The cultural forms often referred to as 'baroque' are the most spectacular expressions of early modern Europe's effort to mediate between knowledge and power at a time when political authority was being centralized, the authority of religion undermined by the division of Christianity, and science and poetry were seen increasingly as rival forms of intellectual authority. Culture and Authority in the Baroque explores the baroque across a wide range of disciplines, from poetics to politics, to the rituals of musical, dramatic, and religious performance.

The essays in this collection...

At the time of his death in 1700, John Dryden was acknowledged as England's greatest writer, his reputation even rivaling that of Shakespeare. Certainly, whether considered as a poet, a dramatist, or as a critic, Dryden far outstripped his contemporaries in the sheer scope and variety of his literary production. The amazing versatility of his pen was matched only by the transformational energy that shapes individual works, from heroic dramas to great satires.

For Enchanted Ground, Jayne Lewis and Maximillian E. Novak have brought together many of the world's experts on Dryden,...

Intellectuals rarely make a significant impact on one field of scholarship let alone several, yet Amos Funkenstein (1937-1995) displayed an intellectual range that encompassed several disciplines and broke new ground across seemingly impenetrable scholarly boundaries. The philosophy of history from antiquity to modernity, medieval and early modern history of science, medieval scholasticism, Jewish history in all of its periods - these are all areas in which he made lasting contributions. Thinking Impossibilities brings together Funkenstein's colleagues, friends, and former...

The principle of tolerance is one of the most enduring legacies of the Enlightenment. However, scholarly works on the topic to date have been primarily limited to traditional studies based on a historical, 'progressive' view or to the critiques of contemporary writers such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Foucault, and MacIntyre, who believed that the core beliefs of the Enlightenment, including tolerance, could actually be used as vehicles of repression and control rather than as agents promoting individual and group freedom.This collection of original essays by a distinguished international group...

Between the waning of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Enlightenment, many fundamental aspects of human behaviour - from expressions of gender to the experience of time - underwent radical changes. While some of these transformations were recorded in words, others have survived in non-verbal cultural media, notably the visual arts, poetry, theatre, music, and dance. Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression explores how artists made use of these various cultural forms to grapple with human values in the increasingly heterodox world of the...

Godwinian Moments is the first ever book collection on the work of William Godwin, the radical British philosopher, novelist, and pamphleteer who contributed extensively to the political and cultural shifts of 1783 to 1834. These essays reveal Godwin as a manyfaceted thinker, pursuing progressive change through various genres and discursive contexts, while confronting moments of tension and contradiction in his views.

Leading scholars of British Romanticism examine his writings both well-known, such as Caleb Williams and Political Justice, and...

The tumultuous climate of early modern England had a profound effect on its Catholic population's domestic life, social customs, literary inventions, and political arguments. Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism explores the broad spectrum of the early modern English Catholic experience, presenting fresh and often startling assessments of the most problematic topics in post-Reformation English Catholicism.

The contributors to this volume - all leading or rising scholars of early modern studies - conceptualize English Catholicism as a hazardous series of...

Eighteenth-century questions about the properties essential to life often explored the boundary between the physical world of the body and the immaterial world of the mind and soul. Locating materialism within the larger history of ideas, Vital Matters examines how and why eighteenth-century scientists, philosophers, writers, and artists questioned nature and its animating principles.

In this volume, interdisciplinary essays by premier scholars in literary studies, art history, and the history of science and medicine analyse a wide range of subjects, including ghosts and...

The notion of 'selfhood' conjures up images of self-sufficiency, integrity, introspectiveness, and autonomy - characteristics typically associated with 'modernity.' The seventeenth century marks the crucial transition to a new form of 'bourgeois' selfhood, although the concept goes back to the pre-modern and early modern period. A richly interdisciplinary collection, Space and Self integrates perspectives from history, history of literature, and history of art to link the issue of selfhood to the new and vital literature on space.

As Space and Self shows, there have...

In this collection, thirteen distinguished contributors examine the influence of the ancient skeptical philosophy of Pyrrho of Elis and Sextus Empiricus on early modern political thought. Classical skepticism argues that in the absence of certainty one must either suspend judgment and live by habit or act on the basis of probability rather than certainty. In either case, one must reject dogmatic confidence in politics and philosophy.

Surveying the use of skepticism in works by Hobbes, Descartes, Hume, Smith, and Kant, among others, the essays in Skepticism and Political Thought...