2010 Abstracts
Alan Altimont (Saint Edward's University):
“Damon and the Deipnosophists: Andrew Marvell's Reading of Athenaeus of Naucratis”
Andrew Marvell derived not only the basic ideas for “The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn” and the Mower Poems from Athenaeus of Naucratis’s The Deipnosophists but also the color symbolism and the notion of an animal loving a human being of “The Nymph Complaining”; a specific passage of description, and the aesthetic and ethical underpinning of “Damon the Mower”; and the social conflict and legend of a garden of sexual depravity underlying Damon’s attitude toward and way of describing the garden in “The Mower Against Gardens.”
Bernadette Andrea (University of Texas at San Antonio):
“Elizabeth I And Persian Exchanges”
For the most part, earlier Tudor encounters with the roughly contemporaneous Safavid Persian dynasty have been neglected in the burgeoning criticism since the 1990s that focuses on Anglo-Ottoman exchanges. Yet, the bulk of the early voyages by the English merchants attempting to circumvent the Iberian monopoly on global commodity exchange turned northeastwards. My analysis of Queen Elizabeth’s Persian exchanges proceeds through each node in this network, from the letters for the Russian and Persian sovereigns entrusted to her “ambassador,” Anthony Jenkinson; to the “Tartar girl” he obtained for the queen on his Central Asian travels; to the portrait of the “Persian lady” long thought to represent Elizabeth.
Matthew Augustine (Washington University in St. Louis):
“Green Thoughts: An Argument against the Miltonizing of Marvell Studies”
What I suggest in this paper is that recent scholarship on Marvell can be read as seeking to fashion a place in literary history for Marvell much like the one occupied by John Milton; and what I here argue is that such efforts threaten to occlude or flatten that which is singularly Marvellian. To monumentalize is perhaps always to run the risk of idealizing; but more importantly, the interpretive strategies of source-hunting, of deep annotation, the assumption, moreover, of coherent and continuous and intelligible structures of thought and design, are—so I argue—strategies and assumptions specific to Milton. With Marvell, allusion is more often used to deconstruct than to double or amplify, his metaphorics more tuned to the liminal and indeterminate than the certain or secure; thus to read Marvell Miltonically, as this paper shows, is to misconstrue and misconceive Marvell.
Matthew Knox Averett (Creighton University):
“Secrecy and the Renaissance Artist”
In his story of the competition panels for the Baptistery of Florence, Giorgio Vasari, tells us that Filippo Brunelleschi worked alone whereas Lorenzo Ghiberti consulted others. Yet, Vasari is vague on which was the better course of action, leaving us to wonder about the value of artistic collaboration. Should the artist keep his work secret until it is unveiled, as Vasari’s hero, Michelangelo, does? Or should artists work openly, as Leonardo da Vinci recommends in his notebooks? While focusing on Vasari’s Lives, this paper considers a wide body of Renaissance art literature in an examination of several key aspects of working alone or in collaboration.
Fr. Edward J. Baenziger (University of St. Thomas):
“Saints in the Renaissance”
How does a person become a saint? The life-long process continues after death, for only the Church declares heroic persons “saintly”. The Renaissance saw declared saints, but the lives of the saintly from 1500 -1700 were placed in the crucible of a renewing Catholic consciousness and the labyrinth of political infighting. Thus very few were chosen for the Church at large. Others were to be canonized much later, but many have simply never been reconsidered. We examine France, Italy and Spain for their respective “saintly lives” during this period.
Christopher Baker (Armstrong Atlantic State University):
“Greedily she engorged: Eve's Satanic Sacrament”
Milton's diction in Paradise Lost (IX, 791)suggests that Eve's eating of the fruit may be a parody of communion. To "greedily engorge" calls to mind not only the Greek verb trogo, the classical word for biting into fruit, but the use of that same verb by Jesus in John 6:54 to describe the eating of his body as the eucharist. Eve's vigorous eating thus becomes a grotesque perversion of Jesus's command to partake of his body and blood and the theological antithesis of his statement that "The one who eats this bread will live forever" (6:58).
Debra Barrett-Graves (California State University, East Bay):
“Defamation and Representation: Mary Queen of Scots and the Placard Affair”
An anonymous placard, which appeared shortly after Darnley’s murder in 1567, portrays the Queen of Scots as a mermaid, while daggers encircle a hare, the crest of James Hepburn. The anonymous libel proved damning. Critics who discuss the “Mermaid and the Hare” placard point to Mary as a whore and Bothwell as a murderer. By comparing the Mermaid and the Hare placard with a watercolor of Mary Queen of Scots, by herself, one can identify how the anonymous placard artist uses parody to depict the queen as a virtual Frenchwoman, a fanatical Romanist, and a wanton capable of vicious intrigue.
Charles Beem (University of North Carolina, Pembroke):
“Elizabeth I: The Gender Queen”
In the final decade of the twentieth century, gender emerged as a methodological portal for feminist reinterpretations of the life and career of Elizabeth I, in the works of scholars such as Susan Bassnet, Carole Levin, and Susan Frye. Since that heady time, which did so much to reinvent historical interpretations of the Virgin Queen, there has been an inevitable backlash. In the works of Susan Doran and, more recently, in a forthcoming edited volume by Anna Whitelock and Alice Hunt, the importance of gender as an analytical tool for understanding Elizabeth has been subject to scholarly scrutiny. In this paper, I will be revisiting my own analysis of gender, as deployed in my first book, [The Lioness Roared], to once again make the case that Elizabeth was, and remains, the ultimate gender queen.
Greg Bentley (Mississippi State University):
“‘let me taste of thy cup’: The Poetics of Penitence in John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi”
In The Duchess of Malfi, Webster repeats the act of kneeling and rising as an allegory and a parody of Christ's death and resurrection. He does so to emphasize the formal, psychological, and ideological value of penitence for both the individual subject and for the court or community. As a dramatist, however, Webster moves the idea and act of penitence from the realms of liturgy and sacrament into the worlds of ethics and art.
J. Matthew Boyleston (Houston Baptist University):
“Lycidas Has a Ghost Behind its Canvas: Milton's Use of the Sonnet to Suggest Poetic Compassion in the Great Elegy”
What is moving in "Lycidas" is the personal way that poem's form follows its content. Through the sonnet form, Milton is able to suggest ideas and emotions that, if written, could fall into the trap of unfeeling sentimentality, or unfeeling dogmatism. The multiple possibilities that these technical touches suggest allow a vision of death and the value of the poetic memorial to be complex, contradictory, and two-sided. How poetry is written is surely a thought of self-conscious importance to a poet as ambitious as Milton. A close-reading of the poem reveals to us where the real, genuine, and personal compassion lies. It is hid beneath the conventions of the pastoral elegy and only becomes apparent when we pay attention.
