Agnes Bowker's Cat: Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England

ISBN-13: 9780198207818 / Angielski / Twarda / 2000 / 368 str.

David Cressy

Opis

Cressy examines how the orderly, Protestant, and hierarchical society of post-Reformation England coped with the cultural challenges posed by beliefs and events outside the social norm. Drawing on local texts and narratives he reveals how a series of troubling and unorthodox happenings--bestiality and monstrous births, seduction and abortion, nakedness and cross-dressing, excommunication and irregular burial, iconoclasm and vandalism--disturbed the margins, cut across the grain, and set the authorities on edge.

Recenzje

In this highly readable and instructive book, the well-known social historian David Cressy tells fifteen stories of strange or troubling incidents ... he seeks to avoid the conventional formulation of a problem and a hypothesis and a "clear sense of closure", relying instead on laying out his evidence as fully as possible, listening carefully to the "voices of the past", and remaining alert to multiple connections and layers of significance.