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77399 results in Boydell & Brewer

Page 92 of 3870

Companion to Latin American Photography
  • Nathanial Gardner
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 June 2026
  • How can photography enrich our knowledge of Latin America?

    Photography provides unique insights into Latin America. It acts as a witness, agent, and archive - containing a wealth of knowledge about the continent, its social classes, and its multiple ethnicities. This companion introduces the reader to the role that photography plays in Latin America, offers ways in which it can be studied, and reveals how this medium can promote a deeper awareness of the region.

    It reviews the history of photography in Latin America; ways in which the technology transmits distinctive information; the influence of specific photographers and their relationships with patrons, mentors, and students; the role of institutions in promoting photography; and the developing Latin American canon. The Companion to Latin American Photography also explores how the medium can shape Latin American narratives and cultural identities; assert or question power; serve as testimony and memory; and represent and empower women, children and youth, as well as marginalized groups such as the disappeared.

    The study is intended not only to provide an overview of Latin American photography (including dozens of images from a vast array of photographers over the past two centuries), it also discusses innovative work taking place there. Above all, this book can be viewed as a guide to the ways in which photography can enhance and expand a viewer's knowledge of Latin America.

Women, Transnational Networks and Patriotism in Northern and Central Europe, 1763-1814
  • Nicole Pohl
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 June 2026
  • A gateway to the complex world of eighteenth-century sociability of elite women and of their lasting impact on modern concepts of national identity and community.

    In the dynamic intellectual and social landscape of eighteenth-century Northern Europe, the interplay between patriotism, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism was pivotal in shaping the era's cultural and political discourse. This study delves into the intricate networks of elite women who navigated and influenced these concepts through their participation in salons and literary circles. By examining figures such as Anna Amalia of Weimar, Dorothea von Kurland, members of the Bluestockings, Friederike Brun and the grande Dame of eighteenth-century salon world, Mme de Staël, the narrative uncovers how these women fostered transnational dialogues and cultural exchanges that were crucial in redefining public spirit and national identity.

    Grounded in extensive archival research and touching on the lives of over twenty-five individuals, the work highlights the nuanced roles these women played as cultural mediators and agents of change across national borders, challenging the traditional male-dominated historiography. The exploration of their contributions offers fresh insights into the interconnectedness of European intellectual life and the critical role of gender in shaping historical discourses. This book not only broadens our understanding of the Enlightenment but also provides a rich, interdisciplinary perspective on the socio-political transformations of the era.

Women and Magic in Medieval Romance
  • Genre, Intertextuality and Power
  • Jane Elizabeth Bonsall
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 June 2026
  • Explores the conventions and contradictions inherent in archetypes of magical femininity - from loathly ladies to monstrous mothers - in a range of popular late medieval English romances.

    The female characters in Middle English romances with particular power and agency are often portrayed as supernatural, possessing either magical abilities or identities. This book argues that a genre-focused reading of these supernatural women reveals romance's strategies for working through and articulating anxieties about the changing world of the late medieval period, as well as exposing their contemporary audiences' unexpectedly flexible attitudes toward feminine authority and moral ambiguity.

    It explores five distinct types of magical femininity: the Tristan tradition's marvelously gifted healers; the Muslim princess in Bevis of Hampton; the endlessly wealthy fairy imagined by Sir Launfal and Partonope of Blois; the monster-mother Melusine; and Morgan le Fay, the prototypical witch. By tracking the way each type first establishes then complicates generic patterns, this study highlights the tension between romance's persistent fascination with feminine power, and its simultaneous reiteration of the social and generic bounds on women's agency and authority. Interrogating generic expectations from an intersectional feminist perspective, it makes a case for a recuperative re-reading of romance, one that asks us to revise our assumptions about the potentialities of women's power in the medieval imaginary.

Robert of Torigni's Chronography and the Universal Chronicle Tradition
  • Gabriele Passabì
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 June 2026
  • Offers a reassessment of universal chronicle-writing and its ideological implications in the twelfth century.

    The Chronography of Robert of Torigni is a key source for the political landscapes of twelfth-century Normandy, England, and wider Western Europe. Robert was at the heart of the Norman political network that revolved around Empress Matilda and her son Henry II, and so a crucial witness to the intense political transformations occurring in the Anglo-Norman world.

