Faust Book Research Articles

"It Is No Small Presumption to Dismember the Image of God": Early Modern Leg Amputation on the Barber-Surgeon's Table and the Dramatist's Page.

Using the multiple versions of Doctor Faustus's fraudulent leg removal presented in texts A and B of Christopher Marlowe's tragedy, along with The English Faust Book (a source text for Marlowe), and examining an extensive number of early modern surgical manuals, this essay discusses leg amputation in the early modern period. As well as attempting to understand the circumstances that would cause a surgeon to proceed with such an extreme course of action, the essay also explores the operation itself, its evolution through the early modern period, the instruments used, the life prospects of an amputee in terms of mobility and prosthetics, and finally the social implications and moral responsibilities of removing a limb in the context of a society that placed great importance in the idea of corporeal integrity in the afterlife.

Another Pre-1592 Copy of the English Faust Book

Abstract A second copy of a pre-1592 edition of the English Faust Book, Marlowe’s source for Doctor Faustus, has been uncovered in a catalogue of books owned by a London apothecary. This catalogue, of which at least a quarter are books associated with an apothecary’s profession, was compiled by the owner himself, one Edward Barlow, and, most importantly, is firmly dated 17 November 1589/90. This discovery, made by Peter Murray Jones of King’s College, Cambridge, is the second appearance of that book prior to the publication of its only extant edition in 1592, providing confirmation that Marlowe could have written Faustus prior to 1592. But whenever Marlowe wrote his play, the medico-magical material he employed had its source in a work that a practising apothecary judged valuable enough to add to his other professional books. The complete record of Jones’s discovery is found in Volume IX of Private Libraries in Renaissance England, PLRE 263.157.

Damnable Lives? The Inter-Textual Relations between Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” and “The English Faust” Book

Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus is a problematic work in regards to the issues of its date and authorship, but one thing can be stated with certainty: it was inspired by The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus which is commonly known as the English Faust Book. The present article observes inter-textual dimensions between Marlowe’s tragedy Doctor Faustus and its prose source-book – the English Faust Book. The article discusses intertextual relations both at paradigmatic and syntagmatic levels. According to the analysis, it becomes obvious that despite several similarities between the two texts, certain differences also exist which are conditioned by political and religious factors of time and social-historical factors of space.

Helen of Troy: from Homer to Hollywood

List of Illustrations Preface Source Acknowledgments Conventions Introduction: Ab ovo Beginnings Stories and Contexts 1. Narrating Myth Whose Story? Absence Fragments and Narrative Closure The Textual Shudder Myth and Repetition Origins Myth and Meaning Causes (En)Closure 2. Beauty Excess and Deficiency Narrating the Absolute Staging the Absolute Detailing Helen The Beauty Effect Helen's Breasts Androgyny Helen's Scar Relativizng the Absolute Helen and Old Age Beauty: Subjectivity and Objectivity Beauty and Nostalgia 3. Abducting Helen Missing Moments Homer, the Iliad Herodotus, the Histories Chaucer and Narrative Gaps Helen and Cressida The Law's Resolution of Women's Rights (1632) Statute Change in 1597 The Rape of Lucrece (1594) Helen (of Troy) Rape as Revenge 4. Blame Accounts Casting Blame: Helen, Paris, and the Gods Sidestepping Blame: Sympathy in the Iliad Competing Narratives: the Odyssey Twisting Eulogy/And Censure Both Together Voicing Helen: Euripides Helen Among the Sophists Agency (1): Joseph of Exeter Agency (2): Middle English Troy Books George Peele, The Tale of Troy (1589) Deifying Helen: John Ogle, The Lamentation of Troy (1594) Mimetic Desire, the Scapegoat, and Blasphemy Naming and Shaming 5. Helen and the Faust Tradition Form and Appearance in the English Faust Book Helen in the English Faust Book Dr Faustus and Language Dr Faustus and Boundaries Goethe (1749-1832) Goethe and Representation Goethe and the Beauty of Language The Face that Launched a Thousand Ships Jo Clifford (1950- ) Clifford's Helen and Gender Politics 6. Parodying Helen Comedy The Novel Caribbean Helen: Derek Walcott, Omeros (1990) Notes References Index

