Renaissance Studies Commons^™

A Poem On The Late Massacre In Virginia. With Particular Mention Of Those Men Of Note That Suffered In That Disaster, Christopher Brooke

English 144 Class Projects

No abstract provided.

The Sparrow Hawk Castle - A Mostly Ignored Literary Motif Across The Cultures And The Centuries, Albrecht Classen

Quidditas

Johann Schiltberger included a curious episode about the ‘Sparrow Hawk Mountain’ in his famous travelogue Reisebericht from 1427. This episode can be traced back to John Mandeville’s Travels in the German translation by Michel Velser. This study examines the similarities between Mandeville’s text and Schiltberger’s account, but then also the use of this motif in the tradition of the Melusine novel (Jean d’Arras and Thüring von Ringoltingen). Further attempts are made to identify sources for this episode Mandeville might have drawn from, including an Armenian chronicle and even the love treatise De amore by Andreas Capellanus.

Explanations And Justifications Of War In The British Kingdoms In The Seventeenth Century, Roger B. Manning

Quidditas

The influence of Machiavelli on English and Scottish political discourse can be detected not just on politicians and military men, but also among clerics and the well educated elite– even when they do not cite him directly. In England and Scotland, as in mainland European countries, Machiavellian discourse placed war at the center of discussion. Some justified their bellicosity in the secularized language of Roman historians and Italian humanists and thought that since war was the main theme of history and could be regarded as an inevitable phenomenon, England might as well profit by it. This necessarily brought England into …

The Saint And The Swan: Animal Interactions In The Hagiography Of Hugh Of Avalon, Emma Grover

Quidditas

Animals in medieval hagiography typically appear in conjunction with saints who practice withdrawal from normal human society or are otherwise socially marginalized, such as hermits, outcasts, or mendicant friars. The association of these figures with animals emphasizes the saints’ status on the social margins; for these saints, interaction with animals is a substitute for participation in human society. An exception to this pattern is Hugh of Avalon, bishop of Lincoln in the late twelfth century. An animal companion, the swan of Stow, appears prominently in all three hagiographical accounts of Hugh’s life and is the most recognizable characteristic of his …

Front Matter

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

‘Framed And Clothed With Variety’: Print Culture, Multimodality, And Visual Design In John Derricke’S Image Of Irelande, Andie Silva

Publications and Research

This chapter argues that the twelve illustrative plates in John Derricke's Image of Ireland (1581) were the author's primary focus, aimed at readers who practiced the kinds of ‘laudable exercises’ demanded of committed Protestants: a kind of reading that was recursive, studious, and dynamic. This essay contextualises Derricke’s Image in relation to printer John Day’s output in the late sixteenth century as well as to contemporary illustrated texts from which Derricke may have drawn inspiration as a reader and woodcarver. I focus on the seven plates containing small alphabetical keys and their impact on how and in what order we …

Latin Poetry. Ludovico Ariosto. Ed. And Trans. Dennis Looney And D. Mark Possanza. The I Tatti Renaissance Library 84. Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 2018., Alessandro Giammei

Transnational Italian Studies Faculty Research and Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Music And Communal Division During The French Wars Of Religion, Cameron G. Wade

Honors Theses

This Senior Honors Thesis explores the social and cultural impact of confessional musical composition and performance on the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598). Because Huguenots and Catholics identified with and were widely identifiable by their respective musical styles, cultural divisions between each confession were emphasized by differences in music. This capacity of sacred and confessionally-influenced secular music to highlight and reinforce societal divides is evidenced by the interconfessional violence that accompanied the public performance of sacred music in cities as well as the pressures imposed on composers to create music which clearly aligned with their respective confessions. As the wars …

St. Roch Military Marches In Wallonia: Memory, Commemoration, And Identity, 1866-1940, Erik Hadley

Quidditas

Ritualized public processionals known as military saint marches thrive in popular memory and define local identity in Francophone Belgium (Wallonia). The annual processionals involve thousands of marchers dressed in Napoleonic-era military uniforms, carrying authentic muskets and escorting a statue of St. Roch, the patron saint of disease protection. Many of these marchers trace family participation through multiple generations and two St. Roch marches received UNESCO recognition as examples of “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” in 2012. While participants claim there is no historical rupture between the modern marches and the processionals celebrated prior to the French Revolution, there is a …

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

“That Kingdom Is Mine”: On Spain’S Early Modern Polemics Of Possession Over Jerusalem, Circa 1605, Chad Leahy

Quidditas

Spanish claims to the throne of Jerusalem in the early modern period have often been viewed in light either of royal mythologies connecting the Habsburgh monarchy to the biblical kings David and Solomon or to prophetic discourses of imperial Messianism relating to universal monarchy. This paper broadens our understanding of Spanish claims to Jerusalem through close reading of two archival documents produced in 1605. In defending Spanish preeminence and sovereignty in Jerusalem, I argue that these documents participate in a “polemics of possession” that crucially informed cultural production related to the Holy City in the period more broadly. These documents …

