Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Milton And The Middle Ages: Poetic Analogues And Visual Representations Of The War In Heaven, Expulsion Of The Rebel Angels, And Michael And The Dragon, Steven Hrdlicka

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Milton is not typically connected to the Middle Ages as much as to the later Enlightenment and the Romantic periods. Yet many distinctively medieval ideas can be seen in Paradise Lost, especially in the scenes that are related to the War in Heaven. Milton’s account of the war displays a medieval understanding of history in terms of typology in the drama of salvation. Particular details about the war itself such as St. Michael and Lucifer’s sword fight, Jesus’ eventual ending of the war, and the human characteristics of the fallen angels all have clear parallels in longstanding Christian poetic and …

The Signifying Power Of Pearl, Jane Beal

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The spiritual language, Ovidian love stories, and use of liturgical time in Pearl all invite allegorical interpretations of the poem. While there is clearly a literal, elegiac sense to the poem, there are also allegorical meanings. This makes perfect sense in light of the tradition of four-fold scriptural and literary interpretation in the Middle Ages, which the Pearl-Poet clearly used to understand biblical parables and compose his poetic masterpiece. The poet’s use of metaphoric language, memory of the legends of Orpheus and Eurydice and Pygmalion and Galatea, and astute interweaving of parables from the church liturgy alongside invocations of the …

Temples Of Caesar: The Politics Of Renaissance Georgics Translations, Kimberly Johnson

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Between the last years of Elizabeth I’s reign and the regicide of Charles I, three major English translations of Virgil’s middle poem, the Georgics, were published. Each translation appeared at a moment of religio-political crisis in England, a coincidence made more significant by the ambivalent political stance of Virgil’s text, which simultaneously communicates praise for Octavian and suspicion about an imperial program that disenfranchised the agricultural classes, an oversight which Virgil records in the Georgics as impiety. This paper charts the ways in which seemingly innocent translation decisions manage to perform a critical interrogation of monarchal authority, particularly as it …

Old Icelandic Gaglviðr, Aurelijus Vijūnas

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This essay discusses a debated word form gaglviðr occurring in stanza 42 of the Old Icelandic poem VÄluspá 'The Prophesy of the Seeress'. The noun gaglviðr is problematic both from the semantic point of view (Old Icelandic gagl 'gosling', viðr 'tree; forest' 'gosling forest'?), and because it possesses a variant spelling galgviðr ('gallows' tree;’gallows' forest') which occurs in another manuscript containing the same poem. In the present paper, the form gaglviðr is considered to be the correct and the original form of this word, whereas the form galgviðr is interpreted as a scribal error. Various existing semantic analyses of the …

Pain For Pen: Gaspara Stampa's Stile Novo, Amy R. Insalaco

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The Italian critic and scholar, Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) dismisses Gaspara Stampa's Rime (1553) thus:

She was a woman; And usually a woman, when she is not given to ape men, uses poetry and submits it to her affections because she loves her lover or her own children more than poetry. The lazy practice of women is revealed in their scanty theoretical and contemplative power.

For him, Stampa’s poetry is somehow inferior to her male counterpart’s poetry because it lacks “theoretical and contemplative power.” This essay will analyze aspects of Stampa’s poetry which disprove this claim.

Allen D. Breck Award Winner: Nothing’S Paradox In Donne’S “Negative Love” And “A Nocturnal Upon S. Lucy’S Day”, Sean Ford

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John Donne's complicated use of paradox is nowhere more inviting than in the grammatical and conceptual use of the word "nothing," especially when Donne chooses to give this noun the quality of substance and presence, rather than using it to denote the absence of anything. Two poems in particular, from the Songs and Sonets, give affirmative existence to a nothing in order to make distinct arguments regard- ing the status of an existing thing. Both “Negative Love” and “A Nocturnal Upon S. Lucy’s Day, being the shortest day” rely on this paradox to give a precise definition of the …

Review Essay: Jeffrey Powers-Beck. Writing The Flesh: The Herbert Family Dialogue, Owen Staley

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Jeffrey Powers-Beck. Writing the Flesh: The Herbert Family Dialogue. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998. 290 pp. incl. bibliography, 3 appendices, and index. $54.50 cloth. ISBN 0–8207–0283–5.

