Renaissance Studies Commons^™

The Appropriation Of St Cuthbert: Architecture, History-Writing, And Ecclesiastical Politics In Durham, 1083-1250, John D. Young

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This paper describes the use of the cult of Saint Cuthbert in the High Middle Ages by both the bishops of Durham and the Benedictine community that was tied to the Episcopal see. Its central contention is that the churchmen of Durham adapted this popular cult to the political expediencies of the time. In the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, when Bishop William de St. Calais ousted the entrenched remnants of the Lindisfarne community and replaced them with Benedictines, Cuthbert was primarily a monastic saint and not, as he would become, a popular pilgrimage saint. However, once the Benedictine …

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No abstract provided.

Peter Severinus: From Humours To Chemistry In The Sixteenth Century, Michael T. Walton, Robert M. Fineman

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The re-discovery of the works of Mendel and others has added greatly to our understanding of genetics. Such is now the case of Peter Severinus, with the recent recovery (or re-discovery) of his seminal work, Idea Medicinae Philosophicae (1571). Severinus concurred with Paracelsus’s (1493-1541) concept of seeds (little chemical factories) that worked on matter to form living things; but he was also aware of transplantation (grafting and cross-pollination) that changed phenotypes and genotypes in plants. Severinus applied this understanding to hereditary diseases in humans and extended Paracelsian theory. He believed that certain diseases in one’s offspring were caused by a …

Tracing Shakespeare’S Sea-Change: From The Tempest To The New York Times, Joshua L. Comer

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An historical approach to the changing use of a Shakespearean phase, like “sea- change,” offers a case study in the long-standing power and evolving meaning of Shakespeare’s language. While all sea-changes today are not so major as those of which Ariel sang in The Tempest, the rich language of Ariel’s song has acquired a significant place in the history of American journalism.

Alan D. Breck Award Winner (2006)

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Kimberly Johnson

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

Heloise And Abelard Today: A Student Response Approach, Carol Breslin, Donald F. Duclow

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The story of Heloise and Abelard has aged remarkably well. We teach their “Personal Letters” and Abelard’s Historia calamitatum in two undergraduate courses. This article discusses an informal writing assignment, in which our students adopt the persona of Astralabe, the son of Heloise and Abelard, and write a letter to Heloise concerning his parents’ lives and loves. Often students read the correspondence through the filter of contemporary experience. They consider Abelard’s behavior as patriarchal and boorish, and object to what they see as Heloise’s extreme humility and acceptance of the anti-feminist palaver of her day. However, when students remember and …

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No abstract provided.

History As A Detective Story, James H. Forse

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Josephine Tey (nom de plume of Elizabeth MacKintosh). The Daughter of Time, with Introduction by Robert Barnard (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995; original copyright 1951 by Elizabeth MacKintosh). 206 pages. $14.00.

Temples Of Caesar: The Politics Of Renaissance Georgics Translations, Kimberly Johnson

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Between the last years of Elizabeth I’s reign and the regicide of Charles I, three major English translations of Virgil’s middle poem, the Georgics, were published. Each translation appeared at a moment of religio-political crisis in England, a coincidence made more significant by the ambivalent political stance of Virgil’s text, which simultaneously communicates praise for Octavian and suspicion about an imperial program that disenfranchised the agricultural classes, an oversight which Virgil records in the Georgics as impiety. This paper charts the ways in which seemingly innocent translation decisions manage to perform a critical interrogation of monarchal authority, particularly as it …

William Of Auvergne And Popular Demonology, Thomas De Mayo

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Theologian and bishop of Paris during St. Louis’ early reign, William of Auvergne (d. 1249) aimed in his life and writings to combat the myriad threats he perceived as facing Christianity. The early thirteenth century saw many potential competitors to official doctrines concerning the natural and supernatural worlds—Arabic philosophy imported into the universities, heretical attacks on the institutional church, and persistent folk beliefs and practices. William attributed these challenges to an underlying demonic conspiracy directed against humankind. This paper examines William’s treatment of popular beliefs on the Wild Hunt, a mysterious congregation of spirits, and related beliefs about female spirits …

Rendering Shakespearean Rhetoric Visible In The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, Katherine Kickel

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Traditionally, the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery is considered an important moment in England’s art history narrative. In this essay, I argue that the Boydell collection also reflects a new preference for reading Shakespeare’s plays in the eighteenth century via its editorial illustration of parts of the plays that would not normally be emphasized in theatrical productions.

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Review Essay: Some Thoughts On The Greater Integration Of Islamic Sources Into The Wider Framework Of Medieval History, John J. Curry

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The study of Islam has been attracting greater interest in recent years, due to high-profile political and economic events. In addition, the rise of world history programs has generated a need for resources by which both students and faculty alike can strengthen their knowledge in this field. Still, general knowledge on the field is limited. This disparity has occurred, in part, because the field of Islamic history, especially in its formative and medieval periods, has been oriented toward specialists rather than a general audience. Often, world history sourcebooks are content to give only short selections from religious sources such as …

Charlemagne’S Denarius, Constantine’S Edicule, And The Vera Crux, John F. Moffitt

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In 806 a much-discussed silver denarius bearing the likeness of Charlemagne was issued. This is called the “temple-type” coin due to the (as yet unidentified) architectural structure illustrated on the reverse side, and which is explicitly labeled as representing the epitome of “Christian Religion.” By examining different kinds of archeological and documentary evidence, this building can now be finally identified. It is, in short, the “Edicule” built by Constantine the Great in 326 to cover the Tomb of Christ (or Holy Sepulcher) in Jerusalem.

Old Icelandic Gaglviðr, Aurelijus Vijūnas

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This essay discusses a debated word form gaglviðr occurring in stanza 42 of the Old Icelandic poem VÄluspá 'The Prophesy of the Seeress'. The noun gaglviðr is problematic both from the semantic point of view (Old Icelandic gagl 'gosling', viðr 'tree; forest' 'gosling forest'?), and because it possesses a variant spelling galgviðr ('gallows' tree;’gallows' forest') which occurs in another manuscript containing the same poem. In the present paper, the form gaglviðr is considered to be the correct and the original form of this word, whereas the form galgviðr is interpreted as a scribal error. Various existing semantic analyses of the …

Delno C. West Award Winner (2006)

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Margaret Harp

The West Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a senior scholar at the annual conference.

Twentieth-Century Illustrators’ Interpretations Of The Works Of Rabelais, Margaret Harp

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Gustave Doré's mid-nineteenth-century illustrations of François Rabelais's oeuvre have become as well-known as the text itself: their fanciful details capture the literally larger-than-life personality of the French sixteenth-century humanist's protaganist-giants, Pantagruel and Gargantua. Equally intrigued by the thematic complexity and imaginative narrative of this Renaissance masterpiece, subsequent artists and illustrators of Rabelais continue to create new and unexpected artistic representations. This paper presents the illustrations of a lesser-known twentieth-century French wood engraver, Jean Chièze. His notable contributions to a 1935 commemorative edition of Pantagruel simultaneously highlight the medieval woodcut, emphasize the playful tone of Rabelais's narrative and allude to contemporary …

Review Essay: Rodney Stark’S Vision Of Medieval Christianity, Elspeth Whitney

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Rodney Stark. For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003, 504 pages, and The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. New York: Random House, 2005, 304 pages.

Enchanted Islands Floating On The Foam Of Perilous Seas, Jean Macintyre

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In localizing The Tempest on “an uninhabited island,” the 1623 Shakespeare Folio associates the setting with the floating island that some masque machines represented. Such machines acted as movable stages to transport masquers from within the set to the spot from which their dances would begin; other masques allege that their immobile sets were also floating islands. Though the stages, permanent or temporary, on which The Tempest was performed were not mobile, they nonetheless were a kind of island surrounded by spectators, on which the magician Prospero, aided by Ariel, writes, casts, and directs a play whose roles are unwittingly …

Romancing The Chronicles: 1 Henry Iv And The Rewriting Of Medieval History, Bradley Greenburg

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This essay explores the ways Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV deploys Welshness as a counterforce to English national stability. I argue that the critical habit of equating the genre of romance with untruthfulness or silliness does not pay close enough attention to what Shakespeare does in his history plays. The Hal he gives us, whose youth and military training in Wales he suppresses, is, generically, a romance character. But, instead of a knight in his father’s service (where his adventures would be securely in the service of the realm), or knight errant, he is an errant haunter of bad company, an …

Delno C. West Award Winner (2004)

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James H. Forse

The Delno C. West Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a senior scholar at the annual conference.

Delno C. West Award Winner (2005)

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Susan Stakel

The Delno C. West Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a senior scholar at the annual conference.

Monasteries As Financial Patrons And Promoters Of Local Performance In Late Medieval And Early Tudor England, Christine Sustek Williams

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The elaborate cycle plays produced in the larger, wealthy municipalities of York, Chester, Wakefield and Coventry receive the lion’s share of attention among scholars of medieval theatre. Until recently, performance activities in smaller communities have received little or no attention, except perhaps as something of antiquarian interest. And one area of theatre history that has been largely overlooked is the involvement of monasteries in local performance activities. Yet the precious few, fragmentary, monastic records that survived the dissolutions of the monasteries under Henry VIII and Edward VI, suggest that several monasteries gave active financial support to local theatre in England …

Everyman In Production: A Dance Of Death A Staging At California State University, Chico (2004), Jan Hawkley

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Medieval dramatic works, while historically significant and intellectually interesting, may seem irrelevant and even incomprehensible in our day. The language is problematic in pronunciation, phrasing and word meaning. Allegory today often is considered didactic and overly simplistic, yielding only one- dimensional characters. Medieval society appears obtuse to modern students, functioning with a totally different worldview and social hierarchy; medieval concepts of comedy and religion are difficult for us to grasp today. Additionally, we obviously have no recordings of actual performances, so we do not know how a given play was staged; we must surmise medieval staging from descriptions of performances …

Entertaining Yet Erudite Social History, Ginger L. Guardiola

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Barbara A. Hanawalt. Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. 300 pages. $18.95.

Allen D. Breck Award Winner (2005)

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Bradley Greenburg

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

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No abstract provided.

Representing A Bigger Middle Ages, Carol Neel

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Barbara H. Rosenwein. A Short History of the Middle Ages. Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2002. 362 pages. $42.95.

Colin McEvedy. The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History. London: Penguin Books, 1992. 112 pages. $13.95.

Patrick J. Geary. The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002. 261 pages. $19.95.

Allen D. Breck Award Winner (2004)

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Jennifer McNabb

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

Getting Your Name Out There: Traveling Acting Companies And Royal And Aristocratic Prestige In Tudor England, James H. Forse

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Records published to date concerning early English drama suggest that in the first third of the sixteenth century touring activity by municipal, amateur acting companies exceeded that of royal and aristocratic troupes. But after about 1535, the religious, social, and economic policies of Henry VIII, and Edward VI, severely limited locally based performances. At the same time tours by royal acting troupes substantially increased. Yet of all the Tudors, it was Elizabeth who seems to have realized the potential of her acting troupe representing the monarch's presence throughout the kingdom. From the beginning of her reign the Queen’s Men appeared …