The Elizabethan Mind: Searching for the Self in an Age of Uncertainty (Hardcover)

The Elizabethan Mind: Searching for the Self in an Age of Uncertainty By Helen Hackett Cover Image
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Description


The first comprehensive guide to Elizabethan ideas about the mind

What is the mind? How does it relate to the body and soul? These questions were as perplexing for the Elizabethans as they are for us today—although their answers were often startlingly different. Shakespeare and his contemporaries believed the mind was governed by the humours and passions, and was susceptible to the Devil’s interference.
 
In this insightful and wide-ranging account, Helen Hackett explores the intricacies of Elizabethan ideas about the mind. This was a period of turbulence and transition, as persistent medieval theories competed with revived classical ideas and emerging scientific developments. Drawing on a wealth of sources, Hackett sheds new light on works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Sidney, and Spenser, demonstrating how ideas about the mind shaped new literary and theatrical forms. Looking at their conflicted attitudes to imagination, dreams, and melancholy, Hackett examines how Elizabethans perceived the mind, soul, and self, and how their ideas compare with our own.

About the Author


Helen Hackett is professor of English literature at University College London. An expert on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, she is the author of Shakespeare and Elizabeth and A Short History of English Renaissance Drama.

Praise For…


“Hackett reads a breathtaking diversity of literature with great sensitivity . . . The Elizabethan Mind . . . is an impressive achievement.”—P. Kishore Saval, Australian Book Review
 

“Hackett’s extraordinary achievement in The Elizabethan Mind combines learning and empathy as she ranges across cognitive, emotional, spiritual, and physiological approaches. Come for Hamlet, stay for female complaint, Catholic poetics, sonnets, psychomachia, and much more.”—Emma Smith, author of This is Shakespeare





Product Details
ISBN: 9780300207200
ISBN-10: 0300207204
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication Date: July 12th, 2022
Pages: 448
Language: English
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