Renaissance Studies Commons^™

The Image Falls Apart, Alexa N. Curran

Masters Theses

The Image Falls Apart is a phenomenological account of my collision with Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross (ca. 1435). In an ever-expanding landscape of visual stimuli, how do we make sense of images that are an encounter with the sacred? Of what use to a modern viewer is an altarpiece of the late medieval period that, in its miraculous rendering of each of its human figures, reflects the impending iconophobia of the Protestant Reformation? And what does falling have to do with it? With careful attention to the assembly of bodies in space, this multidisciplinary project, …

“One Object Yields Both Grief And Joy”: Death In Elizabeth Cary’S The Tragedy Of Mariam (1613), Valeria Suprunova

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that the dialog between early ancient Roman and early modern English traditions of death and dying helps illuminate the complex relationship between tyranny and death in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) and that death is an inextricable and dynamic element of the text.

A Technical And Performance Re-Examination Of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’S Escarramán, Op. 177: Beyond The Angelo Gilardino Publication. A New Performance Edition Of Gallarda, Daniel Monroy Reyes

Theses and Dissertations--Music

This dissertation provides a technical and performance-oriented re-examination of the first four movements of Escarramán: A Suite of Spanish Dances from the XVIth Century (After Cervantes), Op. 177, by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. It argues that the suite embodies a fundamental tension between the composer’s original compositional and structural intentions and the ergonomic limitations of the guitar, and evaluates the proposed solutions by Angelo Gilardino in the 1979 Bèrben edition.

This research employs a comparative, practice-led framework to address the paradox of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s non-idiomatic writing. Its primary contribution is the development of a performance synthesis that maintains harmonic integrity while enhancing …

Interspecies Responsivity In Early Modern Drama And Animal Performances, Taylor C. Culbert

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation proposes an expansive, interspecies definition of performance that uses behavior rather than cognition as the decisive feature and illustrates how such a definition can reshape our approach to theatre and performance history. Using the concept of responsivity, which refers to the embodied and affective ways that humans and non-human animals acknowledge and react to one another, I trace human–animal interactions across a variety of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century performance genres, from the aristocratic stag hunt and entertainments involving trained animals to the plays of Molière and Shakespeare. Drawing on my experience training animals, I offer a new perspective on …

The Substance Of Reality: Moral Perfectionism In Shakespeare's Hamlet., David Wright

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Through a selection of and close reading of key passages, I offer an interpretation of Hamlet that seeks to illuminate the play as an important work of moral philosophy, and to situate the play within a strand of moral philosophy named moral perfectionism by Stanley Cavell. Indeed, Hamlet is a masterpiece of Renaissance drama, but when read with attention to moral perfectionism, the play yields additional layers of meaning. Hamlet is a “philosophical drama” that navigates the “moral calling of philosophy”—a text that seems to, almost uncannily, elicit the audience to think reflectively, to ask fundamental human questions along …

"To Keep Men In Awe": Religious Subversion And Anti-Providentialism In Marlowe's Tamburlaine And The Jew Of Malta, Will White

Honors Theses

In early modern England, the term “atheist” held quite a different meaning from its modern usage. Most often, it referred not to person who rejected God’s existence, but who rejected the validity of divine providence: the notion that God exerts control and order over the events of Earth. This understanding of atheism informs the reading of the 16th century playwright Christopher Marlowe, whose connection to atheistic ideas is perhaps more visible than any of his contemporaries. In this thesis, I argue that the unifying element of religion in Marlowe’s drama is anti-providentialism – a rejection of providence. I examine two …

Uncovering Artemisia: Turning Rage Into Fame, Sophie Longo

Undergraduate Theses in Art History

During the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries in Italy - more commonly known as the Italian Renaissance and early Baroque periods - masters like Titian, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio made a name for themselves and secured legacies through the widespread popularity and study of their masterpieces. As time progressed, however, more artworks have been found, and more histories, especially by women Baroque artists, have been explored. With the rise of women’s rights movements and social justice campaigns from the mid-20th century on, stories of female artists and figures have further emerged from the woodwork and hold greater precedence in …

Animal Triangulation – Expanding The Oppressed/Oppressor Binary To A Triadic Constituency: The Oppressor, The Proxy, And The Oppressed, Katherine A. Abelanet

English Dissertations - Archive

Drawing on three fields of study, Animal Studies, Black Studies, and Shakespeare Studies, this dissertation examines animal triangulation as a system of oppression in which three constituents are triangulated for the benefit of the oppressor. Through triangulation, the oppressed/oppressor duality expands, creating a triad: the oppressor, the proxy, and the oppressed. This reimagining of the traditional binary of oppression opens new areas of conversation by adding an additional component. In animal triangulation, a proxy is created when an oppressor trains an animal or an animalized human to produce an abusive outcome on an oppressed group. By using a proxy, the …

