Renaissance Studies Commons^™

Review Essay: Arthur Marotti, Ed. Catholicism And Anti-Catholicism In Early Modern English Texts, Eugene R. Cunnar

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Arthur Marotti, ed. Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. 266 pp.

Milan And The Development And Dissemination Of Il Ballo Nobile: Lombardy As The Terpsichorean Treasury For Early Modern European Courts, Katherine Tucker Mcginnis

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"Le mosche d'Italia in una poppa, Volando in Francia, per verder i ragni...." In these lines, titled "Di Pompeo Diabone," the Milanese artist and poet Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo celebrated the Italian dancing masters who, lured like flies to the web of the spider, served in the courts of France. In the sixteenth century there were many Italians in France, including a large number of influential and prosperous dancing masters. In spite of obvious connections with Florence via Catherine de’ Medici, the majority came from Lombardy, an area long considered the center of il ballo nobile, the formalized social …

Review Essay: Confident Readings: Medieval And Early Modern (Christian) Spirituality And Its Recent Interpreters, Steven F. Kruger

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Catherine M. Mooney, ed. Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. xiii + 277 pp.

Richard Rambuss. Closet Devotions. Durham and London: Duke Univer- sity Press, 1998. xiii + 193 pp.

The Life And The Literary Reputation Of Margaret Cavendish, James Fitzmaurice

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It might be said of the œuvre of Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) and in loose, jocular paraphrase of Sigmund Freud that biography has been destiny. Certainly a great many people who study British literature today pay as much attention to the various, often brief, assessments of the life of the woman as to what she wrote. For those scholars who concentrate on canonical male writers of the seventeenth century, she remains as she has for the last fifty years or so—a colorful eccentric who goes by the nickname “Mad Madge.” She is, thus, sufficiently represented by the few poems, the snippet …

Four Altar Panels By Bernhard Strigel: Some Historical And Philological Perspectives, Hans A. Pohlsander

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In 1507 the German painter Bernhard Strigel (Memmingen 1460–1527) created an altar of the Holy Cross of which four side panels have survived, while the presumably carved center has been lost. These four panels were formerly housed in Kynžvart (Königswart) Castle near Mariánské Lázne (Marienbad) in northwest Bohemia but were transferred to the National Gallery in Prague in 1972. The altar apparently was commissioned by the emperor Maximilian I and presented by him as a gift to Pope Julius II. Maximilian at this time was hoping to travel to Rome and to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the pope, …

The Château Anet As Artistic Inspiration, Margaret Harp

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From its inception, the Renaissance Château Anet, located due east of Paris just outside of the town of Dreux, was envisaged as a locale not only for the best and brightest of the royal court—namely, the king Henry II and his mistress Diane de Poitiers—but also as a veritable canvas for the most prominent architects, sculptors, painters, and poets of the day. These artists, and particularly the poets, viewed Anet as a spectacular artifice that mirrored Diane's beauty and elegance. While clearly catering to the court, the poetry reflected the common perception of Anet. Upon visiting the chateau in 1557 …

"Goodly Woods": Irish Forests, Georgic Trees In Books 1 And 4 Of Edmund Spenser's Færie Queene, Thomas Herron

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Whilst vitall sapp did make me spring,

And leafe and bough did flourish brave,

I then was dumbe and could not sing,

Ne had the voice which now I have:

But when the axe my life did end,

The Muses nine this voice did send.

—Verses upon the earl of Cork's lute, attributed (ca. 1633) to Edmund Spenser

Review Essay: Epstein, Marcia Jenneth. Prions En Chantant: Devotional Songs Of The Trouvères, William Burgwinkle

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Epstein, Marcia Jenneth. Prions en chantant: Devotional Songs of the Trouvères. Toronto Medieval Texts and Translations, II. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1997. 240 pp. Paperback $19.95. ISBN 0-802-07826-5. Hardback $50.00. ISBN 0-802-00840-2.

Review Essay: Major Women Writers Of Seventeenth-Century England, Theodora A. Jankowski

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Major Women Writers of Seventeenth-Century England, ed. James Fizmaurice, Josephine A. Roberts, Carol L. Barash, Eugene R. Cunnar, and Nancy A. Gutierrez. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1997. 408 pp. Paperback $29.95. ISBN 0-472-06609-9. Hardback $52.50. ISBN 0-472-09609-5.

