Intellectual History Commons^™

Pedro Mexía And The Politics Of Translation In The Early Modern World, Erin Fairweather, Robert Fritz

Posters-at-the-Capitol

Spanish humanist Pedro Mexía (1497-1551) wrote two highly influential texts in the sixteenth century, the Silva de varia lección (1540) and the Historia imperial y cesárea (1545), which were, notably, written in Spanish, a vernacular language, as opposed to Latin, the academic language of the age. As these books presented previously inaccessible scientific and historical knowledge to the common person, they were soon translated into several languages, achieving widespread fame and influence. However, the texts have been mostly forgotten and have seen little study in recent times. Nevertheless, the Silva and the Historia can help us better understand the politics …

Acts Of Disruption In The Eighteenth-Century Archives: Cooperative Critical Bibliography And The Ballitore Project, Danielle Spratt, Deena Al-Halabieh, Stephen Martinez, Quill Sang, Joseph Sweetnam, Stephanie Guerrero, Rachael Scarborough King

Criticism

This essay outlines a method of intersectional feminist book history that we call “cooperative critical bibliography,” a practice of engaging faculty and students at different ranks and at different institutions in the act of collaboratively transcribing and digitizing historical archives of understudied communities, often those that comprise the quotidian and domestic daily lives of everyday people. Cooperative critical bibliography’s non-hierarchical method centers the shared expertise and scholarship of students as they participate in broadening the accessibility of historical knowledge and revising standards of the historical literary canon through transcription, digitization, and shared reflection. By creating a pedagogical space that resituates …

To Be Necessary: The Remarkable Life Of Mary Wollstonecraft, Elisabeth Phillips

Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History

Although overshadowed by her daughter, Mary Shelley, in the public imagination, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) stands as a significant figure in her time who left a significant legacy. Her writings advocating for women’s education, equal rights, and career opportunities established her as the progenitor of the modern women’s rights movement. Wollstonecraft’s ideas resonated in the era of the Atlantic world revolutions and laid the foundation for later advances of women in the Western world; therefore, it is important to study her contributions in the present.

The Nurse Of Elfland: Lizzie Endicott And C.S. Lewis, Reggie Weems

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

In Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis introduced Lizzie Endicott as the first of two "other blessings" in his childhood, even before his introduction of Warnie. But apart from his abbreviated 136-word biography, very little is known about the nurse who introduced Lewis to faery tales. Based on the Lewis Family Papers, genealogical research, and personal interviews with Lizzie’s relatives, this article introduces Lizzie to the world of Lewismania. It also suggests various ways in which Lizzie influenced the man and the author that C.S. Lewis became, as well as the mythical worlds he created and Lewis’s anonymous tributes to …

Definitions And Depictions Of Rhetorical Practice In Medieval English Fürstenspiegel., Joseph Ethan Blaine Sharp

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how medieval authors defined rhetoric and depicted rhetorical practice in medieval English Fürstenspiegel. It begins by analyzing how the field of medieval rhetorical historiography has overlooked the Fürstenspiegel as a rhetorical genre due to its overt reliance on meta-rhetorical handbook genres as the objects of its analysis. This dissertation challenges traditional narratives that positions medieval rhetoric as a primarily academic discipline divorced from political practice by engaging in horizontal reading practices that examine the broader culture of medieval rhetorical practice alongside the definitions of rhetoric found in medieval English Fürstenspiegel. In so doing, this dissertation …

Transforming Leviathan: Job, Hobbes, Zvyagintsev And Philosophical Progression, Graham C. Goff

Journal of Religion & Film

The allegory of Leviathan, the biblical serpent of the seas, has undergone numerous distinct and even antithetical conceptions since its origin in the book of Job. Most prominently, Leviathan was the namesake of Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 political treatise and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s 2014 film of the same name, a damning indictment of Russian corruption. These three iterations underscore the societal transition from the recognition of power as being derived from God to the secularization of power in Hobbes’s philosophy, to the negation of the legitimacy of divine and secular institutional power, in Zvyagintsev’s controversial film. This examination of Leviathan’s three unique …

