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"In discussions of the works of Donne, Milton, Marvell, and Bunyan, Early Modern Asceticism shows how conflicting approaches to asceticism animate depictions of sexuality, subjectivity, and embodiment in early modern literature and religion. The book challenges the perception that the Renaissance marks a decisive shift in attitudes towards the body, sex, and the self. In early modernity, self-respect was a Satanic impulse that had to be annihilated--the body was not celebrated, but beaten into subjection--and, feeling circumscribed by sexual desire, ascetics found relief in pain, solitude, and deformity. On the basis of this austerity, Early Modern Asceticism questions the ease with which scholarship often elides the early and the modern."--

Spirituality in literature. --- 1500-1700 --- England. --- Bunyan. --- Donne. --- Early modern literature. --- Marvell. --- Milton. --- Reformation. --- Renaissance. --- asceticism. --- austerity. --- body/soul. --- early modern literature. --- poetry. --- religion. --- self-denial. --- self. --- the body.

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This volume considers the influential revival of ancient philosophical skepticism in the 16th and early 17th centuries and investigates, from a comparative perspective, its reception in early modern English, Spanish and French drama, dedicating detailed readings to plays by Shakespeare, Calderón, Lope de Vega, Rotrou, Desfontaines, and Cervantes. While all the plays employ similar dramatic devices for "putting skepticism on stage", the study explores how these dramas, however, give different "answers" to the challenges posed by skepticism in relation to their respective historico-cultural and "ideological" contexts.

Literature: history & criticism --- Literary studies: plays & playwrights --- Calderón de la Barca. --- Cervantes. --- Drama. --- Early Modern Literature. --- Jean de Rotrou. --- Lope de Vega. --- Shakespeare. --- Skepticism.

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This study takes a fresh look at the abundant scenarios of disguise in early modern prose fiction and suggests reading them in the light of the contemporary religio-political developments. More specifically, it argues that Elizabethan narratives adopt aspects of the heated Eucharist debate during the Reformation, including officially renounced notions like transubstantiation, to negotiate culturally pressing concerns regarding identity change. Drawing on the rich field of research on the adaptation of pre-Reformation concerns in Anglican England, the book traces a cross-fertilisation between the Reformation and the literary mode of romance. The study brings together topics which are currently being strongly debated in early modern studies: the turn to religion, a renewed interest in aesthetics, and a growing engagement with prose fiction. Narratives which are discussed in detail are William Baldwin's Beware the Cat, Robert Greene's Pandosto and Menaphon, Philip Sidney's Old and New Arcadia, and Thomas Lodge's Rosalynd and A Margarite of America, George Gascoigne's Steele Glas, John Lyly's Euphues: An Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and his England, Barnabe Riche's Farewell, Greene's A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, and Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller.

English fiction --- Disguise in literature. --- Transubstantiation in literature. --- Lord's Supper in literature. --- Reformation in literature. --- History and criticism. --- British Literature. --- Early Modern Literature. --- Eucharist Debate. --- Prose Fiction.

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Lettering the Self argues that letters in medieval and early-modern France reveal the contours of the pre-modern self. Letters in this period were complicated compositions which, in addition to their administrative and artistic functions, represented the self in relation to its various others: social superiors and subordinates; friends and lovers; teachers and students; allies and adversaries; patrons and supplicants. These relationships were expressed in the content and form of letters: the rule-bound medieval discipline of letter writing structured the expression of interpersonal relationships in exacting ways, and writers navigated its rules to express contradictory and even illicit relations.
Each chapter focuses on a particular epistolary exchange in its intellectual and cultural context, from Baudri of Bourgueil and Constance of Angers, through Heloise and Abelard, Christine de Pizan's participation in the querelle du Roman de la rose, Marguerite de Navarre and Guillaume Briçonnet, to Michel de Montaigne and Étienne de La Boétie, emphasizing the importance of letter-writing in pre-modern French culture and tracing a selective yet significant history of the letter, contributing to our understanding of the development of the epistolary genre, and the pre-modern self.

KATHERINE KONG is an Assistant Professor of French at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

French letters --- Latin letters, Medieval and modern --- Self in literature. --- History and criticism. --- French culture. --- French literature. --- Katherine Kong. --- early modern France. --- early modern literature. --- epistolary culture. --- letter writing. --- literary history. --- medieval France. --- medieval literature. --- pre-modern self.

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How was the early modern pursuit of knowledge in very different spheres conditioned by a shared desire for certainty? How did this desire in turn link the epistemological crises produced by the religious upheavals of early modern Europe with the development of new scientific methods? This volume recontextualizes the production of knowledge in the early modern period (1550-1700), focusing on the social and institutional dimensions of inquiry in light of political and cultural challenges. The collection explores how uncertainties about religious identities (and even the status of irreligion) challenged traditional modes of learning. As knowledge of all sorts was integrated into different traditions in a context of unprecedented religious questioning, institutions and texts sought new means of controlling and regulating "truth." Questions of representation became newly fraught as the production of knowledge increasingly challenged established orthodoxies. --

Religion and civilization --- History --- Europe. --- Europe --- Civilisation --- Civilization --- Inquisition. --- Jesuit learning. --- Spain. --- early modern biblical exegesis. --- early modern epistemology. --- early modern literature. --- early modern skepticism. --- history of medicine. --- history of religion. --- picaresque.