Lester Brothers (University of Central Missouri):
“A Mexican Tribute to a Renaissance Master: Missa Quam pulchri sunt gressus tui by Francisco López Capillas”
The influence of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina well beyond his death in 1594 is well-known, but in details not known well. This paper documents a particularly remarkable example of this in a Mass by the mid-seventeenth-century Chapelmaster of Mexico City Cathedral, Francisco López Capillas.
Angela Bullard (Texas Christian University):
“Good Garden Management in Edmund Spenser’s Bower of Bliss and Garden of Adonis”
This presentation will establish that early modern thinking on the connection between the cultivation of the land and the self was more than metaphorical—it was also literal. This literalization of the body’s relationship to the garden and other cultivated areas stems from recent studies in historical phenomenology. To best exemplify this connection between garden and its affect on the self, I will turn to Edmund Spenser’s rendering of two legendary gardens, the Bower of Bliss and Garden of Adonis, in the Faerie Queene.
Kristin Bundesen (Walden University):
“Elizabeth I and her ladies; cocoon, staff or independent force”
Elizabeth has been painted as a sexually jealous, shrewish and mean-spirited queen bee in an uncomfortable female hive storming about breaking fingers and banning from court any woman foolish enough to fall in love without permission. However, this is not a complete picture of the complex relationship between the queen and her ladies. This paper challenges the traditional assumptions that the queen preferred her ladies-in-waiting to serve simply as an obedient privacy barrier and presents evidence that they acted as an extension of her will and operated independently carefully negotiating their relationship with Elizabeth with that of their dynastic and political interests.
Brad Campbell (Mississippi State University):
“‘This is a match’: Eroticism and Psychic Coupling in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale”
Critical evaluations of female agency in The Winter’s Tale often complicate Paulina’s role as facilitator of Leontes’ psychic transformation from a self-sufficient dictator to a virtuous leader. Recent feminist criticism focuses on Paulina’s subversion of conventional notions of masculinity as a means by which she inverts the power structure within the play; however, this paper argues that such readings marginalize the transformative power of discourse as these readings emphasize Paulina’s inversion of the dominant power structure instead of illustrating how her subversive acts allow Leontes to undergo an erotic experience, which leads to his complete actualization of self-knowledge and self-mastery.
Jill Carrington (Stephen F. Austin State University):
“Revisiting the Globes of the Tommaso Rangone Monument in Venice”
The present paper revisits the highly-specific reliefs of the terrestrial and celestial globes flanking the statue of Tommaso Rangone installed in 1558 on the façade of the church of San Giuliano in Venice. It revises the reading of the terrestrial globe based on new photographs and shows that Rangone's testament does not support Weddigen's tantalizing suggestion the globe reliefs were modeled after actual globes or maps that Rangone himself owned.
Liana De Girolami Cheney (UMASS Lowell):
“Giorgio Vasari's ‘Sala degli Elementi’: Symbolism of Fire”
In 1555, Giorgio Vasari, assisted by Cristofaro Gherardi, designed and painted a mythological and cosmological theme in the Sala degli Elementi, an apartment of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici at Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The Apartment of the Elements is dedicated to the four elements (air, earth, fire and water), which in antiquity were considered to be at the origin of the world. The four elements are personified as a history-painting theme. These are depicted in the ceiling and in the walls of the room. The focus of this presentation is on the element of Fire, symbolized with The Forge of Vulcan. Using Vasari’s "I Ragionamenti" as a guide, the complex alchemical symbolism of fire is unveiled.
Frederic Clark (Department of History, Princeton University):
“Medieval ‘Renaissance’ in Renaissance Europe: Early Modern Readings of the Carolingian Revival”
In problematizing the medieval/early modern “divide,” recent scholarship has located numerous “renaissances” in the Middle Ages—cultural and intellectual revivals thought to presage, parallel, or even rival the humanist efflorescence of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. Yet despite the success of these revisionist narratives, far less has been done to examine how the early modern rhetoric of renaissance itself co-opted medieval precedents. Accordingly, by examining the historical and philological works of Johannes Trithemius, Christophe Milieu, Pierre Pithou, Isaac Casaubon and others, this paper traces early modern constructions of the so-called Carolingian Renaissance, exploring how scholars openly weighed questions of periodization and comparative history not dissimilar from those which dominate current historiographical discourse.
Susan Clarke (Australian National University):
“The Concept of Neo-Stoic Retirement in Royalist Polemic and Poetry, 1647-48”
This paper offers evidence that royalist polemicists and poets of the late 1640s, including Richard Lovelace in 'The Grasse-hopper' appropriated the Lipsian, activist construction of the Stoic concept of retirement. It thus challenges the conventional wisdom that royalists retreated into Stoic indifference to survive the experience of defeat. It also reopens debate on the dating of Marvell's poem 'The Garden'.
Ann Louise Cole (University of Arkansas-Fayetteville):
“Valorous Ventures: The Renaissance Explorer as Epic Hero”
In the early modern period, the Renaissance explorer replaced the traditional warrior epic hero. This paper will consider how the explorers Vasco da Gama and Columbus are appropriated and utilized as early modern epic heroes as well as how they reflect the cultural moment in which they are appropriated. Luís Vaz de Camões utilizes Vasco da Gama in Os Lusíadas to lament the decline of Portugual and consider the potential that it once had. Joseph Barlowe in his Columbiad appropriates Columbus in order to praise the birth of a new American empire.
Anthony Crifasi (Benedictine College):
“From the scholastics to the early moderns: paradigm shift or scientific proof?”
Certain historians of science have portrayed the shift during the late Renaissance from scholastic sensory realism to early modern sensory skepticism as a paradigm shift that was not subject to scientific verification or falsification. I believe that a close examination of specific scientific findings regarding the physiological seat of vision during the 16th century shows that there were indeed scientifically decisive grounds for resolving this dispute at the time. In particular, advancements in sensory physiology revealed that the visual power was associated with an organ that has no access to the external qualities that it was supposed to receive, contrary to the requirements of prior theories of vision.
