Cohen utilizes the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary literary and cultural studies to shed new light on the relationships between technologies and the people who used them during the early modern period.

Udo Thiel presents a critical evaluation of the understanding of self-consciousness and personal identity in early modern philosophy. He explores over a century of European philosophical debate from Descartes to Hume, and argues that our interest in human subjectivity remains strongly influenced by the conceptual framework of early modern thought.

Contains forty original essays.

Shakespeare scholars and cultural theorists critically investigate the relationship between early modern culture and contemporary political and technological changes concerning the idea of the 'human.' The volume covers the tragedies King Lear and Hamlet in particular, but also provides posthumanist readings of other Shakespearean plays.

A Companion to Tudor Literature presents a collection of thirty-one newly commissioned essays focusing on English literature and culture from the reign of Henry VII in 1485 to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. Presents students with a valuable historical and cultural context to the period Discusses key texts and representative subjects, and explores issues including international influences, religious change, travel and New World discoveries, women’s writing, technological innovations, medievalism, print culture, and developments in music and in modes of seeing and reading

Throwing fresh light on a much discussed but still controversial field, this collection of essays places the presence of Italian literary theories against and alongside the background of English dramatic traditions, to assess this influence in the emergence of Elizabethan theatrical convention and the innovative dramatic practices under the early Stuarts.

'Curious and Modern Inventions' offers an insight into the motivating forces behind music, tracing it to a new conception of instruments of all sorts - whether musical, artistic, or scientific - as vehicles of discovery.

Through a multidisciplinary collection of case studies, this book explores the effects of the digital age on medieval and early modern studies. Divided into five parts, the book examines how people, medieval and modern, engage with medieval media and technology through an exploration of the theory underpinning audience interactions with historical materials in the past and the real-world engagement of a twenty-first century audience with medieval and early modern studies through the multimodal lens of a vast digital landscape. Each case study reveals the diversity of medieval media and technology and challenges readers to consider new types of literacy competencies as scholarly, rigorous methods of engaging in pre-modern investigations of materiality. Essays in the first section engage in the examination of medieval media, mediation, and technology from a theoretical framework, while the second section explores how digitization, smart technologies, digital mapping, and the internet have shaped medieval and early modern studies today. The book will be of interest to students in undergraduate or graduate intermediate or advanced courses as well as scholars, in medieval studies, art history, architectural history, medieval history, literary history, and religious history.

Communities have often shaped themselves around cultural spaces set apart and declared sacred. For this purpose, churches, priests or scholars no less than writers frequently participate in giving sacred figures a local habitation and, sometimes, voice or name. But whatever sites, rites, images or narratives have thus been constructed, they also raise some complex questions: how can the sacred be presented and yet guarded, claimed yet concealed, staged in public and at the same time kept exclusive? Such questions are pursued here in a variety of English texts historically employed to manifest and manage versions of the sacred. But since their performances inhabit social space, this often functions as a theatrical arena which is also used to stage modes of dissent, difference, sacrifice and sacrilege. In this way, all aspects of social life - the family, the nation, the idea of kingship, gender identities, courtly ideals, love making or smoking - may become sacralized and buttress claims for power by recourse to a repertoire of religious symbolic forms. Through critical readings of central texts and authors - such as Sir Gawain, Foxe, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, or Vaughan - as well as less canonical examples - the Croxton play, Buchanan, Lanyer, Wroth, or the tobacco pamphlets - the twelve contributions all engage with the crucial question how, and to what end, performances of the sacred affect, or effect, cultural transformation.

This book foregrounds the pressures that three transformative technologies in the long sixteenth century—the printing press, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass—placed on long-held literary practices, as well as on cultural and social structures. Sheila J. Nayar disinters the clash between humanist drives and print culture; places the rise of gunpowder warfare beside the equivalent rise in chivalric romance; and illustrates fraught attempts by humanists to hold on to classicist traditions in the face of seismic changes in navigation. Lively and engaging, this study illuminates not only how literature responded to radical technological changes, but also how literature was sometimes forced, through unanticipated destabilizations, to reimagine itself. By tracing the early modern human’s inter-animation with print, powder, and compass, Nayar exposes how these technologies assisted in producing new ways of seeing, knowing, and being in the world.