Singing Petrarch In The Cinquecento: Embodied Reading And The Italian Madrigal, Thomas A. Hedrick Iii

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how composers of sixteenth-century Italian madrigals highlighted poetic line rhythm, repeated vowel sounds (or assonance), and word repetition in figures of speech—all elements of the verse that have been previously overlooked by scholars, who have traditionally focused on musical depictions of the text’s semantics. The analysis in chapters 2, 3, and 4 shows that composers used a consistent set of techniques from the madrigals of Arcadelt to those of Monteverdi, and musical examples draw from large collection of madrigals on Petrarch sonnets. The analytical methodology is built on the premise that Cinquecento encounters with poetry can be …

Aguaaaa!!!, Cory Villegas

Theses and Dissertations

“AGUA” is a call for new models of learning and sharing, celebrating the diasporic as a place of global revolution. Salsa, rooted in Latin American and Afro-Caribbean histories, is choreographer Cory Villegas’s expression of cultural legacy. As an Afro-diasporic dance, Salsa carries the wealth and variety of African and Indigenous roots. Villegas contextualizes her thesis event “Las Leyendas: An Afro Cuban Suite,” presenting herself and her troupe Soul Dance Co. as evidence that contradicts the erasure of Latin & Caribbean Culture in US dance history. The paper uses English and Spanish, written, visual, and oral materials with an accompanying webpage.

Visualizing Ancient Empire In Tudor England: Imperial Monarchy, Reformation, And The Antique Soldier In The Title Page To Richard Grafton’S Large Chronicle (1569), Peter Nicholas Otis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis analyzes the iconography and visual sources of the title page to the first volume of A chronicle at large and meere history of the affayres of Englande (1569) by the Tudor author Richard Grafton. Representing the visual synthesis of several distinct but interrelated currents that developed in the preceding century, the title page to the Large Chronicle offers a rare glimpse into a transitional moment in the middle Tudor perception and visual representation of the British past. These currents include imperializing royal iconography, with origins in antecedent representations in the late fifteenth century; the entry of the ‘classicizing’ …

Stomach And Womb: Early Modern Recipes For The Perinatal Woman, Grace E. Beacham

English Theses - Archive

Stomach and Womb examines the recipes from early modern obstetrical treatises and midwifery manuals, revealing an ontology of parturiency that winds through the concurrent Shakespearean plays, Twelfth Night and The Winter’s Tale. Gynecological and obstetrical texts from the era detail how pregnant women were to order themselves after conception with utmost concern for their diet, governing the outputs of their bodies by managing the inputs, the foods they ingested before, during, and after pregnancy and childbirth. Further, the associated images of the stomach and the womb during this time present an essential link between foodways and a construct of …

In My End Is My Beginning: Mary Stuart And The Foundation Of Her Religious Pragmatism, Shantelle M. Clement

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots and Dowager Queen of France, demonstrated atypical religious tolerance during the turmoil of the sixteenth-century reformations, particularly in comparison to other monarchs of the time. This research especially focuses on her upbringing in France, and how her education and those around her influenced the pragmatism and actions displayed as a monarch in Scotland until July 1565. Her youth in France and religious tolerance is a rare focus in secondary sources compared to the more dramatic events in her later life.

Faithful Partner: The Role And Agency Of Pastors' Wives In The Protestant Reformation, Elizabeth M. Dubendorfer

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This thesis explores the critical yet often overlooked roles of pastors' wives during the Protestant Reformation, focusing on three key figures: Katharina von Bora, Katharina Schütz Zell, and Elisabeth Cruciger. It examines how these women navigated the complexities of Reformation-era Germany, blending traditional gender roles with new practices that emerged from their unique positions as clerical spouses. By investigating their personal histories, theological contributions, and community engagements, the thesis demonstrates that these pioneering women established a distinct archetype for pastors' wives. This archetype was characterized by a profound commitment to faith, an expanded view of motherhood and wifely duties, and …

The Archival Impulse: English Family Record Keeping And Archives, Ca. 1450–1700, Maura Kenny

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

England in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries witnessed a proliferation of documents arising from a growth in literacy and an expansion of state administrative offices. Scholarship on the archival history of this period has grown recently but it has focused mainly on institutional and state archives. Very little has been written about family or personal archives and the uses made of them. Based on modern archival theory and extensive archival research, this dissertation seeks to fill this gap by addressing the creation of family records and archives as a whole, exploring early modern English families as a “community of records.” …

A Poor Third? A Reexamination Of Manuscript And Print Markets In Fifteenth And Sixteenth-Century Rouen, Kate Hodgson