Noah Dion (Yale University):
“Deceived by Satan: Readers Respond to Satan's Soliloquy”
In this presentation I will argue that Milton models the second soliloquy in Book 4 of Paradise Lost on that of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, a sixth century poet and bishop, who first characterized Satan in a dramatic role within an epic poem, the De Spiritualis Historiae Gestis. I will show that Milton would have been familiar with this epic, and that he specifically used this soliloquy to confound our expectations about Satan and his sinister motivations by applying deceptively innovative rhetoric to that traditional speech. This project will invite further exploration into the literary relevance of Late Antiquity in the Renaissance and to reveal how Milton used that tradition to his own advantage even as he radically departs from it.
Phillip Donnelly (Baylor University):
“Historical Appearance in Areopagitica”
The first part of this paper considers how John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) evokes Machiavellian commonplaces regarding political reality and the appearance of history. In the second part, I show how Areopagitica deploys key moments in what Milton elsewhere calls “the story of Scripture.” In doing so, Milton challenges the Machiavellian assumptions that he imputes to those who would continue to support the Licensing Order of 1643. Ultimately, I contend that the respective use of historical narration in Machiavelli’s and Milton’s writing reveals contrasting accounts of the capacity for rhetoric, or suasive discourse, to participate in the appearance of reality.
Susan Dunn-Hensley (Wheaton College):
“Leaving London: Memory of Pilgrimage and the Sacred Feminine in Elizabeth I's Progress Entertainments”
Elizabeth’s staging of her royal person presented her people with a fascinating inversion of pilgrimage, which allowed the image of the feminine sacred to walk among her people. The royal progresses, which involved traveling from one place to the next and often took the queen to East Anglia, a region associated with the Marian shrines of Ipswich and Walsingham as well as other less well-known pilgrimage sites, evoked memory of medieval pilgrimages and of the medieval sacred virgin. However, although Elizabethan progresses continued to foreground the feminine sacred, the means of doing so and the implications for real women changed dramatically. Additionally, the role of the city became a great deal more complex in the symbolic narrative of the progress.
Charles Etheridge (Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi):
“Aristotle, Averroes, and Wilson”
My paper will explore adaptations of Aristotelian rhetoric created by al Rushd and by Wilson. Both rhetoricians’ methodologies, examples, and defenses of the art of rhetoric will be explored, both in the light of each other and in the light of Kennedy’s “objectives” for the cross cultural study of rhetoric. This exploration will lend understanding both to the enduring value of the Aristotelian rhetorical system as well as providing an exploration of the limitations in the Aristotelian system that are exposed by translating it to another cultural milieu.
Yael Even (University of Missouri, St. Louis):
“Luca Landucci on Violence”
The present paper examines Luca Landucci’s accounts of public brutality in renaissance Tuscany. The acts of violence that Landucci describes in his Diario Fiorentino include what we would term today as war crimes (especially by the Pisans and Venetians) and defacements of religious images (especially by the Jewish community). The study will examine not only the nature of these acts but also the punishments of the perpetrators and the Florentines’ reactions to them.
Jennifer Ezell (Missouri State University):
“From Courtesan to Commedia: The Rise of the Actress During the Italian Renaissance”
Although Italy produced no Shakespeare, its Renaissance was no less remarkable or lacking in creative energy. In 1578 Drusiano Martinelli led a commedia troupe from Italy into Paris and then into England. This feat was remarkable not because of the kind of troupe he was leading, but because his troupe contained three featured actresses, who performed in England eighty years before the women of England were allowed on their own stages. In1587, this same troupe traveled into Spain and these same women are believed to be the first women in a full-length play on stage in Spain, as well. From the very beginning, the church, the government, and audiences had very different opinions about women and the stage. This paper can only begin to unravel the complexities of events led women to the stage during the Italian Renaissance and their triumphs that make them noteworthy today.
Joan Faust (Southeastern Louisiana University):
“Defining the Indefinable: Marvell’s ‘The Definition of Love’”
The enigma of Marvell’s “The Definition of Love” has focused on the title—is it really a “definition” of love”? In his use of “Definition,” and attempts to “define” definition, Marvell acknowledges the inevitable gap between concept and portrayal. To illustrate possible ways of translating one sphere of existence to another, Marvell explores humankind’s attempts at understanding the liminal area between the idea and its explanation through three seemingly unrelated, so parallel, contexts: rhetoric, cartography, and mathematics. By the end of the poem, the reader concludes that, like the space between parallel lines, the gulf between idea and representation is often unbridgeable and thus, “infinite.”
William Ferleman (Oklahoma State University):
“Virtu’, Fortuna’s Threat, and the Utopian Maintenance of the English State Apparatus in Spenser’s Bower of Bliss”
That is to say, what Spenser has in mind when he states that through his poem he desires to fashion a gentleman, he intimates that he wants to mold a noble man who could potentially become head of the English commonwealth; this is the point at which private virtue translates into public (political) virtue; for Spenser, the “fashioning” of a gentleman is the introduction of the man into the narrow political realm and likely the realm of the court—either as courtier or potentially as prince. Spenser originally wanted to fashion the political virtues principally after Arthur became a prince, but it is undeniably the case that in many episodes of The Faerie Queene, Spenser represents or allegorizes private virtues that become, more or less, public virtues, and this is particularly true with Sir Guyon as he performs in The Bower of Bliss, a politically-charged space.
Gabriel Fernandez (Texas A&M University-Kingsville):
“At Charges for a Looking Glass: Richard III's Theatre of Mirror”
Richard III is embroiled in his very own milieu of reflection. He is persistently concerned with the way he and his environment are presented. Richard becomes the reincarnate Narcissus, doomed to drown himself and others within his very own English myth. Water imagery and references to mirrors/glass will be analyzed. The presentation ends with an analysis of the references to St. Paul in Richard III and a contrast of St. Paul and Richard III.
Raymond-Jean Frontain (University of Central Arkansas):
“Donne, Tagore, and Love's Passing Moment”
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Alex Garganigo (Austin College):
“Testing the Tests in The Rehearsal Transprosed”
Oaths are an important but neglected theme of Marvell’s Rehearsal Transprosed. I will argue that its largely skeptical attitude toward test oaths that confound religious and civil loyalties constitutes an appeal for legislation that would scale them back to a bare minimum: not much more than the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy. Composed after Parliament passed the Test bill in 1673 but failed to ratify its companion bill for Ease of Protestant Dissenters, Part II of The Rehearsal lobbies for another ease bill and uses the admission that Marvell took the required Test himself as an opportunity to suggest paradoxically that future legislation should steer clear of such “tests and picklocks” of conscience.
