Humankinds : the renaissance and its anthropologies / edited by Andreas Höfele ; Stephan Laqué.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Anthropology is a notoriously polysemous term. Within a continental European academic context, it is usually employed in the sense of philosophical anthropology, and mainly concerned with exploring concepts of a universal human nature. By contrast, Anglo-American scholarship almost exclusively associates anthropology with the investigation of cultural and ethnic differences (cultural anthropology). How these two main traditions (and their 'derivations' such as literary anthropology, historical anthropology, ethnology, ethnography, intercultural studies) relate to each other is a matter of debate. Both, however, have their roots in the path-breaking changes that occurred within sixteenth and early seventeenth-century culture and scientific discourse. It was in fact during this period that the term anthropology first acquired the meanings on which its current usage is based. The Renaissance did not 'invent' the human. But the period that gave rise to 'humanism' witnessed an unprecedented diversification of the concept that was at its very core. The question of what defines the human became increasingly contested as new developments like the emergence of the natural sciences, religious pluralisation, as well as colonial expansion, were undermining old certainties. The proliferation of doctrines of the human in the early modern age bears out the assumption that anthropology is a discipline of crisis, seeking to establish sets of common values and discursive norms in situations when authority finds itself under pressure."--Publisher's website

Print version record.

Literary Sites of the Human. Liminal Anthropology in Shakespeare's Plays / Aleida Assmann. -- The Space of the Human and the Place of the Poet: Excursions into English Topographical Poetry / Serena Olejniczak Lobsien.

Religious Beings. Among the Fairies: Religion and the Anthropology of Ritual in Shakespeare / Brian Cummings. -- Golding's Metamorphoses, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and Puritan Anthropology / Enno Ruge.

Negotiating the Foreign. When Golden times convents: Shakespeare's Eastern Promise / Richard Wilson. -- "Cony Caught by Walking Mort": Indigenous Exoticism in the Literature of Roguery / Bettina Boecker. -- Renaissance Anthropologies of Security: Shipwreck, Barbary fear and the Meaning of 'Insurance' / Cornel Zwierlein.

Human and Non-Human. Shakespeare's Public Animals / Paul Yachnin. -- "Fellow-brethren and compeers": Montaigne's Rapprochement Between Man and Animal / Markus Wild. -- Animal Art /Human Art: Imagined Borderlines in the Renaissance / Ulrich Pfisterer.

Thinking the Human. "Now they're substances and men": The Masque of Lethe and the Recovery of Humankind / Tobias Döring. -- Shakespeare Ever After: Posthumanism and Shakespeare / Stefan Herbrechter.

In English.

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