    This book places his chronicle within its wider textual community, casting new light on the social practices, intellectual rationale, and ambitions of the chroniclers who followed the historiographical traditions of Eusebius of Caesarea, Jerome and Sigebert of Gembloux. Along with Torigni's Chronography, the book examines how independent chroniclers and continuators at Savigny, Mortemer, Ourscamp as well as John of Salisbury adapted the chronicles of Eusebius-Jerome and Sigebert, openly engaging with - or reacting against - their understanding of time, empire and power. It demonstrates how textual traditions and ideological discourses can move across geopolitical boundaries, illuminating the specific circumstances that made the Eusebius-Jerome and Sigebert tradition of chronicle-writing successful in this period.

Charles Gildon’s The Life of Mr Thomas Betterton, the Late Eminent Tragedian
  • An Annotated Edition, including Betterton’s The Amorous Widow
  • Edited by David Roberts
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 June 2026
  • Roberts reveals how Gildon's fusion of biographical study with neoclassical aesthetics and theatrical theory makes The Life an essential text for understanding early eighteenth-century performance.

    Charles Gildon's The Life of Mr Thomas Betterton is a landmark text in English theatrical biography. First published in 1710, it not only commemorated the death of Thomas Betterton, the most renowned English actor of his era, but is the first major study in English to focus on an actor's craft rather than his personal life. However, despite its pioneering nature, Gildon's work has long been overshadowed by controversy. With one quarter of the text copied from a French oratorical treatise, many readers and scholars dismissed it as a plagiarized work.

    This first modern edition reassesses the value of a text that is part biography, part textbook, and part borrowed from French sources. Here, David Roberts, reframes The Life as an essential resource not only for theatre history and life writing, but also for the study of publishing practices and early theories of plagiarism. Furthermore, as in Gildon's original publication, Roberts presents the Life with Betterton's comedy, The Amorous Widow.

    In a comprehensive introduction, Roberts explores Gildon's relationships with both his publishers and with Betterton himself, presenting the Life as a classical dialogue based on a personal knowledge of the actor. It also sheds light on how Gildon exploited early definitions of plagiarism, balancing his unacknowledged borrowings with original insights into acting theory.

    With old spelling and detailed annotations, this edition provides a rich foundation for understanding Gildon's impact on theatre, publication, and the evolving standards of intellectual property.

Vox Clamantis by John Gower: The Voice of One Crying""
  • Edited and translated by Robert Meindl, Mark T Riley, R F Yeager
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 June 2026
  • The first English translation into verse of the full Vox Clamantis, with explanatory notes.

    John Gower's Vox Clamantis is one of the major poetic achievements of the Middle Ages. Its subject matter ranges from his dream-vision account of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 to sharp critiques of the clergy, merchants, and lawyers, all with the intention of teaching the lessons of the past as a guide to the present. In Gower's view, everything that is and happens must be read and interpreted for the guidance God provides: history, Scripture and nature are replete with auguries sent by God to guide rulers if they but learn to read them. Ultimately for Gower, rulers - and we ourselves - are responsible for our own choices, for good or ill.

    This line-by-line translation from the original Latin into Modern English is intended for a wide audience, and to be easily readable by scholars and non-scholars alike. It replicates Gower's Latin meter as closely as possible in English, uses straightforward language, and clarifies many difficult points of medieval legal theory, Classical allusion, and theological interpretation heretofore left unexplained in any previous attempts, full or partial, to translate the poem. Extensive notes trace Gower's sources, from Ovid to Peter Riga's Aurora to Alexander Nequam's De Naturis rerum to Nigel Wireker's Speculum Stultorum and the Bible, among many others. Classical and Biblical allusions are identified and fully but succinctly explained. This book also includes the "Letter to Arundel", translated in verse for the first time.

Administrative Reform in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain and its Empire
  • A System of Economy
  • Sebastian Meurer
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 June 2026
  • Indispensable for understanding the historical forces that shaped modern governance.

    How did Enlightenment philosophy shape the modern bureaucratic state? While thinkers like Adam Smith and David Hume are celebrated for their contributions to political economy, the crucial work of administrative reformers has largely been forgotten-until now. Here, this question is explored through the untold story of the specialists of public administration, such as the Commissioners for Examining the Public Accounts, whose pioneering efforts to translate political economy into practice laid the foundation for contemporary public administration.