Sarah Gawronski (Utah State University ):
“Robert Dudley: A Story of Scandal”
The most controversial suitor of Elizabeth I’s reign was Robert Dudley. Robert Dudley was the son and grandson of traitors. Yet, almost immediately, it was apparent to all the court that he was Elizabeth’s favorite. And over time it seemed likely that he might gain the coveted position of King consort. Only one thing stood in his way: his living wife. When she was found dead at the bottom of the steps in September 1560, Robert was suspected of murder and his suit to the queen was threatened. It was the resident ambassadors of Elizabeth’s court who witnessed this relationship and listened to the rumors and reported both home to their sovereigns as well as passed along recommendations and opinions on how to deal with this lowly upstart.
Evan Getz (Houston Baptist University):
“The Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson as Hagiography: Lucy Hutchinson's Response to Courtly Romance”
In the Preface to Order and Disorder, Lucy Hutchinson worries about the abuses of
imagination that attend romances. In light of her proscriptions against the use of fancy and romance, N. H. Keeble’s charge that she in fact writes a romance in her Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson and suggests that she maintained an ambivalent attitude towards the genre. However, other critics claim that Hutchinson writes a hagiographical account of her husband’s life. I argue that the generic similarities between hagiography and romance have misled some critics to classify the Memoirs as romance and show that the hagiographical Memoirs present a Puritan response to romance and courtly aesthetics.
Max E. Grossman (University of Texas at El Paso):
“Art and Politics in Renaissance Siena: The Iconographic Program of the Piazza del Campo”
The fact that Siena was the only major city in Central Italy that was not founded in antiquity caused serious political problems for its government in the Early Renaissance period. As a consequence, the city’s leaders promoted the myth that Siena had actually been founded by the Romans; and it commissioned an ambitious program of sculptures and paintings in the Piazza del Campo and on the façade of the adjacent civic headquarters, the Palazzo Pubblico, that was intended to convince the public of the city’s ancient origins.
Gabriella Gruder-Poni (Independent):
“A Forest of Meanings in ‘Upon Appleton House’”
My paper attempts to reconcile two interpretations of "Upon Appleton House": the biblical allegory, which involves the whole poem, and a reading that emphasizes the Cupid imagery, derived from Ausonius's "Cupid Crucified," at the climax of the poem. In one reading the poet fleetingly adumbrates Christ; in the other, Cupid. My paper suggests that a further series of allusions to Ovid and Renaissance attempts to wrest Christian meanings from the myths and iconography of Cupid provide the link between the two apparently incompatible interpretations.
H. Ashley Hall (Creighton University ):
“Scriptores Puriores: Philip Melanchthon’s Appeal to the Cappadocian Fathers”
My presentation would summarize the reception of the Cappadocian Fathers (Sts. Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa) by Christian Humanist and Lutheran Reformer, Philip Melanchthon. I will emphasize that Melanchthon cited the Cappadocian Fathers throughout his career, and that these references to and quotations of the Cappadocian Fathers appear in the major concerns of Melanchthon’s career as a philologist, a pedagogue, and as a theologian.
Robert W. Haynes (Texas A&M International University):
“The Malvolian Moment: Folly and Governance in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night”
The implications of the practical joke played on Malvolio in Twelfth Night are provocative, and this paper will argue that they reside in the nature of social and self-governance brought into question by the post-disaster dynamics of a static world in which love is a dead issue. When the self-governance of the individual has reached the point of the luxurious futility of the Illyria in which this story begins, a kind of recalibration of justice becomes necessary, and nothing but a measure of humiliation will suffice to restore the best prospects for individual and social order.
Shelley Hazen (Northeastern State University):
“Female Resistance to Male Domination in A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
A Midsummer Night’s Dream presents itself as a humorous, fun-loving play about the trials and tribulations of love followed by the ever present “happily ever after”. After close reading, we see forms of male dominance and the female resistance to it. Women have long been thought of as subordinate to men, and a woman without a male figurehead, was regarded as abnormal and a threat to the male-dominated world. From historical records and Renaissance texts we learn that Queen Elizabeth also faced this scrutiny. With parallels to Queen Elizabeth, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream William Shakespeare exploits the tradition of male domination and the female resistance to it through his female characters Hippolyta, Titania, and Hermia.
Christine Hoffmann (University of Arkansas - Fayetteville):
“Cheaters, Saints, and Simultaneous Narrative: Lessons from Thomas More’s History of Richard III”
Thomas More's biographers emphasize the dexterity of his legal mind in the months before his trial, but More's efforts to display, rather than explain, the difficulty of his position can be viewed not just as legal maneuvers but as experiments in an illustrative technique-simultaneous narrative. This technique, devised to illustrate a moral without recourse to any necessarily realistic design, is one More had already utilized in his History of Richard III, which provides not a continuous narrative but a series of didactic notations alluding to rhetorical and moral positions rather than historically verifiable events. The History is less concerned with Richard's villainy than it is in examining the complicity that sanctions his ascendancy.
Kimberley Hogan (University of Louisiana at Monroe):
“The Rape of Lucrece: Metamorphic ‘unlocked treasure’ ”
The female gaze has been berated as the seductive well-spring in which men should “guard their hearts against lest they should fall” (Proverbs 7). The immoral woman has forever been the nemesis of men, seeking to devour those who come in her path. The “pretty speech” and “wandering gaze” suggests the “ruin of many” (Proverbs 7). This preoccupation men have so fondly been caught up in has left them blind to their own faults. The eye has remained on the female and all attributes of this particular organ, feminized. LaRue Love Sloan suggests, “this insistence that women were driven by their sexual appetites and that men should beware of the female eye” produced a fear of the woman’s sexual prowess suggested through the female gaze.
Maurice Hunt (Baylor University):
“Twelfth Night and ‘the pregnant enemy’: The Devil in What You Will”
Characters in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night mention the devil at least sixteen times. The most problematic reference is Viola's asserting that her disguise as the male servant Cesario is a "wickedness" in which "the pregnant enemy"—the devil—"does much." This paper explores the dimensions of the Shakespearean idea of the devil as humankind's enemy who is both pregnant with monstrous issue and the impregnator of its imagination. It does so with reference to religious motifs such as that of the Annunciaiton and to misleading, often beauteous, appearances in Twelfth Night —in this latter instance in the context of the linkage between the devil and disguise made in Book 1 of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene .
