LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Early Modern England
built 491 days ago
In the opening preface to his Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England, Philip Almond argues that the subject of demonic possession remains largely unexplored within historical research. Through this statement he is openly echoing the words of Daniel Walker’s Unclean Spirits (1981), a work which greatly influences Almond’s text. It is true that whilst much research has been carried out on beliefs in early modern witchcraft, the subjects of possession and exorcism have failed to attract quite the same level of analysis. This is surprising, considering the fact that cases of demonic possession fit naturally into the wide spectrum of early modern spiritual beliefs, including those involving prophesies, visions and dreams, alongside witchcraft accusations.
Source:
For early Modern England, containing female speech was essential to maintaining order. Through their speech, women could raise questions about and subvert patriarchal power. The frequency of this trope shows that there was a great apprehension about what speech and the tongue could accomplish. The female tongue was used as a metaphor for many problems and issues within the culture. This thesis analyzes two body politic metaphors in which the female tongue as a character wreaks havoc on the social body. Thomas Tomkis and William Averell utilize this metaphor in very different ways.
Source:
This path-breaking study explores the diverse and varied meanings of manhood in early modern England and their complex, and often contested, relationship with patriarchal principles. Using social, political and medical commentary, alongside evidence of social practice derived from court records, Dr Shepard argues that patriarchal ideology contained numerous contradictions, and that, while males were its primary beneficiaries, it was undermined and opposed by men as well as women. Patriarchal concepts of manhood existed in tension both with anti-patriarchal forms of resistance and with alternative codes of manhood which were sometimes primarily defined independently of patriarchal imperatives. As a result the differences within each sex, as well as between them, were intrinsic to the practice of patriarchy and the social distribution of its dividends in early modern England.
Source:
Healy's argument centers on early modern culture, but she occasionally draws connections to AIDS and other modern "plagues." Her analysis of the cultural meaning of syphilis might be helpful in thinking about the way cancer is used today to conceptualize corruption within the body politic. Also, her discussion of the London Orders (banishing suspect populations from the city during epidemics) helps contextualize the mechanisms of quarantine and exclusion common in contemporary responses to SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and to other social "diseases" such as terrorism.
Source:
Chapter 1 presents a comprehensive overview of the early modern culture of epistolarity in England. Chapter 2 approaches the material and organizational components of letter exchange, emphasizing the anxieties which accompany letter writing in all its modes. Chapter 3 investigates how social custom, the physical body, and various emotions were persuasively textualized in the letter. Chapter 4 shifts the focus from affect to information in order to consider the sociocultural meanings inhering in the transmission of news and intelligence, information frequently exchanged via letters and professional manuscript newsletters. Chapter 5 examines the intersection of print culture with the idea and practices of letter writing. Discourses which used the designation “letter” or “epistle,” those either transferred from manuscript or constructed especially for print, often functioned as persuasive tools in print.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Early Modern England