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6 Chapter 2 The spoken word Language, literacy and aspects of identity in early modern Wales Language, literacy and aspects of identity in early modern Wales Richard Suggett and Eryn White INTRODUCTION The history of the spoken word in early modern Britain involved the changing fortunes of seven or eight languages. The related English and Scots tongues expanded socially and geographically eroding Scottish Gaelic and reducing Cornish and Norse (spoken in Orkney and Shetland), and later Manx, to the point of extinction. Irish and Welsh proved the most resilient
What would it feel like to be visited frequently by a companion from another world? Or even to be taken away to visit another world? In early modern Scotland, there is a good deal of evidence for visionaries who experienced relationships with spirits. These visionaries were ordinary people who had extraordinary experiences, and who often gained special powers as a result. Most of the visionaries, though not all, were women. Most of the spirits were fairies or ghosts. The ghosts were usually experienced as male, while the fairy queen was important to several
the sonneteer (or sonnetist) on the English stage in the early modern period has not. 5 Patrick Cheney, for instance, is mostly concerned with Shakespeare’s engagement with authorship and creation of his own myth as the national poet-playwright, while David Schalkwyk focuses on the performative power of sonnets in Shakespeare’s plays. 6 The
In the northern Italian peninsula in the early modern period, performance was one of the means by which cultural communication and exchange took place among Christians, Muslims and Jews. 1 Performance was one of the central ways through which cultural minorities negotiated and helped to shape their terms of existence and it became a mutually beneficial
Chapter 7 . Public transcripts, popular agency and the politics of subsistence in early modern England I I n the summer of 1596, the balladeer Thomas Deloney was facing imprisonment. While Londoners were struggling with the consequences of harvest failure, Deloney had published, ‘a certein ballad containing a Complaint of the great Want and Scarcitie of Corn within the Realm’. His offence was to have represented the Queen speaking ‘with hir people in dialogue-wise in very fond and undecent sort’ and to have prescribed ‘orders for ye remedying of this dearth of
8 Irish-language sources for Irish Catholic identity since the early modern period: a brief survey Éamonn Ó Ciardha The five decades after the ‘Flight of the Earls’ (1607) witnessed a marked decline in the fortunes of the professional learned classes of poets, scribes, brehons, genealogists and chroniclers. Although the wholesale destruction of manuscripts and the carelessness of subsequent generations have deprived us of much of their œuvre, nearly six thousand manuscripts (many of which remain unedited and untranslated) have survived the ravages of time to
7 Kinship, poor relief and the welfare process in early modern England Sam Barrett The poor in England Kinship, poor relief and the welfare process Overview – the ‘problem’ of kinship Historiographical writing on the depth and functionality of kinship in early modern England is limited. It is also contradictory. On the extent and depth of kinship networks, for instance, early commentators such as Peter Laslett were clear that English households tended to be relatively small and simple and that, because of demographic constraint (migration, ‘background
This book discusses the extent of John Lyly's importance for early modern authorship in three parts: prose fiction, drama and reception. The first two parts study Lyly's impact on early modern culture, focusing on prose fiction and drama respectively. In each part, the first chapter assesses Lyly's originality and the second chapter assesses the impact of that authorship upon the print market for each of those literary forms. These two parts demonstrate how Lyly's work was innovative and was received and commodified by his contemporaries. The third part of the book examines Lyly's reception history up to the present day, focusing on nineteenth-century uses of the word euphuism as part of a debate over appropriate literary male style. The dynamic relationship between performance and text creates the market for two basic kinds of English literature: printed single-story fiction and printed drama. Lyly's dramaturgical stories are as elusive and protean as his prose fiction. At the same time that his character Euphues was being reworked and commodified by print writers and publishers, Lyly reworked and innovated ways to create fictional worlds and characters in the theatre.
In Early Modern Europe, the provision of military medical care was one of the many challenges caused by widespread and persistent warfare. During active conflict, warring parties established hospitals to care for personnel in army and naval service. According to Ole Peter Grell, the development of military hospital systems shows the significance that nation states attached to healthcare for their forces. 1 Moreover, Geoffrey Parker has referred to first-rate methods of medical treatment devised by the Spanish Army
This collection offers important new insights across a broad range of topics relating to medicine in Early Modern Ireland. Of particular note is the substantial attention devoted to the years before 1750, a period that has been relatively neglected in studies of Irish medicine. The book brings together an exciting selection of established scholars, such as Peter Elmer and Clodagh Tait, as well as a number of early career historians. Their work effectively situates Irish medicine in relation to long-term social and cultural change on the island, as well as to appropriate international contexts, encompassing Britain, Europe and the Atlantic World. The chapters also engage in various ways with important aspects of the historiography of medicine in the twenty-first century. Among the key subjects addressed by the contributors are Gaelic medicine, warfare, the impact of new medical ideas, migration, patterns of disease, midwifery and childbirth, book collecting, natural history, and urban medicine. A common thread running through the chapters is the focus on medical practitioners. The book accordingly enables significant new understanding of the character of medical practise in Early Modern Ireland. This collection will be of interest to academics and students of the history of Early Modern medicine. It also contains much that will be essential reading for historians of Ireland.