Table of Contents

Introduction.- “Live like a King”—Monument of Philopappus and the Continuity of Client-King.- Dreams of Kings in the Liber Thesauri Occulti of Pascalis Romanus.- The Jewel for the Crown: Reconsidering Female Kingship and Queenship in the Galfridian Historiography.- King Arthur: Leadership Masculinity and Homosocial Manhood.- Innocent and Simple: The Making of Henry VI’s Kingship in Fifteenth Century England.- Mending People’s Broken Hearts: the Fashioning of Rulership in John Ford’s The Broken Heart.- Henrietta Maria as a Mediatrix of French Court Culture: A Reconsideration of the Decorations in the Queen’s House.- Royalty and Divinity in Katherine Philips’s Poems.- Private and Public: Rulers, Kings and Tyrants in Plato, Aristotle, John of Salisbury, Shakespeare and His Contemporaries.- Tobias Smollett’s Literary Redefinition of Kingship for the Eighteenth Century.

Promotional Information

"This collection stands out for its varied range of topics, multifaceted approaches, diversified perspectives and a thoughtful dialogical introduction that widens the purview of the medieval West. It is immensely exciting and rewarding to see the fruits of an international collaboration with uniquely important and substantial contributions by East Asian scholars to one of the major themes in medieval and early modern studies." (Yu-cheng Lee, Distinguished Research Fellow, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica) "Perceiving Power in Early Modern Europe is an eclectic collection of essays that together traces the evolution of absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy. The essays bring out an array of the axes and valences of power ... . Professor Francis K. H. So's informative and sure-footed introduction not only places the discrete essays in a provocative dialogical context but also present analogous Chinese notions of kingship such as the Mandate of Heaven and Wang Dao-notions that parallel the divine rights of kings / the Magna Carta and noblesse oblige respectively." (King-Kok Cheung, Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles)

About the Author

Francis So is chair professor of English at Kaohsiung Medical University. He has taught and served as administrator at National Sun Yat-sen University and Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages. He has published works on medieval and Renaissance English literature, Chinese-Western comparative literature and cultural contacts along the Silk Road.