
Impossible bequests of the soul; an outlawed younger son who rises to become justice of the king's forests; the artificially-preserved corpse of the heir to an empire; a medieval clerk kept awake at night by fears of falling; a seventeenth-century noblewoman who commissions copies upon copies of her genealogy; Elizabethan efforts to eradicate Irish customs of succession; thoughts of the legacy of sin bequeathed to mankind by our first parents, Adam and Eve. This book explores how inheritance was imagined between the lifetimes of Chaucer and Shakespeare. The writing composed during this period was the product of what the historian Georges Duby has called a 'society of heirs', in which inheritance functioned as a key instrument of social reproduction, acting to ensure that existing structures of status, wealth, familial power, political influence, and gender relations were projected from the present into the future. In poetry, prose, and drama--in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and his Canterbury Tales; in Spenser's Faerie Queene; in plays by Shakespeare such as Macbeth, As You Like It, and The Merchant of Venice; and in a host of other works--we encounter a range of texts that attests to the extraordinary imaginative reach of questions of inheritance between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Moving between the late medieval and early modern periods, Imagining Inheritance examines this body of writing in order to argue that an exploration of the ways in which premodern inheritance was imagined can make legible the deep structures of power that modernity wants to forget.
This book investigates how the concept of inheritance functioned as a primary mechanism for social reproduction and power projection in English literature between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. Alex Davis, a scholar of medieval and early modern literature, utilizes a wide range of canonical texts to argue that premodern inheritance practices reveal foundational structures of status, wealth, and gender that continue to influence modern societal frameworks. By analyzing poetry, prose, and drama, the author demonstrates how these literary works served as sites for negotiating the transmission of familial and political authority.
What You Will Find
Scope Limits
Scholars recognize this work as a significant contribution to the study of premodern social structures and their representation in literature. Readers frequently note the academic rigor and the breadth of the author's textual analysis across the transition from the medieval to the early modern era.
Page Count:
311
Publication Date:
2020-01-01
Publisher:
OUP Oxford
ISBN-10:
0192592130
ISBN-13:
9780192592132
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