Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England / / edited by Susanne Rupp, Tobias Döring

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910811450903321
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Leiden; ; Boston : , : BRILL, , 2005
• ISBN: 94-012-0207-9; 1-4175-9117-X
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (207 p.)
• Collana: Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ; ; 86
• Disciplina: 820.9382
• Soggetti: Holy, The; Sacred space - England
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Tobias DÖRING: Introduction -- Paul STROHM: The Croxton Play of the Sacrament: Commemoration and Repetition in Late Medieval Culture -- Andrew James JOHNSTON: The Secret of the Sacred: Confession and the Self in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight -- Thomas HEALY: Performing the Self: Reformation History and the English Renaissance Lyric -- Andreas HÖFELE: Stages of Martyrdom: John Foxe's Actes and Monuments -- Andrew HADFIELD: James VI and I, George Buchanan and the Divine Right of Kings -- Verena OLEJNICZAK LOBSIEN: "Transformed in show, but more transformed in mind": Sidney's Old Arcadia and the Performance of Perfection -- Susanne RUPP: Performing Heaven: The State of Grace in Seventeenth-Century Protestant Theology -- Richard WILSON: Dyed in Mummy: Othello and the Mulberries -- Ina SCHABERT: The Lady's Supper: Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum as a Female Celebration of the Eucharist -- Irmgard MAASSEN: Canonized by Love? Religious Rhetoric and Gender-Fashioning in the Sonnet -- Sabine SCHÜLTING: Tobacco-Sacred and Profane -- Notes on Contributors.
• Sommario/riassunto: Communities have often shaped themselves around cultural spaces set apart and declared sacred. For this purpose, churches, priests or scholars no less than writers frequently participate in giving sacred figures a local habitation and, sometimes, voice or name. But whatever ; sites, rites, images or narratives have thus been constructed, they also raise some complex questions: how can the sacred be presented and yet guarded, claimed yet concealed, staged in public and at the same time kept exclusive? Such questions are pursued here in a variety of English texts historically employed to manifest and manage versions of the sacred. But since their performances inhabit social space, this often functions as a theatrical arena which is also used to stage modes of dissent, difference, sacrifice and sacrilege. In this way, all aspects of social life - the family, the nation, the idea of kingship, gender identities, courtly ideals, love making or smoking - may become sacralized and buttress claims for power by recourse to a repertoire of religious symbolic forms. Through critical readings of central texts and authors - such as Sir Gawain, Foxe, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, or Vaughan - as well as less canonical examples - the Croxton play, Buchanan, Lanyer, Wroth, or the tobacco pamphlets - the twelve contributions all engage with the crucial question how, and to what end, performances of the sacred affect, or effect, cultural transformation.