Renaissance Studies Commons^™

Review Essay: Miran Bozovic. An Utterly Dark Spot: Gaze And Body In Early Modern Philosophy, Shankar Raman

Quidditas

Miran Bozovic. An Utterly Dark Spot: Gaze and Body in Early Modern Philosophy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

The Lioness In The Text: Mary Of Egypt As Immasculated Female Saint, Onnaca Heron

Quidditas

The oral legend of Saint Mary of Egypt, whose death is assigned the date of about A.D. 430, was first recorded in Greek by Sophronius, bishop of Jerusalem, in the mid-sixth century; roughly two centuries later, Paulus, the deacon of the church of holy Naples, translated Sophronius’s text into Latin. While closely following his Greek source in the Latin translation, Paulus the deacon inserted a “Prologus auctoris,” an introductory allusion to the blinding and healing of Tobit by the archangel Raphael

“Falseness Reigns In Every Flock”: Literacy And Eschatological Discourse In The Peasants’ Revolt Of 1381, Tison Pugh

Quidditas

The literature of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, a miscellany of fourteenth-century poetry and prose penned before, during, and after the insurrection, often stresses the importance of literacy to the nonaristocratic population of England. Since literacy was a primary marker of one’s social status in the stratified society of medieval England, the rise of literacy in the lower orders pointed to a dramatic change in the prevail- ing socioeconomic structure. In the literature of the revolt, eschatological themes highlight the tensions resulting from this tremendous upheaval in the traditional estates. The power of literacy is depicted as adumbrating a new …

The Repudiation Of The Marvelous: Jonson’S The Alchemist And The Limits Of Satire, Ian Mcadam

Quidditas

Our present conception of alchemy is, at best, shadowy and confused. As Charles Nicholl states in The Chemical Theatre, "The modern image...tends in two directions: one scientific, the other magical. The first defines alchemy simply and chronologically as early chemistry...out of which modern chemistry began to emerge during the seventeenth century.” On the other hand, “alchemy is popularly defined as one of the ‘occult arts’.... To us, the alchemist’s avowed quest for miraculous substances—the Philosopher’s Stone which converts all to gold, the Elixir Vitae which confers immortality—belongs to the realm of magic rather than science.” Nevertheless, to consider Renaissance …

Review Essay: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Ed. The Postcolonial Middle Ages, Dorothy Kim

Quidditas

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed. The Postcolonial Middle Ages. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. 286 pp. ISBN 0312219296.

Montaigne And The Coherence Of Memory, Douglas Mcfarland

Quidditas

Among the many classical authorities to whom Montaigne refers either through direct reference or quotation, little attention has been paid to Lucan and to his contribution to the intellectual and rhetorical strategies of the Essais. Hugo Friedrich, for instance, in his chapter on Montaigne’s intellectual inheritance from the classical world, does not even mention Lucan’s name. Although Virgil, Lucretius, Plutarch, and several others clearly have influenced both the style and content of the Essais in seemingly more direct and overt ways, Montaigne, nevertheless, turns to Lucan consistently and with regularity. The essayist directly alludes to Lucan on three occasions …

Meter Change As A Relic Of Performance In The Middle English Romance Sir Beues, Linda Marie Zaerr

Quidditas

Despite the paucity of direct evidence of performance, some form of public representation of the Middle English popular verse romances remains a possibility, and that possibility has been reached by extrapolation from a number of directions. The convergence of evidence, though indirect, has become convincing, and a new approach strengthens that likelihood even further. In an attempt to understand if and how the romances were performed, scholars have considered internal references to performance, historical documents of performance and audience, physical evidence from the manuscripts, cognitive theory, theory of orality and “mouvance,” and evidence from textual variants.

Review Essay: James Sharpe. The Bewitching Of Anne Gunter: A Horrible And True Story Of Deception, Witchcraft, Murder, And The King Of England, Frances E. Dolan

Quidditas

James Sharpe. The Bewitching of Anne Gunter: A Horrible and True Story of Deception, Witchcraft, Murder, and the King of England. New York: Routledge, 2000. 238 pp. + xvi. $26.00.

Review Essay: John Kitchen. Saints’ Lives And The Rhetoric Of Gender: Male And Female In Merovingian Hagiography, Isabel Moreira

Quidditas

John Kitchen. Saints’ Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender: Male and Female in Merovingian Hagiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 255 pp. ISBN 0195117220.

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Allen D. Breck Award Winner: “Ples Acsep Thes My Skrybled Lynes”: The Construction And Conventions Of Women’S Letters In England, 1540–1603, James Daybell

Quidditas

The central themes of this essay are delineated by the contrasting examples of two female correspondents. Both women are from similar gentry backgrounds and wrote in the late 1570s to early 1590s. The first is Mary Harding, the court maid of Lady Bridget Manners, herself the daughter of Elizabeth, countess of Rutland, famed for her marriage to Robert Tyrwhit in 1594, which so greatly incurred the wrath of Elizabeth I. Only four of Mary Harding’s letters have survived, all of which were sent to her mistress’s mother in order to keep her abreast of court news, her daughter’s progress, and …

Review Essay: Anna Battigelli. Margaret Cavendish And The Exiles Of The Mind, Sylvia Bowerbank

Quidditas

Anna Battigelli. Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998.

Review Essay: Anglo-Saxonism And The Construction Of Social Identity, Peter Richardson

Quidditas

Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity. Ed. John D. Niles and Allen J. Frantzen. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997.

Re-Visioning Renaissance Women: On The Perils And Pleasures Of Re-Viewing The Past, Sara Jayne Steen, Susan Frye

Quidditas

Two years ago, editor Sharon Beehler and the editorial board of the jour- nal Quidditas (formerly the Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association) requested that we—Sara Jayne Steen and Susan Frye—edit a gathering of essays on women in the Renaissance as one way to mark the journal’s new name and critical directions. The gathering printed here, even more than we had hoped, announces this journal’s position as interdisciplinary, historically grounded, and willing to ask of history, literature, and the arts both familiar, recurring questions and those newer questions occasioned by a variety of theoretical perspectives.

Inventing The Wicked Women Of Tudor England: Alice More, Anne Boleyn, And Anne Stanhope, Retha M. Warnicke

Quidditas

In Tudor histories, perhaps more than in other histories, writers have failed to distinguish, as Judith Shapiro has pointed out with reference to anthropological literature, "consistently between the sex bias emanating from the observer and the sex bias characteristic of the community under study.” The sex and gender bias of early modern society was, of course, pervasive and ubiquitous. Prescriptive works instructed women to confine their activities to domestic and family matters. Even as litigators in the courts of law, they were disadvantaged. Generally defining women as the inferior sex, their male contemporaries judged women’s worth by their chastity, silence, …

Playing The Waiting Game: The Life And Letters Of Elizabeth Wolley, Elizabeth Mccutcheon

Quidditas

Almost fifty years ago Wallace Notestein, an English historian, commented that while both the men and the women of late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England remain "strangers" and “shadowy figures” to us, the women are “much more shadowy.” Pointing out that “Our knowledge of women comes largely from the incidental mention of them by men who seldom took pains to characterize and individualize them,” he insisted that “It is as individuals that we must know them, if we are to understand them as members of a sex.” Obviously a great deal has changed for the better. We know much more about the …

Learning To Be Looked At: The Portrait Of [The Artist As A] Young Woman In Agnès Merlet’S Artemisia, Sheila Ffolliott

Quidditas

Agnès Merlet's 1997 film Artemisia opens with a full-screen, tight close-up of an eye, under a sepia veiling effect that prevents its appearing overly clinical. The image provides an effective introduction to issues this film about a seventeenth-century woman-artist explores. We might expect a film about a visual artist to concern that person’s eye. We also expect film, itself a visual medium, to fascinate the eye of the spectator. But rather than simply confirm such expectations, this filmic eye unsettles. First, because of the extremity of the close-up, we see only part of the eye. Then, although it stares directly …

“There Is Nothing More Divine Than These, Except Man”: Thomas Moffett And Insect Sociality, Monique Bourque

Quidditas

When Thoomas Moffett wrote in the Theater of Insects that "there is nothing more divine than these, except Man," he asked his readers some pointed questions about insects, and made some blunt statements:

where is Nature more to be seen than in the smallest matters, where she is entirely all? for in great bodies the workmanship is easie, the matter being ductile; but in these that are so small and despicable, and almost nothing, what care? how great is the effect of it? how unspeakable is the perfection? ... Do you require Prudence? regard the Ant; Do you desire Justice? …

