Culture In Early Modern England Research Articles

The Social Universe of the English Bible: Scripture, Society, and Culture in Early Modern England, by Naomi Tadmor

Some translations of the Bible make astonishing accommodations with their contemporary society. In a very literal sense of ‘translate’, Clarence Jordan carried Israel to the Georgia of the black communities that he wrote for in The Cotton Patch Bible: Jerusalem became Atlanta, Jesus was lynched rather than crucified. The early English translators, from the Wycliffite versions to the King James Bible, made similar moves, readily seen in the way some of their illustrations show biblical figures in contemporary costume, and perceptible in the text through, say, the substitution of a very English oak for the Mediterranean terebinth in the story of Absalom. Several of Naomi Tadmor’s illustrations show this use of costume, and the oak/terebinth is one of her examples of Anglicisation of the text. But the themes which she explores in this fascinating and closely-argued book are nearly invisible in comparison with such examples. Concentrating on the Old Testament, she examines four areas of language wherein the translators adapted the Hebrew world to their early modern world: neighbourliness, marriage, service and hierarchy. The adaptations tended to obscure the original meaning by reflecting English society, and they also helped shape this society.

NAOMI TADMOR. The Social Universe of the English Bible: Scripture, Society, and Culture in Early Modern England.

NAOMI TADMOR. The Social Universe of the English Bible: Scripture, Society, and Culture in Early Modern England.

The Social Universe of the English Bible: Scripture, Society, and Culture in Early Modern England. By Naomi Tadmor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xvi + 208 pp. $95.00 cloth.

The Social Universe of the English Bible: Scripture, Society, and Culture in Early Modern England. By Naomi Tadmor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xvi + 208 pp. $95.00 cloth. - Volume 81 Issue 2

Theatre and Culture in Early Modern England, 1650–1737: From Leviathan to Licensing Act (review)

Theatre and Culture in Early Modern England, 1650–1737: From Leviathan to Licensing Act (review)

Catie Gill, ed. Theatre and Culture in Early Modern England, 1650–1737: From Leviathan to Licensing Act. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Pp. 190. $99.95 (cloth).

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Reviews: On Anachronism, the Debate on the Crusades, the Social Universe of the English Bible. Scripture, Society, and Culture in Early Modern England, Godly Reading. Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720, Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas, the Intellectual and Cultural World of the Early Modern Inns of Court., Shakespeare Only., Literatures of Exile in the English Revolution and its

Reviews: On Anachronism, the Debate on the Crusades, the Social Universe of the English Bible. Scripture, Society, and Culture in Early Modern England, Godly Reading. Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720, Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas, the Intellectual and Cultural World of the Early Modern Inns of Court., Shakespeare Only., Literatures of Exile in the English Revolution and its

Toxic Encounters: Poisoning in Early Modern English Literature and Culture

AbstractThis essay discusses the various ways poisoning signified as a literal act and symbolic motif in the literature and culture of early modern England. I offer an overview of the scholarship on the subject, from its early focus on dramatic imagery and questions of historical prevalence, to its interest in poisoning’s cultural and rhetorical meanings. This field of study has enjoyed significant growth in the past 10 years with increased critical attention to embodiment, political rhetoric, and encounters between dominant and marginalized groups. Poisoning serves as an important index of early modern ideas about violence, language, health (individual and social), gender, and nationhood. I argue, finally, that it is most significant in its production of a rhetoric of terror, one that may be particularly situated in its historical moment, but also that resonates with readers and critics of later periods.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Writing the History of the English Bible: A Review of Recent Scholarship

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Writing the History of the English Bible: A Review of Recent Scholarship

MATTHEW DIMMOCK and ANDREW HADFIELD (eds), Literature and Popular Culture in Early Modern England.

THE presence of Peter Burke’s influential Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978; rev. 1994) can be felt throughout this ostensibly more narrowly focused collection. Burke writes an approving afterword, and many of the contributors examine his notion that popular culture was everybody’s culture until a discernable rift gradually grows between the longstanding elite culture of the learned and more popular forms of expression. In the literature of Early Modern England Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie (c.1580), with its dismissals of the ‘base men with servile wits’ who wrote for the press and the ‘mongrell Tragy-comedie’ of the theatre, is an apparent landmark in this emerging division between elite and popular.1 And yet, matters were not so simple. Sidney’s own works were soon to be popularized, both in print and on stage; his great protégé, Edmund Spenser, had a predilection for jest books (6–7). The terms ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ are shown to be as problematic in the period as they remain in our own time; but, as Burke notes, ‘we cannot easily speak about the interaction of elite culture and popular culture without first making the distinction’ (210). While no new, or refined, theoretical model is proposed, this volume does present a diverse and stimulating range of essays, which taken together illustrate the complex nature of assimilations and negotiations between popular and elite cultural forms.

