Books by Katherine Eggert
"An unusually wide-ranging and original book, written with real stylistic flair. Eggert shows how... more "An unusually wide-ranging and original book, written with real stylistic flair. Eggert shows how alchemy, as both a discourse and a set of knowledge-practices, illuminates problems in many different domains, from transubstantiation to Kabbalah to debates over anatomy and reproduction. By using alchemy as a guiding thread, she reveals how each domain points up the limits of humanism in the early modern period. A delicately balanced, timely study that will be widely of interest to scholars of literature, science, medicine, and intellectual history more broadly."—Henry S. Turner, Rutgers University
"Disknowledge": knowing something isn't true, but believing it anyway. In DISKNOWLEDGE: LITERATURE, ALCHEMY, AND THE END OF HUMANISM IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND, Katherine Eggert explores the crumbling state of learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even as the shortcomings of Renaissance humanism became plain to see, many intellectuals of the age had little choice but to treat their familiar knowledge systems as though they still held. Humanism thus came to share the status of alchemy: a way of thinking simultaneously productive and suspect, reasonable and wrongheaded.
Eggert argues that English writers used alchemy to signal how to avoid or camouflage pressing but discomfiting topics in an age of rapid intellectual change. DISKNOWLEDGE describes how John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, John Dee, Christopher Marlowe, William Harvey, Helkiah Crooke, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare used alchemical imagery, rhetoric, and habits of thought to shunt aside three difficult questions: how theories of matter shared their physics with Roman Catholic transubstantiation; how Christian Hermeticism depended on Jewish Kabbalah; and how new anatomical learning acknowledged women's role in human reproduction. DISKNOWLEDGE further shows how Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Margaret Cavendish used the language of alchemy to castigate humanism for its blind spots and to invent a new, posthumanist mode of knowledge: writing fiction.
Covering a wide range of authors and topics, DISKNOWLEDGE is the first book to analyze how English Renaissance literature employed alchemy to probe the nature and limits of learning. The concept of disknowledge—willfully adhering to something we know is wrong—resonates across literary and cultural studies as an urgent issue of our own era.
Available in hardcover and as an ebook. Read the Table of Contents and an excerpt at http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/15417.html.
For most Renaissance English thinkers, queenship was a catastrophe, a political accident that thr... more For most Renaissance English thinkers, queenship was a catastrophe, a political accident that threatened to emasculate an entire nation. But some English poets and playwrights proved more inventive in their responses to female authority.
In SHOWING LIKE A QUEEN, Katherine Eggert argues that Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton turned the political problem of queenship to their advantage by using it as an occasion to experiment with new literary genres. Unlike other critics who have argued that a queen provoked only anxiety and defensiveness in her male subjects, Eggert demonstrates that even after her death Elizabeth I's forty-five-year reign enabled writers to entertain the fantasy of a counterpatriarchal realm.
Eggert traces a literary history of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in which the destabilizing anomaly of female rule enables Spenser to reshape the genre of epic romance and gives Shakespeare scope to create the ruptured dynastic epic of the history plays, the psychologized tragedy of Hamlet, and the feminized tragedies of "Antony and Cleopatra" and "The Winter's Tale." Turning to the second half of the seventeenth century, Eggert reveals how even after more than sixty years of male governance, Milton bases his marital epic Paradise Lost upon the formulae of queenship.
Now available as an Ebook at http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/13372.html
Papers by Katherine Eggert
Ovidian Transversions: 'Iphis and Ianthe', 1350-1650. ed.Valerie Traub, Patricia Badir, and Peggy McCracken, 2019
John Lyly’s 1580s play GALATEA stages an early modern version of "alternative facts": the blatant... more John Lyly’s 1580s play GALATEA stages an early modern version of "alternative facts": the blatant and unrepentant practice of and adherence to false knowledge. This false knowledge comes to include not only the enterprise of alchemy, one of the occupations tried on by Rafe, the aspiring and criminally minded young man who is the center of the play’s comic subplot. It also includes the very underpinnings of Lyly’s play both in Ovidian transformation, and in the humanistic education that has made Ovid’s text accessible and meaningful to Lyly’s audience – the same humanistic education on which Lyly’s own livelihood and aspirations depended. Alchemy, humanism, and Ovidian transformation thus all participate in "disknowledge," an epistemological practice in which one knows something isn’t true, but believes it anyway.
Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, 2019
John Ruskin’s THE STONES OF VENICE (1851–53) is suffused with Spenser’s FAERIE QUEENE. This essay... more John Ruskin’s THE STONES OF VENICE (1851–53) is suffused with Spenser’s FAERIE QUEENE. This essay proposes that Ruskin’s view of Spenser’s allegorical women repeats and intensifies an aesthetic experience that THE FAERIE QUEENE models: the view of a woman in which one looks at her but does not see. Since THE STONES OF VENICE aligns active feminine sexuality with the Renaissance itself, Ruskin thus, by means of Spenser, offers a periodized aesthetics in which the medieval allows us not to see the Renaissance, no matter how much it comes into our view.
Representations, 2000
As opposed to figuring poetry as rape, THE FAERIE QUEENE also, if only intermittently, hints at p... more As opposed to figuring poetry as rape, THE FAERIE QUEENE also, if only intermittently, hints at poetry as a vehicle for rapture, a suffusion of delight that suspends the quest and admits a multiplicity of both erotic and epistemological pleasures. This rapture is felt specifically in scenes identified as allegories of the writing and/or reading of poetry.
