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The Demonization Of Sidney’S Cecropia: Erasing A Legal Identity, Stephanie Chamberlain

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In October fo 1533, fourteen-year-old Catherine de' Medici married Henri, duc d'Orléans in a union meant to secure a favorable political alliance between Francis I, the King of France and Pope Clement VII, her uncle and legal guardian. When, however, the Pope unexpectedly died less than a year later, Catherine’s symbolic worth virtually died as well: leaving a less than enamored France to bear the burden of one whose status, as R. J. Knecht has noted, “was immediately reduced to that of a foreigner of relatively modest origins.”1 When Henri unexpectedly died following a ceremonial jousting match in 1559, Catherine …

Glimpsing Medusa: Astoned In The Troilus, Timothy D. O'Brien

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In these pages I would like to consider the role of Medusa in Chaucer's Troilus—a modest enough enterprise except for the fact that there is not a single reference to this puzzling figure in the entire work, or in any of Chaucer’s other works for that matter. Such an absence does not of course mean absence of influence. After all, Chaucer does not mention Boccaccio, even though his Il Filostrato supplies the narrative material for and fundamental shape of the Troilus. Obscuring authorial indebtedness because of some “anxiety of influence” is one thing; alluding to a figure from …

The Fall Of Troy And The Rise Of Elizabethan Drama: Empowering The Audience, Charles Whitney

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The English Reformation, along with urbanization, commercial development, and other major social and cultural changes, both reflect and affect a multifaceted contestation of authority among genres and modes of discourse in the sixteenth century. Robert Weimann finds the Elizabethan period marked by clashes “between diverse authorities engaging in rivalry for the more persuasive image, logic, truth, and form of saying things,” as “the claims on God-given legitimacy of secular and ecclesiastical institutions...were irretrievably undermined.” Rather than accept the authority of a document, according to its type and status, before it was actually read, audiences tended to approach representations as sites …

Allen D. Breck Award Winner

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Marie Kelleher

This article does not appear in the current volume of Quidditas

Review Essay: Richard Utz. Chaucer And The Discourse Of German Philology: A History Of Reception And An Annotated Bibliography Of Studies, Anita Obermeier

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Richard Utz. Chaucer and the Discourse of German Philology: A History of Reception and an Annotated Bibliography of Studies, 1793–1948. Making the Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, 2002. xxi + 446 pp.

Review Essay: Melitta Weiss Adamson, Ed. Regional Cuisines Of Medieval Europe: A Book Of Essays, Debby Banham

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Melitta Weiss Adamson, ed. Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe: a Book of Essays. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

Review Essay: Linda Woodbridge. Vagrancy, Homelessness, And English Renaissance Literature, Ken Jackson

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Linda Woodbridge. Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

“Women Of The Wild Geese”: Irish Women, Exile, And Identity In Spain, 1596–1670, Andrea Knox

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Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was subject to major invasion and settlement. Tudor foreign policy towards Ireland attempted to introduce an English model of government and, during the reign of Elizabeth I, attempts were made to introduce the Protestant religion. During the sixteenth century both England and Ireland were the regular focus of European Catholic plots. This led the Tudor monarchs to invade Ireland with a double agenda: to prevent European invasion, and to subdue a country over which it had always been difficult to exercise any influence. Henry VIII invaded Scotland and France in the 1540s, and …

Review Essay: Lucrezia Tornabuoni De’ Medici. Sacred Narratives, Deanna Shemek

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Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici. Sacred Narratives. Ed. and trans. Jane Tylus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 286 pages plus notes and index.

Review Essay: J. A. Burrow. Gestures And Looks In Medieval Narrative, E. Ann Matter

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J. A. Burrow. Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xi + 200 pp.

Full Issue

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Interpreting Early Modern Woman Abuse: The Case Of Anne Dormer, Mary O'Connor

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[T]hese hard laws I live under must keepe us from seeing one another.

Anne Dormer

When Anne Dormer, of Rousham, Oxfordshire, wrote to her sister, Elizabeth Trumbull, in August 1686, she complained that she would not be able to greet her on her return from a tumultuous year in France. Elizabeth (sometimes called Katherine) was married to the special envoy William Trumbull and had just endured the events of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Anne’s husband, Robert Dormer, had certain “laws” under which his wife had to live, one of which prohibited her from going to London to …

Delno C. West Award Winner: Tradition And Originality In El Greco’S Work: His Synthesis Of Byzantine And Renaissance Conceptions Of Art, Richard G. Mann

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Domenicos Theotokopoulos (1541–1614), usually called El Greco, had one of the most unusual "career paths" of any artist of his era. In less than a decade, he transformed himself from a Byzantine icon painter into one of the most innovative artists of the western European Renaissance. His Spanish contemporaries had no difficulty in acknowledging the significance of his origins. Thus, the court poet Paravicino declared “Creta le dió la vida y los pinceles” (Crete gave him life and the painter’s craft). Nevertheless, most North American and western European scholars of the modern era have maintained that his initial experiences as …