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 England's 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.

Provides a compelling argument for the need to re-think the status of armor, spoils, and trophies in relation to early modern cultural memory Turns to visual culture with a level of attentiveness to detail that is unprecedented in prior analyses of early modern military texts Deploys a breadth of critical perspectives by relevant early modern scholars such as Peter Stallybrass, Jonathan Gil Harris, and Heather James, as well as theorists like Derrida and Benjamin.

Autorentext
Susan E. Harlan is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Wake Forest University, USA.

Inhalt

CHAPTER 1 Objects fit for Tamburlaine: Self-Arming in Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great , Robert Vaughan's Portraits, and The Almain Armourer's Album .- INTERLUDE Epic Pastness: War Stories, Nostalgic Objects, and Sexual and Textual Spoils in Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage. - **

CHAPTER 2 Spoiling Sir Philip Sidney: Mourning and Military Violence in the Elegies, Lant's Roll , and Greville's Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney. - * INTERLUDE Scatter'd Men: Mutilated Male Bodies and Conflicting Narratives of Militant Nostalgia in Shakespeare's Henry V* .-

CHAPTER 3 The Armored Body as Trophy: The Problem of the Roman Subject in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar , Antony and Cleopatra , and Coriolanus .- CODA Let's Do't After the High Roman Fashion: Funeral and Triumph.- BIBLIOGRAPHY.