Renaissance Studies Commons^™

William Of Auvergne And Popular Demonology, Thomas De Mayo

Quidditas

Theologian and bishop of Paris during St. Louis’ early reign, William of Auvergne (d. 1249) aimed in his life and writings to combat the myriad threats he perceived as facing Christianity. The early thirteenth century saw many potential competitors to official doctrines concerning the natural and supernatural worlds—Arabic philosophy imported into the universities, heretical attacks on the institutional church, and persistent folk beliefs and practices. William attributed these challenges to an underlying demonic conspiracy directed against humankind. This paper examines William’s treatment of popular beliefs on the Wild Hunt, a mysterious congregation of spirits, and related beliefs about female spirits …

Rendering Shakespearean Rhetoric Visible In The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, Katherine Kickel

Quidditas

Traditionally, the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery is considered an important moment in England’s art history narrative. In this essay, I argue that the Boydell collection also reflects a new preference for reading Shakespeare’s plays in the eighteenth century via its editorial illustration of parts of the plays that would not normally be emphasized in theatrical productions.

Front Matter

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Review Essay: Some Thoughts On The Greater Integration Of Islamic Sources Into The Wider Framework Of Medieval History, John J. Curry

Quidditas

The study of Islam has been attracting greater interest in recent years, due to high-profile political and economic events. In addition, the rise of world history programs has generated a need for resources by which both students and faculty alike can strengthen their knowledge in this field. Still, general knowledge on the field is limited. This disparity has occurred, in part, because the field of Islamic history, especially in its formative and medieval periods, has been oriented toward specialists rather than a general audience. Often, world history sourcebooks are content to give only short selections from religious sources such as …

Charlemagne’S Denarius, Constantine’S Edicule, And The Vera Crux, John F. Moffitt

Quidditas

In 806 a much-discussed silver denarius bearing the likeness of Charlemagne was issued. This is called the “temple-type” coin due to the (as yet unidentified) architectural structure illustrated on the reverse side, and which is explicitly labeled as representing the epitome of “Christian Religion.” By examining different kinds of archeological and documentary evidence, this building can now be finally identified. It is, in short, the “Edicule” built by Constantine the Great in 326 to cover the Tomb of Christ (or Holy Sepulcher) in Jerusalem.

Old Icelandic Gaglviðr, Aurelijus Vijūnas

Quidditas

This essay discusses a debated word form gaglviðr occurring in stanza 42 of the Old Icelandic poem VÄluspá 'The Prophesy of the Seeress'. The noun gaglviðr is problematic both from the semantic point of view (Old Icelandic gagl 'gosling', viðr 'tree; forest' 'gosling forest'?), and because it possesses a variant spelling galgviðr ('gallows' tree;’gallows' forest') which occurs in another manuscript containing the same poem. In the present paper, the form gaglviðr is considered to be the correct and the original form of this word, whereas the form galgviðr is interpreted as a scribal error. Various existing semantic analyses of the …

Delno C. West Award Winner (2006)

Quidditas

Margaret Harp

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

Twentieth-Century Illustrators’ Interpretations Of The Works Of Rabelais, Margaret Harp

Quidditas

Gustave Doré's mid-nineteenth-century illustrations of François Rabelais's oeuvre have become as well-known as the text itself: their fanciful details capture the literally larger-than-life personality of the French sixteenth-century humanist's protaganist-giants, Pantagruel and Gargantua. Equally intrigued by the thematic complexity and imaginative narrative of this Renaissance masterpiece, subsequent artists and illustrators of Rabelais continue to create new and unexpected artistic representations. This paper presents the illustrations of a lesser-known twentieth-century French wood engraver, Jean Chièze. His notable contributions to a 1935 commemorative edition of Pantagruel simultaneously highlight the medieval woodcut, emphasize the playful tone of Rabelais's narrative and allude to contemporary …

Review Essay: Rodney Stark’S Vision Of Medieval Christianity, Elspeth Whitney

Quidditas

Rodney Stark. For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003, 504 pages, and The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. New York: Random House, 2005, 304 pages.

