This book focuses on the cultural reception of Milton and his works in nineteenth-century America. Using reception theory, the work analyzes the contributions of Milton and his writings to demonstrate how major social movements appropriated him in ways that reinvent him, making him what Margaret Fuller called emphatically American. The book centers on Milton's influence on the movements focused on the development of American Christianity, abolition, and women's suffrage. Each group approaches his writings with different horizons of expectations determined, in part, by the social problems they address. Each has unique ways of disseminating and consuming information about Milton and his writings, sometimes determined by how readers in different geographical locations read him. And, each debate makes extensive use of American periodicals of the period, revealing critical information about how Milton's writings were disseminated and deployed. Milton's presence in these debates helped shape American society at the time and provides proof for us of how Milton can remain relevant in the issues faced by Americans in 'our day.'

The Equality of Flesh traces a new genealogy of equality before its formalization under liberalism. While modern ideas of equality are defined through an inner human nature, Brent Dawson argues that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries conceptualized equality as an ambivalent and profoundly bodily condition. Everyone was made from the same lowly matter and, as a result, shared the same set of vulnerabilities, needs, and passions. Responding to the political upheavals of colonialism and the intellectual turmoil of new natural philosophies, leading figures of the English Renaissance, including Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare, anxiously imagined that bodily commonality might undermine differences of religion, race, and class.

As the period progressed, later authors developed the revolutionary possibilities of bodily equality even as new ideas of fixed racial inequality emerged. Some--like the utopian radical Gerrard Winstanley and the republican poet John Milton--challenged political absolutism through the idea of humans as base, embodied creatures. Others--like the heterodox philosopher Margaret Cavendish, the French theologian Isaac La Peyrère, and the libertine Cyrano de Bergerac--offered limited yet important interrogations of racial paradigms. This moment, Dawson shows, would pass, as bodily equality was marginalized in the liberal theories of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. In its place, during the Enlightenment pseudoscientific racism would come to anchor inequality in the body. Contending with the lasting implications of material equality for modernity, The Equality of Flesh shows how increasingly vehement notions of racial difference eclipsed a nascent sense of human commonality rooted in the basic stuff of life.

This interdisciplinary collection of ten essays is the first to redefine historical conceptions of loneliness in the Western world by exploring its manifestation in early modern textual sources. Contrary to current scholarly consensus that loneliness in Britain was understood as an emotion from the late eighteenth century, only beginning to emerge in its literary form in the writings of the Romantic poets, the contributors in this volume argue that early modern people were capable of complex and conflicting feelings of social and emotional isolation which were expressed in a wide range of writings. Moreover, these products of loneliness continue to resonate poignantly with humanity today.

A collection of innovative examinations of embodiment in Milton's oeuvre that challenge assumptions about disciplinary boundaries

This volume brings unprecedented focus to the forms, spaces, and implications of embodied motion in Milton's writing and its afterlives to explore how and why he privileges the body--human and textual--as a site of dynamic movement. The contributors bring a variety of lenses to Milton's moving bodies: political history, kinematics, mathematics, cosmology, translation, illustration, anatomies of racialized and disabled bodies, and twenty-first-century pedagogies. From these wide-ranging vantage points, they consider anew Milton's contributions to the histories of scientific development, global exploration and imperial expansion, migration and diaspora, and translation and adaptation in England, Europe, and the Americas, from the early modern period to today. Milton's Moving Bodies draws together established and emerging scholars, offering fresh analyses of the poet's legacy for multiple traditions within and beyond Milton studies.

Herrschsüchtige Ehefrauen, wollüstige Jungfern, hässliche Vetteln, männerquälende Hexen und pseudogelehrte Frauen begegnen häufig in satirischen Schriften der Frühen Neuzeit. Indem sie misogyne Topoi und Traditionen aufgreifen und aktualisieren, erweisen sich Frauensatiren als bedeutendes transgenerisches Phänomen der deutschen Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte im Kontext der europäischen Querelle des Sexes.

Das weit über hundert Texte umfassende Corpus wird in der komparatistisch angelegten Studie erstmals erschlossen. Um die literarischen Konstruktionen >devianter Frauen

David F. Slade's critical edition of Desvíos de la naturaleza: O tratado del origen de los monstruos by Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo and José de Rivilla Bonet y Pueyo is the first complete edition published since the text's original 1695 debut. At the center of the treatise is the case of conjoined twins born in Lima, Peru, in 1694. Although they died shortly after their birth, their appearance became a crucial locus of scientific, theological, historical, and philosophical discourse. Organized into ten chapters and an extended appendix that reviews other similar medical cases, the text is an early example of eighteenth-century criollo subjectivity.

This edition includes a critical introduction that offers a literary history of the text and its place in a larger context of multidisciplinary works related to monstrous births. It makes the case for the hybrid authorship of the text between Peralta Barnuevo and Rivilla Bonet y Pueyo, marking the first of Peralta Barnuevo's many publications. The introductory essay further explores Desvíos de la naturaleza: O tratado del origen de los monstruos as an important contribution to criollo scientific knowledge, the study of monsters in the Ibero-American and broader Western world, as well as the implications for our current representations of disability.

This edition is number 105 in the Ediciones críticas series from Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs.

