Renaissance Studies Commons^™

Review: Shaping Intellectual Disabilities In Early Modern England, Mardy Philippian

Quidditas

In Shaping Intellectual Disabilities in Early Modern England, Alice Equestri has assembled an impressive collection of essays by researchers interested in early modern conceptions of intellectual disability. Like Hobgood and Wood's groundbreaking collection Recovering Disability in Early Modern England (2013) and Leslie C. Dunn's edited collection Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama (2020), Equestri's volume will benefit scholars for some time to come. Of use to both early career scholars and those well established in the field of early modern disability studies, Shaping Intellectual Disabilities in Early Modern England invites readers into twelve individual studies of a diverse …

One Thing Leads To Another: A New Approach To Teaching Medieval Literature In The Twenty-First Century, Nicholas Markellos

Quidditas

Part of the problem with defining the "Middle Ages" stems from nineteenth-century historians' attempts to distinguish the Renaissance as a unique period that brought about modernity. In examining the literature of this period, however, it is clear that there was a certain element of queerness that surrounded this bewildering age. As a literature teacher, I found that my students do not always see these strange and important elements in the antiquated translations of the texts. To that end, I designed a new curriculum unit that approaches the reading of several medieval stories through a queer perspective, as well as a …

Medieval Old Age As Discourse: Conflicting Views And Perspectives In Pre-Modern German And European Literature From The Early To The Late Middle Ages, Albrecht Classen

Quidditas

This article revisits and reviews the broad and intense discourse on old age in the medieval and to some extent early modern worlds and examines the major scholarly contributions to this extensive topic. The discussion of old age during the Middle Ages found expression in fields such as history, philosophy, medicine, theology, literature, the visual arts, pharmacy, and military studies. It is not that long ago that old age itself finally gained more interest in historical research, but we can by now rely on a number of well-researched monographs and edited volumes dealing with this highly complex topic. Previous scholarship …

Allen D. Breck Award Winner

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

Recipient of the Breck Award 2025

Kierra E. Burns

Dante And The Nine Worthies: Glory Or Fame?, Thomas L. Cooksey

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In Paradiso 18, Dante is introduced by Cacciaguida, to eight martial heroes: Joshua, Judas Maccabaeus, Roland, Charlemagne, William of Orange, Renouard, Godfrey of Bouillon, and Robert Guiscard. Joined by Cacciaguida they form a group of nine, suggesting that Dante is playing with the topos of the Nine Worthies, popular in chivalric literature. While there are various prototypes, the canonical version of the Nine was codified by Jacques de Longuyon in his romance Voeux du paon (The Vow of the Peacock), appearing around 1312, a date tantalizingly close to the composition of the Paradiso. A comparison is instructive both …

Mapping Gender And Territory: The Continent Allegories On European World Maps From The Late Middle Ages To The Renaissance Until The Early Enlightenment, Katharina Eva Oehmichen

Comparative Woman

The four-part set of female continent allegories, which originated in the early Renaissance, was born out of a European need for a new vehicle of thought that served the functions of representing imperial expansion and the superiority of Western science and civilization, while gratifying the curiosity of the readers about newly discovered lands at the same time. The shift from the Christian symbolic tradition of the representation of the continents on world maps mirrored the shift in Western perception and knowledge of the world and Europe’s position in it. Apart from geo-political and imperial agendas that might have favored a …

King Lear'S "Poor, Bare, Forked Animal" And The Cross, Paul J. Stapleton

Quidditas

In William Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear describes the “unaccommodated man” as a “poor, bare, forked animal.” Lear’s comments are ostensibly about Edgar disguised as Poor Tom, but critics have detected in the passage a more general expression about human nature. The term “forked” is regularly glossed as “two-legged,” but there are philological problems with this reading. This paper, therefore, takes into consideration an alternate meaning for “forked” based on sixteenth-century usages that relate the noun “fork” to instruments of torture. The paper discusses the depiction of the cross as a “fork” (Latin – furca) in the antiquarian Justus Lipsius’s …

