Shaping Remembrance from Shakespeare to Milton
- Submitting institution
-
Coventry University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 30879299
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
10.1017/9781108394697
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- ISBN
- 978-1108422987
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This long-form output is the result of a research over an extended period of time, including a 12-month Leverhulme-funded period, conducted by the researcher. The research combines travel fieldwork as well as archival research in original manuscripts conducted by the researcher, synthesized with methodology informed by new materialism. It brings together the materiality (eg visual, textual, material monuments) with religion (and secularism) and gender, and thus reshapes 'remembrance' for the early modern period.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This monograph examines the textual and material forms used to shape remembrance in the century between the Elizabethan Settlement to the English Civil War. Whether situated in churches or circulating in more flexible, mobile works, such as manuscript and printed memorials, portraits, jewellery, textiles or antique ‘rarities’—funeral monuments were ubiquitous in early modern England. This transdisciplinary study engages a wide variety of such artefacts, placing them in conversation with Shakespeare’s romances and Milton’s early works. The book includes newly recovered women’s commemorative works in a similar array of forms, supporting an exploration of how memory shaped gendered performances of memorialization in early modern England.
This research pursues a transdisciplinary method based on fieldwork in church buildings and extensive archival research. Rather than pursuing documentary aims, this book removes monuments from antiquarian and parochial concerns to relocate them in rich and provocative relationships with early modern texts, from masques, poems and plays to devotional writings. This study demonstrates the value of transdisciplinarity to reimagining monuments and to implementing the insights gleaned to interpret the commemorative inflections in Shakespeare and spectral figures in Milton. The transdisciplinary lens, moreover, brings into focus memorial works by early modern women, introducing a new archive for future study.
By engaging both sacred and secular aspects of remembrance as they inform texts and artefacts, this research advances three topics of wide critical debate in early modern studies: religion, materiality, and gender. The book makes use of the pliability of posthumanist critique to join these three strands and to explore the involvement of subjects and objects in systems of exchange where early modern men and women experienced loss and recollection.
The project was supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship and was nominated for The Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize (Renaissance Society of America).
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -