Renaissance Studies Commons^™

Front Matter

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Fame And The Making Of Marriage In Northwest England, 1560-1640, Jennifer Mcnabb

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Because England did not enact a comprehensive reform of its medieval marital law until Lord Hardwicke’s Act in 1753, it was possible to construct a binding marriage outside the authority of the Church of England during the Tudor and Stuart periods. Marriages created by the exchange of present-tense consent, even if they failed to follow the church’s suggested rules concerning time and place, its emphasis on clerical presence, and its stress on publicity (through three readings of the banns or the procurement of a marriage license), were considered spiritually legitimate throughout the eight decades prior to the civil wars. An …

Tenth-Century Drama In The Twenty-First Century A Staging Of Three Plays By Hrotsvit Of Gandersheim At Stetson University (2005), Julia Schmitt

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During the fall semester of 2005, the Department of Communication Studies and Theatre Arts at Stetson University undertook a unique, but highly rewarding production challenge. Professor Ken McCoy and I were asked by The English Department of Stetson University to stage a medieval play in conjunction with the Southeast Medieval Association Conference to be held at Stetson during the month of September. The English Department was eager to offer conference attendees an opportunity to experience a live production of a medieval play.

Delno C. West Award Winner (2003)

Quidditas

James K. Otté

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

The Morality Of Misogny: The Case Of Rustico Filippi, Vituperatore Of Women, Fabian Alfie

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At the outset of his influential study on Rabelais, Mikhail Bakhtin makes an interesting observation. The scholar dedicates several pages to detail how the French author’s critical reception changed over time. Bakhtin illustrates how the attempt to comprehend an author can frequently be stymied by the cultural changes that occur across the centuries. As scholars analyze writers of earlier periods, the investigation of the cultural and textual background can become increasingly difficult.

Wedding Vows And Coffins: Canticles' Rhetoric, The Liturgical Form Of Matrimony And Middleton's A Chaste Maid In Cheapside (1613), Lisa Beauchamp

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The concluding scene of Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside begins as a double funeral procession and turns into a wedding as the lovers rise from their coffins to be married; but what are coffins doing in a wedding scene? The coffins, as an onstage sign of the metamorphosis of funeral into wedding, are the emblematic focus for this paper. This investigation exposes the resonances of Canticles’ erotic betrothal and Revelation’s matrimonial fulfilment as a rhetoric common to both theatrical rituals and to ecclesiastical scriptures. After briefly introducing what I call Canticles’ rhetoric – Canticles itself, its exegesis, and …

Betwixt War And Peace: The Dual Function And Substance Of The Bell, James K. Otté

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This paper owes its inspiration to Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage and to its protagonist, Henry Fleming, who

One night, as he lay in bed, the winds had carried to him the clangoring of the church bell as some enthusiast jerked the rope frantically to tell the twisted news of a great battle. This voice of the people rejoicing in the night had made him shiver in a prolonged ecstasy of excitement. Later, he had gone down to his mother’s room and had spoken thus: ‘Ma, I'm going to enlist.’ ‘Henry, don't you be a fool,’ his mother had …

Full Issue

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Iconoclasm And Iconophilia In Othello, Catherine E. Winiarski

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In his book War Against the Idols, Carlos Eire argues that iconoclastic resistance to the Medieval Catholic Church began with the gentle scolding of Erasmus and ended as the "shibboleth" of radical Calvinism. The use of images in religious instruction and practice was one of the major points of dispute between Protestant reformers and Catholic counter-reformers. Iconoclasm was certainly not confined to radical Calvinism; Anglican reformers, especially those who had spent time in continental Europe as exiles (like John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury), quickly raised the issue in their country, which had its own unique history of religious reform. …

Helena, Heraclius, And The True Cross, Hans A. Pohlsander

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More than three hundred years stand between the empress Helena, or St. Helena, and the Byzantine emperor Heraclius. This chronological distance has not been a hindrance to a very close association of the two personalities with each other. The link is not dynastic but thematic; it is provided by the Holy Cross, or the True Cross, i. e. the very cross of Christ's passion. It is the purpose of this article to show the manifestation of this link in the religious literature and ecclesiastical art of the Middle Ages and in the liturgy to this day.

Allen D. Breck Award Winner (2003)

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Catherine E. Winiarski

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

Front Matter

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No abstract provided.

Fama And Fortuna: Giorgio Vasari’S Michelangelo, Peter Kanelos

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The life of Michelangelo is set indisputably as the capstone to Giorgio Vasari’s monumental, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori (1568). Cathedral-like in its detail and expanse, Vasari’s collection of biographies is itself a carefully designed and constructed work of art. Its separate parts are crafted with concern for the whole; from its series of individual narratives, a single grand narrative emerges. Buonarroti’s position in this is conspicuous, and purposefully so. In the first edition of the Vite (1550)—his biography, the only one granted a living artist—concludes the work decisively. It is the final entry and the …

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,” …

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.

Front Matter

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No abstract provided.

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.

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: 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.

Full Issue

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No abstract provided.

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 …

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.

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 …

Wîse Maget, Jolyon Timothy Hughes

Quidditas

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.

Interpreting Early Modern Woman Abuse: The Case Of Anne Dormer, Mary O'Connor

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[T]hese hard laws I live under must keepe us from seeing one another.

Anne Dormer

When Anne Dormer, of Rousham, Oxfordshire, wrote to her sister, Elizabeth Trumbull, in August 1686, she complained that she would not be able to greet her on her return from a tumultuous year in France. Elizabeth (sometimes called Katherine) was married to the special envoy William Trumbull and had just endured the events of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Anne’s husband, Robert Dormer, had certain “laws” under which his wife had to live, one of which prohibited her from going to London to …

The Fall Of Troy And The Rise Of Elizabethan Drama: Empowering The Audience, Charles Whitney

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The English Reformation, along with urbanization, commercial development, and other major social and cultural changes, both reflect and affect a multifaceted contestation of authority among genres and modes of discourse in the sixteenth century. Robert Weimann finds the Elizabethan period marked by clashes “between diverse authorities engaging in rivalry for the more persuasive image, logic, truth, and form of saying things,” as “the claims on God-given legitimacy of secular and ecclesiastical institutions...were irretrievably undermined.” Rather than accept the authority of a document, according to its type and status, before it was actually read, audiences tended to approach representations as sites …

Allen D. Breck Award Winner

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Marie Kelleher

This article does not appear in the current volume of Quidditas

Review Essay: Lucrezia Tornabuoni De’ Medici. Sacred Narratives, Deanna Shemek

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Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici. Sacred Narratives. Ed. and trans. Jane Tylus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 286 pages plus notes and index.

Review Essay: Melitta Weiss Adamson, Ed. Regional Cuisines Of Medieval Europe: A Book Of Essays, Debby Banham

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Melitta Weiss Adamson, ed. Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe: a Book of Essays. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

Review Essay: Linda Woodbridge. Vagrancy, Homelessness, And English Renaissance Literature, Ken Jackson

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Linda Woodbridge. Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001.