Telling Tears in the English Renaissance

Download or read book Telling Tears in the English Renaissance written by Marjory E. Lange and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-06 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tears and weeping are, at once, human universals and socially-constrained phenomena. This volume explores the interface between those two viewpoints by examining medical literature, sermons, and lyric poetry of the 16th and 17th centuries to see how dominant paradigms regarded who could, who must, and who must not weep. These paradigms shifted in some cases radically, during these centuries. Without a clear understanding of how the Renaissance 'read' tears, it is difficult to avoid using our own preconceptions -- often quite different and very misleading. There are five chapters; one on medical and scientific material, two on sermons, and two on different types of lyric.