David Loewenstein

Written by a team of leading international scholars, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and War illuminates the ways Shakespeare's works provide a rich and imaginative resource for thinking about the topic of war. Contributors explore the multiplicity of conflicting perspectives his dramas offer: war depicted from chivalric, masculine, nationalistic, and imperial perspectives; war depicted as a source of great excitement and as a theater of honor; war depicted from realistic or skeptical perspectives that expose the butchery, suffering, illness, famine, degradation, and havoc it causes. The essays in this volume examine the representations and rhetoric of war throughout Shakespeare's plays, as well as the modern history of the war plays on stage, in film, and in propaganda. This book offers fresh perspectives on Shakespeare's multifaceted representations of the complexities of early modern warfare, while at the same time illuminating why his perspectives on war and its consequences

Written by a team of leading international scholars, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and War illuminates the ways Shakespeare's works provide a rich and imaginative resource for thinking about the topic of war. Contributors explore the multiplicity of conflicting perspectives his dramas offer: war depicted from chivalric, masculine, nationalistic, and imperial perspectives; war depicted as a source of great excitement and as a theater of honor; war depicted from realistic or skeptical perspectives that expose the butchery, suffering, illness, famine, degradation, and havoc it causes. The essays in this volume examine the representations and rhetoric of war throughout Shakespeare's plays, as well as the modern history of the war plays on stage, in film, and in propaganda. This book offers fresh perspectives on Shakespeare's multifaceted representations of the complexities of early modern warfare, while at the same time illuminating why his perspectives on war and its consequences

Written by an international team of literary scholars and historians, this collaborative volume illuminates the diversity of early modern religious beliefs and practices in Shakespeare's England, and considers how religious culture is imaginatively reanimated in Shakespeare's plays. Fourteen new essays explore the creative ways Shakespeare engaged with the multifaceted dimensions of Protestantism, Catholicism, non-Christian religions including Judaism and Islam, and secular perspectives, considering plays such as Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King John, King Lear, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Winter's Tale. The collection is of great interest to readers of Shakespeare studies, early modern literature, religious studies, and early modern history.

Treacherous Faith offers a new and ambitious cross-disciplinary account of the ways writers from the early English Reformation to the Restoration generated, sustained, or questioned cultural anxieties

Written by an international team of literary scholars and historians, this collaborative volume illuminates the diversity of early modern religious beliefs and practices in Shakespeare's England, and considers how religious culture is imaginatively reanimated in Shakespeare's plays. Fourteen new essays explore the creative ways Shakespeare engaged with the multifaceted dimensions of Protestantism, Catholicism, non-Christian religions including Judaism and Islam, and secular perspectives, considering plays such as Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King John, King Lear, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Winter's Tale. The collection is of great interest to readers of Shakespeare studies, early modern literature, religious studies, and early modern history.

Treacherous Faith offers a new and ambitious cross-disciplinary account of the ways writers from the early English Reformation to the Restoration generated, sustained, or questioned cultural anxieties

This interdisciplinary volume of essays brings together a team of leading early modern historians and literary scholars in order to examine the changing conceptions, character, and condemnation of 'heresy' in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Definitions of 'heresy' and 'heretics' were the subject of heated controversies in England from the English Reformation to the end of the seventeenth century. These essays illuminate the significant literary issues involved in both defending and demonising heretical beliefs, including the contested hermeneutic strategies applied to the interpretation of the Bible, and they examine how debates over heresy stimulated the increasing articulation of arguments for religious toleration in England. Offering fresh perspectives on John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and others, this volume should be of interest to all literary, religious and political historians working on early modern English culture.

In this book some of the most eminent critics of seventeenth-century literature and some of the liveliest younger scholars explore the interconnections between Milton's politics, poetics and prose writings. While the essays focus on Milton's prose, they open up interesting perspectives on his major poems and on seventeenth-century ideologies, theologies and interpretative practices. Their aim is to bridge the gap between a history-of-ideas approach and literary/textual analysis, showing how key ideas - such as authority, divorce, martyrdom or iconoclasm - stimulate and trouble the imagination of a great writer. These essays challenge the notion of Milton's prose as an 'achievement of the left hand', and propose a complex relation between text and context, the aesthetic and the sociopolitical, issues of representation and the politics of gender.

David Loewenstein's Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries is a wide-ranging exploration of the interactions of literature, polemics and religious politics in the English Revolution. Loewenstein highlights the powerful spiritual beliefs and religious ideologies in the polemical struggles of Milton, Marvell and their radical Puritan contemporaries during these revolutionary decades. By examining a wide range of canonical and non-canonical writers - John Lilburne, Winstanley the Digger and Milton, amongst others - he reveals how radical Puritans struggled with the contradictions and ambiguities of the English Revolution and its political regimes. His portrait of a faction-riven, violent seventeenth-century revolutionary culture is an original and significant contribution to our understanding of these turbulent decades and their aftermath. By placing Milton's great poems in the context of the period's radical religious politics, it should be of interest to historians as

How did Milton's understanding of history relate to his literary expression of it? This book explores the role of history in Milton's literary works. It focuses on the writer's imaginative responses to the historical process - his interpretations of the past, visions of the future, and sense of the contemporary historical moment. David Loewenstein presents Milton as a controversial writer actively engaged in shaping, representing and participating in the drama of history of his age. Highlighting the apocalyptic and iconoclastic components of Milton's historical vision, the book examines the more turbulent dimensions of his polemic and poetic works. It stresses the importance of his less canonical texts, including Eikonoklastes and the History of Britain, and shows how they illuminate the sense of history dramatized in Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes. Analysing the literary expressions of Milton's radicalism, this study reveals a complex interaction between consciousness and figurati

Offering a stimulating introduction to one of the most influential texts of Western literature, this book highlights Milton's imaginative daring, in considering the heretical dimensions of Paradise Lo

Although the poet John Milton was a politically active citizen and polemicist during the English Revolution, little has been written on Milton's concept of nationalism. The first book to examine major

This interdisciplinary volume of essays brings together a team of leading early modern historians and literary scholars in order to examine the changing conceptions, character, and condemnation of 'he

This essential resource for scholars and students of the Renaissance is now available in paperback for the first time.

This is a comprehensive history of English literature written in Britain between the Reformation and the Restoration. While it focuses on England, literary effort in Scotland and Ireland is also cover

Among the radical sects which flourished during the tumultuous years of the English Revolution, the early Quakers were particularly aware of the power of the written word to promote their prophetic vi

This is the first edition of the complete works of Gerrard Winstanley (1609-76), the foremost radical English thinker and activist of the English Revolution. It is the only edition to observe the sta