A demonstration of the persistence of numerology, a characteristic of literature in the Middle Ages, in Elizabethan poetry.

This ebook contains the text approved by the external and internal PhD examiners for a thesis carried out under the supervision of Dr John Bimson at Trinity College, Bristol, England. It will be of interest to those who wish to explore cross-cultural connections between early Israel and New Kingdom Egypt, as expressed in triumphal literature. The thesis looks at issues to do with the creation of poetry in each of those cultures, and the links between them, as well as investigating when appropriate cross-cultural contacts might have happened to forge common links between them. From the abstract:This study aims to show that the Israel Stele of Merenptah and the Song of the Sea in Exodus 15 share sufficient common compositional principles and poetic devices as to support a similar dating for the two works. Indeed, the specific combinations of large-scale principles and small-scale devices are shown to be unique within their respective cultures. These claims are supported by analysis of a wide spectrum of both Egyptian and Hebrew triumphal material, together with insights drawn from wider studies in poetics and culture. Some original insights into Egyptian principles of poetic composition are suggested, together with the corresponding cross-cultural implications for Israelite poetry. The later textual history of incorporation of the original poetic work into its current narrative context is also considered.

The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture explores the resurgent interest in literary form and aesthetics in early modern english studies. Essays by leading international scholars reflect on the legacy of historicist approaches and on calls for a renewal of formalist analysis as both a tool and as a defence of our object of study as literary critics. This collection addresses the possibilities as well as the challenges of combining these critical traditions; it tests and reflects on these through practice. It also establishes new lines of enquiry by expanding definitions of form to include the material as well as theoretical implications of the term and explores the early modern roots of these connections. The period's most famous poets such as Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Jonson appear alongside Anne Southwell, Thomas Campion, and many anonymous poets and songwriters. The Work of Form brings together contributors from literary history, historicism, manuscript study, prosodic theory, the history of music, history of the book, as well as print and manuscript culture. It represents avowedly political historical work, alongside aesthetic and theoretical frameworks, work bridging literature and music, and cognitive poetics. In bringing together these diverse commitments, it addresses urgent questions about how we can understand and analyse literary form in a historically-rooted way, and demands rigorous discussion about the status of formal and aesthetic considerations in editing, in literary criticism, and in teaching.

19 Ephemeral Ceremonial Architecture in Prague, Vienna and Cracow in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries -- Index of Names

It followed every major military victory in ancient Rome: the successful general drove through the streets to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill; behind him streamed his raucous soldiers; in front were his most glamorous prisoners, as well as the booty he’d captured, from enemy ships and precious statues to plants and animals from the conquered territory. Occasionally there was so much on display that the show lasted two or three days. A radical reexamination of this most extraordinary of ancient ceremonies, this book explores the magnificence of the Roman triumph, but also its darker side. What did it mean when the axle broke under Julius Caesar’s chariot? Or when Pompey’s elephants got stuck trying to squeeze through an arch? Or when exotic or pathetic prisoners stole the general’s show? And what are the implications of the Roman triumph, as a celebration of imperialism and military might, for questions about military power and “victory” in our own day? The triumph, Mary Beard contends, prompted the Romans to question as well as celebrate military glory. Her richly illustrated work is a testament to the profound importance of the triumph in Roman culture—and for monarchs, dynasts and generals ever since. But how can we re-create the ceremony as it was celebrated in Rome? How can we piece together its elusive traces in art and literature? Beard addresses these questions, opening a window on the intriguing process of sifting through and making sense of what constitutes “history.”

Bringing to bear a variety of perspectives on the poetry, prose, and letters of a writer whose work is just now beginning to emerge from critical neglect, this collection edited by David A. Kent should play an important role in the re-evaluation of Christina Rossetti. It consists of fifteen essays by gifted Victorian scholars who represent a wide range of methodologies and critical concerns, and it offers alternatives to the autobiographical approach that has limited appreciation of Rossetti the writer.

Concerned with the study of music from the early Middle Ages to the seventeenth century. Includes articles on French 16th-century music, theatre and poetry

Free Will: Art and power on Shakespeare’s stage is a study of theatre and sovereignty that situates Shakespeare’s plays in the contraflow between two absolutisms of early modern England: the aesthetic and the political. Starting from the dramatist’s cringing relations with his princely patrons, Richard Wilson considers the ways in which this ‘bending author’ identifies freedom in failure and power in weakness by staging the endgames of a sovereignty that begs to be set free from itself. The arc of Shakespeare’s career becomes in this comprehensive new interpretation a sustained resistance to both the institutions of sacred kingship and literary autonomy that were emerging in his time. In a sequence of close material readings, Free Will shows how the plays instead turn command performances into celebrations of an art without sovereignty, which might ‘give delight’ but ‘hurt not’, and ‘leave not a rack behind’. Free Will is a profound rereading of Shakespeare, art and power that will contribute to thinking not only about the plays, but also about aesthetics, modernity, sovereignty and violence.