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Rehabilitating Reputation in Early Modern Venice Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-15 Caroline Koncz
Until the sultanate’s fall from power in 1517, the Republic of Venice spent several lucrative centuries trading with the Mamluks of present-day Egypt and Syria. Even in their final years of partnership, Venice’s close contact with the Mamluks continued, as visually described in The Reception of the Venetian Ambassadors in Damascus (1511). In the composition, the anonymous Venetian painter depicts a
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The Steadfast Loyalty of Mary, Countess of Shrewsbury, ‘the Only Contriver of Bedlam Opposition’ Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-15 Carole Levin
Mary Countess of Shrewsbury is much less well-known than her mother, Bess of Hardwick, and her niece, Arbella Stuart, but she was also a woman of strong character. One of her most significant characteristics was her loyalty, both to her family, especially her husband Gilbert, her daughters, and her niece, and to the Catholic faith, to which she converted as an adult. Both the loyalty to family and
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Popular Participation in Renaissance Siena’s Romanitas Program Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Samantha Perez
With no clear textual or physical proof of an ancient Roman settlement, Siena faced considerable challenges to its assumed antiquity in the trecento and quattrocento. The damaging insistence by Giovanni Villani, Leonardo Bruni, and Flavio Biondo, among others, of Siena’s Gallic—and thus non-Roman—origins prompted the Sienese state to develop an elaborate civic program in defense of its antiquity and
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Banquo’s Daughters and the Lost #MeToo Macbeth, and Early Modern Alt-Media Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2023-08-19 Todd Andrew Borlik
This article investigates the disturbing accusation, first recorded in 1652, that Macbeth abducted and possibly raped a daughter of Banquo’s. Since Banquo himself was apparently fabricated by the Aberdonian chronicler Hector Boece in the 1520s to romanticize the Stuart dynasty’s origins, his daughter has no historical basis and tales of her grim fate likely represent a literary embellishment on the
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Edmund Spenser’s Sense of an Ending Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2023-08-19 Jesse Russell
Throughout his Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser depicts himself as a “poet magus” who can peer behind the veil of Nature in order to discover a “secret teaching” of ethical and political virtue that he will impart to his readers. His readers are thus tasked with the chore of reforming the fallen world through the creation of an empire under Elizabeth. However, in “The Two Cantos of Mutabilitie,” Spenser
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Indications for a Franciscan Role in the Philanthropic Activities of the Early Florentine Misericordia Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2023-08-19 William R. Levin
Scholarship on Saint Francis of Assisi and the Franciscan movement, established in the thirteenth century, surprisingly tends to ignore his response to a central message of the Church: that we must love and care for the needy among our human brethren. Jesus himself said so, nowhere more explicitly than in Matthew, chapter twenty-five. Yet Francis’s writings repeatedly manifest his familiarity with
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What Does Rape Look Like? Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2023-08-19 Nora Martin Peterson
From the late Middle Ages into the Renaissance, a handful of narratives about sexual assault dominated Western Europe. In the seventeen novellas of Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron (1559) that feature assault or attempted assault, these different narratives coexist. To date, scholarship has not extensively explored the relationship between the novellas of the Heptaméron and the first two sets of
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Dark Caravaggism Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2022-10-06 Letha Ch’ien
Many of Caravaggio’s late istoria altarpieces differ from what is commonly called Caravaggism (the artist’s pictorial mode during his Roman period) strongly enough that together the paintings form a distinctive approach to istoria that requires its own term: Dark Caravaggism. This paper identifies and analyzes this second Caravaggism, a pictorial mode as innovative as the first, but one that has been
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“Deep Dark Truthful Mirror”—The Logic of Petrus Ramus and the Tragedy of Samson Agonistes Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2022-10-06 Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler
The sixteenth-century educational reformer Petrus Ramus was known for disrupting the traditional relationship between logic and rhetoric. He removed the first two of the traditional five canons of rhetoric—invention and arrangement—and assigned them to logic. Thus, to Ramus, invention became not a means of finding arguments but rather a process of uncovering truth and finding a means of inquiry into
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Music, Prayer, and “Something Understood” Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2022-10-06 Camilo Peralta
During the Middle Ages, Christian theologians developed various means for addressing God’s ineffable, or indescribable, nature. One could, for instance, employ apophatic or “negative” theology, or use music and prayer as metaphors for the harmony of the universe and our relationship with Him. This paper examines the use of these and other approaches to the ineffable by the French indiciare Jean Molinet
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Thomas Traherne on Punctuation Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2022-10-06 Tanya K. Zhelezcheva