    This methodologically refined study re-evaluates Britain's administrative reforms of the late eighteenth century. It traces how systematic, resource-oriented administrative rationality replaced patrimonial notions of office, which treated public offices as royal privileges similar to titles of nobility. Sebastian Meurer relates the British reforms to contemporary administrative reform processes in British India and Ireland and reveals their manifold interconnections. Furthermore, the book offers an analysis of the very process, in which new notions pervaded public administration and traces the interrelations of different perspectives and their gradual shift of credibility.

    By connecting the rise of public administration with the early social sciences, this monograph illuminates how ideas once confined to philosophical discourse were adapted into the practical realities of governance, reform, and statecraft across the British Empire.

Women Journalists in the Brazilian Mainstream Press
  • The Case of O País (1884-1912)
  • Edited by Ana Claudia Suriani da Silva, Tania Regina de Luca
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 June 2026
  • A nuanced and complex portrayal of female voices which have long been silenced, offering a fresh perspective on the history of Brazilian journalism and restoring women's rightful place in Brazil's cultural memory.

    This book examines the groundbreaking contributions of Maria Amália de Carvalho, Júlia Lopes de Almeida, Emília Moncorvo Bandeira de Melo (pseudonym Carmen Dolores), and Maria Benedita Câmara Bormann (pseudonym Délia) in Brazil's mainstream press, focusing on their writings published in the influential newspaper O País between 1884 and 1912. Employing psychoanalysis, gender studies, media theory and literary criticism, the chapters in this book explore how these four writers cultivated a collective intellectual network and how their columns became a forum for a critical engagement with the conservative narratives of the male-dominated public sphere. This book questions why their legacies have been marginalised in traditional literary histories and aims to restore their rightful place in Brazil's cultural memory. By presenting a nuanced analysis of these silenced voices, it challenges the persistent myth that women's writing was limited to the 'small press'. A vital reassessment of press history, this book demands a more inclusive understanding of Brazil's journalistic and intellectual heritage, one that properly recognises women as active participants in shaping the Brazilian literary system.

    ANA CLÁUDIA SURIANI DA SILVA is Associate Professor in Brazilian Studies at University College London (UCL), UK.

    TANIA REGINA DE LUCA is Professor in the History of Brazilian Republic at São Paulo State University (Unesp), Brazil.

    CONTRIBUTORS: Alexandro Henrique Paixão, Álvaro Santos Simões Junior, Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva, Milena Ribeiro Martins, Tania Regina de Luca.

Art of Musical Ciphers, Riddles and Sundry Curiosities
  • R. Larry Todd, Katharina Uhde
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 June 2026
  • Offers the first comprehensive account of a centuries-old tradition of encrypting covert messages into music, from the Middle Ages to the present day.

    What do J. S. Bach, beef cabbage, coffee, the SATOR Square, and Marlene Dietrich have in common? Composers have enciphered these and many other words into music.

    Since time immemorial riddles have intrigued us, partly for their mirthful manner of connecting incongruous ideas, partly for their arresting way of opening fresh perspectives on our shared human condition. When we think of riddles, we normally recall verbal conundrums from cultures around the globe. But riddles can penetrate non-verbal aspects of our existence as well. Masking messages in music so that they lurk beneath the sonorous surface is an august Western tradition spanning the Middle Ages to the present. Known as musical cryptography, these puzzling pursuits form the subject of this book, construed broadly enough to capture not just musical ciphers and codes but also a curiosity shop of related techniques, which arguably can advance the greater virtue. They entertain, edify, and enthral, but also bewitch and bewilder, and, when unsolved, perplex and perturb.

Arthurian Literature XL
  • Edited by Megan G Leitch, K S Whetter
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 June 2026
  • Arthurian Literature has established its position as the home for a great diversity of new research into Arthurian matters. It delivers fascinating material across genres, periods and theoretical issues. TLS

    Appropriately for the journal's fortieth milestone, this volume of Arthurian Literature offers an especially wide range of topics, from printers' modifications in early Arthurian books to a study of archetypal characters in several linguistic traditions. It begins with the winner of the Derek Brewer Essay Prize, which has this year been awarded to an original and intriguing investigation of how and why Wynkyn de Worde (or various of his staff working under his direction) modified his 1529 printing of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur. Thereafter, literary-critical explorations range across French, Welsh, and Middle English Arthurian literatures, including examinations of marriage in Chrétien's Chevalier au Lion, Peredur in the Welsh Grail texts, fairies and cosmic providence in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the shifting degrees of agency possessed by Malory's Gwenyvere. The volume also features a lively reconsideration of the Arthurian tomb at Glastonbury from the point of view of material culture, and an examination of Arthur's hagiographical characterisation in Latin-Breton Saints Lives'. It closes with a survey of twentieth-century English-language retellings of Arthurian fiction that highlights female authors' many contributions to the genre.