Review Essay: Lyons, John D. The Tragedy Of Origins: Pierre Corneille And Historical Perspective, Sara E. Melzer

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Lyons, John D. The Tragedy of Origins: Pierre Corneille and Historical Perspective. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1996. 236 pp. $45.00. ISBN 0-804-72616-7.

Review Essay: Mendelson, Sara, And Patricia Crawford. Women In Early Modern England, Jan Stirm

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Mendelson, Sara, and Patricia Crawford. Women in Early Modern England. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998. xviii+ 480 pp. Illus. Paperback $19.95. ISBN 0-198-20812-x. Hardback $35. ISBN 0-198-20124-9.

Review Essay: Harris, Jonathan Gil. Foreign Bodies And The Body Politic: Discourses Of Social Pathology In Early Modern England, Julian Yates

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Harris, Jonathan Gil. Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998. xi + 197 pp. $64.95. ISBN 0-521-59405-7.

Full Issue

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No abstract provided.

Building The Imagined Community: Dominican Exempla And Theological Knowledge, Andrea L. Winkler

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During the thirteenth century, preachers considered sermons to be among the most important methods of communicating written material to the unlettered. Within a sermon, the use of exempla—short stories used to illustrate a moral point—was a primary means of disseminating theological information, and throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the number of exempla compilations intended as preaching aids increased markedly. Exempla collectors such as Caesarius of Heisterbach and Stephen of Bourbon shared and re-used stories to disseminate theological knowledge. Despite the communal nature of exempla, individual stories were more than unidirectional theological transmissions or stock tales repeated with …

John Skelton's "Agenst Garnesche": Poetic Territorialism, At The Court Of Henry Viii, Victor I. Scherb

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John Skelton's 1514 flyting "Agenst Garnesche" has been subject to little critical scrutiny. This neglect can perhaps be attributed to the fact that Christopher Garnesche's contribution is missing, but it is also characteristic of the relative neglect accorded to the flyting as a genre, a neglect that has also colored the interpretation of many of Skelton's more abusive poems. One critic, for example, has dismissed the poem as being "nothing but personal abuse of a particularly virulent type . . . adorned with a singular collection of epithets and incomprehensible allusions, which serve only to befog and irritate the reader." …

Objects Of Desire: Reading The Material World Metaphysically In Marguerite De Navarre's Heptaméron, Catharine Randall

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Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth,

where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.

But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven,

where moth and rust do not destroy,

and where thieves do not break in and steal.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

(Matthew 6:19-21)

Review Essay: Williams, Gary Jay. Our Moonlight Revels: "A Midsummer Night's Dream" In The Theatre. Studies In Theatre History And Culture Series, Lois Potter

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Williams, Gary Jay. Our Moonlight Revels: "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the Theatare. Studies in Theatre History and Culture Series, ed. Thomas Postlewait, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 1997. 340 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0-877-45592-9.

Living In The Palaces Of Love: Love And The Soul In A Vision Of St. Aldegund Of Maubeuge (Ca. 635–684), Isabel Moreira

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Abbess Aldegund of Maubeuge, in dictating her visions to the cleric Subnius in her later years, recalled a vision she had experienced in her youth. She saw herself entering a heavenly mansion, richly bejeweled and "steeped" with Christ's "sweet odor." The vision had made a great impression on her. She accredited it with having matured her spiritual understanding, for having first misunderstood the vision's meaning, she now understood it, "the scales having fallen from her eyes." Yet as historians we are not as fortunate as Aldegund claimed to be. Many centuries removed from the events of the seventh century, the …

Front Matter

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No abstract provided.

