In The Chastity Plot, Lisabeth During tells the story of the rise, fall, and transformation of the ideal of chastity. From its role in the practice of asceticism to its associations with sovereignty, violence, and the purity of nature, it has been loved, honored, and despised. Obsession with chastity has played a powerful and disturbing role in our moral imagination. It has enforced patriarchy’s double standards, complicated sexual relations, and imbedded in Western culture a myth of gender that has been long contested by feminists. Still not yet fully understood, the chastity plot remains with us, and the metaphysics of purity continue to haunt literature, religion, and philosophy. Idealized and unattainable, sexual renunciation has shaped social institutions, political power, ethical norms, and clerical abuses. It has led to destruction and passion, to seductive fantasies that inspired saints and provoked libertines. As During shows, it should not be underestimated.
Examining literature, religion, psychoanalysis, and cultural history from antiquity through the middle ages and into modernity, During provides a sweeping history of chastity and insight into its subversive potential. Instead of simply asking what chastity is, During considers what chastity can do, why we should care, and how it might provide a productive disruption, generating new ways of thinking about sex, integrity, and freedom.
Chastity Plot
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Eutopia
As the Brexit debates confirmed, Wales’s relationship to Europe has for far too long been discussed exclusively, narrowly, and in suffocating terms of its social, political, and economic aspects. By contrast, Eutopia sets out to explore the rich, inventive, and exhilarating spectrum of pro-European sentiment evident from 1848 to 1980 in the writings of Welsh intellectuals and creative writers.
This book ranges from the era of O.M. Edwards, through the inter-war period when both right-wing and left-wing ideologies clashed, to the post-war age when major writers such as Emyr Humphreys and Raymond Williams became influential. This study clearly demonstrates that, far from being insular and parochial, Welsh culture has long been hospitably internationalist. As the very title, Eutopia, concedes, there have of course often been utopian aspects to Wales’s dreams of Europe. However, while some may therefore choose to dismiss them as examples of mere wishful thinking, others may fruitfully appreciate their aspirational and inspirational aspects.
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Four Shakespearean Period Pieces
In the study of Shakespeare since the eighteenth century, four key concepts have served to situate Shakespeare in history: chronology, periodization, secularization, and anachronism.
Yet recent theoretical work has called for their reappraisal. Anachronisms, previously condemned as errors in the order of time, are being hailed as alternatives to that order. Conversely chronology and periods, its mainstays, are now charged with having distorted the past they have been entrusted to represent, and secularization, once considered the driving force of the modern era, no longer holds sway over the past or the present.
In light of this reappraisal, can Shakespeare studies continue unshaken? This is the question Four Shakespearean Period Pieces takes up, devoting a chapter to each term: on the rise of anachronism, the chronologizing of the canon, the staging of plays “in period,” and the use of Shakespeare in modernity’s secularizing project.
To read these chapters is to come away newly alert to how these fraught concepts have served to regulate the canon’s afterlife. Margreta de Grazia does not entirely abandon them but deftly works around and against them to offer fresh insights on the reading, editing, and staging of the author at the heart of our literary canon.
Yet recent theoretical work has called for their reappraisal. Anachronisms, previously condemned as errors in the order of time, are being hailed as alternatives to that order. Conversely chronology and periods, its mainstays, are now charged with having distorted the past they have been entrusted to represent, and secularization, once considered the driving force of the modern era, no longer holds sway over the past or the present.
In light of this reappraisal, can Shakespeare studies continue unshaken? This is the question Four Shakespearean Period Pieces takes up, devoting a chapter to each term: on the rise of anachronism, the chronologizing of the canon, the staging of plays “in period,” and the use of Shakespeare in modernity’s secularizing project.
To read these chapters is to come away newly alert to how these fraught concepts have served to regulate the canon’s afterlife. Margreta de Grazia does not entirely abandon them but deftly works around and against them to offer fresh insights on the reading, editing, and staging of the author at the heart of our literary canon.
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Machines of the Mind
In Machines of the Mind, Katharine Breen proposes that medieval personifications should be understood neither as failed novelistic characters nor as instruments of heavy-handed didacticism. She argues that personifications are instead powerful tools for thought that help us to remember and manipulate complex ideas, testing them against existing moral and political paradigms. Specifically, different types of medieval personification should be seen as corresponding to positions in the rich and nuanced medieval debate over universals. Breen identifies three different types of personification—Platonic, Aristotelian, and Prudentian—that gave medieval writers a surprisingly varied spectrum with which to paint their characters.
Through a series of new readings of major authors and works, from Plato to Piers Plowman, Breen illuminates how medieval personifications embody the full range of positions between philosophical realism and nominalism, varying according to the convictions of individual authors and the purposes of individual works. Recalling Gregory the Great’s reference to machinae mentis (machines of the mind), Breen demonstrates that medieval writers applied personification with utility and subtlety, employing methods of personification as tools that serve different functions. Machines of the Mind offers insight for medievalists working at the crossroads of religion, philosophy, and literature, as well as for scholars interested in literary character-building and gendered relationships among characters, readers, and texts beyond the Middle Ages.
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Poetry of John Tyndall
John Tyndall (c. 1822–1893), is best known as a leading natural philosopher and trenchant public intellectual of the Victorian age, who spoke and wrote controversially on the relationship between science and religion. Far fewer people know that he also wrote poetry.
The Poetry of John Tyndall contains annotated transcriptions of all 76 of Tyndall’s extant poems, the majority of which have not been published before. The poems are complemented by an extended introduction, which explores what the poems can tell us about Tyndall’s self-fashioning, his values and beliefs, and the role of poetry for him and his circle. More broadly, this introduction addresses the relationship between the scientific and poetic imaginations, and wider questions of the purpose of poetry in relation to science and religion in the nineteenth century.
The Poetry of John Tyndall contains annotated transcriptions of all 76 of Tyndall’s extant poems, the majority of which have not been published before. The poems are complemented by an extended introduction, which explores what the poems can tell us about Tyndall’s self-fashioning, his values and beliefs, and the role of poetry for him and his circle. More broadly, this introduction addresses the relationship between the scientific and poetic imaginations, and wider questions of the purpose of poetry in relation to science and religion in the nineteenth century.
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British Book Collector
"Something for my Native Town" celebrates new research on one of the finest collections of manuscripts and rare books in the North West of England, the R.E. Hart Collections of the Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery. Leading scholars from the fields of art history and history of the book examine anew the internationally important manuscripts and rare printed books in Hart’s collection. They also analyze the practice of collecting itself in the context of the waning of industrial revolution. Copiously illustrated with color prints, this volume marks R.E. Hart’s achievement as a collector—one who collected for himself and for his community in posterity.
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