:Doctor Faustus with the English Faust Book

:<i>Doctor Faustus with the English Faust Book</i>

Goethes Musiktheater: Singspiele, Opern, Festspiele, 'Faust' by Tina Hartmann Faust: Mythos und Musik by Hans Joachim Kreutzer (review)

MLR, ioi.i, 2006 279 Goethes Musiktheater: Singspiele, Opern, Festspiele, 'Faust'. By Tina Hartmann. (Hermaea, 105) Tubingen: Niemeyer. 2004. viii + 568 pp. ?86. ISBN 3-48415105 -6. Faust: Mythos und Musik. By Hans Joachim Kreutzer. Munich: Beck. 2003. 187 pp. ?29.90. ISBN 3-406-50464-7. ImAuftrieb: GrenzuberschreitungenmitGoethes 'Faust'inInszenierungender neunziger Jahre. Ed. by Hans-Peter Bayerdorfer. (Theatron, 36) Tubingen: Niemeyer. 2002. 239 pp. ?56. ISBN 3-484-66036-8. Scholars brought up to think of drama and opera as distinct arts may be unaware of the extent to which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theatre was reliant on music. Plays which students read as pure text were regularly dependent on incidental accompaniments that could determine their success. Resident orchestras needed to be engaged, and audiences expected to hear background music in much the same way as cinema-goers do today. There was also the widespread practice of interspersing seri? ous drama with interludes and entr'actes?an intrusive device by today's standards, but one which Goethe employs when he inserts 'Walpurgisnachtstraum' into Faust, thus pre-empting any lingering hopes of linearity in the plot-line. Tina Hartmann's main concern is the seventeen libretti which Goethe wrote or planned. They are examined with several key issues in mind: the influence of the North German Singspiel and French opera comique, divergences from the customary norms, and the effectthat his engagement with musical theatre was to have on Faust. The author's sensitive approach disproves Calvin Brown's dictum that libretti tend to interest the dilettante, the faddist, and the crackpot. Goethe is shown to have been well attuned to the requirements of the medium and is credited with attempting to establish a poetology of the genre. Old favourites are placed in a new light: 'Erlkonig', for example, reads differentlywhen it is recognized that it was sung by the suicidally distraught bride of a loutish fisherman. Hartmann devotes much space to background and contextualization, stressing that audience awareness of the 'classics' was preserved less by Sophocles and Homer than by countless popular operas on mythical themes. Sections of Greek drama were chanted or sung, and Herder even claimed: 'Bei den Griechen war die ganze Sprache Gesang' (quoted p. 496). These are some of the reasons that persuaded the poet to focus on Singspiele, Musikfeste, and ltalian favourites such as carnival parades, intermezzi, and opere buffe.Far from insisting on the primacy of the text, he actu? ally facilitated a transition from 'Erzahlung mit Gesang' to 'Gesang mit Erzahlung' (p. 131) and, as Schiller observed, achieved a 'Salto mortale in die Opernwelt' long before the recognizably operatic portions of Faust II were committed to paper. Not all his effortswere successful. The radically progressive Scherz, List undRache ended up as an unstageable monstrosity. Several later projects, from the sequel to Mozart's Zauberflote to Der Lowenstuhl and Feradeddin und Kolaila, were doomed by the ab? sence of a suitable composer; neither Carl Friedrich Zelter nor Bernhard Anselm Weber could convince the poet that they would do his texts justice. Schiller's influence on the final form of Faust I has long been acknowledged; what is less well known is that both he and Goethe were strongly influenced by the 'epic' potential of recent operas such as Salieri's Tarare and Mozart's Don Giovanni. Hart? mann reproduces relevant portions of their correspondence before undertaking an examination of the musical and operatic components of Goethe's unique conflation of domestic tragedy with world theatre. Here, too, her approach is no less rigorous for being on familiar territory. Hans Joachim Kreutzer's Faust: Mythos und Musik is, by contrast, a relatively slender compilation of eight distinct chapters that proceed from the Faust Book of 1587 to musical compositions by Louis Spohr, Robert Schumann, and Hector Berlioz, 280 Reviews via Charles Gounod and Arrigo Boito, right down to Alfred Schnittke. The book is packed with interesting asides and thoughtful comments that make itideal reading for the relative novice. The study begins, rightly,with Spohr, whose reputation exceeded that of Beethoven in his day and whose Faust opera enjoyed huge popularity until it was replaced by Gounod. A tendency to see everything through Goethe's eyes...