The Book Of Margery Kempe: Religious Discourse And The Carnivalesque Woman, Kathryn Summers

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Both during her lifetime and since the full manuscript of her forceful autobiography was discovered, no one has quite known what to do with Margery Kempe. Even her staunchest contemporary supporters occasionally lost patience with her or worried that they had inadvertently allied themselves with the wrong side in the divine conflict. Margery followed all the conventional Christian forms: she passed repeated ecclesiastical trials for orthodoxy with flying colors; she went on all the right pilgrimages; she said numberless prayers and took countless communions; even her crying fits and most of her visions have been shown to reflect the experiences …

Allen D. Breck Award Winner (1998): "The City's Usuries": Commerce And Cymbeline, Goran V. Stanivukovic

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Scholarship on early modern masculinity and male sexuality has not considered Cymbeline at any great length. Yet Cymbeline is jammed with men embroiled with the difficulties of the quest for national identity, a quest connected with the complications of shaping man's erotic identity. In Cymbeline the construction of masculinity depends upon one man's measuring of himself against another man, for example, Posthumus against Iachimo, Cloten against Posthumus; of one male community against another, of Romans against Britons. It has been a traditional tendency of gender-oriented criticism to interpret male subjectivity in Cymbeline as part of the process of forging British …

Review Essay: Goldberg, Jonathan. Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples, Christy Desmet

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Goldberg, Jonathan. Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1997- vii + 255 pp. ISBN 0-8047-2982-4. $45.00.

Review Essay: Hanson, Elizabeth. Discovering The Subject In Renaissance England, Louise Schleiner

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Hanson, Elizabeth. Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998. xii + 190 pp. $54.95; and Matchinske, Megan. Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England: Identity Formation and the Female Subject. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998. xi + 247 pp. $59.95. ISBN 0-521-62254-9.

Front Matter

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No abstract provided.

Classicism And Christianity In Hélisenne De Crenne's Les Angoysses Doulouoreuses Qui Procedent D'Amours, Megan Conway

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Although Renaissance philosophers and theologians like Marsilio Ficino strove mightily to show Plato and Plotinus compatible with Saint Paul, writers of popular prose and poetry suffered no such qualms. While it appears curious and often shocking to modern readers to find reference to the apostles and Apollo in successive paragraphs, many Renaissance writer followed Dante's example in The Divine Comedy and saw nothing incongruous in embracing classical mythology while espousing Christian doctrine. A fascinating example of this combination of traditions is the popular French work of a female author of the early Renaissance—Hélisenne de Crenne's Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent …

To "Eche Out Our Performance With Your Mind": Making Performance Pedagogy Intellectually Sound, Sharon A. Beehler

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When the Chorus in Henry V instructs the audience about what to expect in Act III, it reiterates the point made earlier in the play that the spectator must take an active role in helping the players achieve their goal of presenting an effective drama: "eche out our performance with your mind" (line 35), says the Chorus. This would seem to be a commonplace of theater theory, but unfortunately, recent attempt by some teachers to incorporate televisual performance activities into the Shakespeare classroom have all too often neglected the intellectual participation of students with "performance texts," that is, with printed …

1997 Allen D. Breck Award Winner: A Woman's Life As Ancillary Text: The Printed Texts Of The Biography Of Elizabeth Tanfield Caary, Jesse G. Swan

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As the first woman to write and publish an original play in English, Elizabeth Tanfield Cary, Viscountess Falkland, has become the subject of increased attention and appreciation over the last few decades. Since a major reason for studying Cary has been the feminist motivation to document women's contributions to the English language and its literature and culture, biographically informed criticism has naturally drawn much attention. With Cary, biographically informed criticism has been fostered by the existence of the Life of Cary, a biography written within a couple of decades of her death primarily by one of her four conventual daughters, …

Review Essay: Bjork, Robert E. And John D. Niles, Eds. A Beowulf Handbook. University Of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1997. 466 Pp., Illustrations. $60.00., Joyce Tally Lionarons

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Bjork, Robert E., and John D. Niles, eds. A Beowulf Handbook. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1997. 466 pp., illustrations. $60.00.

Review Essay: Busby, Keith, Ed. Word And Image In Arthurian Literature, James A. Rushing Jr.

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Busby, Keith, ed. Word and Image in Arthurian Literature. Garland, New York, 1996. x + 380 pp. $75.00.

Review Essay: De Weever, Jacqueline. Chaucer Name Dictionary: A Guide To Astrological, Biblical, Historical, Literary, And Mythological Names In The Works Of Geoffrey Chaucer, Sigmund Eisner

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de Weever, Jacqueline. Chaucer Name Dictionary: A Guide to Astrological, Biblical, Historical, Literary, and Mythological Names in the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, 709. Garland Publishing. New York, 1996. xxi + 451 pp. $24.95.