Christina Iluzada (Baylor University):
“‘The Whole Creation Groaneth in Pain Together’: The Suffering and Redemption of Earth in Paradise Lost”
Milton’s poetic rendering of the Biblical Fall involves a reaction from all of creation, including Nature and Earth. To broaden current ecocritical arguments, I argue that Nature and Earth’s reaction to the Fall allude to cosmic Biblical suffering and the promise of redemption. Using the Biblical context of Romans 8 will aid us in interpreting the cosmic response to the Fall and will show the relationship between Earth and Eve specifically as one that—in addition to material and sympathetic connections—has typological and eschatological implications.
Amanda Kellogg (University of North Texas):
“A Grave Courtship: Queen Elizabeth's Marriage Question and The Merchant of Venice”
This paper argues that Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is an excellent source to glean information about the cultural imagination and its understanding of the female condition during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign. I will argue for a reading of Portia’s character that examines the position she shared with Queen Elizabeth in relation to the legal-rhetorical system. This reading will also permit greater insight into the culture-wide legal imagination in Shakespeare’s time. Portia and Elizabeth share a common relationship to the law; in both cases, masculine figures of authority use the legal system to rule their bodies. Just as Elizabeth’s parliaments sought to constrain her choices through legal discourse, Portia’s father and suitors appropriate the female body for legal and economic advantage.
Yvonne Kendall (University of Houston-Downtown):
“Spain and its Overlooked Role in Renaissance Dance”
Dance was a focal point in the social life of Renaissance Europe, but published dance manuals exist only for France and Italy. Each of the major dance manual of the 16th and early 17th century, however, mentions Spain as equal in terpsichorean influence, but where are the sources? In this paper, the references to Iberian treasures will be explored alongside the four extant manuscripts. This includes a newly discovered work from the Biblioteca de Catalunya in Barcelona.
George Klawitter (St.Edward's University):
“The Definition of Love: Marvell's Use of Donne”
To define anything, much less love, is always problematic. Thus it is with Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love” poem, which Legouis calls “the second-greatest of Marvell’s love-poems” (63). Most readers, of course, do not see any personal references by Marvell in this poem. In contrasting Marvell’s style to Donne’s, Alvarez notes Marvell’s sacrifice of the personal/topical in “The Definition of Love” so that Marvell might achieve a poem of some perfection, as if to suggest that a personal poem cannot be perfect: what Alvarez forgets, especially for a love definition poem, is that a definition has to start with a particular: we cannot define “house” until we have seen a house, then many houses, and thence to an abstraction of “house.”
William Korver (Northeastern State University (Oklahoma)):
“Shakespeare’s Fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Origins, Innovations and Legacy”
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare mirrors John Aubrey’s works The Remains of Gentilism and Judaism and The Wiltshire Fairies as well as other Renaissance texts by depicting fairies in a conventional way through his use of fairy names, his inclusion of a changeling, and the hospitality of fairies. However, the Bard also portrays fairies in an unorthodox manner by presenting the magical creatures light-heartedly and by describing his fairies as small in stature and benevolent creatures overall. Many writers, including the supposedly anti-Shakespearian J. R. R. Tolkien, would imitate Shakespeare’s approach to fairies in subsequent centuries.
Ken Kurihara (Fordham University):
“Co-preacher sent by God: Celestial wonders and Lutheran clergy in 16th-century Germany”
Lutheran clergy in 16th-century Germany showed great interst in "Wunderzeichen (wonder-signs)" in the sky such as comets, irregular movements of the suns, northern lights, and strange apparitions, and frequently discussed them in their sermons and other writings. This paper analyzes why they were interested in such phenomena and how they "used" them in their discourses. Clergy interpreted these wonders as the signs of God's wrath and used the news to promote their various agendas. They claimed that "Wunderzeichen" were "co-preachers" sent by God to warn the people to take heed of their preachers' messages. These "Wunderzeichen" discourses show the dynamic interactions between theology, natural phenomena, and communal politics.
Marie Ladino (University of Maryland, College Park):
“Florentine Grand-ducal Diplomacy in the Roman Art World: Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte as an Agent of Ferdinando de' Medici”
While Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte is celebrated as Caravaggio’s first major patron in Rome, his primary activities in the art world in the late sixteenth century were, in reality, centered much more around his role as an ambassador and artistic agent working on behalf of Ferdinando I de’ Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany. To further the grand duke’s propagandistic agenda for himself and his state, the cardinal advised Ferdinando on opportunities to buy and commission works of art. He also supported Ferdinando’s large-scale art and architectural projects. Del Monte's relationship with the Florentine court sheds new light on the importance of the artistic agent and the vital role artwork played in Florentine grand-ducal politics.
Jaime A. Lara-Perez (University of Houston Downtown):
“Confessions: John Milton's Pastoral Elegy”
John Milton’s Lycidas is a closet poem: a highly charged homoerotic poem of longing and melancholy; but it is also a poem which constrains this component. Milton’s manipulation works as the vessel of masking and creating a closet by which the author himself could not escape.
Catherine Loomis (University of New Orleans):
“‘Little Man, Little Man’: Early Modern Representations of Robert Cecil”
At the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, her Secretary of State Robert Cecil was described by a contemporary as England’s “king . . . in effect,” and Cecil was a powerful presence who affected English culture as well as its political history. This paper looks at images of Cecil, particularly as he is depicted in a 1603 watercolor of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral. There, a tall, adult male figure was originally drawn to represent Cecil; it has been carefully razed out and replaced with a more accurate image of the Secretary and his physical deformities. I will discuss the creation of this image and its relationship to other images of Cecil as well as to images of monstrous or “savage and deformed” humans from early modern pamphlets and medical texts. I will also discuss Elizabeth’s use of the term “little man” to describe Cecil and its implications for definitions of early modern masculinity.