“Sad Stories Of The Death Of Kings”: Lyric And Narrative Release From Confining Spaces In Shakespeare’S Richard Ii, Jennifer C. Vaught

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The relation of Shakespeare's plays to other literary forms like lyric and narrative is a topic that continues to invite speculation. A number of his plays contain songs and sonnets, reported stories and winter’s tales. In this essay I examine lyrics and narratives in Richard II and their dialogic relation to the surrounding text. In a play about a self-enclosed King these utterances tend to occur in enclosures: Richard delivers lyrics while immured at Flint Castle and the dungeon at Pomfret, whereas his Queen laments in an enclosed garden and promises to tell the King’s story during her exile in …

John Skelton's "Agenst Garnesche": Poetic Territorialism, At The Court Of Henry Viii, Victor I. Scherb

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John Skelton's 1514 flyting "Agenst Garnesche" has been subject to little critical scrutiny. This neglect can perhaps be attributed to the fact that Christopher Garnesche's contribution is missing, but it is also characteristic of the relative neglect accorded to the flyting as a genre, a neglect that has also colored the interpretation of many of Skelton's more abusive poems. One critic, for example, has dismissed the poem as being "nothing but personal abuse of a particularly virulent type . . . adorned with a singular collection of epithets and incomprehensible allusions, which serve only to befog and irritate the reader." …

Review Essay: Willbern, David. Poetic Will: Shakespeare And The Play Of Language, Frederick Kiefer

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Willbern, David. Poetic Will: Shakespeare and the Play of Language. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1997. xix + 237 pp. $37.50.

Review Essay: De' Medici, Lorenzo. The Autobiography Of Lorenzo De' Medici The Magnificent: A Commentary On My Sonnets, Joseph Rosenblum

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de' Medici, Lorenzo. The Autobiography of Lorenzo de' Medici the Magnificent: A Commentary on My Sonnets. Trans. James Wyatt Cook. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, vol. 129. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, Binghamton, N.Y., 1995. 289 pp. $28.

Divergent Journeys: Devils, Readers, And The Narrator's Art In 'Þe Deuelis Perlament', Gary D. Schmidt

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In 1509, Wynkyn de Worde published a five-hundred-line poem that he, in defiance of the poet's own suggestion that the piece be called 'þe Deuelis Perlament' (1 490), entitled 'The Parliment of Fyendys'. It would remain known by that title — if it can be said to have been known at all — for the next three centuries, when the Roxburghe Club reprinted de Worde's text about 1820 for private distribution. A wider audience would wait almost another half-century for Furnivall's EETS edition in 1868. But still another century would pass before 'þe Deuelis Perlament' began to be taken seriously …

Review Essay: Kugel, James L., Ed. Poetry And Prophecy: The Beginnings Of A Literary Tradition, Janine Marie Idziak

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Kugel, James L., ed. Poetry and Prophecy: The Beginnings of a Literary Tradition. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y. 1990. 251 pp. $13.95.

Review Essay: John D. Bernard, Ceremonies Of Innocence: Pastoralism In The Poetry Of Edmund Spenser, Steven Max Miller

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John D. Bernard, Ceremonies of Innocence: Pastoralism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser, Cambridge University Press, 1989, ix, 242 pp., biblio., $42.50.

Gaspara Stampa's Poetry For Performance, Janet L. Smarr

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During the mid-sixteenth century in Italy, when a remarkable number of women joined in the production of poetry, one of the channels open to their pursuit of intellectual life and fame was the Venetian saloon. There music and poetry mingled as poems were frequently sung or recited before an audience rather than read privately in silence. The poetry of Gaspara Stampa was produced for this milieu. Published in 1554, a year after her death, her collection of more than three hundred poems has been approached in two main ways: as the autobiographical self-expression of a passionate woman and more recently …

Chaucer's Sense Of An Ending, Colleen Donnelly

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The problem of closure plagued Chaucer throughout his career, and critics have continued to point out his 'inability" to end or finish many of his poems. This lack of closure often frustrates the casual reader and perplexes the serious scholar, leaving both to wonder if Chaucer was incapable of bringing his poems to an end or if he simply intended to tease his audience with such inconclusiveness. Neither answer is quite satisfactory. To understand that this inconclusiveness was deliberately created by Chaucer the master poet, and not by Chaucer resignedly handing the pen over to the befuddled persona whoo records …

Sodom And Gomorrah: The Use Of Mandeville's Travels In Cleanness, Liam O. Purdon

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The Pearl-Poet's late fourteenth-century appropriation in Cleanness of a mid-fourteenth century work, Mandeville's Travels, has been an established fact since the publication of Robert J. Menner's edition of the poem. The poet uses the Travels as a source for two important episodes: the description of Sodom and Gomorrah's cataclysmic destruction and the description of Belshazzar's brief and idolatrous reign in Babylon. While many points of connection between the Travels and Cleanness in the Sodom and Gomorrah episode have been identified, the poet's dependence on Mandeville in this scene raises two questions that have not yet been satisfactorily answered. …

