Sophie Chiari

The first comprehensive history of Byzantine warfare in the tenth century

The Early Modern 'Fated Sky'

Shakespeare's Representation of Weather, Climate and Environment

Sandhya Patel

This book explores reactions to and representations of natural disasters in early modern Europe. The contributors illustrate how the cultural production of the period - in manuals, treatises, sermons, travelogues and fiction - grappled with environmental catastrophe. Crucially, they interrogate how people in the early modern era rationalized and mediated the threat of events like plagues, great frosts, storms, floods and earthquakes. A vital contribution to environmental history, this book highlights the parallels between early modern responses to natural disaster and climate anxiety in our own era.

Events in Excess

The Writing of Natural Disaster in Europe, 1500–1826

While our physical surroundings fashion our identities, we, in turn, fashion the natural elements in which or with which we live. This complex interaction between the human and the non-human already resonated in Shakespeare's plays and poems. As details of the early modern supra- and infra-celestial landscape feature in his works, this dictionary brings to the fore Shakespeare's responsiveness to and acute perception of his 'environment' and it covers the most significant uses of words related to this concept. In doing so, it also examines the epistemological changes that were taking place at the turn of the 17th century in a society which increasingly tried to master nature and its elements. For this reason, the intersections between the natural and the supernatural receive special emphasis. All in all, this dictionary offers a wide variety of resources that takes stock of the 'green criticism' that recently emerged in Shakespeare studies and provides a clear and complete overview of the idea, imagery and language of environment in the canon.

Shakespeare and the Environment: A Dictionary

With its many rites of initiation (religious, educational, professional or sexual), Elizabethan and Jacobean education emphasized both imitation and discovery in a struggle to bring population to a minimal literacy, while more demanding techniques were being developed for the cultural elite. The Circulation of Knowledge in Early Modern English Literature examines the question of transmission and of the educational procedures in16th- and 17th-century England by emphasizing deviant practices that questioned, reassessed or even challenged pre-established cultural norms and traditions. This volume thus alternates theoretical analyses with more specific readings in order to investigate the multiple ways in which ideas then circulated. It also addresses the ways in which the dominant cultural forms of the literature and drama of Shakespeare’s age were being subverted. In this regard, its various contributors analyze how the interrelated processes of initiation, transmission and transgression operated at the core of early modern English culture, and how Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton, or lesser known poets and playwrights such as Thomas Howell, Thomas Edwards and George Villiers, managed to appropriate these cultural processes in their works.

The Circulation of Knowledge in Early Modern English Literature

Samuel Cuisinier-Delorme

This edited collection aims at highlighting the various uses of water in sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth-century England, while exploring the tensions between those who praised the curative virtues of waters and those who rejected them for their supposedly harmful effects. Divided into three balanced sections, the collection includes contributions from renowned specialists of early modern culture and literature as well as rising young scholars as it seeks to establish a dialogue between different methodologies, and explain why the spa-related issues examined still resonate in todays society. Sophie Chiari is Professor of English Literature at the Universite Clermont Auvergne, France, specializing in ecocritical studies. Previous publications include Shakespeares Representation of Weather, Climate and Environment (2019). She is currently working on Shakespeares Environment: A Dictionary (2021). Samuel Cuisinier-Delorme is a lecturer at the Universite Clermont Auvergne where his research focuses on English Literature from the 16th _18th centuries. Samuel lives and works in Vichy, where he is developing research projects on waters and balneology. He is currently planning a seminar on spa literature and is also working on a forthcoming book in French on the same topic, Regards sur le thermalisme europeen du Moyen Age au XIXe siecle (2021).

Spa Culture and Literature in England, 1500-1800

John Mucciolo

A fascinating insight into court entertainment - encompassing dance, music and performance - in the age of Shakespeare.

Sophie Chiari

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