Memories of War in Early Modern England: Armor and Militant Nostalgia in Marlowe, Sidney, and Shakespeare [Paperback]

This book examines literary depictions of the construction and destruction of the armored male body in combat in relation to early modern English understandings of the past. Bringing together the fields of material culture and militarism, Susan Harlan argues that the notion of spoiling  or the sanctioned theft of the arms and armor of the vanquished in battle  provides a way of thinking about Englands relationship to its violent cultural inheritance. She demonstrates how writers reconstituted the spoils of antiquity and the Middle Ages in an imagined military struggle between male bodies. An analysis of scenes of arming and disarming across texts by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare and tributes to Sir Philip Sidney reveals a pervasive militant nostalgia: a cultural fascination with moribund models and technologies of war. Readers will not only gain a better understanding of humanism but also a new way of thinking about violence and cultural production in Renaissance England.

CHAPTER 1  Objects fit for Tamburlaine: Self-Arming in Marlowes Tamburlaine the Great, Robert Vaughans Portraits, and The Almain Armourers Album.- INTERLUDE  Epic Pastness: War Stories, Nostalgic Objects, and Sexual and Textual Spoils in Marlowes Dido, Queen of Carthage.-?

CHAPTER 2  Spoiling Sir Philip Sidney: Mourning and Military Violence in the Elegies, Lants Roll, and Grevilles Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney.- INTERLUDE  Scatterd Men: Mutilated Male Bodies and Conflicting Narratives of Militant Nostalgia in Shakespeares Henry V.-?

CHAPTER 3  The Armored Body as Trophy: The Problem of the Roman Subject in Shakespeares Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus.- CODA  Lets Dot After the Hilƒ,