BiblioVault - Books about 17th Century

Games and War in Early Modern English Literature

From Shakespeare to Swift

Holly Faith Nelson

Amsterdam University Press, 2019

This pioneering collection of nine original essays carves out a new conceptual path in the field by theorizing the ways in which the language of games and warfare inform and illuminate each other in the early modern cultural imagination. They consider how warfare and games are mapped onto each other in aesthetically and ideologically significant ways in the plays, poetry, or prose of William Shakespeare, Thomas Morton, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, and Jonathan Swift, among others. Contributors interpret the terms ‘war games’ or ‘games of war’ broadly, freeing them to uncover the more complex and abstract interplay of war and games in the early modern mind, taking readers from the cockpits and clowns of Shakespearean drama, through the intriguing manuals of cryptographers and the ingenious literary war games of Restoration women authors, to the witty but rancorous paper wars of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

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The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750

The English Phallus

Thomas A. King

University of Wisconsin Press, 2004

Taking on nothing less than the formation of modern genders and sexualities, Thomas A. King develops a history of the political and performative struggles that produced both normative and queer masculinities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The result is a major contribution to gender studies, gay studies, and theater and performance history.
The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750 traces the transition from a society based on alliance, which had subordinated all men, women, and boys to higher ranked males, to one founded in sexuality, through which men have embodied their claims to personal and political privacy. King proposes that the male body is a performative production marking men’s resistance to their subjection within patriarchy and sovereignty. Emphasizing that categories of gender must come under historical analysis, The Gendering of Men explores men’s particpation in an ongoing struggle for access to a universal manliness transcending other biological and social differentials.

This is volume one of two projected volumes.

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Giambattista Marino

Adonis

Thomas E. Mussio

Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2019

This is the first complete translation in English of Giambattista Marino’s Adone, a poem of 20 cantos written in Italian and first published in 1623 in Paris. Although Marino’s work has been characterized as a mythological poem with the tragic tale of Venus and Adonis at its core and woven through with retellings of many Greek and Roman myths, it is clear that Marino strove to write more than an Italian version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The highly wrought descriptive passages that permeate the poem, the allusions to contemporary political figures and events, and the rich scientific, philosophical, and theological language of many passages reflect Marino’s particular poetic style, his broad interests, and his engagement with the political and intellectual scene of early seventeenth-century Europe. One of the goals of this translation is to provide a highly accessible version of the whole poem and to expand its readership to include not only students and scholars of the romance epic and the early modern period but also curious general readers. It is hoped that this modern, annotated translation will spur new research on Marino’s poem and bear new assessments of the poem’s relation to its sources, of its influence on later literature, and of its vital connection with key issues of Marino’s time, such as scientific advancement, discovery and exploration, and the power and influence of the Catholic Church.

Translated, with introduction and notes by Thomas E. Mussio.

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Global Goods and the Country House

Comparative Perspectives, 1650–1800

Edited by Jon Stobart

University College London, 2023

Fresh insights into the multi-directional flow of goods and cultures that enmeshed the eighteenth century.

Global goods were central to the material culture of eighteenth-century country houses. Across Europe, mahogany furniture, Chinese wallpapers, and Indian textiles formed the backdrop to genteel practices of drinking sweetened coffee, tea, and chocolate from Chinese porcelain. They tied these houses and their wealthy owners into global systems of supply and the processes of colonialism and empire.

Global Goods and the Country House builds on these narratives and then challenges them by decentering our perspective. It offers a comparative framework that explores the definition, ownership, and meaning of global goods outside the usual context of European imperial powers. What were global goods and what did they do for and mean to wealthy landowners in places at the “periphery” of Europe (Sweden and Wallachia), in the British colonies of North America and the Caribbean, or in the extra-colonial context (Japan or Rajasthan)? By placing these goods in their specific material context—from the English country house to the princely palaces of Rajasthan—we gain a better understanding of their use and meaning and of their role in linking the global and the local.

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