The Life And Legacy Of Edwin Greenlaw: “Teacher And Scholar”, Mykelin Higham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing from recently available archival documents, this paper traces the life, works, and influence of Edwin Greenlaw (1874–1931), a notable scholar of Spenser and the English Renaissance and a beloved and influential teacher. Information from a biographical manuscript authored by his brother is supplemented with contextual history of literary education in turn-of-the-century America and the debates between literary historians and critics of the early twentieth century in order to trace Greenlaw’s model impact as both a practitioner and leader. His exegesis of Spenser’s political allegory, his numerous edited literature textbooks for the general student, and his activism for a more …

Not So Dystopian: A Historical Reading Of Eugenics In Science Fiction, Riley Sanders

The Forum: Journal of History

Broadly, this paper is an effort in complicating traditional readings of eugenic themes in science fiction. Two landmark novels, Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), are highlighted as representative of the early and late stages of eugenics. By focusing on the troubling historical context surrounding these authors, I denounce the simple reading of these works as merely “dystopian”. Scholars like Francis Fukuyama advance these simplistic readings by instinctively assuming that Wells and Huxley were against eugenics. This paper continues the tradition that David Bradshaw popularized in his book The Hidden Huxley, which argues …

Review Of Writing And Constructing The Self In Great Britain In The Long Eighteenth Century, Edited By John Baker, Marion Leclair, And Allan Ingram, Kelly J. Plante

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

A review of Writing and Constructing the Self in Great Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century, eds. John Baker, Marion Leclair, and Allan Ingram. Written by Kelly Plante.

The Anglo-Saxons--Stoddard And Lovecraft: Ideas Of Anglo-Saxon Supremacy And The New England Counter-Revolution, Benjamin M. Welton

Madison Historical Review

This paper attempts to explain the New England Counter-Revolution through two very different men--H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) and T. Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950). While one was a respected and popular scholar, and the other was a little-known pulp writer, both men combined New England regionalism, a belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority, the primacy of modern science, and a belief in racial/eugenic differences to create a unique political paradigm little recognized at the time but influential today.

Ethnic Irony In Melvin B. Tolson's "Dark Symphony", Elizabeth Newton

Publications and Research

This article historicizes musical symbolism in Melvin B. Tolson’s poem “Dark Symphony” (1941). In a time when Black writers and musicians alike were encouraged to aspire to European standards of greatness, Tolson’s Afro-modernist poem establishes an ambivalent critical stance toward the genre in its title. In pursuit of a richer understanding of the poet’s attitude, this article situates the poem within histories of Black music, racial uplift, and white supremacy, exploring the poem’s relation to other media from the Harlem Renaissance. It analyzes the changing language across the poem’s sections and, informed by Houston A. Baker Jr.’s study of “mastery …

Animal-Human Vocabulary Builder, Domenick Acocella, Rene Cordero

Open Educational Resources

The assignment helps students individually build a usable, expanding vocabulary of terms and concepts, enabling each to further contribute to the ongoing, evolving written, oral, and visual conversations centered on the use of and thought about animals for food, clothing, work, entertainment, experimentation, imagery, and companionship.

Henry Adams: An Education In Autobiography, Marcellus Richie

Dissertations and Theses

This essay will begin by breaking down Henry Adams’s starting sentence in his autobiography word by word, piece by piece – pondering its meanings and permutations in the context of subsequent chapters of this iconic memoir. The essay will then consider whether Adams’s Education should still be regarded as a classic of American autobiography or seen merely as an irrelevant and out-of-date artifact. In a nation radically transformed since Adams’s time, does the book still deserve its high flung reputation? In other words, which of the images cited above is most relevant to The Education: an image of optimistic youth …

Tolkien's Work On The Oxford English Dictionary: Some New Evidence From Quotation Slips, Rachel A. Fletcher

Journal of Tolkien Research

This article presents previously undiscussed material, in the form of citation slips, relating to Tolkien’s work on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The separation of these slips from the OED archives means that they have been almost entirely overlooked, and their relevance to Tolkien studies has not been recognised. Nevertheless, they have the potential to be a valuable resource, especially for understanding the specialist skills Tolkien brought to the dictionary as a scholar of Old English. One item is of particular biographical interest, as it suggests that Tolkien was carrying out work for the OED earlier than previously …

