Salem, Massachusetts, 1692. In a plain meetinghouse a woman stands before her judges. The accusers, girls and young women, are fervent and overexcited. The accused is a poor, unpopular woman who had her first child before she was married. As the trial proceeds the girls begin to wail, tear their clothing, and scream that the woman is hurting them. Some of them expose wounds to the horrified onlookers, holding out the pins that have stabbed them -- pins that appeared as if by magic. Are they acting or are they really tormented by an unseen evil? Whatever the cause, the nightmare has begun: The witch trials will eventually claim twenty-five lives, shatter the community, and forever shape the American social conscience.

The specific course of the Reformation in England in the 16th-17th centuries brought about interest in the Jewish Bible, i.e. the Old Testament, and the emergence of a self-image held by the British that they constitute a people of the Book, beside the Jews. This, in turn, gave rise to philosemitism, which marked British culture from the days of Cromwell to those of Churchill, being tinged in various tones, from millenarianism to philo-Zionism. However, the tradition of philosemitism in England was accompanied by manifestations of antisemitism; the same people who extolled the Jews opposed their admission to Parliament; people who defended Jewish rights in the 18th-19th centuries often shared anti-Jewish stereotypes of their time; and leaders who sympathized with Zionism could believe in a Jewish conspiracy against Christian civilization. Ch. 4 (pp. 83-117), "Fictional Heroes and Heroines", deals with 19th-century literature and shows how some writers (e.g. Walter Scott, Dickens, Trollope) could combine philosemitic and antisemitic motifs in their literary works.

The foremost theoretical statement and practical criticism of seventeenth century texts from the standpoint of reader response

Stephen Greenblatt has been at the center of a major shift in literary interpretation toward a critical method that situates cultural creation in history. Shakespearean Negotiations is a sustained and powerful exemplification of this innovative method, offering a new way of understanding the power of Shakespeare's achievement and, beyond this, an original analysis of cultural process.

Stephen Greenblatt sets out to explain his longtime fascination with the ghost of Hamlet's father, and his daring and ultimately gratifying journey takes him through surprising intellectual territory. It yields an extraordinary account of the rise and fall of Purgatory as both a belief and a lucrative institution--as well as a capacious new reading of the power of Hamlet. In the mid-sixteenth century, English authorities abruptly changed the relationship between the living and dead. Declaring that Purgatory was a false "poem," they abolished the institutions and banned the practices that Christians relied on to ease the passage to Heaven for themselves and their dead loved ones. Greenblatt explores the fantastic adventure narratives, ghost stories, pilgrimages, and imagery by which a belief in a grisly "prison house of souls" had been shaped and reinforced in the Middle Ages. He probes the psychological benefits as well as the high costs of this belief and of its demolition. With the doctrine of Purgatory and the elaborate practices that grew up around it, the church had provided a powerful method of negotiating with the dead. The Protestant attack on Purgatory destroyed this method for most people in England, but it did not eradicate the longings and fears that Catholic doctrine had for centuries focused and exploited. In his strikingly original interpretation, Greenblatt argues that the human desires to commune with, assist, and be rid of the dead were transformed by Shakespeare--consummate conjurer that he was--into the substance of several of his plays, above all the weirdly powerful Hamlet. Thus, the space of Purgatory became the stage haunted by literature's most famous ghost. This book constitutes an extraordinary feat that could have been accomplished by only Stephen Greenblatt. It is at once a deeply satisfying reading of medieval religion, an innovative interpretation of the apparitions that trouble Shakespeare's tragic heroes, and an exploration of how a culture can be inhabited by its own spectral leftovers.

Taking the classical view that the political shapes man's consciousness, Allan Bloom considers Shakespeare as a profoundly political Renaissance dramatist. He aims to recover Shakespeare's ideas and beliefs and to make his work once again a recognized source for the serious study of moral and political problems. In essays looking at Julius Caesar, Othello, and The Merchant of Venice, Bloom shows how Shakespeare presents a picture of man that does not assume privileged access for only literary criticism. With this claim, he argues that political philosophy offers a comprehensive framework within which the problems of the Shakespearean heroes can be viewed. In short, he argues that Shakespeare was an eminently political author. Also included is an essay by Harry V. Jaffa on the limits of politics in King Lear. "A very good book indeed . . . one which can be recommended to all who are interested in Shakespeare." —G. P. V. Akrigg "This series of essays reminded me of the scope and depth of Shakespeare's original vision. One is left with the impression that Shakespeare really had figured out the answers to some important questions many of us no longer even know to ask."-Peter A. Thiel, CEO, PayPal, Wall Street Journal Allan Bloom was the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor on the Committee on Social Thought and the co-director of the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy at the University of Chicago. Harry V. Jaffa is professor emeritus at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate School.

"Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture - not the friendly unassuming architecture of the vernacular but the uniquely strange and exciting buildings put up by the great and powerful, ranging from huge houses to gem-like pavilions and lodges designed for feasting and hunting - is a phenomenon as remarkable as the literature which accompanied it, the literature of Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, Marlow, Jonson, Campion and others. Forty years after adventuring into this world in his first book, 'Robert Smythson', in which he discussed one family of mason-architects and the great houses with which they were connected, Mark Girouard has returned to the subject to cover the whole rich field in detail. In this beautiful and fascinating book, Girouard discusses social structure and the way of life behind it, the evolution of the house plan, the ferment of excitement aroused in English patrons and craftsmen as they learnt about the classic Five Orders and the buildings of Ancient Rome from publications and engravings, the surprising wealth of architectural drawings which survive from the period, the inroads of foreign craftsmen who brought new fashions in ornament with them, but also the strength of the native tradition which was creatively integrated with the 'antique' style. Behind the book is a vivid consciousness of the European scene, and the different ways in which different countries reacted to new influences yet did not abandon their native traditions. Italy, France, central Europe and above all the Low Countries provide the background, and England was influenced by all of them. But the principal argument of the book is the individuality of the English achievement. Girouard's pioneering work on Elizabethan architecture, then an unfashionable period, has helped inspire an increasing number of architectural historians to venture into the field. His new book benefits from their researches and publications, but is essentially a product of new research and travel on his part. The results are displayed with his own unique sense of style, and are fired by the excitement which the architecture of the period still generates in him." -- from book jacket.

The ten essays published in this volume were written over the space of a decade, but they were conceived from the start as a coherent whole, presenting Peiresc's study of discrete languages and literatures of the Near East and North Africa. For Peiresc the student of the Classical past, this described the eastern and southern space in which the Greeks and Romans lived and strove. For Peiresc the Christian, this was the world of the Bible that impacted upon the Greeks and Romans. And for Peiresc of the Mediterranean (for he was born in Aix, spent much time in Marseille, and lived outside of the region for only 6 of his 57 years), this was the territory that his friends and colleagues sailed to, lived in and, usually, came back from. The convergence of these axes in the life of one man, and a man of singular intellectual power and charm whose vast personal paper arsenal had survived, makes this such a compelling project. The essays are arranged in a roughly chronological order. They follow the course of Peiresc's own projects from his early encounter with the ancient Near East in Greek and Roman literature, through his engagement with Arabic to his deepening kowledge of rabbinic texts to the wider world of the new oriental studies of the seventeenth century which he helped create: Samaritan, Coptic and Ethiopic.

Hamlet tells Horatio that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy. In Double Vision , philosopher and literary critic Tzachi Zamir argues that there are more things in Hamlet than are dreamt of--or at least conceded--by most philosophers. Making an original and persuasive case for the philosophical value of literature, Zamir suggests that certain important philosophical insights can be gained only through literature. But such insights cannot be reached if literature is deployed merely as an aesthetic sugaring of a conceptual pill. Philosophical knowledge is not opposed to, but is consonant with, the literariness of literature. By focusing on the experience of reading literature as literature and not philosophy, Zamir sets a theoretical framework for a philosophically oriented literary criticism that will appeal both to philosophers and literary critics. Double Vision is concerned with the philosophical understanding induced by the aesthetic experience of literature. Literary works can function as credible philosophical arguments--not ones in which claims are conclusively demonstrated, but in which claims are made plausible. Such claims, Zamir argues, are embedded within an experiential structure that is itself a crucial dimension of knowing. Developing an account of literature's relation to knowledge, morality, and rhetoric, and advancing philosophical-literary readings of Richard III, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet , and King Lear , Zamir shows how his approach can open up familiar texts in surprising and rewarding ways.

"A wave of plague ravaged the cities of northern Italy in 1630-31, ravaging Christian and Jewish communities alike. In Writing Plague Susan L. Einbinder explores the Hebrew texts that lay witness to the event. These Jewish sources on the Great Italian Plague have never been treated together as a group, Einbinder observes, but they can contribute to a bigger picture of this major outbreak and how it affected people, institutions, and beliefs; how individuals and institutions responded; and how they did or did not try to remember and memorialize it"-- Provided by publisher.

