Patrick J. McGrath. Early Modern Asceticism: Literature, Religion, and Austerity in the English Renaissance. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. Pp. 248. $72.00 (cloth).

Abstract Reformation theology induced a profound thanatological crisis in the semiotics of the human being and the body. The Protestant Reformation discontinued numerous practices of intercession and communal ritual, and the early modern subject was left vulnerable in the face of death. The English Renaissance stage played out these anxieties within the larger context of the epistemological uncertainties of the age, employing violence and the anatomization of the body as representational techniques. While theories of language and tragic poetry oscillated between different ideas of imitatio (granting priority to the model) and mimesis (with preference for the creative and individual nature of the copy), the new anatomical interest and dissective perspectives also had their effects on the rhetorical practices of revenge tragedies. In the most shocking moments of these plays, rhetorical tropes suddenly turn into grisly reality, and figures of speech become demetaphorized, literalized. In a double anatomy of body and mind, English Renaissance revenge tragedy simultaneously employs and questions the emblematic and poetic traditions of representation, and the ensuing indeterminacy and ambiguity open paths for a new mimesis.

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Word-entries and Big Data in Lexicons of Early Modern English

Renaissance and Reformation ◽

10.33137/rr.v37i4.22648 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 37 (4) ◽

pp. 215-234

Author(s):

Ian Lancashire

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Text Analysis ◽

Online Database ◽

Modern Language ◽

University Of Toronto ◽

The Past ◽

Early Modern English ◽

History Of ◽

Survival And Growth ◽

The University

This brief thirty-year history of Lexicons of Early Modern English, an online database of glossaries and dictionaries of the period, begins in a fourteenth-floor Robarts Library lab of the Centre for Computing and the Humanities at the University of Toronto in 1986. It was first published freely online in 1996 as the Early Modern English Dictionaries Database. Ten years later, in a seventh-floor lab also in the Robarts Library, it came out as LEME, thanks to support from TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) and the University of Toronto Press and Library. No other modern language has such a resource. The most important reason for the emergence, survival, and growth of LEME is that its contemporary lexicographers understood their language differently from how we, our many advantages notwithstanding, have conceived it over the past two centuries. Cette brève histoire des trente ans du Lexicons of Early Modern English, une base de données en ligne de glossaires et de dictionnaires de l’époque, commence en 1986 dans le laboratoire du Centre for Computing and the Humanities, au quatorzième étage de la bibliothèque Robarts de l’Université de Toronto. Cette base de données a été publiée gratuitement en ligne premièrement en 1996, sous le titre Early Modern English Dictionnaires Database. Dix ans plus tard, elle était publiée sous le sigle LEME, à partir du septième étage de la même bibliothèque Robarts, grâce au soutien du TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research), de la bibliothèque et des presses de l’Université de Toronto. Aucune autre langue vivante ne dispose d’une telle ressource. La principale raison expliquant l’émergence, la survie et la croissance du LEME est que les lexicographes qui font l’objet du LEME comprenaient leur langue très différemment que nous la concevons depuis deux siècles, et ce nonobstant plusieurs de nos avantages.

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