Enchanted Islands Floating On The Foam Of Perilous Seas, Jean Macintyre

Quidditas

In localizing The Tempest on “an uninhabited island,” the 1623 Shakespeare Folio associates the setting with the floating island that some masque machines represented. Such machines acted as movable stages to transport masquers from within the set to the spot from which their dances would begin; other masques allege that their immobile sets were also floating islands. Though the stages, permanent or temporary, on which The Tempest was performed were not mobile, they nonetheless were a kind of island surrounded by spectators, on which the magician Prospero, aided by Ariel, writes, casts, and directs a play whose roles are unwittingly …

Romancing The Chronicles: 1 Henry Iv And The Rewriting Of Medieval History, Bradley Greenburg

Quidditas

This essay explores the ways Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV deploys Welshness as a counterforce to English national stability. I argue that the critical habit of equating the genre of romance with untruthfulness or silliness does not pay close enough attention to what Shakespeare does in his history plays. The Hal he gives us, whose youth and military training in Wales he suppresses, is, generically, a romance character. But, instead of a knight in his father’s service (where his adventures would be securely in the service of the realm), or knight errant, he is an errant haunter of bad company, an …

Delno C. West Award Winner (2004)

Quidditas

James H. Forse

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

Delno C. West Award Winner (2005)

Quidditas

Susan Stakel

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

Monasteries As Financial Patrons And Promoters Of Local Performance In Late Medieval And Early Tudor England, Christine Sustek Williams

Quidditas

The elaborate cycle plays produced in the larger, wealthy municipalities of York, Chester, Wakefield and Coventry receive the lion’s share of attention among scholars of medieval theatre. Until recently, performance activities in smaller communities have received little or no attention, except perhaps as something of antiquarian interest. And one area of theatre history that has been largely overlooked is the involvement of monasteries in local performance activities. Yet the precious few, fragmentary, monastic records that survived the dissolutions of the monasteries under Henry VIII and Edward VI, suggest that several monasteries gave active financial support to local theatre in England …

Everyman In Production: A Dance Of Death A Staging At California State University, Chico (2004), Jan Hawkley

Quidditas

Medieval dramatic works, while historically significant and intellectually interesting, may seem irrelevant and even incomprehensible in our day. The language is problematic in pronunciation, phrasing and word meaning. Allegory today often is considered didactic and overly simplistic, yielding only one- dimensional characters. Medieval society appears obtuse to modern students, functioning with a totally different worldview and social hierarchy; medieval concepts of comedy and religion are difficult for us to grasp today. Additionally, we obviously have no recordings of actual performances, so we do not know how a given play was staged; we must surmise medieval staging from descriptions of performances …

Entertaining Yet Erudite Social History, Ginger L. Guardiola

Quidditas

Barbara A. Hanawalt. Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. 300 pages. $18.95.

Allen D. Breck Award Winner (2005)

Quidditas

Bradley Greenburg

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

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Representing A Bigger Middle Ages, Carol Neel

Quidditas

Barbara H. Rosenwein. A Short History of the Middle Ages. Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2002. 362 pages. $42.95.

Colin McEvedy. The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History. London: Penguin Books, 1992. 112 pages. $13.95.

Patrick J. Geary. The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002. 261 pages. $19.95.

Allen D. Breck Award Winner (2004)

Quidditas

Jennifer McNabb

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

Getting Your Name Out There: Traveling Acting Companies And Royal And Aristocratic Prestige In Tudor England, James H. Forse

Quidditas

Records published to date concerning early English drama suggest that in the first third of the sixteenth century touring activity by municipal, amateur acting companies exceeded that of royal and aristocratic troupes. But after about 1535, the religious, social, and economic policies of Henry VIII, and Edward VI, severely limited locally based performances. At the same time tours by royal acting troupes substantially increased. Yet of all the Tudors, it was Elizabeth who seems to have realized the potential of her acting troupe representing the monarch's presence throughout the kingdom. From the beginning of her reign the Queen’s Men appeared …

Front Matter

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

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

Quidditas

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

Quidditas

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

Quidditas

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

Quidditas

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

Quidditas

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

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Iconoclasm And Iconophilia In Othello, Catherine E. Winiarski

Quidditas

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. …