Full Description
The cultural forms often referred to as 'baroque' are the most spectacular expressions of early modern Europe's effort to mediate between knowledge and power at a time when political authority was being centralized, the authority of religion undermined by the division of Christianity, and science and poetry were seen increasingly as rival forms of intellectual authority. Culture and Authority in the Baroque explores the baroque across a wide range of disciplines, from poetics to politics, to the rituals of musical, dramatic, and religious performance.
The essays in this collection span what has been called the 'baroque crescent' stretching from Spain through Italy to Russia, but they also bring Shakespeare and English cosmological poetry into productive dialogue with continental Europe in the reinterpretation of baroque world-views. The editors, Massimo Ciavolella and Patrick Coleman, along with a group of eminent scholars from across the disciplinary and geographic spectrum, investigate baroque modes of persuasion with careful attention to the complexity of particular cultural phenomena and their political and aesthetic implications. This collection redefines the way the baroque will be understood.
Contents
Introduction
MASSIMO CIAVOLELLA AND PATRICK COLEMAN
Believing and Not Believing': Shakespeare and the Archaeology of Wonder
PETER G. PLATT
Philosophical Tours of the Universe in British Poetry, 1700-1729, Or, The Soaring Muse
LORNA CLYMER
Marino and the Meraviglia
PAOLO CHERCHI
I Would Rather Drown, Than Not Find New Worlds
PAOLO FASOLI
Truth and Wonder in Naples circa 1640
JON R. SNYDER
'Particolar gusto e diletto alle orecchie': Listening in the Early Seicento
ANDREW DELL'ANTONIO
From Liturgy to Literature: Prayer and Play in the Early Russian Baroque
RONALD VROON
Reconciling Divine and Political Authority in Racine's Esther
ANN DELEHANTY
Apostles and Apostates: The Court of Peter the Great as a Chivalrous Religious Order
ERNESTA ZITSER
Self-Knowledge and the Advantages of Concealment: Pierre Nicole's 'On Self-Knowledge'
JOHN D. LYONS
The Baroque Social Bond in the Memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz
MALINA STEFANOVSKA
A Different Kind of Wonder? Women's Writing in Early Modern Spain
LISA VOLLENDORF
Contributors
Index
