterpretation of early modern texts.

This volume makes an important contribution to the understanding of translation theory and practice in the Early Modern period, focusing on the translation of knowledge, literature and travel writing, and examining discussions about the role of women and office of interpreter. Over the course of the Early Modern period, there was a dramatic shift in the way that translation was conceptualised, a change that would have repercussions far beyond the world of letters. At the beginning of the period, translation was largely indistinguishable from other textual operations such as exegesis, glossing, paraphrase, commentary, or compilation, and theorists did not yet think in terms of the binaries that would come to characterise modern translation theory. Just how and when this shift occurred in actual translation practice is one of the topics explored in this volume through a series of case studies offering snapshots of translational activity in different times and places. Overall, the picture that emerges is of a translational practice that is still very flexible, as source texts are creatively appropriated for new purposes, whether pragmatic, pedagogical, or diversional, across a range of genres, from science and philosophy to literature, travel writing and language teaching. This book will be of value to those interested in Early Modern history, linguistics, and translation studies.

This book brings a new perspective to secular music sources from the Middle Ages and early modernity by viewing them as media communication tools, whose particular features shape the meaning of their contents. Ranging from the eleventh to seventeenth centuries, and across countries and genres, the chapters offer innovative insights into the historical relationship between music and its presentation in a wide variety of media. The lens of media enables contributors to expand music history beyond notated music manuscripts and instruments to include images, furniture, luxury items, and other objects, and to address uniquely visual and material aspects of music sources in books and literature. Drawing together an international group of contributors, the volume pays close attention to the medial and material dimensions of musical sources, considering them as multifaceted objects that not only contain but also determine the nature of the music they transmit. Transforming our understanding of musical media, this volume will be of interest to scholars of musicology, art history, and medieval and early modern cultures.

Broadside ballads-folio-sized publications containing verse, a tune indication, and woodcut imagery-related cautionary tales, current events, and simplified myth and history to a wide range of social classes across seventeenth century England. Ballads straddled, and destabilized, the categories of public and private performance spaces, the material and the ephemeral, music and text, and oral and written traditions. Sung by balladmongers in the streets and referenced in theatrical works, they were also pasted to the walls of local taverns and domestic spaces. They titillated and entertained, but also educated audiences on morality and gender hierarchies. Although contemporaneous writers published volumes on the early modern controversy over women and the English witch craze, broadside ballads were perhaps more instrumental in disseminating information about dangerous women and their acoustic qualities. Recent scholarship has explored the representations of witchcraft and malfeasance in English street literature; until now, however, the role of music and embodied performance in communicating female transgression has yet to be investigated. Sarah Williams carefully considers the broadside ballad as a dynamic performative work situated in a unique cultural context. Employing techniques drawn from musical analysis, gender studies, performance studies, and the histories of print and theater, she contends that broadside ballads and their music made connections between various degrees of female crime, the supernatural, and cautionary tales for and about women.

The heart is an iconic symbol in the medieval and early modern European world. In addition to being a physical organ, it is a key conceptual device related to emotions, cognition, the self and identity, and the body. The heart is read as a metaphor for human desire and will, and situated in opposition to or alongside reason and cognition. In medieval and early modern Europe, the “feeling heart” – the heart as the site of emotion and emotional practices – informed a broad range of art, literature, music, heraldry, medical texts, and devotional and ritual practices. This multidisciplinary collection brings together art historians, literary scholars, historians, theologians, and musicologists to highlight the range of meanings attached to the symbol of the heart, the relationship between physical and metaphorical representations of the heart, and the uses of the heart in the production of identities and communities in medieval and early modern Europe.