Elizabeth Mackay (University of Dayton):
“Pedagogy, Paradox, and Possibility: The Sixteenth-Century Grammar School and Its ‘Good Mother’”
This paper explores a narrative of the sixteenth-century grammar school, a narrative that paradoxically included a "good mother." This paper argues that rhetorical and pedagogical handbook writers transformed maternity into a "figure" through which they imagined and brought into being a humanist-inspired education. Although male writers claimed biological mothers were threats to public society, they inadvertantly reinstalled maternity as a powerful instructional/rhetorical agent who emerged at the center of the public sphere. Finally, this paper considers some of the possibilities the paradoxical narrative of the "good mother" created for actual mothers outside of the grammar school.
Joseph McFadden (University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas ):
“The Spanish Armada and Ireland, 1588-89”
In the story of the Spanish Armada, written in the main by the victorious English, it is difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction. Most of us can recall our early history lessons about the glorious victory of the outmanned and smaller English fleet over the powerful and "thought-invincible" Spanish Armada. We were told that the defeat of the Armada was a decisive battle marking the eventual decline of Spanish power. My purpose in this paper is not to focus on the "glorious defeat" of the Armada, but instead to discuss the "stragglers" among the fleet who, for a variety of reasons, sought the safety of Ireland on their return voyage. A fatal decision for at least twenty-six or so ships and their crews, that has given rise to a mytholigy that has proven to be rather long-lived.
Sean McDowell (Seattle University):
“Shadwell’s Shadow in Marvell’s ‘On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost’”
While “On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost” appears to have been occasioned by the famous “tagging” of Milton’s verses in Dryden’s extravagant and therefore never produced opera, The State of Innocence and the Fall of Man (1674), Andrew Marvell’s critical comments draw upon a wider controversy over the decorum and functions of rhyme in drama, a controversy including not only in the tussle between Dryden and Sir Robert Howard in the 1660s but also and more immediately in Thomas Shadwell’s criticisms of Dryden’s dramatic methods, especially his deviations from the example of Ben Jonson. Marvell’s comments on literary decorum harmonize with Shadwell’s positions and further align Marvell with the proto-whig aesthetic intelligentsia surrounding the Duke of Buckingham in the 1670s.
Patrick McGrath (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign):
“Epitaphium Damonis: Bacchic Orgies and the Church Fathers”
This paper argues that patristic writing on virginity influences the close of John Milton’s “Epitaphium Damonis,” a Latin poem composed in 1639 upon the death of his best friend Charles Diodati. In particular, Milton alludes to Theodoret of Cyrrhus’ (393-466 A.D.) Historia Religiosa and Methodius of Olympus’ (260-312 A.D.) Symposium during Damon’s (i.e. Charles Diodati's) participation in the Revelation-informed marriage feast of the Lamb, where he rages in a Bacchic frenzy and experiences the rewards of the chaste with a thyrsus of Zion. While the combination of Bacchic orgies and the Lamb’s marriage feast may seem incongruous, I show how Theodoret and Methodius provide a precedent for it.
Timothy McKinney (Baylor University):
“Crosscurrents of Venetian Style and Patronage in Adrian Willaert’s Setting of Ne l’amar’e fredd’onde”
Adrian Willaert’s madrigal Ne l’amar’e fredd’onde appeared in 1548, eleven years before Willaert’s famous Musica nova madrigals were published but well after they were composed. The text was written by Lelio Capilupi as a tribute to Helena Barozza, wife of Antonio Zantani; both spouses were important figures in the Venetian artistic and social scene in which Willaert worked. Antonio’s documented interest in Musica nova and his interactions with Willaert’s circle lend great significance to the sharing of expressive musical codes I find between Musica nova and Ne l’amar’e fredd’onde. The paper examines what these madrigals’ similarities and differences tell us about the private and privileged status of Willaert’s Musica nova style in connection with Venetian society and artistic patronage.
John Mercer (Northeastern State University):
“A way of telling the truth: Shakespearean References in Bill Cain's Equivocation”
Bill Cain’s play Equivocation, which premiered in 2009 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, presents a revisionist version of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. In Equivocation, Robert Cecil orders Shakespeare (“Shag”) to write a play describing the government’s official version of the Gunpowder Plot. In the course of the play, Shag is introduced to equivocation—”a way of telling the truth.” Cain manages to tell his own truth about the Gunpowder Plot, life in post-9/11 America, and the fine line between truth and propaganda by including an astonishingly large number of references to Shakespeare’s life, theatre, and plays.
Sr. Paula Jean Miller (University of St. Thomas Houston):
“St. Bonaventure: a Meeting of East and West”
Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1217-1274)culminates the Augustinian tradition of the West, while also integrating the Greek Patristic inheritance. Themes from Augustine’s contemporary, Maximus the Confessor(580-662)are:the processions of the Trinity; the Logos/Verbum Increatum as mediator between God and creation; the Incarnate Hypostatic Union as the Center of history and medium of restoration; and the risen Christ as the eschatological synthesis of the created order in God. Subsidiary themes include humanity as microcosm, reconciler of opposites, and mediator of a transfigured creation; the trichotomy of mind, sensibility and intelligibility; and Christian Wisdom, Love, and Freedom as the threefold way to deification of the cosmos.
Tim Moylan (St. Louis College of Pharmacy):
“Inflecting History: John Nichols’ Alteration of the Elvetham Pageant Woodcut”
John Nichol’s account of Edward Seymour’s entertainments for Elizabeth at Elvetham includes a print that contains a number of curiously anachronistic elements. In reproducing the original, the engraver, identified only as T.G., replaced the 16th century galleon with an 18th century man-of-war and the Cross of St. George with the Union Jack. Although this may be no more than artistic license, the changes are suggestive and invite a consideration of what motivated the alterations as well as the implications for later scholarship of the tendency to take such liberties.
Kara Northway (Kansas State University):
“‘[O]’er-hasty’ or “praise be rashness’?: The Value of Speed in Early Modern Hamlet Performances”
While Hamlet has traditionally been associated with delay, evidence, in fact, indicates a preoccupation with speed. Early modern people craved swiftness, particularly for communication and travel. Performances of Hamlet catered to this desire through language, movement, and the stirring of affect. This paper compares the audiences’ experiences of participating vicariously and directly in the early modern concept of “speed-making” during stagings in two places: London theaters and on the trade ship Red Dragon in 1607 Sierra Leone by sailors for English and African audiences. In two different venues, Hamlet tested the value of speed.
Arlen Nydam (Independent Scholar):
“The Unity of Sidney's Poetic Structures”
This paper analyzes formal relationships between the arrangement of the poems in Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and those in the Old Arcadia.
