Bøger udgivet af University of Delaware Press

The Tactics of Toleration examines the preconditions and limits of toleration during an age in which Europe was sharply divided along religious lines. During the Age of Religious Wars, refugee communities in borderland towns like the Rhineland city of Wesel were remarkably religiously diverse and culturally heterogeneous places. Examining religious life from the perspective of Calvinists, Lutherans, Mennonites, and Catholics, this book examines how residents dealt with pluralism during an age of deep religious conflict and intolerance. Based on sources that range from theological treatises to financial records and from marriage registries to testimonies before secular and ecclesiastical courts, this project offers new insights into the strategies that ordinary people developed for managing religious pluralism during the Age of Religious Wars.Historians have tended to emphasize the ways in which people of different faiths created and reinforced religious differences in the generations after the Reformation's break-up of Christianity, usually in terms of long-term historical narratives associated with modernization, including state building, confessionalization, and the subsequent rise of religious toleration after a century of religious wars. In contrast, Jesse Spohnholz demonstrates that although this was a time when Christians were engaged in a series of brutal religious wars against one another, many were also learning more immediate and short-term strategies to live alongside one another. This book considers these "tactics for toleration" from the vantage point of religious immigrants and their hosts, who learned to coexist despite differences in language, culture, and religion. It demands that scholars reconsider toleration, not only as an intellectual construct that emerged out of the Enlightenment, but also as a dynamic set of short-term and often informal negotiations between ordinary people, regulating the limits of acceptable and unacceptable behavior.Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

A Taste for the Foreign examines foreignness as a crucial aesthetic category for the development of prose fiction from Jacques Amyot's 1547 translation of The Ethiopian Story to Antoine Galland's early eighteenth-century version of The Thousand and One Nights. While fantastic storylines and elements of magic were increasingly shunned by a neo-classicist literary culture that valued verisimilitude above all else, writers and critics surmised that the depiction of exotic lands could offer a superior source for the novelty, variety, and marvelousness that constituted fiction's appeal. In this sense, early modern fiction presents itself as privileged site for thinking through the literary and cultural stakes of exoticism, or the taste for the foreign. Long before the term exoticism came into common parlance in France, fiction writers thus demonstrated their understanding of the special kinds of aesthetic pleasure produced by evocations of foreignness, developing techniques to simulate those delights through imitations of the exotic. As early modern readers eagerly consumed travel narratives, maps, and international newsletters, novelists discovered ways to blur the distinction between true and imaginary representations of the foreign, tantalizing readers with an illusion of learning about the faraway lands that captured their imaginations.This book analyzes the creative appropriations of those scientific or documentary forms of writing that claimed to inform the French public about exotic places. Concentrating on the most successful examples of some of the most important sub-genres of prose fiction in the long seventeenth century-heroic romances, shorter urban novels, fictional memoirs, and extraordinary voyages-the book examines how these types of fiction creatively appropriate the scientific or documentary forms of writing that claimed to inform the French public about exotic places.Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

This book discusses some rituals of justice-such as public executions, printed responses to the Archbishop of Canterbury's execution speech, and King Charles I's treason trial-in early modern England. Focusing on the ways in which genres shape these events' multiple voices, I analyze the rituals' genres and the diverse perspectives from which we must understand them.The execution ritual, like such cultural forms as plays and films, is a collaborative production that can be understood only, and only incompletely, by being alert to the presence of its many participants and their contributions. Each of these participants brings a voice to the execution ritual, whether it is the judge and jury or the victim, executioner, sheriff and other authorities, spiritual counselors, printer, or spectators and readers. And each has at least one role to play. No matter how powerful some institutions and individuals may appear, none has a monopoly over authority and how the events take shape on and beyond the scaffold. The centerpiece of the mid-seventeenth-century's theatre of death was the condemned man's last dying utterance. This study focuses on the words and contexts of many of those final speeches, including King Charles I's (1649), Archbishop William Laud's (1645), and the Earl of Strafford's (1641), as well as those of less well known royalists and regicides. Where we situate ourselves to view, hear, and comprehend a public execution-through specific participants' eyes, ears, and minds or accounts-shapes our interpretation of the ritual. It is impossible to achieve a singular, carefully indoctrinated meaning of an event as complex as a state-sponsored public execution.Along with the variety of voices and meanings, the nature and purpose of the rituals of justice maintain a significant amount of consistency in a number of eras and cultural contexts. Whether the focus is on the trial and execution of the Marian martyrs, English royalists in the 1640s and 1650s, or the Restoration's regicides, the events draw on a set of cultural expectations or conventions. Because rituals of justice are shaped by diverse voices and agendas, with the participants' scripts and counterscripts converging and colliding, they are dramatic moments conveying profound meanings.Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

The essays in this collection feature many of the world's leading Herbert scholars and are drawn from the more than fifty papers and plenary presentations delivered at the George Herbert's Travels conference held at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in October 2008. They track Herbert's "heart in pilgrimage" through four centuries of time, through west and east across space, through the inner spaces of the suffering body and soul, and through modernity into the postmodern. These essays ask how travel through space and time influences the reception and creation of literary art; in other words, how the movement of poetry affects and effects poetic movements. The interdisciplinary contributors observe Herbert's poetry traveling geographically (from earlier British receptions, to the "American strand," to the Far East), traveling internally (through the interior terrain of formal and bodily experience), and traveling temporally (through the shifting cultural landscapes made by Modern and Postmodern minds). Along the way, they discover connections between Herbert and a kaleidoscopic range of writers and thinkers including Augustine, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Edward Herbert, Anne Clifford, Robert Herrick, Henry Vaughan, Christopher Harvey, Thomas Traherne, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Ridler, R. S. Thomas, Simone Weil, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Philip Larkin, Harold Bloom, Anthony Hecht, John Bradburne, Seamus Heaney, Dallas Wiebe, Carole Rumens, and Vikram Seth. Remarkably, the home-bound Herbert anticipates many modern and post-modern traveling hopes and anxieties. He knows the call of sheer wanderlust, the craving to escape "abroad," while also recommending the utilitarian value of travel to improve oneself, to expand one's cultural, commercial, and spiritual horizons. Yet Herbert also somehow knows the jaded disillusionment, the "grief of pleasures" experienced by the prodigal traveler who has been abroad and abroad and abroad, and strikes the board, and cries "No more!" And in the end-literally, at the end of The Temple, in The Church Militant-he seems to prophesy the present age, in which traveling culture prefigures both millennium and apocalypse.

This book provides wide ranging and comprehensive biographical sketches of forty-two doctors who are best known to the public for their contributions to fields outside of medicine. Largely written by members of the medical profession, the selection of doctors discussed here are those who are, or were, well-known to the public for their contributions to their non-medical fields of choice. In many cases, the readers may have been unaware that well known professionals in fields such as literature, exploration, business, sports, and entertainment was medically qualified.

This book explores representations of the individualistic character in drama, Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean, and some of the Renaissance ideas allowing for and informing them. Setting aside Shakespearean exceptionalism, the study reads a wide variety of plays to explain how intellectual context could allow for such characterization.

Uses the reproductive histories of six celebrity women to demonstrate that pregnancy affected celebrity identity, impacted audience reception of performance, changed company repertory and altered company hierarchy, influenced the development of new plays, and had economic consequences for both women and the companies for which they worked.