Renaissance Studies Commons^™

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

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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

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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

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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

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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 …

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No abstract provided.

Teaching The Black Death, Jennifer Mcnabb

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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

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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)

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No abstract provided.

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

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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

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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

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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

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“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

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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 …

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No abstract provided.

Allen D. Breck Award Winner (2008)

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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

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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

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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 …

Maria Fairfax And The “Easy Philosopher”: Action And Indolence In Andrew Marvell’S “Upon Appleton House”, Byron Nelson

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Andrew Marvell dramatizes the difficult choice between action and indolence in his long pastoral poem, “Upon Appleton House.” The nameless nun’s rhetorical temptation of Isabel Thwaites, as narrated in an apparent digression from the past history of the house, anticipates the poet’s own self-seduction in the woods later in the poem. Both Isabel and the poet need to be rescued from their fallen state. The tension between action and passivity is resolved by the redemptive appearance of “Maria.” The model for her providential intervention is the Shakespearean romance, in which an innocent daughter, who is rescued from danger and degradation, …

Alphabetical Lives: Early Modern German Biographical Lexicons And Encyclopedias, Richard G. Cole

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Those who appear obvious to us as “major players” in past eras may in part result from an unintended consequence of the work of early modern biographical lexicographers. By the eighteenth century, there were enough printed sources and available archival materials to deluge or even overwhelm historians and biographers with information about past actors of sixteenth century history. Those biographical lexicographers made choices about whom to give prominence and whom to minimize or ignore in their works.

Review Essay: Bringing The Middle Ages Into The World History Survey Course: Some Suggestions, Tiffany A. Trimmer

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Too often World Historians neglect coverage of the European Middle Ages, and medieval history courses tend to lose sight of the ways in which medieval Europe played a part in the wider world to which it belonged. Part of this results from the artificial pre/post 1500 CE split that dominates the organization of the typical world history survey, and part from the reluctance of World Historians to realize the potential of a global history approach to the era before the age of exploration and colonization. The works included in this essay attempt to rectify the absence of earlier European historical …

Books Recommended For Courses: Denis De Rougement. Love In The Western World, J. M. Anderson

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Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World has become something of a classic since it first appeared in 1939. Rougemont traces the development of romantic love from its origins in the twelfth century to its mutated condition in the twentieth. His thesis is that romantic love and marriage are fundamentally opposed. “My central purpose,” he wrote in his Preface to the 1956 revised edition, “was to describe the inescapable conflict in the West between passion and marriage; and in my view that remains the true subject, the real contention of the book as it has worked out.” Whereas romantic …

Books Recommended For Courses: Elena Levy-Navarro. The Culture Of Obesity In Early And Late Modernity: Body Image In Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, And Skelton, Holly Overturf

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If next semester’s reading list is feeling a bit thin, consider fattening it up with The Culture of Obesity in Early and Late Modernity: Body Image in Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Skelton, an important new book by Elena Levy-Navarro. The book consists of six chapters, followed by extensive endnotes and a useful index. The first two chapters introduce the next four, and seek to build a history from which a fat culture can be formed. In the last four chapters, Levy- Navarro flexes her (fat-blanketed) literary anthropologist muscles by looking for symbolic meanings of fat in selected works of …

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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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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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.