Though Thomas Traherne’s punctuation has been harshly criticized for its idiosyncrasy, scholars have also frequently admired the stylistic effects that it creates. His punctuation is linked to baroque art and music, the use of periods to highlighting subordinate ideas, capitalization to its inability to foster figurative language, and parentheses to his writing and editing process. This essay draws
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Rhetorical Swordfighting and Satire in Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2022-07-29 Kristen Abbott Bennett
Thomas Watson’s critics have suggested that The Hekatompathia, Or Passionate Centurie of Love ambitiously aspired to be a pedagogical text, but if this work is designed to teach, then this essay suggests Watson’s manipulations of genre, style, and intertexts combine to offer a pedagogy for poets, a compilation of rhetorical postures one may employ to simultaneously deliver and disguise socio-political
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Satire, What Is It Good For? Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2022-07-29 Emily Rowe
Satire and war have a longstanding literal and metaphoric relationship. Satire has long been the medium to criticize war, while also being figured itself as literary ‘warfare.’ This essay examines the interplay between war and satire in two early modern English prose texts, Thomas Nashe’s The vnfortunate trauller (1594) and Thomas Dekker’s Worke for armorours (1609). Both writers contributed satirical
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Titus’s Revenge and/as Imperial Roman Satire Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2022-07-29 Curtis Perry
This essay explores the idea that the grotesque denouement of Titus Andronicus—and specifically that portion of the play staged as Titus’s dinner party—draws upon ideas about Rome and decorum from imperial Roman satire. The cannibal banquet in Act 5 of Titus Andronicus is designed to violate Horace’s remarks from the Ars Poetica about how ‘the feast of Thyestes’ should not be staged in a manner commensurate
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Witty Shrews and Shrewish Wits Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2022-07-29 Hannah Bredar
This essay analyzes the devices and methods of satirical discourse as they are presented by Much Ado About Nothing’s Beatrice and The Taming of the Shrew’s Katherine. By exploring shared points of contact in the “flyting” scenes between Katherine, Beatrice, and their respective suitors, I discuss how ironic, critical speech comes to be elevated as satirical wit in one play, even as it is reduced to
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Breaking Bread with the Bedchamber: Feasting at the Court of James I of England, 1603–1625 Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2021-12-07 Jennifer S. Ng
This article examines the institution of the Bedchamber of James I of England (1603–1625) through the practice of feasting. Originally comprising James VI’s Scottish entourage, the Bedchamber was a novel introduction to the English royal household in the Jacobean period: as such, this group of attendants came to represent both a body with unparalleled royal access, and a Scottish barrier between James I
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(De)Constructing the Madonna’s Cloth of Honor: Pieced Cloths in Late Medieval Italian Paintings, Their Origins, and Iconographic Significance Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2021-12-07 Lilian Zirpolo
The present study centers on pieced textiles included in Marian paintings of the Proto-Renaissance era rendered in Tuscany. The complex geometric patterns of these cloths mimic those found in the Islamic textiles that were then being imported into Europe, consumed by the aristocracy, and later imitated by Italian cloth makers. On a basic level, their colors and patterning reference the virtues of the
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Dematerializing Sovereignties in The Character of Holland and The Loyal Scot Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2021-12-07 William Fitzhenry
This paper argues that in The Character of Holland and The Loyal Scot, Marvell consistently meditates on the nature of political sovereignty, especially regarding its perils and shortcomings. By ventriloquizing republican propaganda and monarchical ideology in these poems, Marvell creates a space where he can stage and then dematerialize these absolutist forms of power. Marvell demonstrates how the
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Dreaming of Death and the Dead in the Stuart Political World Imaginary: The Case of William Laud Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2021-12-07 Carole Levin
William Laud played a critical role in the politics and religion in the reign of James I and especially that of his son, Charles I. There was great antagonism toward him by Puritans, and Laud’s close friendship with George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, made Laud even more controversial, as did his fight with the king’s jester, Archy Armstrong. Dreams were seen as having great significance at time of
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“Sir Francis Drake in the Spanish Literature of the Armada” Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2021-12-07 Cristina Vallaro
The subject of this paper is Sir Francis Drake, Elizabeth I’s most famous privateer, and his role in Spanish texts composed throughout the Armada campaign of 1588. A well-known seaman in both the New World and Europe, Drake had a significant impact on Anglo-Spanish relations, acquiring a reputation as a violent and ambitious man determined to serve his country to the death. The fight against him was
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Constructing the Text of the View of the Present State of Ireland before the New Bibliography Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2021-06-16 Jean R. Brink
This paper begins with an account of the history of modern editions of Spenser’s View, analyzes textual scholarship, and concludes with a skeptical reexamination of Spenser’s rhetorical objectives. As this paper will demonstrate, a critical bibliography is needed to clarify the dates, scribes, and provenance of the twenty-one complete manuscripts of the View of the Present State of Ireland.
