What do English alabasters, apostate nuns and Aaron Copland have in common? They’re just three of the topics dominating our August releases. From the figure of the rogue to early modern military identities, we offer our selection of books to keep your eyes peeled for this August!
Don’t forget, you can get 25% off all of our titles featured in the post with promo code BB685.
Until next time!
English Alabaster Carvings and their Cultural Contexts
English alabasters played a seminal role in the artistic development of late medieval and early modern Europe. This volume incorporates a variety of new approaches to these artefacts, employing methodologies drawn from a number of different disciplines.
Apostate Nuns in the Later Middle Ages
“To make a vow is a matter of the will, to fulfill one is a matter of necessity,” declared late medieval canon law, and religious profession involved the most solemn of those vows. Professed nuns could never renege on their vows and if they did attempt to re-enter secular society, they became apostates. This book is the first to address the practical and legal problems facing women religious, both in England and in Europe, who chose to reject the terms of their profession as nuns.
Roguery in Print
Crime and Culture in Early Modern London
Early modern England was fascinated by the figure of the rogue. The rogue, who could be a beggar or vagrant but also a cutpurse, conman, card sharp, and all-round ‘trickster’ or even a highwayman, appeared in a variety of texts including plays, ballads, romances, sermons, proclamations, and pamphlets. This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of an extensive body of rogue pamphlets published in London between the late sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries, a period which saw a burst of publications about criminals.
Liminality in Cuba’s Twentieth-Century Identity
Rites of Passage and Revolutions
Liminality offers an innovative and provocative analysis of the much-studied Cuban Revolution by reminding us that Fidel Castro’s was actually the second of the island’s twentieth-century revolutions. By bringing 1959 into critical communication with the revolution of 1933, the book explores Cuba’s trajectory from colony to republic to revolution, not as a linear inevitability, but as a rite of collective passage punctuated by turning points in which public debate turned to almost obsessive reflection on national ‘identity’ and national ‘destiny’.
Early Modern Military Identities, 1560-1639
Reality and Representation
Within the large-scale historiography of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century warfare and the early modern military revolution there remain many unanswered questions about the individual soldier and their relationship to the profession of arms. This book examines how early modern fighting men and their peers viewed and represented themselves in military roles, and how they were viewed and fashioned by others.
Forgotten Dreams
Revisiting Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog (b. 1942) is perhaps the most famous living German filmmaker, but his films have never been read in the context of German cultural history. And while there is a surfeit of film reviews, interviews, and scholarly articles on Herzog and his work, there are very few books devoted to his films, and none addressing his entire career to date. Until now. Forgotten Dreams offers not only an analytical study of Herzog’s films but also a new reading of Romanticism’s impact beyond the nineteenth century.
Aaron Copland and the American Legacy of Gustav Mahler
The iconic American composer Aaron Copland (1900-1990) is often credited with creating an unmistakably American musical style, a style free from the powerful sway of the European classics that long dominated the art-music scene in the United States. Yet Copland was strongly attracted to the music of the late-romantic Austrian composer Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), whose monumental symphonies and powerful songs have captivated and challenged American audiences for more than a century. Drawing extensively on archival and musical materials, Aaron Copland and the American Legacy of Gustav Mahler offers the first detailed exploration of Copland’s multifaceted relationship with Mahler’s music and its lasting consequences for music in America.
Q&A with Seth Peabody: Exploring German Film History