ELH, 1994
Within the last decade, Henry V has assumed a surprisingly prominent place not only in Shakespear... more Within the last decade, Henry V has assumed a surprisingly prominent place not only in Shakespeare criticism, but in wider critical debates over the relations between literature and hegemonic political power. Prompted by Stephen Greenblatt's widely influential consideration of the Henriad ...
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Books by Katherine Eggert
"Disknowledge": knowing something isn't true, but believing it anyway. In DISKNOWLEDGE: LITERATURE, ALCHEMY, AND THE END OF HUMANISM IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND, Katherine Eggert explores the crumbling state of learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even as the shortcomings of Renaissance humanism became plain to see, many intellectuals of the age had little choice but to treat their familiar knowledge systems as though they still held. Humanism thus came to share the status of alchemy: a way of thinking simultaneously productive and suspect, reasonable and wrongheaded.
Eggert argues that English writers used alchemy to signal how to avoid or camouflage pressing but discomfiting topics in an age of rapid intellectual change. DISKNOWLEDGE describes how John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, John Dee, Christopher Marlowe, William Harvey, Helkiah Crooke, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare used alchemical imagery, rhetoric, and habits of thought to shunt aside three difficult questions: how theories of matter shared their physics with Roman Catholic transubstantiation; how Christian Hermeticism depended on Jewish Kabbalah; and how new anatomical learning acknowledged women's role in human reproduction. DISKNOWLEDGE further shows how Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Margaret Cavendish used the language of alchemy to castigate humanism for its blind spots and to invent a new, posthumanist mode of knowledge: writing fiction.
Covering a wide range of authors and topics, DISKNOWLEDGE is the first book to analyze how English Renaissance literature employed alchemy to probe the nature and limits of learning. The concept of disknowledge—willfully adhering to something we know is wrong—resonates across literary and cultural studies as an urgent issue of our own era.
Available in hardcover and as an ebook. Read the Table of Contents and an excerpt at http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/15417.html.
In SHOWING LIKE A QUEEN, Katherine Eggert argues that Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton turned the political problem of queenship to their advantage by using it as an occasion to experiment with new literary genres. Unlike other critics who have argued that a queen provoked only anxiety and defensiveness in her male subjects, Eggert demonstrates that even after her death Elizabeth I's forty-five-year reign enabled writers to entertain the fantasy of a counterpatriarchal realm.
Eggert traces a literary history of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in which the destabilizing anomaly of female rule enables Spenser to reshape the genre of epic romance and gives Shakespeare scope to create the ruptured dynastic epic of the history plays, the psychologized tragedy of Hamlet, and the feminized tragedies of "Antony and Cleopatra" and "The Winter's Tale." Turning to the second half of the seventeenth century, Eggert reveals how even after more than sixty years of male governance, Milton bases his marital epic Paradise Lost upon the formulae of queenship.
Now available as an Ebook at http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/13372.html
Papers by Katherine Eggert
"Disknowledge": knowing something isn't true, but believing it anyway. In DISKNOWLEDGE: LITERATURE, ALCHEMY, AND THE END OF HUMANISM IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND, Katherine Eggert explores the crumbling state of learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even as the shortcomings of Renaissance humanism became plain to see, many intellectuals of the age had little choice but to treat their familiar knowledge systems as though they still held. Humanism thus came to share the status of alchemy: a way of thinking simultaneously productive and suspect, reasonable and wrongheaded.
Eggert argues that English writers used alchemy to signal how to avoid or camouflage pressing but discomfiting topics in an age of rapid intellectual change. DISKNOWLEDGE describes how John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, John Dee, Christopher Marlowe, William Harvey, Helkiah Crooke, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare used alchemical imagery, rhetoric, and habits of thought to shunt aside three difficult questions: how theories of matter shared their physics with Roman Catholic transubstantiation; how Christian Hermeticism depended on Jewish Kabbalah; and how new anatomical learning acknowledged women's role in human reproduction. DISKNOWLEDGE further shows how Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Margaret Cavendish used the language of alchemy to castigate humanism for its blind spots and to invent a new, posthumanist mode of knowledge: writing fiction.
Covering a wide range of authors and topics, DISKNOWLEDGE is the first book to analyze how English Renaissance literature employed alchemy to probe the nature and limits of learning. The concept of disknowledge—willfully adhering to something we know is wrong—resonates across literary and cultural studies as an urgent issue of our own era.
Available in hardcover and as an ebook. Read the Table of Contents and an excerpt at http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/15417.html.
In SHOWING LIKE A QUEEN, Katherine Eggert argues that Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton turned the political problem of queenship to their advantage by using it as an occasion to experiment with new literary genres. Unlike other critics who have argued that a queen provoked only anxiety and defensiveness in her male subjects, Eggert demonstrates that even after her death Elizabeth I's forty-five-year reign enabled writers to entertain the fantasy of a counterpatriarchal realm.
Eggert traces a literary history of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in which the destabilizing anomaly of female rule enables Spenser to reshape the genre of epic romance and gives Shakespeare scope to create the ruptured dynastic epic of the history plays, the psychologized tragedy of Hamlet, and the feminized tragedies of "Antony and Cleopatra" and "The Winter's Tale." Turning to the second half of the seventeenth century, Eggert reveals how even after more than sixty years of male governance, Milton bases his marital epic Paradise Lost upon the formulae of queenship.
Now available as an Ebook at http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/13372.html