Renaissance bodies : the human figure in English culture c.1540-1660 / edited by Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Renaissance Bodies is a unique collection of views on the ways in which the human image has been represented in the arts and literature of English Renaissance society. The subjects discussed range from high art to popular culture - from portraits of Elizabeth I to polemical prints mocking religious fanaticism - and include miniatures, manners, anatomy, drama and architectural patronage. The authors, art historians and literary critics, reflect diverse critical viewpoints, and the 78 illustrations present a fascinating exhibition of the often strange and haunting images of the period.

With essays by John Peacock, Elizabeth Honig, Andrew and Catherine Belsey, Jonathan Sawday, Susan Wiseman, Ellen Chirelstein, Tamsyn Williams, Anna Bryson, Maurice Howard and Nigel Llewellyn.

"The whole book ... presents a mirror of contemporary concerns with power, the merits and demerits of individualism, sex-roles, 'selves', the meaning of community and (even) conspicuous consumption."-- The Observer

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Photographic Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Editors and Contributors
• 1 Icons of Divinity: Portraits of Elizabeth I
• 2 Lady Elizabeth Pope: The Heraldic Body
• 3 In Memory: Lady Dacre and Pairing by Hans Eworth
• 4 Magnetic Figures': Polemical Prints of the English Revolution
• 5 The Fate of Marsyas: Dissecting the Renaissance Body
• 6 The Rhetoric of Status: Gesture, Demeanour and the Image of the Gentleman in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England
• 7 Inigo Jones as a Figurative Artist
• 8 'Tis Pity She's a Whore: Representing the Incestuous Body
• 9 Self-Fashioning and the Classical Moment in Mid-Sixteenth-Century English Architecture
• 10 The Royal Body: Monuments to the Dead, For the Living
• References
• Select Bibliography
• Index