Books in the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture series

How the classical and medieval conceptions of Fortune shifted to the modern notion of chance.Is chance nothing more than a projection of human desire on to the world?In this fascinating new study, John Lyons argues that the idea of chance assumed new vigour in the late Renaissance, when converging philosophical and literary currents demystified the powerful concept of Fortune, sensitizing writers to the relationship between human desire and the world's apparent randomness.Up to now, the story of chance has been written by historians of mathematical thought and has focused on calculation, probability and gambling. Lyons, by contrast, highlights the ethical, aesthetic and even erotic aspects of chance. He offers detailed readings of the works of major French authors - Montaigne, Corneille, Lafayette, Scudery, Pascal, Racine, Bossuet, and La Bruyere.Key Features* Renews our understanding of romance, tragedy, comedy & religious polemic in the light of the changed conceptions of the fortuitous * Shows how the emergence of suspense and subjective interest are linked to the shift from Fortune to randomness* Proposes a new view on how religious writers, faced with the sceptical challenge of late Renaissance thought, integrated chance into the post-Reformation mainstream of Catholic teachingsKeywords: Chance, Fortune, Randomness, Probability, French Early Modern Literature, post-Reformation, Genre, Romance, Prose, Montaigne, Corneille, Moliere, Lafayette, Scudery, Pascal, Racine, Bossuet, La Bruyere

A new reading of madness in Don Quixote based on archival accounts of insanity.From the records of the Spanish Inquisition, Dale Shuger presents a social corpus of early modern madness that differs radically from the literary madness previously studied. Drawing on over 100 accounts of insanity defences, many of which contain statements from a wide social spectrum - housekeepers, nieces, doctors, and barbers - as well as the testimonies of the alleged madmen and women themselves, Shuger argues that Cervantes exploration of madness as experience is intimately linked to the questions about ethics, reason, will and selfhood that unreason presented for early modern Spaniards.In adapting, challenging and transforming these discourses, Don Quixote investigates spaces of interiority, confronts the limitations of knowledge - of the self and the world - and reflects on the social strategies for diagnosing and dealing with those we cannot understand. Shuger discovers an intimate connection between Cervantess integration of this discourse of madness and his part in forging the new genre of the European novel.Key Features* Challenges the Foucauldian narrative of repression and the Bakhtinian narrative of liberation* Uses a historicist approach to show how Don Quixote engages, transforms and transcends the historical* Proposes a new reading of the development of the novel that comes from the unreasonable Baroque subject as opposed to the rational Enlightenment subject

The first full-length study of how the concept of the "e;girl"e; was constructed in sixteenth and seventeenth century literature and drama.The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Sisters argues for a paradigm shift in our current conceptions of the early modern sex-gender system, challenging the widespread assumption that the category of the "e;girl"e; played little or no role in the construction of gender in early modern English culture. Girl characters appeared in a variety of texts, from female infants in Shakespeare's late romances to little children in Tudor interludes to adult "e;roaring girls"e; in city comedies. Drawing from a variety of print and manuscript sources, including early modern drama, dictionaries, midwifery manuals, and women's autobiographies, this book argues that girlhood in Shakespeare's England was both a time of life and a form of gender transgression.Key Features:* Charts the emergence of the word "e;girl"e; into early modern English and its evolution from a gender-neutral term applied to both male and female children to one used only for female individuals* Challenges the misconception that girls were largely absent from English Renaissance literature* Offers a literary history of female child characters in Renaissance drama* Features an examination of how women writers described their own girlhoods

Examines the structural similarities between English mercantile treatises and drama c1600-1642. This book analyses the representational conventions of plays and mercantile treatises written between the chartering of the English East India Company in 1600 and the closing of the public playhouses at the outset of the English Civil War in 1642.