Cover

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Front Matter

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Delno C. West Award Winner

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

Recipient of the West Award for 2024

Paul J. Stapleton

North Carolina Central University

Full Issue

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Review: The Poems Of Ben Jonson, Steven Hrdlicka

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Mobility In The Middle Ages - Literary Evidence As A Mental Map For Travel Imaginations: A Critical Reconsideration Of Modern Myths About The Past, Albrecht Classen

Quidditas

Literary fantasy has often served as a meaningful reflection of historical, material, or political developments, and events. This also applies to many works from the European Middle Ages. While popular opinion continues to assume that most medieval people were home-bound, the very opposite can almost be claimed, especially for the late Middle Ages. After the Crusades, the stream of pilgrims to the Holy Land grew tremendously, but many other people were on the roads as well, whether for economic, religious, or political reasons. Constructive contacts between West and East only developed in the course in time, but the basic foundations …

Allen D. Breck Award Winner

Quidditas

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

Recipient of the Breck Award 2024

Jonathan Seyfried

Teaching Margaret Cavendish And Early Modern Women Writers: 1982 - 2013, James Fitzmaurice

Quidditas

I first came across Margaret Cavendish during the summer of 1982 in an innocuous trade collection of early modern women writers. Like many teachers of English, I made a habit of dropping into used book stores, and in such a place I found the collection. It contained a very few selections from Sociable Letters, in among the work of other women. Those few letters set me off on a new path of formal classroom teaching in person and online first at Northern Arizona University and later at the University of Sheffield. Those letters and other material from early modern …

Medieval Hypebeast: The Conspicuous Consumption Of Joan I Of Aragon, Jonathan Seyfried

Quidditas

Limited releases, celebrity culture, and insane profit margins: these features define the hypebeast phenomenon of the early twenty-first century. The rise and fall of this cycle of conspicuous consumption bears remarkable resemblance to the craze for French culture in the Crown of Aragon in the late fourteenth century. King Joan I, starting from the time of his youth as the Duke of Girona, funded several projects to import French culture. In 1380, Joan married Violante de Bar, niece of the French King Charles V and the Duc de Berry. Once Joan and Violante ascended to the throne, they co-created a …

Review: White Before Whiteness In The Late Middle Ages, Alani Hicks-Bartlett

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Teaching Boccaccio's Decameron And The Black Death Post Covid-19, Vanessa Dimaggio

Quidditas

Giovanni Boccaccio’s introduction to the Decameron depicts one of the most gruesome and vivid portraits of the effects of the Black Death in Florence to come out of medieval Italy. Until 2020, students’ understanding of the plague in medieval Florence was, at best, one of lurid interest in the gory details of a disease that killed nearly 1/3 of the population of Europe, an interest far removed from their reality. However, with the rise of the Covid-19 pandemic, students began to understand the difficulties medieval Florentines faced in a way that was all too familiar. This shift in students’ perspective …

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 …

Milton: Politics Of Desire And Dispossession, Sawyer K. Kemp

Open Educational Resources

In this course we will study John Milton’s most famous poem, Paradise Lost, alongside a selection of his major verse and prose works. Milton’s literary projects were inextricably political, and we will wade into the discourse of his legacy as either—or both—state propagandist or public scholar. We will discuss and explore Milton’s role in the charged political climate of the British Revolution of the 17^th century, as well as his work on gender, marriage, divorce, the free press, sin, and heroism.

How do we read Milton’s work in our own political climates of unrest? How has deconstruction of …

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.

