Questioning Bodies in Shakespeare’s Rome

Edited by Maria Del Sapio Garbero Edited by Nancy Isenberg Edited by Maddalena Pennacchia Series edited by Vita Fortunati Series edited by Elena Agazzi

Book cover: Questioning Bodies in Shakespeare’s Rome

Extent: 388 pages

Publisher: V&R unipress

Subjects: Early Modern & Renaissance Studies

Series: Interfacing Science, Literature, and the Humanities / ACUME 2

Language: English

Hardback (Published)

(January 2010)

ISBN: 9783899717402

6.46 x 9.69 inches

Price: $113.00

In stock

Shakespeare, Rome, and the New Science: Re-mapping the World and the Human in Renaissance culture.


Ancient Rome has always been considered a compendium of City and World. In the Renaissance, an era of epistemic fractures, when the clash between the ‘new science’ (Copernicus, Galileo, Vesalius, Bacon, etcetera) and the authority of ancient texts produced the very notion of modernity, the extended and expanding geography of ancient Rome becomes, for Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, a privileged arena in which to question the nature of bodies and the place they hold in a changing order of the universe. Drawing on the rich scenario provided by Shakespeare’s Rome, and adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, the authors of this volume address the way in which the different bodies of the earthly and heavenly spheres are re-mapped in Shakespeare’s time and in early modern European culture. More precisely, they investigate the way bodies are fashioned to suit or deconstruct a culturally articulated system of analogies between earth and heaven, microcosm and macrocosm. As a whole, this collection brings to the fore a wide range of issues connected to the Renaissance re-mapping of the world and the human. It should interest not only Shakespeare scholars but all those working on the interaction between sciences and humanities.

Maria Del Sapio Garbero is Professor of English Literature at Roma Tre University, Italy.

  • Edited by Maria Del Sapio Garbero
  • Edited by Nancy Isenberg
  • Edited by Maddalena Pennacchia
  • Series edited by Vita Fortunati
  • Series edited by Elena Agazzi