16th and 17th century British literature; Religion and Literature; Poetry and Poetics; Early Modern Letters and Letter-Writing
Recent Courses
ENGL 20458/40458 Faeries, Demons and Alchemists: Science, Magic and the Supernatural in Early Modern England
This course aims to explore the messy territory between the scientific, the magical and the religious in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Readings will draw on scholarship in the history of science, by writers such as Frances Yates and Steven Shapin, and on period reflections on the pursuit of knowledge by thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne Margaret Cavendish and Robert Boyle, as well as representations of occult knowledge in the period's literature. Readings may include Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Jonson's The Alchemist, selections from Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and Bacon's The New Atlantis.
This class will think about the reception of the Renaissance, in scholarship and popular culture, or from Burkhardt to Beyonce. What is at stake in the term? What does it mean to periodize a Western cultural past in this way, or to be founding a Renaissance in the present? Readings will include seminal accounts of the Renaissance by thinkers such as Jacob Burkhardt, Aby Warburg, Paul Oscar Kristeller and Joan Kelly, as well as contemporary cultural objects ranging from the film Shakespeare in Love to the fiction of Hilary Mantel and work in the visual arts by artists such as Kehinde Wiley and Harmonia Rosales.