Gawain's "Anti-Feminism" Reconsidered, S. L. Clark, Julian N. Wasserman

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In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the protagonist survives the return blow for which he had contracted with the Green Knight but finds to his dismay that he has unwittingly failed a more significant test. As the awareness comes to Gawain that the Green Knight and his Yuletide host share one identity, that it was upon Bercilak's instructions that his wife attempted to seduce him, and that Morgan la Fée had, in effect, master-minded the whole plan, Gawain reacts with bursts of anger which, wen analyzed, speak not only to the Pearl-Poet's skill at characterization but also …

Bacon's Allegory Of Science: The Theater Of The New Atlantis, Patricia Demers

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I conceive that I perform the office of a true priest of the sense (from which all knowledge in nature must be sought, unless men mean to go mad) and a not unskilful interpreter of its oracles. ("The Plan of the Work," The Great Instauration)

Dramatic poesy among the ancients ... has been regarded by learned men and great philosophers as a kind of musician's bow by which men's minds may be played upon. (Translation of the "De Augmentis," The Second Book)

"Diuine Resemblaunce": Colin Clout's Vision Of Grace, John C. Ulreich

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Colin Clout's vision of the Graces is the imaginative center of Book VI, and in a sense of the whole Faerie Queene, "the sacred noursery / Of vertue" (VI. Proem 3), wherein both the Knight of Courtesy and the reader are instructed in the "vertuous and gentle disciple" of the imagination ("Letter to Raleigh," II, 495). Spenser's readers have been virtually unanimous in their agreement with C. S. Lewis, that the vision on Mount Acidale is "the key to Spenser's whole conception of Courtesy." But there has been considerably less agreement about the precise significance of Spenser's vision. In …

Vegetable Love: Metamorphosis And Morality In Hesperides, Frances M. Malpezzi

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Recent critics of Hesperides, less content than their predecessors with the plucking of but one of Herrick's golden apples, the examination of its beauty, and the savoring of its sweetness, have attempted the task of surveying the landscape of the entire garden, elucidating the pattern of its design, and identifying the various species of plants growing therein. The emphasis now is on seeing Hesperides as an integrated and thematically unified construct. The studies by Whitaker, Chambers, Deming, Rollin, and DeNeef are concerned with the ceremonial mode that pervades the poems in Hesperides. The consensus of these writers is …

Some Observations Of The Deposition Of Archbishop Theodulf Of Orleans In 817, Thomas F. X. Noble

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Theodulf of Orleans, called by Ann Freeman "one of the brightest lights of the Carolingian Renaissance," is one of the most fascinating individuals in the history of the eighth and ninth centuries. He was a fine poet, perhaps the best of the Carolingian era, and more than 4,000 of his verses survive. His Paranesis ad iudices and his work on the filioque dispute indicate that he was a skilled controversialist. Finally, his authorship of the Libri Carolini, the massive Carolingian treatise against the positions on icons taken by the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, reflects a theological knowledge …

The Meaning Of Symmetry, S. K. Heninger

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(An Address Delivered to the 1979 Meeting of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association)

Closure In The Early Spanish Ballad, David William Foster

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One of the hoariest cliches in traditional literary histories apropos the early Spanish ballad (i.e., the Romancero viejo of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) concerns poetic ending or closure: "[The early ballads] frequently end as abruptly as they begin, oftentimes seemingly unconcluded, a characteristic which gives them an air of mystery and special charm." The feature is often attributable to the general and specific origins of the texts in the fragmentation of longer epic poems and chronicles, or in the truncation of longer ballads. The most representative example is "Conde Arnaldos," one of the best of the early Spanish ballads …

"A Growing Or Full Constant Light": A Reading Of Donne's "A Lecture Upon The Shadow", Diane Elizabeth Dreher

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John Donne's "A Lecture Upon the Shadow" has given rise to extensive critical commentary, most of it devoted to the shadow imagery in the poem. However, no one, to date, has proposed a satisfactory explanation for the shadow's shift in meaning from the realm of natural phenomena to that of conjecture and imagination. Pierre Legouis has concluded that "the similitude does not hold good ... it is imperfect." Yet an acceptable explanation is possible and the similitude does hold good when the poem is considered in terms of its dominant structural pattern, the Bonaventuran meditation. In keeping with meditative practice, …