As in many areas of her work, Sor Juana's engagement with acoustical themes restructures gendered discourses and transposes them to a feminine key. Hearing Voices focuses on these aural conceits in highlighting the importance of sound and--in most cases--its relationship with gender in Sor Juana's work and early modern culture. Sarah Finley explores attitudes toward women's voices and music making; intersections of music, rhetoric, and painting; aurality in Baroque visual art; sound and ritual; and the connections between optics and acoustics.

Finley demonstrates how Sor Juana's striking aurality challenges ocularcentric interpretations and problematizes paradigms that pin vision to logos, writing, and other empirical models that traditionally favor men's voices. Sound becomes a vehicle for women's agency and responds to anxiety about the female voice, particularly in early modern convent culture.

This is the first volume to explore the reception of the Pythagorean doctrine of cosmic harmony within a variety of contexts, ranging chronologically from Plato to 18th-century England. This original collection of essays engages with contemporary debates concerning the relationship between music, philosophy, and science, and challenges the view that Renaissance discussions on cosmic harmony are either mere repetitions of ancient music theory or pre-figurations of the 'Scientific Revolution'. Utilizing this interdisciplinary approach, Renaissance Conceptions of Cosmic Harmony offers a new perspective on the reception of an important classical theme in various cultural, sequential and geographical contexts, underlying the continuities and changes between Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This project will be of particular interest within these emerging disciplines as they continue to explore the ideological significance of the various ways in which we appropriate the past.

The Curious Eye provides insight into the subject of optically-mediated vision by returning to the literature of the seventeenth century, the historical moment in which human visual capacity in the West was first extended through the application of optical technologies to the eye. Bringing imaginative literary works by Francis Bacon, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn together with optical and philosophical treatises by Johannes Kepler, Rene Descartes, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, the volume explores the social and intellectual impact of the new optical technologies of the seventeenth century on its literature. At the same time, it demonstrates that social, political, and literary concerns are not peripheral to the optical science of the period but, rather, an integral part of it, the legacy of which we continue to experience.

When people speak about love and money, they usually are referring to a conflict: love distorted by the desire for money. Such statements imply that love has a distinct form before economics interferes, but this book aims to show that such a view simplifies what is going on, because people have always been deeply shaped by everything in the social order, including economics. So when people say that money is distorting love, what they are really saying is that the current relationship of love and economics is different from an earlier relationship. This book seeks then to demonstrate the intertwining of the discourses of love and money over a long history by focusing on moments when parallel conceptions appear in economic theories and love stories. The two discourses intersect because both seek to define qualities and behaviors of human beings which are most valuable and hence most desirable. Similar descriptions of valuable behaviors appear at roughly the same time in economic theories of how to acquire wealth and literary stories of how to find ideal lovers.

By tracking mutual expressions of desire, value, and acquisition in economics and love stories, this book argues for the ubiquity of the intertwining of these discourses, while exploring shifts in conceptions of value. It focuses on four eras when economic and romantic conceptions of what is most desirable were actively changing in English discourses: the early modern 17th century, the Victorian 19th, the modernist 20th, and the postmodern present.

The author of Comentarios reales and La Florida del Inca, now recognized as key foundational works of Latin American literature and historiography, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega was born in 1539 in Cuzco, the son of a Spanish conquistador and an Incan princess, and later moved to Spain. Recalling the family stories and myths he had heard from his Quechua-speaking relatives during his youth and gathering information from friends who had remained in Peru, he created works that have come to indelibly shape our understanding of Incan history and administration. He also articulated a new American identity, which he called mestizo.

This volume provides guidance on the translations of Garcilaso's writings and on the scholarly reception of his ideas. Instructors will discover ideas for teaching Garcilaso's works in relation to indigenous thought, European historiography, natural history, indigenous religion and Christianity, and Incan material culture. In essays informed by postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, scholars draw connections between Garcilaso's writings and contemporary issues like migration, multiculturalism, and indigenous rights.

The author of Comentarios reales and La Florida del Inca, now recognized as key foundational works of Latin American literature and historiography, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega was born in 1539 in Cuzco, the son of a Spanish conquistador and an Incan princess, and later moved to Spain. Recalling the family stories and myths he had heard from his Quechua-speaking relatives during his youth and gathering information from friends who had remained in Peru, he created works that have come to indelibly shape our understanding of Incan history and administration. He also articulated a new American identity, which he called mestizo.

This volume provides guidance on the translations of Garcilaso's writings and on the scholarly reception of his ideas. Instructors will discover ideas for teaching Garcilaso's works in relation to indigenous thought, European historiography, natural history, indigenous religion and Christianity, and Incan material culture. In essays informed by postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, scholars draw connections between Garcilaso's writings and contemporary issues like migration, multiculturalism, and indigenous rights.

Locating Milton: Places and Perspectives collects nine previously unpublished essays that examine Milton's works as the product of his unique intellectual experiences at home and abroad, while also tracing the ways in which those works themselves express the influence of his travel, his reading, and his political engagement. Following an interpretive introduction that seeks to locate Milton through his last surviving letter, the first group of essays examine how young Milton locates himself through his travels in Italy, how Milton's early reading leads him to situate himself intellectually, and how the intellectual framework Milton generated remains pertinent to students and communities today. The second group calculates the impact of early modern mathematical and scientific models on Milton's cosmology, demonstrating how Milton's complex negotiations of such models give form and perspective to his greatest poetic works. The final group of essays locates Milton distinctly through his works' global reception, ranging from the anonymous English poem Praeexistence, to Milton's place in the new world and science fiction, to his presence as a figure inspiring political resistance in communist Hungary.