Women, Religion, and Emotions in Modern Germany and Beyond
  • Edited by Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker, Martina Cucchiara
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 June 2026
  • Analyzes the role of emotions in the religious lives of women from across Germany and Europe from the nineteenth century to the 1970s.

    Scholarship on women and religion has focused primarily on the intersection between women's religious engagement and their emancipation. This volume goes beyond that to examine the vital role religion has played in the private and public lives of German and European women. Because emotions are central to the expression of religiosity, it draws on approaches from the history of emotions to examine how women understood, felt and practiced religion in their search for meaning.

    Spanning from the nineteenth century to the 1970s, the volume's essays show how religion helped women make sense of their lives. It also illuminates the degree to which women used religion and its attendant emotional scripts to shape modern society and how religious discourses in turn shaped women's emotions and comportment in the public sphere. The volume builds on recent research that shows that religion-especially the religiosity of women-remained a pressing public concern in modern Europe. From anxieties over the religiosity of Bavarian servants to restrictive norms imposed on Jewish widows, from the interfaith commitments of kindergarten teachers to the autobiographical narratives of aspiring Protestant deaconesses, from the suffering of stigmatics in Germany and Belgium to Irish women's public narratives of their religiosity, this book reveals how women's faith and attendant religious emotions have been central to their public and private lives.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Nineteenth-Century America
  • Discourse and Criticism
  • Herbert Rowland
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 June 2026
  • Surveys the considerable nineteenth-century American discourse on and response to the writings of the German dramatist, critic, art theorist, and theological thinker.

    Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) was a leading figure in the humanist revival in German culture that culminated in Weimar Classicism. His plays and drama criticism mark the rise of middle-class forms and values and influenced contemporaries and successors alike. His work in art theory still stimulates discussion, while his liberal theological writing has had a perhaps even greater impact. In the US, Lessing first drew major attention during the German craze of the early nineteenth century and achieved his greatest fame during the third quarter of the century. His drama criticism and views on theology and the arts became entrenched in a robust American discourse about those subjects. Many Americans thought of him less as a historical figure than as a virtual contemporary.

    This book surveys critical commentary on Lessing published in prominent journals and periodicals from 1796 to the end of the nineteenth century, a period before the professionalization of literary scholarship in America, when individuals of varying professional backgrounds routinely assessed foreign writers in the context of their own national experience. Chapters focus on the unfolding of Lessing's presence in the US, on broad assessments of his life and work, and, respectively, on American responses to his fables and epigrams, his plays and drama criticism, his art-historical and -theoretical writing, and his theological work.

Inventing Percy Grainger
  • The Construction of Biography on Page, Stage and Screen
  • Sarah Kirby
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 June 2026
  • Investigates the dialogue and tensions between Percy Grainger's public biography and his self-conscious autobiographical construction via his own writings and autobiographical museum.

    The Australian-American composer Percy Grainger (1882-1961) described himself as an 'all round man': composer, pianist, artist, inventor, linguist, ethnographer, essayist, and more. He also went to great lengths to shape his own biographical narrative, developing an eccentric public persona in the press, writing extensive autobiographical texts and establishing a vast autobiographical museum. But what happens when this self-fashioned narrative meets writers, scholars, and creatives in the decades since his death? This book traces the construction and negotiation of Grainger's biography on page, stage and screen through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, exploring the tensions and dialogue between these and Grainger's autobiographical self.

    Through a series of case studies, with a focus on works created in Australia, the book explores how Grainger's public persona and received biographical narrative were developed then transformed by other writers, playwrights, filmmakers, and performance artists to suit the changing needs of their own time and place. Examining a variety of texts, from celebrity profiles, obituaries, and traditional academic studies, to film, theatre, opera and poetry, the book offers a biography of an afterlife: a study of how Grainger set up a series of mechanisms to control how his life would be remembered, then tests these against a succession of works that engage directly with those sources.

