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Renaissance Bodies

The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540-1660

Renaissance Bodies is a unique collection of views on the ways in which the human image has been represented in the arts and literature of English Renaissance society. The subjects discussed range from high art to popular culture – from portraits of Elizabeth I to polemical prints mocking religious fanaticism – and include miniatures, manners, anatomy, drama and architectural patronage. The authors, art historians and literary critics, reflect diverse critical viewpoints, and the 78 illustrations present a fascinating exhibition of the often strange and haunting images of the period.

With essays by John Peacock, Elizabeth Honig, Andrew and Catherine Belsey, Jonathan Sawday, Susan Wiseman, Ellen Chirelstein, Tamsyn Williams, Anna Bryson, Maurice Howard and Nigel Llewellyn.

"The whole book ... presents a mirror of contemporary concerns with power, the merits and demerits of individualism, sex-roles, ’selves’, the meaning of community and (even) conspicuous consumption."—The Observer

Distribution by the University of Chicago Press only to customers in the USA and Canada. Customers elsewhere should visit the UK website of Reaktion Books.


302 pages | 6.125 x 9.25

Picturing History

Art: British Art

Culture Studies

History: British and Irish History


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Table of Contents

Photographic Acknowledgements
Notes on the Editors and Contributors
Introduction - Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn
1. Icons of Divinity: Portraits of Elizabeth I - Andrew Belsey and Catherine Belsey
2. Lady Elizabeth Pope: The Heraldic Body - Ellen Chirelstein
3. In Memory: Lady Dacre and Pairing by Hans Eworth - Elizabeth Honig
4. ’Magnetic Figures’: Polemical Prints of the English Revolution - Tamsyn Williams
5. The Fate of Marsyas: Dissecting the Renaissance Body - Jonathan Sawday
6. The Rhetoric of Status: Gesture, Demeanour and the Image of the Gentleman in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England - Anna Bryson
7. Inigo Jones as a Figurative Artist - John Peacock
8. ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore: Representing the Incestuous Body - Susan J. Wiseman
9. Self-Fashioning and the Classical Moment in Mid-Sixteenth-Century English Architecture - Maurice Howard
10. The Royal Body: Monuments to the Dead, For the Living - Nigel Llewellyn
References
Select Bibliography
Index

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