MATTHEW DIMMOCK and ANDREW HADFIELD (eds). Literature and Popular Culture in Early Modern England.

MATTHEW DIMMOCK and ANDREW HADFIELD (eds). Literature and Popular Culture in Early Modern England.

The Social Universe of the English Bible: Scripture, Society, and Culture in Early Modern England – By Naomi Tadmor

The Social Universe of the English Bible: Scripture, Society, and Culture in Early Modern England – By Naomi Tadmor

The social universe of the English Bible. Scripture, society and culture in early modern England. By Naomi Tadmor. Pp. xvi+208 incl 18 ills. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. £55. 978 0 521 76971 6

The social universe of the English Bible. Scripture, society and culture in early modern England. By Naomi Tadmor. Pp. xvi+208 incl 18 ills. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. £55. 978 0 521 76971 6

Catholic Culture in Early Modern England. Edited by Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur F.Marotti

Catholic Culture in Early Modern England. Edited by Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur F.Marotti

The Social Universe of the English Bible: Scripture, Society, and Culture in Early Modern England, by Naomi Tadmor

The Social Universe of the English Bible: Scripture, Society, and Culture in Early Modern England, by Naomi Tadmor

Literature and Popular Culture in Early Modern England (review)

Review(s) of: Literature and popular culture in early modern England, by Dimmock, Matthew and Andrew Hadfield, eds, Farnham, Ashgate, 2009; paperback; pp. xi, 219; R.R.P. 55.00 pounds, ISBN 9780754665809.

Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780–1880

Fashionable Acts is a welcome addition to the new theatre history. For 15 years now the previously rather sequestered, somewhat antiquarian and too-easily-disregarded study of the theatre of the past has slowly been finding its place in the main flow of social history and cultural scholarship, and beginning to consolidate an historiography that responds to, and belongs within, modern scholarly discourse on the past. The process began some time around the publication of Marc Baer's Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), and has built a body of work since then, in a series of important essay collections as well as in monographs. These include radical departures into histories of performance such as Tracy C. Davis's Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), but this late-twentieth-century example is unusual: the larger body of the new work is in earlier periods, and forms an interesting concentration in the long eighteenth century. The list includes not only Baer's book on theatre riots, and Jane Moody's study of the same decades in her Illegitimate Theatre in London 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) but also valuable studies such as Paula R. Backscheider's Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), John O'Brien's Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1690–1760 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) and Gillian Russell's The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). This eighteenth-century concentration may be related to the use by mainstream cultural and political historians of the concepts of ‘performance’ and ‘the theatrical’ as tools in characterizing social conduct in a way peculiarly significant in that period. In works like Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992) the reading of social performance begins to be more important than setting out simple taxonomies of class and power, and comes to be understood as a key hegemonic tool. Theatre historians are beginning to demur at the idea that all social behaviour is to be read as performance, and to assert that the difference between what happens on stages, on the one hand, and in the auditorium or indeed the streets and coffee houses, on the other, is still fundamental to the understanding of drama and music and their reception. Nevertheless, we have benefitted from the wide acceptance of the idea that at certain social moments, especially perhaps in the eighteenth century and immediately beyond, some groups used performative behaviour as an important aspect of their self-definition; and that such public appearances included attendance at the theatres. In reciprocation, as it were, for the transfer of this element of theatre discourse to analysis of the wider public sphere, performance historians are increasingly willing to acquire the techniques and undertake the labour, particularly in the form of the statistical analysis, that are the basic tools of mainstream social history.

Catholic Culture in Early Modern England

Catholic Culture in Early Modern England

Matthew Dimmock and Andrew D. Hadfield, eds. Literature and Popular Culture in Early Modern England. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009. xiii + 219 pp. index. illus. $99.95. ISBN: 978–0–7546–6580–9.

Matthew Dimmock and Andrew D. Hadfield, eds. Literature and Popular Culture in Early Modern England. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009. xiii + 219 pp. index. illus. $99.95. ISBN: 978–0–7546–6580–9.

Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England. By Alison Shell and Catholic Culture in Early Modern England. Edited by Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur F. Marotti

Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England. By Alison Shell and Catholic Culture in Early Modern England. Edited by Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur F. Marotti

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