This new series features five online museum exhibits created by undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin for a class titled “Colonial Latin America Through Objects.” The class assumes that Latin America was never a continent onto itself. The course also insists that objects document the nature of historical change in […]
Sir John Hawkins: Queen Elizabeth’s Slave Trader, by Harry Kelsey (2003)
Following his successful biography of the famous English corsair, Francis Drake, Harry Kelsey turns to Drake’s lesser-known but equally adventurous cousin, John Hawkins (1532-1595).
From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature, by Barbara Newman (1995)
What do virility, erotic passion, and the child abandonment have to do with the history of Christianity? In her collection of essays entitled From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature, Barbara Newman addresses these subjects in relation to a shift in gender ideologies in the medieval Church between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries.
Religion and the Decline of Magic, by Keith Thomas (1971)
Political and religious discord, disease, famine, fire, and death afflicted the lives of the English population between 1500 and 1700. While alcohol and tobacco provided an escape, Keith Thomas argues that astrology, magic, and religion offered all levels of society a way to make sense of human misfortune.
The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature, by Barbara Fuchs (2013)
For Shakespeare and contemporaries on page and stage like Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, and Thomas Middleton, “the Spanish vein” ran rich and deep, “even as the political situation between the two nations deteriorated in the wake of the Reformation and imperial rivalries.”