Archaeologies of English Renaissance LiteratureThis study draws on the theory and practice of archaeology to develop a new perspective on the literature of the Renaissance. Philip Schwyzer explores the fascination with images of excavation, exhumation, and ruin that runs through literary texts including Spenser's Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, Donne's sermons and lyrics, and Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall. Miraculously preserved corpses, ruinedmonasteries, Egyptian mummies, and Yorick's skull all figure in this study of the early modern archaeological imagination. The pessimism of the period is summed up in the haunting motif of the beautiful corpse that, once touched, crumbles to dust.Archaeology and literary studies are themselves products of the Renaissance. Although the two disciplines have sometimes viewed one another as rivals, they share a unique and unsettling intimacy with the traces of past life - with the words the dead wrote, sang, or heard, with the objects they made, held, or lived within. Schwyzer argues that at the root of both forms of scholarship lies the forbidden desire to awaken (and speak with) the dead. However impossible or absurd this desire may be,it remains a fundamental source of both ethical responsibility and aesthetic pleasure. |
Contents
Traces of the Dead | 17 |
Colonial Archaeology from | 36 |
Monastic Ruins in Elizabethan Poetry | 72 |
Copyright | |
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Abbey Adventus Saxonum Albans ancient Anglo-Saxon antiquarian archaeology and literary artefacts body bones British Britons Browne's burial buried California Press Cambridge University Press cannibalism Catholic charnel house Christian Christopher Tilley church contemporary corpse cremation crumbling dead death Digging discovery dissolution Donne's dust Early Modern earth Edmund Spenser Egyptian Elizabethan England English excavation exhumation Faber Faerie Queene flesh Glastonbury grave Hamlet human remains Hydriotaphia ibid imagination Ireland Irish John Donne John Weever King Lament literary studies Literature living London Material Culture Medieval memory metaphor Michael Shanks monuments mumia mummy mummy-eating objects Oxford University Press pagan passage past poem poet poetic poetry Protestant reference Reformation Renaissance Roberta Gilchrist Roman Romeo Routledge ruined monastery Samuel Daniel Saxon seems seventeenth century Shakespeare skull sonnet sonnet 73 St Erkenwald Stonehenge texts textual Thomas Browne Titus Andronicus tomb traces tradition trans urns vault voice Wales Walsingham Weever White Horse Hill William