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God As Androgyne: Jane Lead’S Rewriting Of The Destiny Of Nature, Sylvia Bowerbank

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Jane Lead [or Leade] (1624–1704) was one of the few seventeenth-century Englishwomen bold and radical enough to engage in "God-talk"—to used Rosemary Ruether's term. When the power of the English king and church was restored in 1660, radical millenarians were repressed and had to face that the English revolution—“God’s cause”— had failed politically, at least temporarily. In her recuperation of God’s cause, Lead argued that the revolution, properly understood, would be “intrinsical.” In her prophecies, Lead unites a radical hermeneutics of Scripture with Jacob Boehme’s concept of God as androgyne in order to reconfigure both God and divine history. According …

The Unfortunate Traveller And The Ramist Controversy: A Narrative Dilemma, Kurtis B. Haas

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The narrative and rhetorical structure of Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller has vexed its critics almost since its initial appearance in 1593. Most modern critics have followed a line something akin to that of G.R. Hibbard, who sees Nashe as a writer unable at times to distinguish his own voice from that of the narrator, Jack Wilton. Stephen Hilliard’s study of Nashe notes the critical tendency to see The Unfortunate Traveller as “a formless work, spun out by a careless author with no fixed purpose” and, though he chides such critics for ignoring its many virtues, grants that they likely …

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.

Wîse Maget, Jolyon Timothy Hughes

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In Medieval German Literature, the figure of the wise man occurs repeatedly. This can be evidenced in several primary works of literature from the period. In Wolframs von Eschenbach's Parzival Trevrizent is shown to be a very wizened and understanding member of Parzival’s own family. In Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan, the title figure is known to be wise before he is physically mature. However, in the critical literature on the period, there is no mention of older female characters exhibiting similar attributes as those qualities exemplified by the male figure of young Tristan, let alone younger women or girls.

Allen D. Breck Award Winner: The Presence Of The Past: Shakespeare In South Africa, Natasha Distiller

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In what ways has Shakespeare—as a collection of texts, as cultural capital, as a tool of a colonial education system as powerful as the bible and the gun—manifest in South African culture? Today I will sketch the presence of the past in a way which aims to draw out the South African in Shakespeare as much as the Shakespearean in South Africa. I do this following the post-colonial call to redress the imbalance of knowledges between the West and the Rest, and in order to break a simplistic cultural binary which posits “African,” colonized culture on one side and “European,” …

Delno C. West Award Winner: Using And Abusing Delegated Power In Elizabethan England, James H. Forse

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Queen Elizabeth's government, like most early modern European governments, was one that sought to extend its influence and power throughout the realm. But at the same time it possessed minimal financial resources and coercive machinery of power, and therefore, while it issued mandates, it had to depend upon local officials and individuals to whom it delegated power. Nor did Elizabeth’s government have any machinery of oversight to “watch-dog” those delegated powers. Only when issues came to the attention of the Privy Council after-the-fact did the government, occasionally, intervene to redress abuses of those delegated powers. Two areas in which these …

Review Essay: Michelle P. Brown. The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality And The Scribe, Thomas Klein

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Michelle P. Brown. The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality and the Scribe. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. xvi, 479 pp.

Review Essay: Alan Bray. The Friend, Garrett P.J. Epp

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Alan Bray. The Friend. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 380pp. Ill.

Review Essay: Valeria Finucci. The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, And Castration In The Italian Renaissance, Liz Horodowich

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Valeria Finucci. The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8223-3065-2. $24.95 paper.

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