Martha Oberle (Frederick Community College):
“I Have Sinned”
The Concordance illustrates how surprisingly frequently Shakespeare made use of the word confess. This paper contends that that word is used in both secular and religious sense amd that aspects of the Roman Catholic sacrament, Penance, appear in several plays.
James Ortego (Troy University - Dothan):
“Did Shakespeare Contribute to the King James Bible? - The King, his Men, and the Passion of the Poet”
William Shakespeare and the King James Bible represent arguably the most influential writer and text in all of Western literature, respectively, yet scholars do not know the extent—if any—of Shakespeare’s influence on the King James Bible. Critics consequently wonder, “Did Shakespeare contribute to the King James Bible?” This essay examines the association between Shakespeare and the translators and ultimately suggests that the likely possibility existed for Shakespeare to review the Bible’s phonology. A study of Shakespeare and his relationship with King James I, John Richardson, and Roger Andrews will clarity Shakespeare’s influence on the King James Bible.
Paul Parrish (Texas A&M University):
“Learning and Literature at Little Gidding”
Little Gidding is best remembered as a residence and retreat from the secular world established by the Ferrar family. Little Gidding was that, but more. Family members were committed to learning—through the Little Academy, the Story Books, and the Harmonies—and they were, even if indirectly, involved in their creation of sacred verse by the poets George Herbert and Richard Crashaw. Little Gidding is rightly seen as a family retreat with a strong devotional character, but we miss some of the strength of the community if we neglect its role in advancing learning and sacred literature.
Margaret Peters (Northeastern State University, Tahlequah OK):
“Shylock as Malevolent Jew or Tragic Victim: The Merchant of Venice and Religious Turmoil in Renaissance England”
Is Shylock a greedy, malevolent Jew slinking through the streets of Venice ranting about his ducats and demanding his pound of flesh or a somber, practical, religious man enduring insults and abuse because he is different from the Venetian Catholics? Shakespeare wrote both portrayals into Shylock’s character in The Merchant of Venice. Based on long-held prejudices against Jews, but also influenced by the religious conflict of the Tudor era, Shylock’s character is more than a stereotype. He is also a symbol of the religious intolerance and persecution that plagued Renaissance England during the turmoil of the Reformation.
Kelcey Ponder (Independent Scholar):
“Faustus: Too Obtuse to Know Better”
Deeply corrupted and wanton for infinite knowledge and power, Christopher Marlowe's Faustus strikes a deal with the Devil to gain power and knowledge. Faustus completes his damnation by rejecting God's forgivensss. Faustus limits his power by rejecting repentance, persuasion by the Evil Angel, threats by the Devil and Mephistopheles, and his own greed. The appearance of the Good Angel, Evil Angel, and the Old Man is a byproduct of Faustus’s deal with the Devil. The Good Angel tries to persuade Faustus to repent, while the Evil Angel succeeds in preventing this. The Old Man represents the most damning test for Faustus, as he lectures Faustus on the infinite forgiveness of God and Faustus passes up this opportunity.
Diana Presciutti (Rice University):
“Imaging Abundance at the Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Medicean Siena”
I examine how two frescoes painted in the 1570s in the Scala hospital in Siena articulated an ideology of abundance by linking the care of foundlings with the provision of sustenance to the local community. In the Distribution of Grain, the Scala is represented as the possessor of vast quantities of grain, which it allocates to the needy. The fresco of the Assignment and Payment of Wet Nurses in turn makes visible the ability of the hospital to adequately fund and administrate the nursing of a large number of infants. Both frescoes picture a wealth of resources fundamentally at odds with the dire state of institutional and communal finances at the time, two decades after the Medici grand dukes assumed control of the city.
Rezaur Rahman (Texas State University):
“Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and the Nihilist Self-Devouring Wolf”
Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida is often considered as something of a black sheep. In an attempt to put the genre-bending work in context, my paper explores the play alongside fellow "problem play" Measure for Measure. By looking closely at how these two plays negotiate the individual body within a social context, one can gain a further understanding of why these plays have trouble blending in with the flock.
Helaine Razovsky (Northwestern State University of Louisiana):
“‘I am the dog’: Faulty Interpretation in Two Gentlemen of Verona”
In Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, the servant Launce bewails his dog’s hard-heartedness. Launce’s speech in Act 2, scene 3, presents the audience with layers of difficulty; a reader digging through the layers of ambiguity and of false parallels would arrive at a kernel that is linked to the nature of identity. I argue that Shakespeare’s representation of Launce’s relation to his dog is linked to the practice of interpretation in the play, which focuses the audience’s attention repeatedly on the nature of identity. Launce’s role as a servant raises class issues, just as Julia’s cross-dressing raises gender issues, and Proteus’s abandonment of Julia and betrayal of Valentine raise issues of male homosocial relations. In every case, Shakespeare forces the audience to confront the nature of human construction of identity.
Mark Reuter (University of Nebraska-Lincoln):
“Political Pageantry: Elizabethan Court Entertainments as Political Discourse”
In recent decades, a great number of works have examined the representations attributed Queen Elizabeth I. However, many of these representations are inconsistent and sometimes seem to completely contradict one another. This paper argues that, in order to understand the bewildering array of representations of Elizabeth, historians must not view each representation in isolation, but rather as an ongoing political discourse between Elizabeth and her courtiers. Viewing the entertainments presented to the Queen as a discourse provides a new method for charting the growth and transformation of political thought within the Elizabethan nobility.
Sarita Rich (Brigham Young University):
“Dangerous Conceits: Perverse Alchemical Transmutations in William Shakespeare's Othello”
Shakespeare consistently treats alchemy as a redemptive metaphor with fruitful possibilities for human transformation. Typically, a corrupt form (narrator of a poem, for example) is perfected by an a purified form (love of a woman, for instance). However, this alchemical tradition is inverted in Othello, in which disastrous alchemy displaces beneficent alchemy. This inversion has not been addressed in the scholarship concerning Shakespeare’s alchemical allusions. The inversion of the traditional literary alchemical paradigm accomplishes the simultaneous inversions of the Renaissance alchemist, the function of virtuous rhetoric, and the Protestant ideal of companionate marriage. Reading these inversions allows critics to define another possibility for the nature of the tragedy in Othello, one that concerns Desdemona’s failure as an equally guilty culprit.