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Dressed in Sheep’s Clothing: Pastoral and Reform in Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2021-06-16 Denna Iammarino
This study investigates the presence of pastoral themes in Spenser’s prose dialogue, A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596). Tracing the traditional pastoral themes of generational conflict, degeneration, and regeneration in Spenser’s late pastorals, this study considers how Spenser’s inclusion of these pastoral themes shape paradigms of reform in the View. It argues that generational conflict
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Edmund Spenser’s View of Christendom: New Legal and Theological Contexts for A View of the Present State of Ireland Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2021-06-16 Brian C. Lockey
This paper considers how Spenser’s conception of conscience and universal law and justice in A View of the Present State of Ireland can be understood within the context of jurist Christopher St. German’s early sixteenth-century tract on equity and the common law and his subsequent tracts on the reformation of Church corruption. The paper attempts to re-situate Spenser’s engagement with legal and political
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Plantation, Contagion, and Containment in Spenser and Bryskett Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2021-06-16 Andrew Zurcher
Early modern Ireland was notoriously, or reputedly, a place of disease: the plague, the ague, the country fever, the looseness, the bloody flux, and an assortment of coughs, chills, sweats, and other illnesses—Ireland’s endemii morbi or “reigning diseases”—regularly figure in surviving letters and historical accounts from the period. This essay explores not only the reports of disease issuing from
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Prosaic Diction: Finding Patterns in the Words of Spenser’s View Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2021-06-16 Craig A. Berry
Scholars have long noted the eccentric vocabulary of Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland, primarily with an eye toward glossing words unfamiliar outside of a contemporary Irish context. This essay steps back from consideration of individual words to ponder what can be learned from word frequencies, primarily focusing on what the tools of corpus linguistics can tell us about the View and
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Spenser’s View and the Production of Political Knowledge in Elizabethan England Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2021-06-16 Nicholas Popper
This article analyzes the View as an example of knowledge production, rather than plumbing it for representation or ideology as scholars have traditionally done. Tracing the process of construction, sources, and generic conventions that Spenser wielded not only illuminates some of the more curious elements of the View, but also reveals his practices and motivations for it. As this article suggests
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Wetnurse Politics in Spenser’s View and Jones’ Arte and Science Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2021-06-16 Katarzyna Lecky
This essay places Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland (1596) into conversation with John Jones’ 1579 nursing manual Arte and Science in order to contextualize Spenser’s medical solution to Irish rebellion. For both, the Irish wetnurse, who controlled the political system of fosterage undermining England’s agenda in Ireland, is central to the corporate identity of a conjoined Anglo-Irish
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Special Issue Introduction: Re-viewing a Review of the View Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2021-06-16 Thomas Herron
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The Christian Lark: Spenser’s Faerie Queene I. x.51 and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2020-12-18 Kathryn Walls
The likening of the lark to the Christian worshipper as in Herbert’s “Easter Wings” was anticipated by both Spenser and Shakespeare in references that have been overlooked to date. These stand in a tradition most richly represented by the early fourteenth- century French allegorist Guillaume de Deguileville, in his Pèlerinage de l’Ame, in which the pilgrim soul, guided towards the gate of Heaven by
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Lodging Dwelling Painting: Dives and Lazarus at Pittleworth Manor Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2020-12-18 Elizabeth Alice Honig
Taking as its focus a wall painting at Pittleworth Manor, Hampshire, this essay investigates the concepts of place and of dwelling as they were understood and experienced in Renaissance England, particularly by those without a true dwelling-place. The anonymous painting, dated 1580, represents the Biblical story of rich Dives and the beggar Lazarus. It articulates the position of the placeless both
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“Or Else Were this a Savage Spectacle”: the Narrative Possibilities of Spectacle in I Tamburlaine Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2020-12-18 Jeanette Nguyen Tran
This essay examines representations of violence in I Tamburlaine. In the play, Marlowe weds Tamburlaine’s desire for recognition to brutal spectacular violence and attunes audiences to the normative violence that recognition entails for the vulgar or common classes to which Tamburlaine, a poor Scythian shepherd, belongs. In a world that marks certain bodies, social classes and even names as unworthy