Allusive Fontaines, Sicamors, And Pins: Figurative Prophecies Of Grail Piety In The Prose Lancelot, David S. King

Quidditas

At the conclusion of Chrétien de Troyes’s twelfth-century verse Chevalier de la charrete, a spring and sycamore allude to concupiscence and betrayal in Scripture, evoking the hero’s and the queen’s adulterous liaison. The author of the thirteenth-century French Prose Lancelot translates this allusion from a moment of joy for the queen to one of terror, foreshadowing a change in fortune for the hero and his prowess. Every subsequent adventure where the hero encounters a spring and sycamore points to his love for the queen as a source of corruption. Springs shaded by a pine tree hint at the sanctity of …

The Vanishing Lady: Mélusine, Emblems, And Jacques Yver’S Le Printemps D’Yver (1572), Joshua M. Blaylock

Quidditas

In the opening pages of Le Printemps d’Yver (1572), the narrator evokes Mélusine, the cursed half-snake fairy queen, as the architect of the idyllic castle that serves as the locus amoenus of the novella collection. And yet, as suddenly as she appears, Mélusine vanishes from the text with only one other explicit reference to her at the transition point between the third and fourth novellas. While literary scholars have analyzed the two explicit references to Mélusine in Le Printemps as well as Yver’s emblematic prose, none has systematically explored the possibility that her presence pervades the novella collection in ways …

Bewitching Power: The Virtuosity Of Gender In Dekker And Massinger's The Virgin Martyr, Thomas Fish

Faculty Articles

This paper considers Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger’s play The Virgin Martyr (1622) in light of scientific notions of the female body circulating during the period to illustrate how the performance of martyrdom manifested a performance of gender virtuosity, elevating it to the status of the supernatural or divine. Like well-known female martyrs from the period, such as Anne Askew, the protagonist, Dorothea, takes on characteristically male attributes: she assumes the role of the soldier and defies scientific understanding of the female gender by sealing her phlegmatic “leaky” body and exuding divine heat that defies her cold, wet “nature." The …

In Memoriam: Richard L. Harp

Quidditas

This volume is dedicated to Professor Richard L. Harp who died at the age of 73 on 7 March 2019. Richard and his spouse Margaret Harp, Professor of French at UNLV have been active members of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association. Richard served on the Association’s Executive Board, presented papers and chaired sessions at several conferences, and Margaret served as Treasurer, and organized RMMRA’s 2018 Las Vegas conference.

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Allen D. Breck Award

Quidditas

The Breck Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a junior scholar at the annual conference.

Recipient of the Allen D. Breck Award for 2019

BRETTON RODRIGUEZ

Eroticism As A Metaphor For The Human-Divine Relationhip In Attar’S Conference Of The Birds, Or Mantiqu’T-Tair, Marisa Sikes

Quidditas

Farídu’d-Dín Ἁṭṭār’s The Speech of the Birds employs transgressive erotic imagery in multiple sub-tales in ways that both enhance the frame tale’s significance and suggest that persistent, discrete categories of love poetry and religious poetry are untenable as far as Ἁṭṭār’s works are concerned. Eroticism in Ἁṭṭār’s work paradoxically elicits shock and supports orthodoxy, sometimes simultaneously. In the narrative of Shaikh-i Sam’ān religious taboos are broken by a Muslim shaikh devoted to a Christian beloved who spurns him continuously. In “The Princess and the Beautiful Slave-Boy” eroticism is overtly presented as a metaphor for temporary, ecstatic union with the divine. …

Embellishing The Past: Fernando Del Pulgar And History At The Court Of The Catholic Monarchs, Bretton Rodriguez

Quidditas

Composed in the late fifteenth century, Fernando del Pulgar’s Crónica de los Reyes Católicos was the official account of – and therefore one of the best sources for – some of the most significant events in late medieval Spanish history. Within his narrative, Pulgar described the marriage of Isabel and Fernando (better known today as the Catholic Monarchs), the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition, and the buildup to the conquest of Granada. Despite the importance of the events that he described, as well as his own role as official historian, Pulgar revealed a radical understanding of history and history writing …

The World Of Miracles: Science, And Healing In Caesarius Of Heisterbach’S Dialogus Miraculorum (Ca.1240) In Competition With Magic, Albrecht Classen

Quidditas

This paper offers a close reading of some of the miracle tales dedicated to the Virgin Mary as contained in Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus miraculorum (ca. 1240) in order to shed light on the fundamental narrative structures of this genre, the association between the narratives and their material background, and to build a case to argue that medieval miracle narratives actually shared much in common with the discourse on magic. After a critical examination of magic itself and its properties as imagined or realized in the Middle Ages, the analysis highlights the ‘miraculous’ or maybe even ‘magical’ features of Caesarius’s …