Renaissance personhood : materiality, taxonomy, process / edited by Kevin Curran.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Curran, Kevin, Author.

Contributor:

Curran, Kevin, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Individuality--History.

Europe.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, [2020]

Summary:

Explores the history and theory of personhood in the Renaissance periodOffers the first sustained study of the history and theory of personhood in the Renaissance periodProvides a study of personhood from a materialist perspectiveModels new way of entering posthumanist critique – animal studies, ecocriticism, and food studies – into conversation with legal theory, cultural history and literary studiesUnfolding as a series of materially oriented studies ranging from chairs, machines and doors to trees, animals and food, this book retells the story of Renaissance personhood as one of material relations and embodied experience, rather than of emergent notions of individuality and freedom. The book assembles an international team of leading scholars to formulate a new account of personhood in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one that starts with the objects, environments and physical processes that made personhood legible.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Contributors

1 What Was Personhood?

Part I Materialities of Personhood: Chairs, Machines, Doors

2 Daughters, Chairs, and Liberty in Margaret Cavendish’s The Religious

3 The Inner Lives of Renaissance Machines

4 Two Doors: Personhood and Housebreaking in Semayne’s Case and The Comedy of Errors

Part II Taxonomies of Personhood: Status, Species, Race

5 Should (Bleeding) Trees Have Standing?

6 Aping Personhood

7 Race, Personhood, and the Human in The Tempest

Part III Processes of Personhood: Eating, Lusting, Mapping

8 Liquid Macbeth

9 Things in Action: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, Macbeth, and Levinas on Shame

10 Edward Herbert’s Cosmopolitan State

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-4744-4810-0

OCLC:

1312726740