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Kings throughout medieval and early modern Europe had extraconjugal sexual partners. Only in France, however, did the royal mistress become a quasi-institutionalized political position. This study explores the emergence and development of the position of French royal mistress through detailed portraits of nine of its most significant ......
English Catholic Books During the Reign of Philip II
Facing persecution in early modern England, some Catholics chose exile over conformity. Some even cast their lot with foreign monarchs rather than wait for their own rulers to have a change of heart. This book studies the relationship forged by English exiles and Philip II of Spain. It shows how these expatriates, known as the Spanish ......
The impetus for literary creation has often been explained as an attempt to transcend the mortality of the human condition through a work addressed to future generations. Failing to obtain literal immortality, or to turn their hope towards the spiritual immortality promised by religious systems, literary creators seek a symbolic form of ......
This book challenges the notion that Michelangelo, renowned for his magnificent portrayals of the human body, was merely concerned with superficial anatomythat is, the parts of the body that can be seen from the outside. Christian K. Kleinbub provides a fresh perspective on Michelangelo's art of the human figure by investigating what he ......
Rhetoric, Authenticity, and the Transformation of the Self
Western culture is in a moment when wholly new kinds of personal transformations are possible, but authentic transformation requires both personal testimony and public recognition. In this book, Adam Ellwanger takes a distinctly rhetorical approach to analyzing how the personal and the public relate to an individual's transformation and ......
The Postmortem Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire
In 1786, Guatemalan priest Pedro José de Arrese published a work instructing readers on their duty to perform the cesarean operation on the bodies of recently deceased pregnant women in order to extract the fetus while it was still alive. Although the fetus's long-term survival was desired, the overarching goal was to cleanse the unborn child ......
Representing Consciousness in the English Renaissance
Forming Sleep asks how biocultural and literary dynamics act together to shape conceptions of sleep states in the early modern period. Engaging with poetry, drama, and prose largely written in English between 1580 and 1670, the essays in this collection highlight period discussions about how seemingly insentient ......
Sound and statuary have had a complicated relationship in Western aesthetic thought since antiquity. Taking as its focus the sounding statue - a type of anthropocentric statue that invites the viewer to imagine any sounds the statue might make - Sculpted Ears rethinks this relationship in light of discourses on ......
Found in two thirds of the world, rabies is a devastating infectious disease with no effective cure once symptoms appear and a 99.9 percent case-fatality rate. Rabies in the Streets tells the compelling story of the relationship between people, street animals, and rabies in urban India, where one third of human ......
