
The Pathology of the English Renaissance
Sacred Remains and Holy Ghosts
Elisabeth Mazzola(Author)
Brill (Publisher)
Published on 21. August 1998
Book
Leather / fine binding
VIII, 156 pages
978-90-04-11195-0 (ISBN)
Description
This examination of the fate of lost ideas after the Protestant reformation explores what might be called the pathology of the Renaissance.
The first part of the book treats Spenser's Faerie Queene and Milton's Paradise Lost, concentrating on vacant cultural spaces and abandoned icons to trace the gap between sacred and secular life, between poetry and belief. The second part focuses on Shakespeare's Hamlet and Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam to investigate the eschatological implications of this gap, the ways that history is disentangled from memory and nostalgia severed from experience.
The book challenges readings of Renaissance culture as an increasingly secular one, proposing that sacred symbols and practices still powerfully organized the English moral imagination, oriented behaviors and arranged perceptions, and specified the limits of the known world.
The first part of the book treats Spenser's Faerie Queene and Milton's Paradise Lost, concentrating on vacant cultural spaces and abandoned icons to trace the gap between sacred and secular life, between poetry and belief. The second part focuses on Shakespeare's Hamlet and Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam to investigate the eschatological implications of this gap, the ways that history is disentangled from memory and nostalgia severed from experience.
The book challenges readings of Renaissance culture as an increasingly secular one, proposing that sacred symbols and practices still powerfully organized the English moral imagination, oriented behaviors and arranged perceptions, and specified the limits of the known world.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Leiden
Netherlands
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Cloth
With dust jacket
Illustrations
7 Ill.
Dimensions
Height: 245 mm
Width: 165 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
476 gr
ISBN-13
978-90-04-11195-0 (9789004111950)
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Elizabeth Mazzola, Ph.D. (1991) in English, New York University, is Wegman Assistant Professor of English at the City College of New York. She has published many essays on Reformation poetics, and was awarded the Spenser Society's 1996 Isabel MacCaffrey Medal.