Renaissance Studies Commons^™

Putting On The Garment Of Widowhood: Medieval Widows, Monastic Memory, And Historical Writing, Katherine Clark

Quidditas

The idea of the widow in communal memory and historical writing was a resonant and multi-faceted concept for monastic writers of the Middle Ages. This essay focuses on the function and meaning of widowhood in two examples of early medieval historical writing, by one male and one female author, to illustrate how monastic authors engaged significant and enduring aspects of widowhood during the Western European Middle Ages to construct institutional histories. Images of female memory and widowed piety (especially because the widow represented the Church who awaited her spouse, Christ) were useful in describing the experiences of women who held …

Cognition And Recognition In King Lear, Act Iv. Scene Vii, Jenny Rebecca Rytting

Quidditas

Although King Lear’s half-line “You are a spirit I know” (IV.vii.49) has no internal punctuation in the Folio or Quarto versions of Shakespeare’s play, most modern editors add a comma between the words “spirit” and “I.” This spurious comma forces the line to be interpreted to mean “I know that you are a spirit” rather than “You are a spirit that I know,” whereas, without punctuation, both interpretations are viable. I argue that the latter reading is not only possible, based on Shakespeare’s syntactical practices, but also preferable, based on both the immediate context of the line and the theme …

Satire In Boaistuau’S Théâtre Du Monde, Alison Baird Lovell

Quidditas

Le Théâtre du monde [Theater of the World] (1558) of Pierre Boaistuau was an encyclopedic compilation in three books presenting a litany of vices and miseries in human life; the book proved to be an early modern “bestseller” and was reproduced in many editions and translations across Europe. Boaistuau, the first editor of the tales of Marguerite de Navarre, also edited other story collections, besides investigating religious matters, early modern science and medicine including prodigies and monsters, and other developing forms of knowledge. The Théâtre du monde manifested topoi including the theatrum mundi with its vast spectacle displayed …

The Right Stuff: Habitus And Embodied Virtue In Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, Alice F. Blackwell

Quidditas

One of the themes weaving in and out of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is that of virtue: Gawain’s shield proclaims his virtue, yet at the end of the Green Chapel scene, he exclaims vice has destroyed his virtue, leaving him “faulty and false.” This scene has troubled critics and students, however, for many consider his reaction excessive for his default on the rules of a courtly game. The present paper contends that the notion of virtue written for Gawain naturalizes embodied virtue. While both religious and lay writers tended to argue that one possessed predisposition to moral or …

Review Article: Quidditas And Medieval Studies Today, Erin Felicia Labbie

Quidditas

Medieval studies today may be precisely characterized by quidditas. The Aristotelian term quidditas became central to the development of medieval scholastic inquiry in the West when, in 1066 Anselm of Canterbury wrote the Monologion. This eleventh-century foray into the revival of Aristotelian thought is also seen in Porphyry’s third-century translations of Aristotle and in Boethius’ sixth-century concern with universals elaborated in his commentaries on universals and categories. For Anselm and the developing model of medieval scholastic thought, the Monologion and its immediate successor, the Proslogian, assert a double discourse of the difference between quidditas and haeccitas, …

Saints And The Social Order: Alexander Barclay’S The Life Of St. George, Maggie Gallup Kopp

Quidditas

This paper examines The Life of St. George, Alexander Barclay’s 1515 translation of a humanist Latin prose poem. Barclay, who styled himself a laureate in the tradition of Lydgate, adapts laureate poetic practice in order to address a noble audience in a bid to gain court patronage. Barclay’s emendations and additions transform the hagiography of England’s patron saint into a commentary on traditional English ideals of citizenship and good governance, aimed at an audience comprised of both common citizens and noble elites, including, as this paper argues, the young king Henry VIII.

Allen D. Breck Award Winner (2010)

Quidditas

Kristin M.S. Bezio

The Allen D. Breck Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a junior scholar at the annual conference of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association

“Hand Hand Shooke”: Compassionate Touch In George Chapman’S Hero And Leander, Patricia Davis Patrick

Quidditas

Chapman begins his continuation of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander by announcing that he intends to “censure the delights” which the lovers have enjoyed without the sanction of ceremony. However, the narrator does not maintain this attitude of stern judgment. As readers of Chapman’s Hero and Leander have often noticed, the narrator continuously shifts his tone, sometimes censuring the lovers and sometimes sympathizing with them. Chapman’s poem is thus as deeply concerned with the problem of appropriate compassion as it is with the containment of Eros. The narrator’s vacillation between censure and compassion can be fruitfully considered by examining early modern …