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Praising Elizabeth I in Latin at Norwich (1578) Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2020-12-18 Linda Shenk
When Elizabeth I visited the city of Norwich, she was publicly praised as a virgin queen for the first time in her reign. Although this image of Elizabeth becomes important to later historiography, this essay argues that there is a more sustained strand of royal myth-making in this visit that gives her even greater independent and specific political authority: that of an educated queen. At Norwich
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“Where the devil should he learn our language?”: Shakespeare’s Territorial Linguistics Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2020-12-18 Sharon Emmerichs
This article looks at how Spenser’s desire for an English national identity, rooted in a “kingdom of our own language,” is realized in Shakespeare’s works. I track the way early modern systems of power have used language as a colonial weapon and show how Shakespeare demonstrates the problematic effects of imagining language as a scaffold to hold oppressive social structures—such as class, gender, and
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Introduction: Essays Sponsored by the Elizabeth i Society Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2020-06-24 Carole Levin
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Dedicated to the Tudors: Thomas Gemini and a Shifting Book Dedication Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2020-06-24 Valerie Schutte
Thomas Gemini dedicated Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio to Henry viii in 1545, Edward vi in 1553, and then Elizabeth in 1559, with that to Elizabeth differing greatly from those to Henry and Edward. Elizabeth received a gender-appropriate dedication that focused on spirituality and virtue, while Henry and Edward were offered dedications that focused on the need for medical knowledge and training
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Gifts of Imperfection: Elizabeth i and the Politics of Timepieces Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2020-06-24 Miranda Wilson
In 1572 Robert Dudley gave to his queen a tiny clock set in a bracelet, an object scholars believe to be the first wristwatch. While Dudley’s gift to Elizabeth i was striking in its innovation, it was not the only timepiece he or those in his circle gave her. Using the New Year’s Day “Gift Rolls,” only recently collected from disparate archives and transcribed from manuscript by Jane Lawson, I establish
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Henry viii and the “Bewhoring” of the Petrarchan Beloved in Sixteenth-Century English Literature Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2020-06-24 Susan Dunn-Hensley
This article examines the ways in which changes in Marian theology and the defaming and execution of two of Henry viii’s queens affected early modern literary representations of female power. It argues that, through the translations of Thomas Wyatt, Petrarchan poetry entered into a world of state-sponsored iconoclasm, a world where images of the sacred feminine, once revered, could be destroyed, and
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Royal Jewelry Exchange in Sixteenth Century Anglo-Scottish Politics Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2020-06-24 Cassandra Auble
This paper explores how Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth i utilized jewelry in political settings to construct meaning, represent themselves, and negotiate personal and political relationships. Studying the complexities of jewelry’s exchange and circulation between the courts of England and Scotland provides a more nuanced picture of early modern diplomacy and material culture. Jewelry provided a
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Sovereignty at Bridewell Palace: Gender in the Architectural Designs of Hans Holbein the Younger Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2020-06-24 Alicia Meyer
This essay examines the representation of gender and sovereignty in a little examined design for a royal fireplace created by Hans Holbein the Younger during the reign of Henry viii. When Henry sought to divorce Catherine and to establish the Church of England, the Bridewell precinct became a site for political upheaval. As Holinshed’s Chronicle details and William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s 1613
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Violence in Elizabeth’s England: Tudors and Turbervilles Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2020-06-24 Carole Levin, C. J. Kracl
Throughout her life Elizabeth Tudor was aware of the perennial violence that threatened her, threats that were also reflected in the England she ruled over. The experiences of the prominent Turberville family paralleled the type of violence Elizabeth faced, violence in which familial, political, and religious interests intersected. The most well-known of the Turbervilles was the writer George, whose
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The 2019 William B. Hunter Lecture of the scrc: Paleness versus Eloquence: The Ideologies of Style in the English Renaissance Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2019-11-07 Richard Strier
This essay considers the contrast between plainness and eloquence in some canonical English (secular) lyrics and plays from Wyatt through Shakespeare. Its claim is that in the relevant body of work, and in the culture as a whole, each of the styles bore a specifiable ideological charge. It shows that English secular poetry and drama in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century was profoundly aware
