Renaissance Studies Commons^™

Remixing The Canon: Shakespeare, Popular Culture, And The Undergraduate Editor, Andie Silva

Publications and Research

This essay explores the benefits and challenges of using digital editing as a platform for social knowledge production. First, I discuss the underlying impetus for the project, my choice of Scalar as a digital platform, and a number of specific assignments designed to develop skills toward the final edition. Next, I analyze examples from student work, considering the larger implications of students’ annotation choices and the thematic focus each of them chose for their acts. Finally, I outline some of the potential pitfalls of this course. My aim is to privilege students’ discovery, negotiation, and ownership of ideas. As a …

“To Multiply Corn Two-Hundred-Fold”: The Alchemical Augmentation Of Wheat Seeds In Seventeenth-Century English Husbandry, Justin Niermeier-Dohoney

Arts and Communication Faculty Publications

Agricultural reform movements proliferated in seventeenth-century Europe. For many who sought to make farming more economically productive, the practices of chymistry offered a way to accomplish these goals. Placed in the context of the development of a “vegetable philosophy,” or a theory of generation and growth across mineralogical and botanical domains, this article examines the application of chymical techniques in the attempt to enhance wheat seeds through seed-steeping and “fructifying” experiments among seventeenth-century agricultural reformers, particularly in England. I focus on three main sources: instructional husbandry manuals describing how to create “fructifying waters” to fertilize these seeds, the writings of …

Feminine Performance In The Taming Of The Shrew: Final Speech And Missing Soliloquy, Laura Kolb

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Quevedo Y La Tupida Selva Europea Del Anacreón Castellano, Adrian Izquierdo

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

England's Fairest Creatures, Madison Hart

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Set in 1616 Jacobean England, surrounding a tragic chamber pot incident, the place setting of the small fishing town of Lechlade, England, begins our story. From generations of fisherman, Elias Eaton, is the first Eaton not to bear a son. Instead, his fierce daughter in her mid-twenties, Julia, our protagonist, helps her father at the docks daily. Although Julia is a champion for women of her time, she dreams of there being something more out there for her than the town that has shackled Eatons for centuries. Julia’s mother, Sybil, is the daughter to the town baker. Her literate father …

A Seventeenth-Century Air History In Conversation With Antony And Cleopatra, Laura S. Deluca

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

This article works to unpack the recurrences of air-related language utilized in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Throughout this play, the notions of breath, wind, air, and vapor are consistently referenced, demonstrating the way in which atmospheric intangibility was a key point of exploration for contemporary scientists and philosophers. Through this analysis, it is clear that Shakespeare employs breath in three ways: the breath of (public) life, a lack of breath, and, most importantly, breath as a symbol of power and autonomy, which at times overlaps with the breath of life in ways that demonstrate contemporary conceptualizations of living beings. The …

Mentalités And The Search For Total History In The Works Of Annalistes, Foucault, And Microhistory, Jason U. Rose

The Hilltop Review

In this brief essay, the links between the Annales, the works of Michael Foucault, and microhistory are analyzed through the theoretical lens of histoire des mentalités (mentalités). Common threads that link these approaches include the willingness of using outside fields of analysis as well as the willingness to work with vagueness in search of those who Foucault calls, “lost people.” Relatedly, each of these groups and individuals are willing to analyze all aspects of the historical record to fully understand the minds, cultures, and histories of past people. The key to recognizing the relationship of these approaches involve knowing and …

Quod Inane Vocamus: Lucretius’ Void In Seventeenth-Century Italy, Carlo Bottone

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

During the seventeenth century, the revival of atomic theories and the beginning of barometric experiments sparked a philosophical debate on the existence and the nature of void, which in turn generated new attention to the ancient disputes on void and prompted new interpretations of Lucretius’ examination of inane (De Rerum Natura, I.329-397). Commentators began to discuss the passage beyond the ancient philosophical tradition and in relation to modern ideas and recent discoveries, while Vacuists appealed to Lucretian arguments to prove or deny the existence of an absolute void interspersed among corpuscles.

My research contributes to the scholarship on …

Excremental Ecofeminism: Unearthing Waste’S Feminine And Narrative Agency In Early Modern Literature, Courtney Druzak

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project seeks to understand the role of forms of waste in early modern literary texts. It both offers up a theory—known as early modern excremental ecofeminism—for reading period specific texts in relation to waste and articulates how we may do so through close analysis of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the elegies of Mary Sidney Herbert, the sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by Mary Wroth, John Evelyn’s Fumifugium, and finally, William Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra. It chooses a variety of genres across texts from the 1580s to the 1660s both to interrogate …

The Literary Controversies Of Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling, Victoria Duehring

The Forum: Journal of History

This literary review will focus on Michelangelo’s most significant work of color: the Sistine ceiling. Michelangelo’s work has spawned a plethora of literature, but this paper will focus on three main controversial topics: assistants (or lack thereof), the ignudi’s purpose, and restoration. I will also apply a psycho-historical approach to these controversies and identify potential avenues for future research.

Full Issue

The Forum: Journal of History

No abstract provided.

