The Uses of the Future in Early Modern Europe (Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 041599540X ISBN 13: 9780415995405

Publisher: Routledge, 2009

Synopsis

Is modernity synonymous with progress? Did the Renaissance really break with the cyclical, agrarian time of the Middle Ages, inaugurating a new concept of irreversible time in a secular culture defined by development? How does methodology affect scholarly responses to the idea of the future in the past? This collection of interdisciplinary essays from the fields of literary criticism, cultural studies, politics and intellectual history offers new answers to these commonplace questions. They explore elite and popular culture, women and men’s experiences, and the encounter between East and West, providing a comparative view on the range of personal, political and social practices with which early modern people planned for, imagined, manipulated or even rejected the future. Examining poetry, architecture, colonial exploration, technology, drama, satire, wills, childbirth and deathbed rituals, humanism, religious radicalism and republicanism, this collection provides new readings of canonical early modern texts and insights into popular culture.

With a foreword by Peter Burke.

About this title

About the Author:

Andrea Brady is Lecturer in early modern literature at Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author of English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

Emily Butterworth teaches sixteenth-century French literature and thought at King’s College London. She is the author of Poisoned Words: Slander and Satire in Early Modern France (Oxford, 2006).

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 041599540X
• ISBN 13: 9780415995405
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 262
• Editor: Brady Andrea, Butterworth Emily