Original Gangsters: Genre, Crime, And The Violences Of Settler Democracy, Sean M. Kennedy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Building upon examinations of genericity, subalternity, and carcerality by Black, Indigenous, and women-of-color feminist scholars, my dissertation offers an account of how truth claims are produced and sustained to limit social change in representatively governed societies. Taking the gangster genre as my lens, I first resituate the form, assumed to depict white-ethnic conflict in the U.S. and Europe, as a type of resistance to race-based political economic policies imposed by imperial regimes. After linking the subaltern classes of pre-20th-century southern Europe, southern Africa, South Asia, and the U.S. South—all subjected to criminalization as a mode of colonial and capitalist control—I …

Bloodied Hearts And Bawdy Planets: Greco-Roman Astrology And The Regenerative Force Of The Feminine In Shakespeare’S The Winter’S Tale, Christina E. Farella

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis offers a new reading of William Shakespeare’s late play The Winter’s Tale (1623), positing that in order to understand this complex and eccentric work, we must read it with a complex and eccentric eye. In The Winter’s Tale, planets strike without warning, pulling at hearts, wombs, and blood, impacting the health and emotional experience of characters in the play. This work is renowned for its inconsistent formal structure; the first half is a tragedy set in winter, but abruptly shifts to a comedy set in spring/summer in its latter half. What’s more, is that planets, luminaries, and …

More, Pope, Swift: The Use Of English Satire Within The Intellectual Historical Narrative (1516 - 1726), Monica Barry

History | Senior Theses

This paper traces the use of satire as a literary form in England from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. By analyzing three major English satirical writings from the 16th through 18th centuries, this paper unites literature and intellectual history, illustrating how literary analysis provides deeper insight into the progressive relationship between these two major eras in intellectual history. The paper provides a literary criticism of the genre of satire; the use of irony, humor, and exaggeration to criticize one’s vices, often relating to politics. First, the paper explores major concepts and themes of satire during the Renaissance period. Thomas More’s …

Letters From The “Gentlemen Of The Press,” 1810-1845, David E. Latane

English Publications

A collection of letters by men and women associated with the periodical press in England in the first half of the nineteenth century, transcribed, annotated, and presented with scans of the original letters. Notable contributors include Times editors Thomas Barnes and John Delane, Fraser's Magazine writers William Maginn and John Heraud, Charles Molloy Westmacott editor of The Age, Stanley Lees Giffard of The Standard , and Mary Russell Mitford.

Erotic Devotional Poetry: Resisting Neoplatonism In Protestant Christianity, Sarah M. Pruis

Honors Projects

A genre best known for its appearance in Eastern religions, erotic devotional poetry uses sensual imagery to access an experience of the divine. Historically, many Christian traditions, excluding the mystical ones, have pushed back against such literature, seeing it as an impure model that degrades divinity by association with the physical, especially in the specific physical ritual of sex. This stance is a hallmark of Protestant Christianity. The idea of a dichotomy and hierarchy between soul and body, though, comes not from theology but from the introduction theologians made between Western philosophy, particularly Platonic Dualism, and Christianity, which was then …

The Narrative Of Revolution: Socialism And The Masses 1911-1917, Stephen K. Walkiewicz

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to situate The Masses magazine (1911-1917) within a specific discursive tradition of revolution, revealing a narrative pattern that is linked with discourse that began to emerge during and after the French Revolution. As the term “socialism” begins to resonate again within popular American political discourse (and as a potentially viable course of action rather than a curse for damnable offense), it is worthwhile to trace its significance within American history to better understand its aesthetic dimensions, its radical difference, and its way of devising problems and answers. In short, this thesis poses the question: what ideological structures …

Reverse The Curse: Colonialist Legacies Of The Magic Poem, Karen E. Lepri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the conceptual relationships between poetry, magic, and race and their effects on both intellectual and creative practices from modernism through the post-war era. In doing so, this study works cross-disciplinarily, tracing early anthropological and sociological characterizations of primitive religion in connection to early-to-mid-twentieth-century literary study and writing. In working across disciplines at this particularly fungible moment in the history of the academy, this dissertation attempts to understand how the concurrent colonial global context effects the production and organization of knowledge just prior to and during modernism. It ultimately seeks to de-colonize literary thinking about poetry by performing …

The Greater Torment: Religious And Secular Desire In The Poetry And Criticism Of T.S. Eliot, Katie Buonanno

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Complete Bosoms, Incomplete Men: Reading Abstinence In Measure For Measure, Joseph Makuc