Dance, Embodied Politics and Court Culture in Early Modern Spain
  • The Poetics Turn
  • Florence d’Artois
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 June 2026
  • Does dance tell a story? What, if anything, is it intended to represent? How was it conceived in the early modern period?

    This book examines the theories and political uses of dance in Spain during the period preceding and following the 'Poetics turn', which coincided with the rule of Philip III (1598-1621), also known as the Dancing King, and the onset of the reign of Philip IV. While this turning point finalised the definition of dance as an art form, it was also paradoxical. Indeed, this development saw the emergence of an aesthetic thought of dance within Aristotelian poetics, thanks to a common court culture, yet it never led to the formulation of a poetics of ballet.

    By recontextualising this turning point, the book examines the relationship between dance and representation during Spain's Golden Age. It revisits the initial codifications of dance in Italy and figurative experiments at the Burgundian court during the second half of the 15th century, as well as their influence on subsequent practices and humanist theories of dance at the courts of Charles V and Philip II. Subsequently, it focuses on the various shifts in court dance as it became a scenic art at the beginning of the seventeenth century, interrogating the possibility of the king performing dance himself. The book concludes that, in Spain, neo-Aristotelian ideas enabled a shift from an ethical to an aesthetic problematic, which saw dance, whether symbolic or purely kinetic in nature, as a legitimate art form to be placed at the service of the monarchy.

Thinking Through German Literature with Andrew Jaszi
  • A Foundational Approach Applied to Goethe and Kafka
  • Kenneth M. Ralston
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 June 2026
  • Brings to light an important and unconventional teacher of literature whose way of thinking and method are relevant in German Studies and beyond, particularly in view of the present crisis of the humanities.

    At a time when enrollment in the humanities is said to be in "free fall" (Nathan Heller, The New Yorker, 2/27/2023), the figure of Andrew Jaszi offers an alternative vision of what a literary education might look like. Jaszi was a Hungarian-born philosopher and literary scholar in the German Department at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1948 to 1985. His accessible, jargon-free approach, a method he developed through analogy with Goethe's unique way of doing science, attracted students of diverse backgrounds and majors to his classes, while also winning acclaim from colleagues who compared him to Wittgenstein and Buber.

    Drawing on a set of previously unknown tape recordings of Jaszi's seminars, this book offers readers the opportunity to witness this legendary teacher in action. The book's immediate benefit is the illumination provided by Jaszi's original interpretations of Goethe's Faust and Kafka's "The Judgment." More broadly, it illustrates the transformative, whole-self education Jaszi advocated and himself embodied, one that runs counter to the technocratic imperatives of our time. Ultimately, the book's goal is to make better known an important literary thinker and an unconventional teacher of German Studies, the value of whose work extends beyond a single discipline to humanities education in general, with special bearing on its present crisis and potential future.

Yoruba Pentecostalism and Child Witchcraft Accusations
  • Claire P. Ayelotan
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 June 2026
  • An exploration of Yoruba Pentecostalism's role in child witchcraft accusations, examining migration, leadership, and collective responsibility to address faith-based child abuse globally.

    What drives communities to accuse children of witchcraft, and how do religious beliefs and leadership dynamics perpetuate this phenomenon across borders? Claire Ayelotan delves into the involvement of Yoruba (Nigerian) Pentecostal leaders in accusations of child witchcraft in Nigeria and the UK. Using a multidisciplinary approach, her research examines the theological, cultural, socioeconomic, and legal influences that drive such behaviours. Ethnographic studies and interviews with pastors and practitioners reveal how power dynamics, gender roles, and international migration intersect to perpetuate these harmful beliefs. The book uncovers gaps in current literature and presents original insights on the collective responsibility, shared beliefs, and complexities of Pentecostal leadership in this context. By focusing on the global aspects of child witchcraft accusations, it sheds new light on how migration impacts these practices and the negative consequences they have on vulnerable children.

    An important read for academics, policymakers, and child welfare professionals, this book challenges assumptions and urges immediate action to combat faith-based child abuse in all its manifestations.

Medieval Clothing and Textiles 19
  • Edited by Melanie Schuessler Bond, Cordelia Warr
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 June 2026
  • The best new research on medieval clothing and textiles, drawing from a range of disciplines.