Poems Of Debate And Praise: Women As Published Authors In Sixteenth-Century France, Anna Soo-Hoo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Non-fictional, published poetic exchanges between men and women in sixteenth-century France provide new perspectives into how women writers operated in a literary culture whose main producers and dominant voice were male. Contrary to the notion repeated by many critics that women of that period were supposed to stay out of the public sphere, my study finds that publishing a woman’s poems did not destroy her reputation, and there appears to have been no major backlash when a man decided to include poems by a female contemporary in his book. My study takes as its point of departure the notion that …

The Source And Application Of Thomas Müntzer's Theology Of Divination In His Marginal Notes On Tertullian, Roger Drinnon

Master of Sacred Theology Thesis

Drinnon, Roger A. “The Source and Application of Thomas Müntzer’s Theology of Divinization in His Marginal Notes on Tertullian.” Thesis, Concordia Seminary, 2021. 101 pp.

Traditional Lutheran and Marxist interpretations of Thomas Müntzer inadequately account for Müntzer’s theology and practice. The doctrine of the order of creation tied Müntzer’s theology and practice together. According to the order of creation, the goal of the material world was to return to God at the end of time. Müntzer’s writings on the order of creation stated the doctrine was the central tenet of Christianity. By returning to God, Müntzer believed the creation would …

Signal To Noise: Harmonic Temperaments And Patterns Of Interference, Dylan A. Marcheschi

Theses and Dissertations

An audio/visual exploration of historical tuning systems. Most contemporary Western audiences will seldom if ever encounter harmony outside of post-Renaissance tuning conventions. This presentation highlights some of those pre-orthodox harmonic relationships which existed throughout most of history. The corresponding paper documents correlates in recent advances of acoustic ecology.

Power Dressing: Feather Fans And The Visual Language Of Female Portraiture, Charlotte Svetkey

Theses and Dissertations

Feather fans in sixteenth-century portraiture not only allowed the female sitter to express her own claims to wealth, status, and power but also acted as a visual indicator of changes that were occurring on the global stage. Both fans and sitters will be evaluated through ideas of gender and class.

Thomas Middleton And The Plural Politics Of Jacobean Drama, Mark Kaethler

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama

Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama represents the first sustained study of Middleton's dramatic works as responses to James I's governance. Through examining Middleton’s poiesis in relation to the political theology of Jacobean London, Kaethler explores early forms of free speech, namely parrhēsia, and rhetorical devices, such as irony and allegory, to elucidate the ways in which Middleton’s plural art exposes the limitations of the monarch’s sovereign image. By drawing upon earlier forms of dramatic intervention, James’s writings, and popular literature that blossomed during the Jacobean period, including news pamphlets, the book surveys a selection of …

The Medici Example: How Power Creates Art And Art Creates Power, Margaret Hayden

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project looks at two members of Florence’s Medici family, Cosimo il Vecchio (1389-1464) and Duke Cosimo I (1519-1574), in an attempt to assess how they used the patronage of art to facilitate their rule. By looking at their individual political representations through art, the specifics of their propagandist works and what form these pieces of art came, it is possible to analyze their respective rules. This analysis allows for a clearer understanding of how these two men, each in very different positions, found art as an ally for their political endeavors. While they were in power only one hundred …

Shakespeare And The Chronicles: The Test Case Of Richard Ii, Brandon Coimbra

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Shakespeare wrote most of what we know as his English history plays rather early in his career. He was skilled at making the genre more than a copy of the published historical documents and chronicles of his day. Scholarship has long recognized his favorite sources and has established a solid collection of the material he used to bring his country’s past to life on stage. There are many scholarly studies of the influence of Froissart’s, Holinshed’s, Hall’s and Stow’s Chronicles, among others, and they usually describe what Shakespeare borrowed or sometimes even altered from those sources. What they do …

Re-Drowning Ophelia: The Representation Of Female Disintegration In Recent Films Of Hamlet, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

Presented at the Fall 2001 Popular / American Culture Association of the South, Atlantic Beach, Florida, this paper examines several depictions of Ophelia in films of Hamlet starring Kenneth Branagh, Ethan Hawke, Mel Gibson, Kevin Kline, Derek Jacobi, Richard Burton, Campbell Scott. The title hints at Mary Pipher's Re-Claiming Ophelia, in light of then widely circulating Julia Stiles interpretation, where we repeatedly see her contemplating her suicide by drowning. My study elevates the Ophelia of LisaGay Hamilton in the Campbell Scott Hamlet, released the same year. The presentation featured video clips from this Campbell Scott production, originally airing on …

Teaching The Structure Of Hamlet: The "To Be Or Not To Be" Soliloquy Repositioned In Recent Film Adaptations, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

At a crucial turning point in online access to quality productions of Shakespeare, the (April 2010) Great Performances airing of Hamlet (with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart), the occasion arose to turn the open access to it into teaching strategies. Along with all else quirky about it, the production accepts what seems to be a trend in recent film adaptations, dating from at least Zeffirelli's with Mel Gibson in 1991; that is, to rearrange the sequence of Hamlet's 2.2 and 3.1 soliloquies. The precedent dates to the 1603 First Quarto, perhaps, but everything else about the first quarto …