Imagining Inheritance from Chaucer to Shakespeare
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A01=Alex Davis
Author_Alex Davis
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSBB
Category=DSBD
Category=DSC
Category=NL-DS
COP=United Kingdom
Discount=15
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Format=BB
Format_Hardback
HMM=26
IMPN=Oxford University Press
ISBN13=9780198851424
Language_English
PA=Available
PD=20200227
POP=Oxford
Price_€50 to €100
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PUB=Oxford University Press
SMM=240
Subject=Literature: History & Criticism
WG=640
WMM=164
Product details
- ISBN 9780198851424
- Format: Hardback
- Weight: 640g
- Dimensions: 164 x 26 x 240mm
- Publication Date: 25 Feb 2020
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Publication City/Country: Oxford, GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Impossible bequests of the soul; an outlawed younger son who rises to become justice of the king's forests; the artificially-preserved corpse of the heir to an empire; a medieval clerk kept awake at night by fears of falling; a seventeenth-century noblewoman who commissions copies upon copies of her genealogy; Elizabethan efforts to eradicate Irish customs of succession; thoughts of the legacy of sin bequeathed to mankind by our first parents, Adam and Eve.
This book explores how inheritance was imagined between the lifetimes of Chaucer and Shakespeare. The writing composed during this period was the product of what the historian Georges Duby has called a 'society of heirs', in which inheritance functioned as a key instrument of social reproduction, acting to ensure that existing structures of status, wealth, familial power, political influence, and gender relations were projected from the present into the future. In poetry, prose, and drama--in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and his Canterbury Tales; in Spenser's Faerie Queene; in plays by Shakespeare such as Macbeth, As You Like It, and The Merchant of Venice; and in a host of other works--we encounter a range of texts that attests to the extraordinary imaginative reach of questions of inheritance between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Moving between the late medieval and early modern periods, Imagining Inheritance examines this body of writing in order to argue that an exploration of the ways in which premodern inheritance was imagined can make legible the deep structures of power that modernity wants to forget.
Alex Davis is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance (2003) and Renaissance Historical Fiction (2011).