School of Art Undergraduate Honors Theses

Manuscript and print scholars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have deemed Rouen a ‘poor third’ to the workshops in Paris and Lyon. Lacking the cultural status and political influence of these two major centers of book production, Rouen’s manuscript tradition has been coined an “eclectic” group of illuminators who were limited to a local, discontinuous demand for books and whose regional role hardly even bears examination. However, Between 1419 and 1449, Rouen was an epicenter of political and economic exchange between Normandy and England. The city’s manuscript ateliers experienced a period of unparalleled patronage from an international, elite clientele, …

Early Instruments In 21st Century Composition And An Original Composition For Saxophones And Viols, Jacob Bitinas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Composers continually seek new timbres and sonorities to bend to their will. The early music revival of the twentieth century has resurrected dozens of instruments that have gone unutilized in contemporary composition for centuries. The historically-informed-performance movement has now evolved to a point where early instruments and period performance techniques can add extraordinary new characters to twenty-first century compositions. This thesis explores how composers effectively utilize early instruments like the viola da gamba, harpsichord, lute, and recorder in their compositions.

The document also contains interview transcripts from eight composers and performers, including Nico Muhly, Liam Byrne, Martha Bishop, David Loeb, …

Amorous Poems And Passionate Letters: An Analysis Of The Contributions Of Two Female Authors To The Literary Scene Of 16th Century Italy, Ava Buchanan

History Undergraduate Honors Theses

Vittoria Colonna and Chiara Matraini were well known women in intellectual and public Italian society during the 16^th century. However, the history surrounding their individual impacts has often been limited due to the common practice of grouping these two women together or focusing more intently on their male connections. This thesis aims to advance women’s history on the Early Modern period by providing holistic accounts of Vittoria Colonna and Chiara Matraini’s careers that provide a better understanding of the unique contributions that these women made to distinctly female literature in the Early Modern period in Italy. This thesis utilizes …

Contagious Animality: Species, Disease, And Metaphor In Early Modern Literature And Culture, Jeremy Cornelius

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In my dissertation, Contagious Animality: Species, Disease, and Metaphor in Early Modern Literature and Culture, I close read examples of Renaissance drama alongside their contemporary cultural texts to examine anxieties around social differences as constructed and mediated through what I call “contagious animality” in early modern English culture. Animal metaphors circulated anxieties around social differences on the early modern cultural stage in English drama where animality elicits uncertainties about identitarian constructions of difference. In this vein, I close read formal elements and their interactions with early modern culture to argue that animal metaphors transmit modes of speciating difference in …

Jewish Presence In The Venetian Empire: A Challenge To Venetian Mythology, Avery Rosensweig

Honors Theses

This paper attempts to explain the significance of Jewish presence in the Venetian Empire in the context of the myth of Venice. Jews were officially permitted to settle in Venice in 1516, but their connection with the Venetian Empire goes further back. Jews were important for the success of the Venetian Empire, particularly from the sixteenth century onward. The permanent settlement of the Jews in Venice directly impacted the very ideology of the Venetian Empire.

Although the phrase "myth of Venice" was developed by twentieth-century historians, Venetians perpetuated the myth and wove its ideals into the foundation of the Venetian …

Dancing Through The Harlem Renaissance: An Inquiry-Based Unit Plan Exploring Movement And Culture, Marina Tsirambidis

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Incorporating movement and physical activity into the K-12, general education classroom has been on the rise. In a study done in 2019, Chloe Bedard deemed physical activity successful within the primary school setting and was determined to examine the benefits of movement integration into the secondary school setting (Bedard et al 2019, as cited in Romar, 2023). Additionally, dance scholars have researched the positive effects of incorporating dance history and movement into the classroom. With these two major advancements in mind, this study will provide a social studies unit that integrates dance movement. This unit aims to teach students about …

A Nation On The Periphery Of History: A Discussion Of Poland-Lithuania During The Reformation, Dillon Piorkowski

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project hopes to establish several key points. One of which is that Poland is unfairly represented in Western historiography. Specifically, this means that in the English-speaking academic world, Poland is discussed disproportionately. Countries like Germany, France, and Britain have thousands of pages written about them discussing their roles during the Reformation. But Poland does not. This is evidenced by the many Western textbooks that misrepresent the nation. In turn, the project will use these various textbooks as evidence. The second point this project aims to cover is why Poland’s underappreciation is unfair. Simply demonstrating how Poland is underrepresented is …

Women And Ventriloquism In Early Modern English Drama, Ja Young Jeon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bringing together feminist and theater-centered readings, this dissertation examines the status of female vessels that foreign voices inhabit and animate in early modern drama, arguing that the Greek model of ventriloquism represented by the Pythia exerted a powerful influence on the period’s ideas about women’s speech. In feminist work on ventriloquism, despite highlighting theatrical performance’s dependence on citationality, ventriloquism has been largely understood as an analogue for exploring male poets’ authorial power to appropriate women’s voices. In these readings, the term ‘ventriloquist’ is mainly identified with the person who throws his voice into human or nonhuman objects, reminding us of …