Klaus Conermann , Gabriele Ball , Andreas Herz (review)

MLR, ioo.i, 2005 247 Many of them will provide excellent introductions for students unacquainted with the works in question?the pieces on Melusine, Die schone Magelone, and Susanna, in fact, were all firstpublished as 'Nachworte' in Roloff's editions of these works in Reclams Universalbibliothek?and the essay Artes et doctrina: Struktur und Inten? tion des Faust-Buchs von 1587' must surely be accounted one of the best and most sympathetic discussions of this work yet to have appeared. From among the essays focusing on Reformation propaganda there are two which are particularly deserving of mention. The firstis the one on the polemical intention behind much early sixteenthcentury editing, in which Roloff rightly calls for much more research on the aims and methods of editing in this period, when the printed book was really coming into its own for the firsttime; he illustrates his point with compelling examples, includ? ing Sebastian Brant, Erasmus's Novum instrumentum,Ulrich von Hutten's edition of Lorenzo Valla's denunciation of the Donation of Constantine as a forgery,and Otto Brunfels's edition of texts of Jan Hus. The second essay also deals with Hus: Roloff deftly demonstrates how the figure of Hus served as a point of reference in Refor? mation polemics, especially at the time of the Diet of Worms, and sets out in some detail the polemical function of editions of Hus's writings. One senses that Roloff has real understanding of the temper of the sixteenth century. Thus in his discussion of Wickram, whom Gervinus dismissed as an 'unbedeutender Vielschreiber',he perceptively shows how his work provides real insights into attitudes ofthe period. Perhaps the most important essay is 'Thomas Naogeorg und das Problem von Humanismus und Reformation', where Roloff tellingly demonstrates that the supposed antinomy ofhumanism and Reformation is really a false dichotomy created by modern historio? graphy. He calls for much more detailed research at the micro-level: that is to say, close study of the texts themselves in their contemporary intellectual context. How this should be done Roloff has himself exemplified, not only in the essay on the 1587 Faust book and in several of the other pieces in this volume, but especially well in his analysis of Naogeorg's anti-papal polemic Pammachius, a play which had as one of its sources the Vitae Romanorum pontificum(Wittenberg, 1536) of Luther's Eng? lish friend Robert Barnes, who, like Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, to whom Naogeorg dedicated his play, would burn at the stake for his faith. Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, London John L. Flood Briefe der Fruchtbringenden Gesellschaft und Beilagen: Die Zeit Fiirst Ludwigs von Anhalt-Kothen 161J-1650, series Ia (Kothen), vol. m. Ed. by Klaus Conermann with Gabriele Ball and Andreas Herz. Tubingen: Niemeyer. 2003. 753 pp. ?118. ISBN 3-484-17607-5. In their documentation of the activities of the first German academy, the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, the editors have progressed well into the correspondence of Kothen, the home base of its founder, Ludwig von Anhalt. This third volume covers the timespan 1630-36; thus around half the Kothen material has now been published since 1991. Naturally there have been changes in editorial personnel since then, but the name of Klaus Conermann has been continuous. The present reviewer has already commented on previous volumes (in MLR, 90 (1995), 95 (2000), and 96 (2001)), and here unnecessary reduplication is avoided. The period covers the central years of the Thirty Years War, including one of the war's turning points in 1635, when the Elector of Saxony made a separate peace with the Emperor. Thus not only literary and intellectual life is reflected here, but also contemporary political topics, making the volume especially valuable for historians. Sixty-two letters and thirty-fivefurtherassociated documents are included; together 248 Reviews with their commentaries they make up 534 pages of the whole (pp. 131-664). The remainder consists of introductory material, including lists of correspondents and addressees, and at the end indexes of words and names, on the model of previous volumes. Fewer texts in foreign languages occur here, but there are some passages in French and Latin, the latter preceded by a translation or...