Banishing Ganymede At Whitehall: Jove’S “Loathsome Staines” And Fictions Of Britain In Thomas Carew’S Coelum Britannicum, Jessica Tvordi

Quidditas

Thomas Carew’s masque Coelum Britannicum, performed at Whitehall on Shrove Tuesday of 1634, deploys an image of conjugal perfection in order to codify a fiction of national union. Not only are Charles I and Henrietta Maria models of moral and political comportment powerful enough to reform the profligate court of Jove, their harmonious marriage also provides the inspiration for reconciliation between England, Scotland, and Ireland. In order to assert this fiction of unification, the masque invokes images of sexual transgression, symbolically enacts their removal, and equates the strength of Britain with the absence of the deviant monarch, James I. …

“Talk Of Marriage” In Northwest England: Continuity And Change In Matrimonial Litigation, 1560-1640, Jennifer Mcnabb

Quidditas

This article suggests that the matrimonial culture of northwest England from 1560 to 1640 was marked by a complex range of strategies, values, and processes that emphasized matrimony as a performative process. While present-tense language of consent created, in the words of sixteenth-century lawyer Henry Swinburne, the “Substance and indissoluble knot of Matrimony,” people in the northwest consistently identified other words, actions, and attitudes that also communicated matrimonial intent. Litigation from the diocese of Chester’s two consistory courts features considerable “talk of marriage” by litigants and deponents and reveals an enduring emphasis in the northwest on public performance of matrimonial …

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Allen D. Breck Award Winner (2009)

Quidditas

Adele Lee

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

Delno C. West Award (2009)

Quidditas

Andrea Knox

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

“The Whole Is An Idle Dream:” The Early Modern And Post-Modern Quest For Cathay, Adele Lee

Quidditas

This article examines how the Renaissance English understood and responded to the land of Cathay. It argues that although Cathay is technically just another name for China it represented a separate conceptual realm in this period. In other words, Cathay must be considered as being, in many ways, a distinct discursive construct. Viewed as the ‘glittering prize’ of the East India Company, Cathay, which fuelled countless (doomed) attempts at discovery, possessed characteristics both Chinese and Tartar. Descriptions of it converged and diverged simultaneously with descriptions of China and Tartary. As well as being a culturally liminal entity, Cathay was also …

Dancing In The Shadows: Ritual, Drama And The Performance Of Baptisms In The Digby Conversion Of St. Paul And Philip Massinger’S The Renegado., Matthew C. Hansen

Quidditas

The anonymous Digby Conversion of St. Paul aims at historical verisimilitude in order to distance the on-stage baptism the play contains from the rite as performed in early sixteenth-century English churches. Philip Massinger’s The Renegado (published 1624), presenting the conversion and baptism of a Muslim woman, employs specific details to establish the baptism performed on stage as a rite that, while efficacious within the contexts of the play, is markedly different in substantive performance than the form of baptism presented in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer. Both plays frame the dramatically significant and sensitive performance of the religious rite …

The Convent As Cultural Conduit: Irish Matronage In Early Modern Spain, Andrea Knox

Quidditas

Irish catholic women religious who migrated to Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries established a strong tradition of schools, hospitals and charitable institutions. Education and learning were important to Irish communities, and were recognised within Spain. Irish nuns and their convents were not part of an enclosed tradition and outreach work was a central aim. Sponsorship links between women were part of a collective plan, and cultural matronage by and for women appears to have been very effective. Censorship by the Inquisition and tridentine orthodoxy was contested by women’s religious houses which resisted censorship of book collections and art …

Review Essay: “Will In Overplus” A Review Of Shakespeare Biographies, Stephannie S. Gearhart

Quidditas

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,

And Will to boot, and Will in overplus;

More than enough am I that vex thee still

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 135, ll.1-3

It seems to be a kind of Respect due to the Memory of Excellent Men,

specially of those whom their Wit and Learning have made Famous,

to deliver some Account of themselves, as well as their Works, to Posterity.

For this Reason, how fond do we see some People of discovering any little

Personal Story of the great Men of Antiquity, their Families, the common

Accidents of their Lives, and …

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Teaching The Black Death, Jennifer Mcnabb

Quidditas

John Alberth, ed. The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348- 1350: A Brief History with Documents. Bedford Series in History and Culture. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005. 200 pages. $14.95.

Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, ed. The Black Death. Problems in European Civilization. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. 206 pages. $37.99.

Using John Wilders To Teach Shakespeare’S Second Tetralogy, Edmund M. Taft

Quidditas

John Wilders. The Lost Garden: A View of Shakespeare’s English and Roman History Plays. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1978. 154 pp.