English Summer Fellows

Measure for Measure has often been called one of Shakespeare’s problem plays, and as recent productions show, Measure’s problems — including sexual coercion and governmental corruption — resonate with readers and audiences today. Recent scholarship has examined sexual abstinence in Measure for Measure in terms of its historical economic and religious context, arguing that protagonist Isabella represents a radical break from merchant economics by opting out of the sexual economy. However, Angelo and the Duke, the play's other central characters, also make claims about the values of abstinence, and those claims are at odds with Isabella's claims. My research will …

Assur Is King Of Persia: Illustrations Of The Book Of Esther In Some Nineteenth-Century Sources, Steven W. Holloway

Steven W Holloway

The marriage of archaeological referencing and picture Bibles in the nineteenth century resulted in an astonishing variety of guises worn by the court of Ahasuerus in Esther. Following the exhibition of Neo-Assyrian sculpture in the British Museum and the wide circulation of such images in various John Murray publications, British illustrators like Henry Anelay defaulted to Assyrian models for kings and rulers in the Old Testament, including the principal actors in Esther, even though authentic Achaemenid Persian art had been available for illustrative pastiche for decades. This curious adoptive choice echoed British national pride in its splendid British Museum collection …

Buying Time: Consuming Urban Pasts In Nineteenth-Century Britain, Dory Agazarian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is about how historical narratives developed in the context of a modern marketplace in nineteenth-century Britain. In particular, it explores British historicism through urban space with a focus on Rome and London. Both cities were invested with complex political, religious and cultural meanings central to the British imagination. These were favorite tourist destinations and the subjects of popular and professional history writing. Both cities operated as palimpsests, offering a variety of histories to be “tried on” across the span of time. In Rome, British consumers struggled when traditional histories were problematized by emerging scholarship and archaeology. In London, …

Symbols Purely Mechanical: Language, Modernity, And The Rise Of The Algorithm, 1605–1862, Jeffrey M. Binder

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent decades, scholars in both Digital Humanities and Critical Media Studies have encountered a disconnect between algorithms and what are typically thought of as “cultural” concerns. In Digital Humanities, researchers employing algorithmic methods in the study of literature have faced what Alan Liu has called a “meaning problem”—a difficulty in reconciling computational results with traditional forms of interpretation. Conversely, in Critical Media Studies, some thinkers have questioned the adequacy of interpretive methods as means of understanding computational systems. This dissertation offers a historical account of how this disconnect came into being by examining the attitudes toward algorithms that existed …

From Heo To Zir: A History Of Gender Expression In The English Language, Brodie Robinson

Senior Honors Theses

With the growing presence of the LGBTQ+ community on the global stage, the matter of gender has been rushed to the forefront of the public consciousness. News outlets have hotly debated the topic of gender expression, a topic which has motivated mass demonstrations and acts of violence, and this has promoted a linguistic conversation at the international level.

This thesis is intended to provide the historical context for the contemporary debate on gender expression in the English language, and explores both the grammatical background (the Indo-European origins of linguistic gender, the development of the modern pronoun system, etc.) and the …

Literary Societies Of Wofford College, Phillip Stone, Luke Meagher

Library Exhibits

Less than two months after Wofford College opened, on Aug. 1, 1854, eight students met to organize a literary society. Their primary purpose was to practice their skills in debating, oratory, parliamentary procedure and writing, all of which were important skills for college students to develop.

As the college grew, so did the number of societies, with a second one being organized in 1858, a third in 1905 and a fourth in 1920. Over the college’s first century, the literary societies were integral to student life, and they made many lasting contributions. The oldest societies established libraries, began building the …

Vintage Red.Docx, Rowan Cahill

Rowan Cahill

Moving Against Clothespins:The Poli(Poe)Tics Of Embodiment In The Poetry Of Miriam Alves And Audre Lorde, Flávia Santos De Araújo

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines literary representations of the black female body in selected poetry by U.S. African American writer Audre Lorde and Afro-Brazilian writer Miriam Alves, focusing on how their literary projects construct and defy notions of black womanhood and black female sexualities in dialogue with national narratives and contexts. Within an historical, intersectional and transnational theoretical framework, this study analyses how the racial, gender and sexual politics of representation are articulated and negotiated within and outside the political and literary movements in the U.S. and Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s. As a theoretical framework, this research elaborates and uses …