Challenges the concept that the notorious horse penis is key to understanding the Tale of Vǫlsi, via the concept of the "paganesque". A family of Norwegian pagans, stubbornly resisting the new Christian religion, worship a diabolically animated preserved horse penis, intoning verses as they pass it from hand to hand until King Olaf the Saint intervenes. This is the matter of the medieval Tale of Vǫlsi. Traditionally, it has been read as evidence of a pre-Christian fertility cult - or simply dismissed as an obscene trifle. This book takes a new approach by developing the concept of the "paganesque" - the air of a religious culture older than and inimical to Christianity. It shows how the Tale of Vǫlsi deploys a range of vernacular genres, from verbal dueling and mythological poetry to folk belief about milk-stealing witches and the reanimated dead, to create the flavor of paganism for a fourteenth-century Icelandic audience: an imagined paganism that has theological stakes as well as satirical bite. Throughout, the study challenges the notion that the horse penis is the key to understanding the narrative. Once the object is removed from the center of interpretation, the artistry and wit of the tale's "Paganesque" come fully into view.

Contributors to this study examine major features and legacies of operative and speculative Freemasonry in the British Isles and assess their impact upon civic cultures, classes, and institutions in both Europe and America. The volume contains incisive chapters about Freemasonry in colonial and revolutionary America, and about the salient role of the craft in Mexico.

The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars. The Age of Enlightenment profoundly enriched religious and philosophical understanding and continues to influence present-day thinking. Works collected here include masterpieces by David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as religious sermons and moral debates on the issues of the day, such as the slave trade. The Age of Reason saw conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism transformed into one between faith and logic -- a debate that continues in the twenty-first century. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ Huntington Library N001615 Verse. "A satire on the Presbyterians, occasioned by the fact that James Anderson, D.D., of the Presbyterian church in Swallow Street, London, was known to have caught the pox."(Foxon). With a half-title. [London?]: Printed in the year, 1720. [4],24p.; 8°