Rebecca Totaro's Books

The Plague in Print

Essential Elizabethan Sources, 1558–1603

By: Rebecca Totaro

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The Plague in Print

Essential Elizabethan Sources, 1558–1603

By: Rebecca Totaro

In The Plague in Print, Rebecca Totaro takes the reader into the world of plague-riddled Elizabethan England, documenting the development of distinct subgenres related to the plague and providing unprecedented access to important original sources of early modern plague writing. Totaro elucidates the interdisciplinary nature of plague writing, which raises religious, medical, civic, social, and individual concerns in early modern England. Each of the primary texts in the collection offers a glimpse into a particular subgenre of plague writing, beginning with Thomas Moulton’s plague remedy and prayers published by the Church of England and devoted to the issue of the plague. William Bullein’s A Dialogue, both pleasant and pietyful, a work that both addresses concerns related to the plague and offers humorous literary entertainment, exemplifies the multilayered nature of plague literature. The plague orders of Queen Elizabeth I highlight the community-wide attempts to combat the plague and deal with its manifold dilemmas. And after a plague bill from the Corporation of London, the collection ends with Thomas Dekker’s The Wonderful Year, which illustrates plague literature as it was fully formed, combining attitudes toward the plague from both the Elizabethan and Stuart periods. These writings offer a vivid picture of important themes particular to plague literature in England, providing valuable insight into the beliefs and fears of those who suffered through bubonic plague while illuminating the cultural significance of references to the plague in the more familiar early modern literature by Spenser, Donne, Milton, Shakespeare, and others. As a result, The Plague in Print will be of interest to students and scholars in a number of fields, including sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, cultural studies, medical humanities, and the history of medicine.

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Page Count

321

Publisher

Penn State Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820705292

ISBN 13

9780820705293

Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern Culture

Earthquakes, Human Identity, and Textual Representation

By: Rebecca Totaro

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Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern Culture

Earthquakes, Human Identity, and Textual Representation

By: Rebecca Totaro

Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern Culture: Earthquakes, Human Identity, and Textual Representation provides the first sustained examination of the foundational set of early modern beliefs linking meteorology and physiology. This was a relationship so intimate and, to us, poetic that we have spent centuries assuming early moderns were using figurative language when they represented the matter and motions of their bodies in meteorological terms and weather events in physiological ones. Early moderns believed they inhabited a geocentric universe in which the matter and motions constituting all sublunary things were the same and that therefore all things were compositionally and interactively related. What physically generated anger, erotic desire, and plague also generated thunder, the earthquake, and the comet. As a result, the interpretation of meteorological events, such as the 1580 earthquake in the Dover Strait, was consequential. With its radical and seemingly spontaneous shaking, an earthquake could expose inconvenient truths about the cause of matter and motion and about what, if anything, distinguishes humans from every other thing and from events. Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern Culture reveals a need for reexamination of all representations of meteorology and physiology in the period. This reexamination begins here with a focus on the Titanic metamorphoses captured by Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, and the many writers responding to the 1580 earthquake.

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Page Count

263

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1351607626

ISBN 13

9781351607629

Let Me be a Refugee

Administrative Justice and the Politics of Asylum in the United States, Canada, and Australia

By: Rebecca Hamlin

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Let Me be a Refugee

Administrative Justice and the Politics of Asylum in the United States, Canada, and Australia

By: Rebecca Hamlin

Why do decision-makers in similar liberal democracies interpret the same legal definition in very different ways? International law provides states with a common definition of a "refugee" as well as guidelines outlining how asylum claims should be decided. Yet, the processes by which countries determine who should be granted refugee status look strikingly different, even across nations with many political, cultural, geographical, and institutional commonalities. This book compares the refugee status determination (RSD) regimes of three popular asylum seeker destinations - the United States, Canada, and Australia. Despite similarly high levels of political resistance to accepting asylum seekers across these three states, once asylum seekers cross their borders, they access three very different systems. These differences are significant both in terms of asylum seekers' experience of the process and in terms of their likelihood of being found to be a refugee. The book moves beyond the claim by some scholars that asylum seeker destinations are uniformly becoming more exclusionary, and the contrary assertions of other scholars that the same destinations are converging on a new inclusive internationalism leading to the decline of state sovereignty. Instead, Hamlin finds these states to be running on three distinct trajectories, none of which are totally restrictive or expansive. Based on a multi-method analysis of all three countries, including a year of fieldwork with in-depth interviews of policy-makers and asylum-seeker advocates, observations of refugee status determination hearings, and a large-scale case analysis, Hamlin finds that cross-national differences have less to do with political debates over admission and border control policy than with the level of insulation the administrative decision-making agency enjoys from either political interference or judicial review. Administrative justice is conceptualized and organized differently in every state, and so states vary in how they draw the line between refugee and non-refugee.

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Page Count

249

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199373310

ISBN 13

9780199373314

The Lady Anatomist

The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini

By: Rebecca Messbarger

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The Lady Anatomist

The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini

By: Rebecca Messbarger

Anna Morandi Manzolini (1714-74), a woman artist and scientist, surmounted meager origins and limited formal education to become one of the most acclaimed anatomical sculptors of the Enlightenment. The Lady Anatomist tells the story of her arresting life and times, in light of the intertwined histories of science, gender, and art that complicated her rise to fame in the eighteenth century. Examining the details of Morandi’s remarkable life, Rebecca Messbarger traces her intellectual trajectory from provincial artist to internationally renowned anatomical wax modeler for the University of Bologna’s famous medical school. Placing Morandi’s work within its cultural and historical context, as well as in line with the Italian tradition of anatomical studies and design, Messbarger uncovers the messages contained within Morandi’s wax inscriptions, part complex theories of the body and part poetry. Widely appealing to those with an interest in the tangled histories of art and the body, and including lavish, full-color reproductions of Morandi’s work, The Lady Anatomist is a sophisticated biography of a true visionary.

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