“Sad Stories Of The Death Of Kings”: Lyric And Narrative Release From Confining Spaces In Shakespeare’S Richard Ii, Jennifer C. Vaught

Quidditas

The relation of Shakespeare's plays to other literary forms like lyric and narrative is a topic that continues to invite speculation. A number of his plays contain songs and sonnets, reported stories and winter’s tales. In this essay I examine lyrics and narratives in Richard II and their dialogic relation to the surrounding text. In a play about a self-enclosed King these utterances tend to occur in enclosures: Richard delivers lyrics while immured at Flint Castle and the dungeon at Pomfret, whereas his Queen laments in an enclosed garden and promises to tell the King’s story during her exile in …

The Changing Understanding Of The Making Of Europe From Christopher Dawson To Robert Bartlett, Glenn W. Olsen

Quidditas

Two books with the same title, The Making of Europe, published sixty-one years apart, may help us assess profound shifts that have taken place in the understanding of Europe over the last two-thirds of the twentieth century. Both books were or are by master, if quite dissimilar, historians. Though the books share the same title, profound differences, perhaps the program of each author, is revealed in their subtitles. For Christopher Dawson (1889–1970), arguably the most eminent Catholic historian of the twentieth century, The Making of Europe was An Introduction to the History of European Unity (London, 1932). As a …

Review Essay: Jean Renart: The Romance Of The Rose Or Of Guillaume De Dole (Roman De La Rose Ou De Guillaume De Dole), Kathy M. Krause

Quidditas

Jean Renart: The Romance of the Rose or of Guillaume de Dole (Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole). Ed. and trans. Regina Psaki. Garland Library of Medieval Literature 92A. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995. xli + 280 pp.

Review Essay: Jeffrey Powers-Beck. Writing The Flesh: The Herbert Family Dialogue, Owen Staley

Quidditas

Jeffrey Powers-Beck. Writing the Flesh: The Herbert Family Dialogue. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998. 290 pp. incl. bibliography, 3 appendices, and index. $54.50 cloth. ISBN 0–8207–0283–5.

Review Essay: David Wallace. Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages And Associational Forms In England And Italy, Stanley Benfell

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David Wallace. Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. xix + 555 pp.

The Sincere Body: The Performance Of Weeping And Emotion In Late Medieval Italian Sermons, Lyn Blanchfield

Quidditas

In 1493 the well-known and controversial Franciscan preacher Bernardino of Feltre gave a series of Lenten sermons to the people of Pavia. On March 11 he dedicated an entire sermon to the necessity of contrition—or perfect sorrow over sin—in the rite of confession. Speaking to a large audience of both men and women, rich and poor, and the local ecclesiastical and civic authorities, Bernardino discussed how one should behave when contrite: “If you cannot feel sorrow of the body, then at least [feel it] in [your] heart, and if you cannot weep with [your] bodily eyes, then at least [weep] …

“Murder Not Then The Fruit Within My Womb”: Shakespeare’S Joan, Foxe’S Guernsey Martyr, And Women Pleading Pregnancy In Early Modern English History And Culture, Carole Levin

Quidditas

When the character Joan La Pucelle has been captured and is brought before Warwick and York to be condemned at the end of Shakespeare's 1 Henry VI, she at first denies her shepherd father and proclaims both her noble birth and her virginity. She claims that she is issue “from the progeny of kings; virtuous and holy,” and adds proudly, “Joan of Arc hath been a virgin from her tender infancy,/ Chaste and immaculate in very thought” (5.4.38–39, 50–51). These assertions do not, however, impress York and Warwick, who order her to be taken away to her execution. At …

Review Essay: Susanne Woods. Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet, Nancy Gutierrez

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Susanne Woods. Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. xvi + 198 pp.

Review Essay: R. B. Dobson And J. Taylor. Rymes Of Robyn Hood: An Introduction To The English Outlaw, Julian Wasserman

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R. B. Dobson and J. Taylor. Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw. Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, Ltd., 1997. 332 pp.

Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren. Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997. 723 pp.