The Tudor era has long been associated with the rise of nationalism in England, yet nationalist writing in this period often involved the denigration and outright denial of Englishness. Philip Schwyzer argues that the ancient, insular, and imperial nation imagined in the works of writers such as Shakespeare and Spenser was not England, but Britain. Disclaiming their Anglo-Saxon ancestry, the English sought their origins in a nostalgic vision of British antiquity. Focusing on texts including The Faerie Queene, English and Welsh antiquarian works, The Mirror for Magistrates, Henry V and King Lear, Schwyzer charts the genesis, development and disintegration of British nationalism in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. An important contribution to the expanding scholarship on early modern Britishness, this study gives detailed attention to Welsh texts and traditions, arguing that Welsh sources crucially influenced the development of English literature and identity.

The Time Is Out of Joint handles the Shakespearean oeuvre from a philosophical perspective, finding that Shakespeare's historical dramas reflect on issues and reveal puzzles which were taken up by philosophy proper only in the centuries following them. Shakespeare's extraordinary handling of time and temporality, the difference between truth and fact, that of theory, and that of interpretation and revelatory truth are evaluated in terms of Shakespeare's own conjectural endeavors, and are compared with early modern, modern, and postmodern thought. Heller shows that modernity, which recognized itself in Shakespeare only from the time of Romanticism, found in Shakespeare's work a revelatory character which marked the end of both metaphysical system-building and a tragic reckoning with the inaccessibility of an absolute, timeless truth. Heller distinguishes the four stages found in constantly unique relation in Shakespeare's work (historical, personal, political, and existential) and probes their significance as time comes to fall "out of joint" and may be again set aright. Rather than initially bestowing upon Shakespeare the dubious honorary title of philosopher , Heller probes the concretely situated reflections of characters who must face a blind and irrational fate either without taking responsibility for the discordance of time, or with a responsibility which may both transform history into politics, and set right the time which is out of joint. In the ruminations and undertakings of these characters, Shakespeare's dramas present a philosophy of history, a political philosophy, and a philosophy of (im)moral personality. Heller weighs each as distinctly modern confrontations with the possibility of truth and virtue within a human historical condition no less multifarious for its momentariness.

The essays in this collection investigate the ways in which the past was exploited to meet the concerns of the present in early modern England. The understanding of the past in this period was characterized by a deepening and more fully articulated conception of time and history, with its roots in impassioned religious and political controversies. The discourses that arose from this dialogue informed and drew together a daunting range of genres and activities: prose accounts, polemical tracts, poems, plays, romances, secret histories, novels. Although many of these genres are no longer recognized as history, early modern writers and readers treated them as such. In assessing the uses of the past, therefore, these essays consider “literary” and “factual” writings side by side, avoiding traditional chronological and disciplinary divisions and the artificial separation of secular from ecclesiastical history. Cumulatively, they supply the context and provide a vast array of evidence for the way in which the deployment of history for political, religious, moral, aesthetic, or commercial purposes shifted between the mid-sixteenth century and the late eighteenth. Contributors include Ian W. Archer, Eve Tavor Bannet, David Cressy, Richard Dutton, Martin Dzelzainis, Felicity Heal, Christopher Highley, John N. King, Mark Knights, Karen O’Brien, Paul Seaward, John Spurr, Andrew Starkie, Arthur H. Williamson, David Womersley, Daniel R. Woolf, and Blair Worden. Paulina Kewes is a fellow and tutor in English literature at Jesus College, Oxford, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her publications include Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660–1710 (1998), and a number of articles on Renaissance, Restoration, and eighteenth-century drama and politics. She has also edited a volume of essays, Plagiarism in Early Modern England (2003), and is completing a book on the staging of history in Elizabethan England.

Moments of royal succession, which punctuate the Stuart era (1603-1714), occasioned outpourings of literature. Writers, including most of the major figures of the seventeenth century from Jonson, Daniel, and Donne to Marvell, Dryden, and Behn, seized upon these occasions: to mark the transition of power; to reflect upon the political structures and values of their nation; and to present themselves as authors worthy of patronage and recognition. This volume of essays explores this important category of early modern writing. It contends that succession literature warrants attention as a distinct category: appreciated by contemporaries, acknowledged by a number of scholars, but never investigated in a coherent and methodical manner, it helped to shape political reputations and values across the period. Benefiting from the unique database of such writing generated by the AHRC-funded Stuart Successions Project, the volume brings together a distinguished group of authors to address a subject which is of wide and growing interest to students both of history and of literature. It illuminates the relation between literature and politics in this pivotal century of English political and cultural history. Interdisciplinary in scope, the volume will be indispensable to scholars of early modern British literature and history as well as undergraduates and postgraduates in both fields