“O thoughts of men accurst!

Past and to come seems best; things present, worst.”

(2 Henry 4.1.3.107-108)

Front Matter

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Architectural Chastity Belts: The Window Motif As Instrument Of Discipline In Italian Fifteenth-Century Conduct Manuals And Art, Jennifer Megan Orendorf

Quidditas

Offering advice on a range of topics from the quotidian to the extraordinary, from superstition to scientific, fifteenth-century conduct manuals appealed to readers of all Italian social classes. This essay focuses specifically on manuals which prescribe behaviors for women, and investigates the reception of these precepts and the extent to which these notions informed and transformed women’s lives. Specifically, I examine one piece of advice which recurs throughout instructional literature during this time: the prescribed notion that women should remain far removed from their household windows for the sake of their honor, reputation and chastity. Widely read manuals, such as …

Karlsgrab: The Site And Significance Of Charlemagne’S Sepulcher In Aachen, John F. Moffitt

Quidditas

The intention of what follows is to clear up one of the mysteries still surrounding the Charles the Great, now most commonly known by his later appellation “Charlemagne.” Born in 742, the son of King Pepin the Short (ca. 714-768), Charlemagne ruled as king of the Franks after 768; he additionally ruled as Emperor of the West, from 800 until his death in 814. Sources in his time presented him as an emulator and successor of Constantine the Great, and successive Western Emperors presented their own personae as successors of Charlemagne. In 1165, 350 years after Charlemagne’s death, Emperor Frederick …

Utopia Transformed: The Calculated Indirection Of Thomas Starkey’S Dialogue Between Pole And Lupset, Robert W. Haynes

Quidditas

Thomas Starkey’s effort to employ guarded speech and to distance himself from some of the risky views discussed in his Dialogue between Pole and Lupset (1529- 1536?) emulated similar features of Thomas More’s Latin Utopia and, in fact, sought to improve on More’s striking dialogue. Though doomed by the break between Henry VIII and Rome (and that between the king and Starkey’s dialogue’s chief speaker), this unfinished work exhibits a particularly ambitious and in some ways quite skillfully wrought humanist project.

The Education Of The Son In Paradise Regained: Milton’S Of Education As A Guide, Alice Matthews

Quidditas

“The Education of the Son in Paradise Regained: Milton’s Of Education as a Guide” argues that the character of Christ provides a model for effective learning, which is outlined in Milton’s treatise On Education. In the treatise, first published in 1644, some twenty- seven years before his brief epic, Milton explains the purpose for education as strengthening one’s relationship with God, and the best method for acquiring it— gradually, progressing from the easy to the more difficult. In my essay, I will analyze each step in Christ’s education, beginning with his boyhood and culminating in his temptation on …

The Italian, Spanish, And English Fencing Schools In Shakespeare’S England, Stewart Hawley

Quidditas

Three styles of fencing are were taught in England during the Elizabethan era: Italian, Spanish, and English. Non-historical plays of the Elizabethan period are examined to consider what style of fencing was used on stage, and perhaps taught to the actors in plays such as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and others. Historically, scholars have chosen to argue that actors of this period were taught an Italian or Spanish style of fencing, often glossing over the English style. I argue that the unique English style of fencing was probably taught to Elizabethan actors. Showing that these three fencing styles have distinct …

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Allen D. Breck Award Winner (2008)

Quidditas

Alice Blackwell

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

Gaiwan's Five Wits: Technological Difficulties In The Endless Knot, Alice Blackwell

Quidditas

Traditionally, the “five wits” of the endless knot on Gawain’s shield in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” have been read as the five senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. The present paper, following recent work by Peter Whiteford, Simon Kemp, and Garth Fletcher, contends that the five wits may be interpreted as the five internal wits, which include imagination and memory and determine perception. This identification of the five wits as the five internal wits calls into question Gawain’s self-identity, predicated as it is upon the five wits’ faultlessness. In this context, Gawain’s self-understanding is really a self-misunderstanding, and …

Politics And Culture At The Jacobean Court: The Role Of Queen Anna Of Denmark, Courtney Erin Thomas

Quidditas

Until recently, analyses of the Jacobean court marginalized the important role played by James I and VI’s queen consort, Anna of Denmark. While historians and literary critics now acknowledge that Anna was a key player in patronage networks and artistic circles at the time, the extent of her political involvement remains largely unexplored in favor of portraying her solely as a cultural figure. This essay seeks to examine the connections between Anna’s cultural and political activities and suggests that, by viewing Anna’s involvements thorough a dichotomous lens as being either political or cultural, a truly textured and nuanced understanding of …