    The essays collected here continue to showcase the Journal's wide-ranging and eclectic tradition. The topics addressed are the sensory perceptions of textiles in Early Medieval Britain; evidence of the global textile trade as reflected in church facades in Lucca, Italy; the ways in which spinning and weaving in late medieval Cologne influenced the presentation of the cult of the Eleven Thousand Virgins within the city; sumptuary legislation in thirteenth-century Montauban, in the Occitan region of Southern France; visual representations of male underwear in northern European art; and the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century trade in knitted jersey stockings in Norwich and Yarmouth.

Peace Not War: Traditions of Restorative Justice in Imperial Ethiopia, 1769 - 1960
  • Charles Schaefer
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 June 2026
  • Examines one of the few documented early examples of restorative justice from Africa or Latin America.

    With a writing system, Ethiopian emperors as well as pretenders to the throne chronicled their exploits including peace-building feats, and this book showcases and analyses historically verified instances, from as early as 1769, where restorative justice modalities were used to resolve conflict and bring peace to the country.

    Peace not War traces Ethiopia's evolving understanding of restorative justice from the 'forgive and forget' approach which characterized the Zemene Mesafint (Era of the Princes), where perpetrators were exonerated, allowing them to recoup and build their armies to fight another day, to conditional forgiveness, recorded by the imperial court and dependent on atonement. Ethiopia's long history of experimentation with different forms of restorative justice demonstrates ingenuity, flexibility, and adaptability, but as the twentieth century progressed, workable, indigenous forms of restorative justice were sidelined by Western codified law that emphasized retribution.

Diplomacy, Trade and Imperialism in East Africa, 1850-1900
  • Rise of the Katikiro
  • Michael Pesek
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 June 2026
  • A detailed overview of East African diplomacy at the end of the pre-colonial era, which provides a corrective to the commonly held view that African diplomats were inexperienced, naïve and parochial.

    This book traces the history of an elite group that rose to power and wealth in the interlacustrine kingdoms of East Africa at the end of the eighteenth and over the course of the nineteenth century. Katikiro played a major role in shaping the history of their societies at a time of profound change. Royal administrators, chief advisors, envoys - these influential men navigated and directed shifts in the balance of power as old hegemons like the kingdom of Bunyoro stumbled, new contenders like Buganda and Rwanda emerged, the region opened up to trade with the East African Coast and Egypt, and Europeans arrived, first as explorers and missionaries and then as colonial rulers.

    Katikiro were in midst of these changes: as politicians they shaped them; as diplomats they mediated them; and as wealthy businessmen they profited from them. Their rise in the nineteenth century offers a unique inside into the agency of Africans in these events and highlights the many continuities of pre-colonial and colonial histories in the region.

Spenser and the Filidh in Early Modern Ireland
  • Edited by Evan Bourke, Philip Mac a’ Ghoill, Deirdre Nic Chárthaigh
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 June 2026
  • Uncovers a vibrant literary culture often overlooked by colonial historiography and Anglocentric critical traditions. Reimagines Spenser's Munster through multilingual networks, bardic poetry, and digital methodologies.

    Long dominated by Anglocentric narratives, early modern literary studies have often cast Ireland as a backdrop to English self-fashioning. This volume reorients that perspective by foregrounding the multilingual, polyvocal literary culture of Munster in the late sixteenth century, situating Edmund Spenser not as an isolated colonial voice but as one writer among many-Gaelic, Old English, and New English-engaged in a contested cultural landscape. Drawing on archival, digital, and geospatial methodologies, the essays presented here explore bardic poetry, deep mapping, and the politics of language in texts by and about Spenser and his contemporaries. Case studies of bardic poetry, manuscript culture, and poetic networks reveal a vibrant and dynamic Gaelic literary tradition that responded to colonial violence.

    By integrating perspectives from Irish-language literature, English studies, and digital humanities, this collection offers a vital corrective to monolingual historiographies and opens new pathways for understanding the cultural entanglements of Spenser's Munster. It reconceptualises the idea of Spenser in Ireland by highlighting the region's cultural complexity and multilingualism, demonstrating how attention to this richness deepens our understanding of one of the most fraught and fateful periods in the shared history of Ireland and England.

Page 92 of 3870