A Pre-1592 English Faust Book and the Date of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

A Pre-1592 English Faust Book and the Date of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

The English Faust Book: A Critical Edition Based on the Text of 1592

Introduction 1. The Faust books and the Faust legend 2. The English Faust Book and its author 3. Bibliographic analysis and printing history of the early English Faust Book editions 4. Faust in England: dating the The English Faust Book and Dr Faustus Notes to introduction Note on the present text Critical apparatus The English Faust Book Commentary Notes Appendix 1. Bibliography of The English Faust Book Appendix 2. Translation of GFB c.65 Appendix 3. Concordance with Dr Faustus A and B Appendix 4. Parallels between The Most Famous History of the learned Fryer Bacon and (a) Dr Faustus, (b) The Tempest.

:The English Faust Book

:<i>The English Faust Book</i>

Enacting the Reformation in Germany: Essays on Institution and Reception

Contents: Provisional Contents: Preface The course of German history: the Lutheran interpretation The image of Germany in the 16th century The production of Johann Stumpfa (TM)s description of the Swiss Confederation Protestant dogma and city government: the case of Nuremberg The religious policies of Dukes Wilhelm IV and Ludwig X of Bavaria in the first decade of the Protestant era Luther as Barabbas The state of pedagogical theory c. 1530: what Protestant reformers knew about education The social function of schools in the Lutheran Reformation in Germany Liberal or illiberal arts? Lutheranism and literacy: a reassessment Success and failure in the German Reformation The Reformation and its public in an age of orthodoxy How to read a Volksbuch: the Faust book of 1587 Three kinds of Christian freedom: law, liberty, and license in the German Reformation The dilemma of popular history The idea of order in the German Reformation Index.

The English Faust book: a critical edition based on the text of 1592

The English Faust book: a critical edition based on the text of 1592

The Numidian and the German Faustus

The heretic Faustus enters the universe of letters with Augustine’s Confessions at the juncture where the youth learns to place faith above reason. In the same context, that of the Pauline doctrine of justification, Faustus appears in the 16th-century Faust Book. The relationship probably attests to Augustine reception in the German Renaissance, and to the cohesiveness of the universe of letters.

Don Juan and Faust

There is no doubt about it: when we first meet these two interesting characters they are both on their way to Hell. Faust got there in 1587, Don Juan somewhere around 1616 though the date of his arrival is somewhat disputed. But by 1832 Faust is on his way to Heaven, and in 1844 Don Juan is following him with an intermediate stop in Purgatory, the change of flight plan being in each case due to the Eternal Feminine. Both legends, therefore, originally had the same conclusion, and in the course of time both arrived at a different similar conclusion. On the face of it there would not seem to be much similarity between the carefree, whoring, aristocratic Latin and the care-sodden, brooding, academic German. And indeed for some time the two legends developed separately, differing in basic essentials: no pact for Don Juan, no statue for Faust; no Helen for Don Juan, no Donna Anna for Faust; and as a companion in adventures, Leporello (under various names) in the one instance, but Mephistopheles in the other. For Faust an academic milieu with brief trips to court, for Don Juan a court milieu with brief holidays in the country, but no time at all wasted at a university. With Faust a strong interest in the supernatural, with Don Juan an excessive interest in the natural. And yet both, when we first meet them, face the same fate : eternal damnation. In the case of Faust the reason was that he foreswore God and made a pact with the devil; in the case of Don Juan the reason was that he ignored God and lived a life of self-gratification in seduction and murder. The motivation behind Faust's pact with the devil is explicitly stated in the anonymous Frankfurt Faust Book of 1587; the reason why Don Juan acts as he does in Tirso de Molina's play of 1616 (?) is never stated. Faust's motives seem to be loftier: he is seeking knowledge inaccessible to him by normal channels. The power that drives Don Juan would seem to be more obvious, one might even say vulgar, but what is he really trying to achieve, if anything? Faust is clearly trying to achieve something, and goes through a series of different experiences in search of it; but Don Juan pursues a somewhat repetitious course, and one might expect him to get tired of the monotony, since the sequence of his seductions does

