Introduction
1: Terrorism Before the Letter
2: The Act
3: Agents
4: Scene
5: Agency
6: Purpose
A Brief Conclusion
Robert Appelbaum received his BA (Tutorial Studies) from the
University of Chicago an his PhD (English) from the University of
California, Berkeley. He taught at the University of Cincinnati,
the University of San Diego, and the Lancaster University before
taking up his current position as Professor of English Literature
at Uppsala University, Sweden. He has been a fellow of the Mellon
Foundation, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the British Academy,
the Leverhulme
Foundation, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the
Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. In 2007 he received the
Roland H. Bainton Prize for his study of food, literature and
culture in
the Renaissance, Aguecheek's Beef.
This ambitious work has a great deal to offer scholars of early
modern history as well as the study of terrorism ... His thesis
that there is a nascent 'line of descent' in terrorist violence,
from the ancient world, to the early modern, to the modern day, is
compelling. It suggests new directions for historians of violence
when considering early instances of terror, and convincingly argues
for a broader approach to critical terrorism studies.
*Jane Fitzgerald, Parergon*
Terrorism before the Letter carefully recovers the literary history
of a so-called mythography of terrorism that Robert Applebaum
locates in the bloody religious conflicts of early modern Europe.
While boldly considering early modern political violence as
terrorism, Applebaum argues that literature must be discussed by
scholars of terrorism more broadly ... Terrorism before the Letter
offers a timely contribution to terrorist studies.
*Alexander D. Campbell, Times Literary Supplement*
...the book provides a model of applying present-day ways of
thinking about terrorism to the past, while respecting that past on
its own terms. The result leads to a number of insights, many of
them brilliant, that would bene?t all who are interested in
questions of violence and its many representations.
*Sarah Covinton, The Graduate Center and Queens College, CUNY,
Renaissance Quarterly*
...this is a book to make historians think. His stated goals are to
push critical terrorism studies towards a richer engagement with
literary analysis, and to provide contemporary debates with a sense
of how vested Western culture has been in the imaginary of
terrorism (p. 27). But his book deserves to stimulate
historiographical debate, not only about violence, terrorism and
writing, but also about the possibility of transnational
comparative approaches to the darker passages of the European
past.
*Alastair Bellany, English Historical Review*
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