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Between the Stage and the Street: Art and Artifice in Giordano Bruno’s Candelaio Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2019-11-07 Nicholas Albanese
The Italian Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno’s only literary work, the comedy titled Candelaio published in 1582, has been interpreted through a comparative analysis with either his philosophical writings or with other plays from the tradition of the commedia erudita. In this article, I focus on the Candelaio’s textual strategies by drawing on the analytical categories of dissonance and deflection
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Picturing Miracles: Biblical Healings in the Paintings by Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beuckelaer Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2019-11-07 Barbara A. Kaminska
In this essay, I analyze three sixteenth-century Netherlandish paintings of New Testament miraculous healings in the context of the contemporary understanding of miracles and approaches to disability. I argue that, in contrast to the negative perception of the infirm in the early modern literature, the images promote care for the sick as a Christian duty. Given the complicated theological status of
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“Quitting Nature’s Part”: The Reproductive Quest in Dryden’s Virgil Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2019-11-07 Kenneth Connally
John Dryden’s translations of Virgil’s Aeneid and Georgics engage with an early modern discourse of reproduction that encouraged maximizing production while warning against disorderly generativity. While Virgil and Dryden both had political reasons to be invested in patrilineage, their shared interest in Epicureanism, with its denial of life after death, may have driven these poets to search for an
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To Sleep or Not to Sleep—Is it a Question? Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2019-11-07 Joan Faust
Amidst the many trials Donne experienced during his 1623 illness recounted in his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions are bouts of insomnia introduced in Devotion 15 and implied in Devotions 16–18 with the unceasing tolls of bells in the nearby church commemorating the dying and dead. Donne’s agonized longing for the comfort of sleep as he lay day after day and night after night for fourteen days to
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The Illusion of a Future: Early Modern Conceptions of the World to Come Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2019-04-25 John S. Garrison,Marissa Nicosia
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Milton’s Late Poems as Anti-Liturgy Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2019-04-25 Feisal G. Mohamed
This essay suggests “anti-liturgy” to describe Milton’s three late poems as a unified project in devotional verse, and to account for their avant-garde impulse to make the present strange. These qualities are brought into conversation with the posture on liturgy in Milton’s early poems, with Milton’s remarks on justification in De doctrina Christiana, with Catherine Pickstock’s arguments on liturgy
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The Optics of Prediction in The Faerie Queene: Merlin’s Reflecting Telescope Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2019-04-25 Kyle Pivetti
A mirror or a crystal ball? That interpretive crux arises at the heart of Book iii of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene – when Britomart discovers Merlin’s “glassy globe” and first sees Arthegall in its surface. The “looking-glasse,” that is, not only reflects Britomart but also tells the future. This essay revisits the problem of Merlin’s glass by locating it in the context of rapidly developing sixteenth-century
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Ritual Time and Popular Expectations of Papal Rule in Early Modern Rome Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2019-04-25 John M. Hunt
The political and ritual life of early modern Rome provided its inhabitants ample opportunities not only to express grievances with papal government but also to voice expectations of newly elected pontiffs. Three ritual moments in particular—each linked as a cycle related to the pope’s reign—looked toward the future. These were the papal election, the possesso (the newly elected pontiff’s procession
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Executing Calyphas: Gender, Discipline, and Sovereignty in 2 Tamburlaine Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2018-11-28 Timothy A. Turner
This essay situates the execution of Calyphas in 2 Tamburlaine in the context of the gendered disciplinary regimes imposed by Tamburlaine in his quest for global empire. The execution bears a double significance: a father disciplines his son and, simultaneously, a sovereign military commander exercises martial law. In this doubling, the episode fuses a number of related issues in the history of sovereignty
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Pacifism and Performance in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2018-11-28 John Garrison, Kyle Pivetti
This essay takes A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a case study for exploring Shakespeare’s relationship to pacifism. We argue that this play, which uses a love potion to end conflict and to suggest parity across various competing spheres, taps into early modern discourses about peace as well our own contemporary anti-war discourses. We take inspiration from Bernie Boston’s photograph “Flower Power” and