Meet Me In The Middle Ages: Engaging With Fantasy, Reality, And Collaborative World-Building, Amanda Greene

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This critical essay accompanies and describes my thesis project, Medievalia Miscellany, a magazine for middle-grade readers which explores the world of medieval fantasy through art, comics, stories, and activities. Throughout the essay, I use my own term “archaeological upcycling” to discuss and explore a variety of relationships between ideas of parts and a whole. I then use it to characterize the way stories are created out of many different parts and how these parts help a reader to relate to both the world of the story and the world in which they live. I describe the genre of medieval fantasy …

“Whenever We Crossed A Mountain / On This Earth, Yet Another One Appeared”: Circumstantial Poetry In ʿAbd Al-Ghanī Al-Nābulusī’S (D. 1143/1731) Travelogues, Tom J. Abi Samra

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay identifies an early modern aesthetic that mobilizes the mundane to make a point about the world or the grandiose. Through a close reading of the poetry in the travelogues of the 17th-century Ottoman Damascene scholar ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1143/1731), this essay identifies, theorizes, and historicizes early modern Arabic circumstantial verse—what the 19th-century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé calls vers de circonstance. By drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “chronotope,” this essay shows how the poetry in Nābulusī’s travelogues fits within, and sometimes advances, their linear narrative. If poetry is expected to transcend the chronotope in which …

A “Medieval” Myth For A “Modern” Empire Britain Under The Shadow Of Arthur (1461–1612), Julian Gonzalez De Leon Heiblum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation studies the use of the Arthurian myth from the fifteenth through early seventeenth centuries, as a narrative that connected a set of political principles for the unification of Britain and its imperial expansion. Joining other competing political myths in the British archipelago, the political significance of the Arthurian myth has nevertheless been overlooked. On the one hand, the myth informed the transformations of kingship in England and Wales from the crowning of Edward IV to the early years of James’ English reign. It did so specifically within the process of institutionalizing a British crown which was intertwined with …

Maurice Scève Avant La Délie (1535–1544). Une Étude Des Genres Mineurs À L’Origine D’Une Nouvelle Esthétique Poétique, Elizaveta Lyulekina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cette thèse propose d’étudier l’influence du poète lyonnais Maurice Scève, actif entre 1535 et 1562, sur la formation de genres littéraires et le développement de la poésie française de la Renaissance. Elle explore également la contribution considérable du poète à la création de l’identité linguistique et culturelle française.

This dissertation studies the influence of the Lyonnais poet Maurice Scève, active between 1535 and 1562, on the formation of literary genres and the development of French Renaissance poetry. It also explores the poet’s considerable contribution to the creation of French linguistic and cultural identity.

England's Fairest Creatures, Madison Hart

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Set in 1616 Jacobean England, surrounding a tragic chamber pot incident, the place setting of the small fishing town of Lechlade, England, begins our story. From generations of fisherman, Elias Eaton, is the first Eaton not to bear a son. Instead, his fierce daughter in her mid-twenties, Julia, our protagonist, helps her father at the docks daily. Although Julia is a champion for women of her time, she dreams of there being something more out there for her than the town that has shackled Eatons for centuries. Julia’s mother, Sybil, is the daughter to the town baker. Her literate father …

Quod Inane Vocamus: Lucretius’ Void In Seventeenth-Century Italy, Carlo Bottone

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

During the seventeenth century, the revival of atomic theories and the beginning of barometric experiments sparked a philosophical debate on the existence and the nature of void, which in turn generated new attention to the ancient disputes on void and prompted new interpretations of Lucretius’ examination of inane (De Rerum Natura, I.329-397). Commentators began to discuss the passage beyond the ancient philosophical tradition and in relation to modern ideas and recent discoveries, while Vacuists appealed to Lucretian arguments to prove or deny the existence of an absolute void interspersed among corpuscles.

My research contributes to the scholarship on …

Excremental Ecofeminism: Unearthing Waste’S Feminine And Narrative Agency In Early Modern Literature, Courtney Druzak

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project seeks to understand the role of forms of waste in early modern literary texts. It both offers up a theory—known as early modern excremental ecofeminism—for reading period specific texts in relation to waste and articulates how we may do so through close analysis of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the elegies of Mary Sidney Herbert, the sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by Mary Wroth, John Evelyn’s Fumifugium, and finally, William Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra. It chooses a variety of genres across texts from the 1580s to the 1660s both to interrogate …