A history of the Finger Lakes region written from the perspective of spirits of historical figures.

A major new study of the notorious Restoration rake-poet, set in his intellectual context.

John Wilmot, the notorious Earl of Rochester, was the darling of the polished, profligate court of Charles II. One of the finest poets of the Restoration, patron to important playwrights, model for countless witty young rakes in Restoration comedies, he lived a full but short life, dying in 1680 (with a dramatic deathbed renunciation of his atheism) at the age of thirty-three. This edition of Rochester's poetry, brilliantly annotated and introduced by David M. Vieth, has been a classic work for decades. Rochester had many admirers: Graham Greene wrote Lord Rochester's Monkey; Daniel Defoe quoted him often; Tennyson recited his poems; Voltaire admired his satire for 'energy and fire'; Goethe could quote him in English; and Hazlitt said that 'his verses cut and sparkle like diamonds' and that 'his contempt for everything that others respect almost amounts to sublimity'. Book jacket.

The Farce of Sodom is a sexually explicit play which satirizes the reign of Charles II of England during the Restoration of the English monarchy. Explicit and uncompromising in tone, this send-up of the Royal Court grossly exaggerates the rumors surrounding the court of the king. We witness the homosexual King Bolloximian ban ordinary sexual intercourse in his kingdom, decreeing that only anal intercourse be permitted among the entire population. The excesses of the wealthy are shown in a sequence of erotic acts in a court preoccupied with luxuriating in debauchery. Eventually the nature of the acts the wealthy are consigned to perform upsets enough members of the court, and King Bolloximian is violently deposed. He and his closest companions are then consigned to hellfire. Banned for centuries, during recent years The Farce of Sodom has attracted renewed appreciation, with a version of the drama staged at the 2011 Edinburgh Festival.

This book is a travelogue that takes the reader on a journey through the Genesee Valley, the Lakes Country, and the Ridge in New York State. The book includes historical and cultural information about the places visited on the journey. The book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in New York State history and culture. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Lucinda Cole’s Imperfect Creatures offers the first full-length study of the shifting, unstable, but foundational status of “vermin” as creatures and category in the early modern literary, scientific, and political imagination. In the space between theology and an emergent empiricism, Cole’s argument engages a wide historical swath of canonical early modern literary texts—William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Abraham Cowley’s The Plagues of Egypt, Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, the Earl of Rochester’s “A Ramble in St. James’s Park,” and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Journal of the Plague Year—alongside other nonliterary primary sources and under-examined archival materials from the period, including treatises on animal trials, grain shortages, rabies, and comparative neuroanatomy. As Cole illustrates, human health and demographic problems—notably those of feeding populations periodically stricken by hunger, disease, and famine—were tied to larger questions about food supplies, property laws, national identity, and the theological imperatives that underwrote humankind’s claim to dominion over the animal kingdom. In this context, Cole’s study indicates, so-called “vermin” occupied liminal spaces between subject and object, nature and animal, animal and the devil, the devil and disease—even reason and madness. This verminous discourse formed a foundational category used to carve out humankind’s relationship to an unpredictable, irrational natural world, but it evolved into a form for thinking about not merely animals but anything that threatened the health of the body politic—humans, animals, and even thoughts.