Recognizing Traps And Frightening Wolves: Foxes And Lions As A Representative Of Machiavellian Political Ideology In Shakespeare’S Comedies, Grace A. Powell

Student Scholar Showcase

While William Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets have been discussed time and time again over the past few centuries, one topic that has been less traversed is the connection between his Comedies and Niccolò Machiavelli’s political ideologies. This project will explore references of lions and foxes in Shakespeare’s Comedies and the leaders and monarchs within them to determine how beliefs about Machiavelli’s political ideology influenced Shakespeare’s literature and became symbols for leadership and power. This project will be important for gaining historical context on Machiavellian political discourse and how it was represented in the contemporary dramatic literature of William Shakespeare. I …

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’ …

Ecumenical Dialogue Between Reformers And Orthodox Under The Ottomans (15-16th Century), Svetoslav Svetoszarov Ribolov

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

Despite the capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453, the Orthodox Church continued to make contacts with the West. In the 15^th and 16^th centuries, Patriarchs Joasaph II and Jeremias II had ecumenical contacts and theological dialogues with two generations of Reformers. Martin Luther and Melanchthon, and later Martin Crusius, Jakob Andrеä, and their associates in Wittenberg took up the initiative for a serious ecumenical dialogue with Constantinople. Despite a sincere desire on both sides, lack of a common methodological framework in the talks did not allow for significant results. In the end, both sides did not …

Osu Venetian Imprints Dataset, Doug Wayman

Printing and the Book During the Reformation: 1450-1650, an NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers

Provides information about three important functions enabled by the accompanying finding list spreadsheet of books examined at The Ohio State University (OSU) Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML) during the 2022 National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar, Books and Printing during the Reformation, 1450-1650 that took place in July of 2022. Those functions are: to provide links to global databases for descriptive information related to each book, to provide access to authorized versions of names associated with each book, and to provide value-added access to information-rich resources (including images) detailing certain aspects of some of the books, printed between …

Findlist_Venice_1477-1517, Doug Wayman

Printing and the Book During the Reformation: 1450-1650, an NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers

Provides information about three important functions enabled by the accompanying finding list spreadsheet of books examined at The Ohio State University (OSU) Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML) during the 2022 National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar, Books and Printing during the Reformation, 1450-1650 that took place in July of 2022. Those functions are: to provide links to global databases for descriptive information related to each book, to provide access to authorized versions of names associated with each book, and to provide value-added access to information-rich resources (including images) detailing certain aspects of some of the books, printed between …

Introduction To A Finding List Of Early Venetian Books Printed From 1477 To 1517 In The Rare Book And Manuscript Library Of The Ohio State University, Doug Wayman

Printing and the Book During the Reformation: 1450-1650, an NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers

Provides information about three important functions enabled by the accompanying finding list spreadsheet of books examined at The Ohio State University (OSU) Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML) during the 2022 National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar, Books and Printing during the Reformation, 1450-1650 that took place in July of 2022. Those functions are: to provide links to global databases for descriptive information related to each book, to provide access to authorized versions of names associated with each book, and to provide value-added access to information-rich resources (including images) detailing certain aspects of some of the books, printed between …

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 …

Fra Angelico In San Marco: A Comparison Of Fra Angelico’S Frescoes And Altarpieces During His Time In San Marco, Isaac Copeland

Tenor of Our Times

Fra Angelico stood at the crossroads of two major art movements in the early 15th century, the old International Gothic style, and the new Renaissance style. During his stay at San Marco between 1436, when the monastery moved to Florence, and 1445, when Fra Angelico was summoned to Rome, his work reflected elements of both the International Gothic style and the Renaissance style. However, in his works at San Marco, his panel paintings were more conservative, painted with more Gothic conventions than his frescos, which exhibited elements of the rising Renaissance.

A City Of Global Ambition: Duke Cosimo I De’ Medici’S Florence And The Americas, Jillian Hauer

Capstone Showcase

The Age of Conquest marked a turning point in global history, facilitating cross-cultural exchanges between the Eastern and Western hemispheres and paving the way for colonial expansion. Despite Italy's lack of direct involvement in the exploration of the Americas, various city-states eagerly sought to acquire objects and knowledge from the recently exploited lands. This essay focuses on Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici and his efforts to portray Florence as a global center through the collecting, commissioning, and cultivating of objects from and related to the Americas. I investigate mirabilia (objects that evoked wonder or astonishment) associated with the Medici collection, …