Faust 2069: Feuerluft was the Common Term for Oxygen

According to all commentary which I have been able to find for these lines, we would here be expected to visualize a balloon ascent similar to those performed by Henry Cavendish or by the Montgolfier brothers in the early 1780's, and should understand Feuerluft to mean Cavendish's flammable hydrogen, or simply the hot used by the Montgolfiers. General preference for the latter seems to derive from Goethe's use of the word for the products of Friedrich Schlegel's laboratory (JA, xiII, 300) in 1801-a dozen or more years, to be sure, after Goethe wrote the lines quoted above. So long as we feel bound to accept a balloon-like ascent and exit of Faust and Mephisto at the end of the second Studierzimmer scene, it is of no importance whether Feuerluft be taken as hydrogen or hot air. It does appear, however, that these particular interpretations of Feuerluft constitute our principal reason for assuming such an exit. It is my argument here that Faust and Mephisto are to be visualized after line 2072 not rising gently from the scene as if drawn upward by a balloon, but rather shooting away in a spewing rush of flame reminiscent of the old Faust Book. Line 2069 refers, I think, to the highly combustible air which-isolated shortly before these lines were written and still in 1790 the center of intense interest-

Reconstruction of the Faust Book: The Disputations

Toward the close of the last century, one of the busiest areas of literary research centered about the Faust Book. The Faust image, that unique gift of Germany to Western tradition, had fascinated scholars and critics for over a hundred years, and the oldest printed texts of the Faust Book had long since been established and edited. During the nineteenth century, however, further documentary references to the historical Faust had been accumulating, while at the same time researchers had gained a more complete and accurate knowledge of the scope of the Faust legend together with its relationship to similar sorcerers' tales. Then, beginning in the 1880's, a number of important discoveries were made in such rapid succession as to hinder careful evaluation of any one document.

Widman's Wahrhafftige Historia: Its Relevance to the Faust Book

According to fiction, the university in. sixteenth-century Wittenberg can lay claim to those two students whose lives and tragical deaths have since seemed to the Western mind to comprise all its longings and strivings, as well as to epitomize its utmost ideal of heroism. According to fact, of course, Hamlet had long been dead before the university there was founded; and this fact, whether they know it or not, is of great advantage to the Shakespeare scholars, for the historical Faust has been a problem child of the critics for centuries. The Faust Book states that he did study in Wittenberg. Melanchthon seems to have been acquainted with him and to have thought that he had studied black magic in Cracow, too. Documentary evidence may indicate that he graduated at Heidelberg. Now whether or not he ever attended any university—and he most likely did not—over three hundred years of research on the Faust Book has had to cope with the many reports, now authentic, now fantastic, and with the many tales now new and now second-hand which were widely circulated about a real contemporary of Luther who sometimes called himself Faust.

Doctor Faustus: A Case of Conscience

It is now generally agreed that the prose History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, commonly referred to as the English Faust Book, is the source from which is derived Christopher Marlowe's Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Yet, though the main flow of Marlowe's story stems from this source, the total impression left by play and history is very different. There is great poetry to account in part for the difference. There are bursts of eloquence in the magnificent speeches on hell, on the desire for knowledge and power as great as the mind of man may conceive, on the compulsion of Helen's beauty. But these are not enough to account for the grip of the play on all who have known it through the centuries, for the overwhelming sense of the vital importance of what happens in the soul of Faustus, for the terror and pity and awe which the events on the stage produce in the mind of even the most skeptical in the audience.

The Witchcraft Basis in Marlowe's "Faustus"

HE tendency of present-day scholarship is to view the character of Faustus as the product of Marlowe's creative genius working upon the materials afforded him by the English translation of the Faustbuch. This is only part of the truth. An equally essential part, as I shall show, is that Faustus is also in important respects the product of Marlowe's own wide familiarity with Renaissance, medieval, and classical ideas about witchcraft. An examination of the play will reveal that, since Faustus is a witch, Marlowe has endowed him with much of the motive and behavior commonly believed to be typical of those who had signed the compact with Hell. Not that Faustus is merely a conventional portrait of a witch, of course. So high, imperious, and passionate a figure does not abide final classification. But many of his thoughts and actions are unmistakably those of the witch of European tradition; and they are not to be found in the English Faust book. The demonstration of this fact in the following pages will put us in possession of information both as to Marlowe's learning and as to the right interpretation of what is perhaps his greatest dramatic achievement.

The English Faust Book and the Date of Marlowe's Faustus

The English Faust Book and the Date of Marlowe's Faustus