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A Tribe of Roaring Girls: Crime and Gender in Early Modern England Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2018-11-28 Adrienne L. Eastwood
Scholars who write about early modern women and crime have focused primarily on prostitution and witchcraft which they deem “feminine” crimes. Removing this gender bias by employing a non-essentialist perspective, reveals a more nuanced picture of women’s participation in crime. Women who were unwilling—or perhaps not feminine enough—to use their sexual attributes to make money existed and are reported
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“Ye Lovers of Physick, come lend me your Ear”: Dangerous Doctors in Early Modern London Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2018-11-28 Jillian Linster
The highly recognizable title-page illustration from Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus was also used in the printing of a ballad to commemorate the death of “Doctor” John Lambe in 1628. This paper explores rhetorical, historical, visual, and bibliographic connections between the two works as well as the cultural significance of their relationship and the stories they tell, which are fraught
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Meredith Hanmer’s Career in the Church of England, c. 1570–1590 Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2018-03-28 Angela Andreani
This article deals with two pivotal decades in the life of Meredith Hanmer, an Anglican divine of Welsh descent who built his career in the Church of England against the backdrop of shifting ecclesiastical policy, religious debate and the upsurge in anti-Catholicism. Hanmer was close to the establishment but his career trajectory apparently shifted in the early-1590s, when he resigned two London benefices
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Sadeler and Procaccini: The Secular Decoration of Castello Visconti di San Vito in Somma Lombardo Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2018-03-28 Angelo Lo Conte
The paper investigates the pictorial decoration of Castello Visconti di San Vito in Somma Lombardo, one of the finest examples of Lombard aristocratic villa of the first half of the seventeenth century. Built on a pre-existent medieval structure, the castle was richly decorated by a secular iconographic program that, drawn from Flemish sources, was executed in the period 1604–1609 by an equipe of painters
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Leonardo’s Dragons—The “Rider Fighting a Dragon” Sketch as an Allegory of Leonardo’s Concept of Knowledge Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2018-03-28 Sharon Khalifa-Gueta
It has long been known that Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches showing a rider in combat with a dragon do not portray St. George. Viewing these sketches in connection with several of Leonardo’s writings, this essay suggests that they are allegories that should be interpreted on several levels. On the basic level, these combat scenes represent the battle of contraries, based on the symbolism common to Leonardo’s
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Rapture and Horror: A Phenomenology of Theatrical Invisibility in Macbeth Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2018-03-28 Marguerite A. Tassi
Macbeth is arguably Shakespeare’s greatest experiment in the phenomenology of horrible imaginings. For all of its visible supernatural trappings, Macbeth is a play radically steeped in the invisible, which exerts a gravitational force on all aspects of performance. The phantom dagger, King Duncan’s slain body, Lady Macbeth’s murky hell—these unseen supernatural sights are as phenomenologically palpable
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Edmund Spenser’s Ancient Hope: The Rise and Fall of the Dream of the Golden Age in The Faerie Queene Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2018-03-28 Jesse Russell
In the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a debate has rumbled over the sources and significance of Platonic and Neoplatonic motifs in Edmund Spenser’s poetry. While this debate has focused on the presence (or absence) of various aspects of Platonism and/or Neoplatonism, critics have largely ignored the hints of magic derived from Neoplatonism. Through the probable influence of John
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Ars simia naturae: The Animal as Mediator and Alter Ego of the Artist in the Renaissance Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2017-12-09 Simona Cohen
Past research on animals in Renaissance art has indicated their functions as signifiers of human characteristics. This study demonstrates stages in developments of Renaissance art that illustrate transitions from anthropocentric to theriocentric approaches in animal symbolism, where animals are perceived and valued in their own right. Traditional negative animal symbolism was not relinquished, but
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“Swords, ropes, poison, fire”: The Dark Materials of Spenser’s Objectification of Despair-Assisted Suicide, with Notes on Skelton and Shakespeare Explorations in Renaissance Culture (IF 0.1) Pub Date : 2017-12-09 James Nohrnberg
In the Despair episode in Spenser’s Faerie Queene I .ix, the provocative material means for self-slaughter are emblematically doubled with the psychological inducements, particularly on the models of predecessor texts in Skelton’s Magnyfycence and the Cordela story in The Mirrour for Magistrates . The pairing of means and causes is part of a tradition. So also is the despair of a Christian believer