Vanelis Rivera (University of Louisiana at Monroe):
“‘For her purpose fit’: Britomart’s Armor and the Means by which She is Forced to Exist in and be Defined by the Patriarchal Role of Marriage ”
This paper will explore how Britomart’s identity throughout Book III of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is defined by patriarchal standards, and thus how she exemplifies a patriarchal identity. Britomart will be examined through two phases—pre-armor and armor. In the pre-armor phase, Britomart’s identity is undefined because neither her gender nor sexuality is fully recognized. In this phase, the importance of marriage plays a role in how she will be defined throughout the story. Her armor phase will be approached by how she becomes more comfortable and complacent with the role she has been fitted in during her quest. Furthermore, the Elizabethan notion that a monarch has two bodies, body natural and body politic, will be used to analyze Britomart as encompassing various figures.
Katelynn Robinson (Emporia State University):
“Emptiness, Misery, and Death in John Donne’s ‘A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day’”
John Donne often writes about an emptiness or nothingness caused by death, absence or loss, and the misery that comes from emptiness. Rather than three topics this is actually one, usually referring to the author’s anxiety over his faith vs. secular matters. Whether it is a manifestation of Donne’s worry about losing his faith through dangerous knowledge or overemphasis of love and secular life, emptiness is a primary topic in Donne’s writings. “A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day” is Donne exploring his apprehensions about the dangers of knowledge to faith, the distraction of secular life, and the emptiness that has resulted from losing himself in a secularity that blinded him, yet the resulting darkness (misery) has brought him closer to God.
Clifford Ronan (Texas State University-San Marcos):
“Longinus and Shakespearean Surprise”
Certainly by the time he reached thirty, Shakespeare was able to fulfill Longinus’ prescription for literary genius. It seems odd, therefore, that there is little if any speculation that Longinus had an influence upon him. Longinus is mentioned glancingly in at least two sixteenth century English publications. More important, two Latin translations of Longinus’ Greek appeared on the continent before the future dramatist left school. In addition, a public university oration at Oxford by the eminent John Rainolds had praised Longinus’ advice at length. Though this oration was not published until after the don’s death when Shakespeare’s career was already in full swing, a Stratford schoolmaster or, later, a friend in London, could easily have called the playwright’s attention to the ancient’s ideas or directly to the Latin text.
I am not alone in finding Shakespeare's writing more consistantly 'natural,’ effective, and surprising than any other authors, ancient or modern. I have been struck by how Shakespeare’s imagery, other phrasing, and plotting strategies are designed to grab immediate attention and linger for later reflection. My paper seems to be the first study, however, to note especially close parallels between Shakespeare’s practice and the prescriptions of the ancient Greek rhetorician Longinus, whose work had been published and discussed in England before Shakespeare reached the age of thirty.
David Sabrio (Texas A&M University-Kingsville):
“Shakespeare in Love as an Introduction to Shakespeare Study”
The academy-award winning film Shakespeare in Love (1998) is an excellent vehicle for introducing students to the study of Shakespeare. Set in 1593 London, the film provides opportunities to introduce students to many important ideas related to Shakespeare study. Among the topics to be covered in the presentation are the following: the physical layout of a London playhouse; the influence of the plague on playgoing; the process by which a play goes from page to stage; Puritan polemics against the stage; Renaissance marriage customs; scenes from Romeo and Juliet; conjecture about Shakespeare's biography. The film is also very good at capturing the excitement and mood of the London theater scene of the 1590s.
Michael Saenger (Southwestern University):
“Shakespeare and the Borders of English”
Two kinds of people are very important in Renaissance plays, and never appear in propria persona on an ordinary stage: women and French people. In an age in which the ontological status of materiality, performance and language were already vexed, the stage put enormous energy into a pointedly hybrid art, which offers “real” men and their synthetic female love object, as well as “real” England and its mimicked foreigners. Such hybridity is part and parcel of the complex status of the theater more generally, which was at the nexus of oral and written language, high and low culture, art and criminality, dream and reality, and comedy and tragedy. Here I explore how the borders of the world of "Englishness" were articulated.
Martine Sauret (Macalester College):
“Le nouveau continent; nouveau centre, nouveau miroir, mire du nous dans Des Cannibales et Des Coches de Montaigne”
L'analyse de deux chapitres du livre I, 31 Des Cannibales et du Livre III, 6 Des Coches de Montaigne portera sur l'influence de Ticho BrahÈ sur le dÈcentrement du monde et en quoi cette vision ainsi que les récentes expÈditions sur le nouveau continent affectent Montaigne sur le sujet de l'Autre, l'IndigÈne et lui-m’me.
Mark Schneider (Virginia Tech):
“Flights of Transformation: The Contributions of Girard Desargues (1591-1661) to the Stereotomy of the French Baroque Staircase”
It has not so far been noted that Desargues applied his conception of a universal, transformational geometry for stonecutting (stereotomy) directly to his own nascent theory of architectural form. His architectural theory has surprising connections to French Baroque architectural style. My paper focuses upon Desargues’ application of his system to the staircases for the Lyons town hall, the grand court of a chateau at Vizille near Grenoble, and a house for a Parisian client. This work raises interesting questions about the origins of Desargues’ ideas and Baroque architecture; e.g., Is it possible that the plastic continuity of Baroque architecture influenced Desargues’ geometrical theories or vice versa?
Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler (Texas State University-San Marcos):
“Listening and Saving in Milton's Comus”
The reformed logic of the sixteenth-century educational reformer Petrus Ramus radically reconceptualized the traditional view of rhetorical invention as a logical process designed to actualize the essence of things. This process required the testing of intuition against real and often concrete measures in the world, including verbal and written interactions with others. Thus, verbal exchange, thought risky, become a crucial part of the process of actualizing what is, which we may understand as the essence of divine creation that makes anything what it is. In Comus, the actualization of chastity develops according to this essential Ramist principle.
Randi Smith (University of Tennessee, Knoxville):
“Confessing Communication: Moments of Metapoesis in Francis Quarles' Emblems”
Seventeenth century poet Francis Quarles recognizes many of the problems of written communication and uses that recognition to enhance his poetry. Of course, he was not alone in his anxiety; familiar with contemporary critical texts, it was inevitable that he should engage in the metapoetic practices of his day. His emblems’ metapoetic moments guide his audience into a fuller communication with his work. Second, they question the efficacy of written, and—by implication—verbal communication not only between himself and his audience, but also between Christians and God. This second form of metapoesis begins to comment on the limitations of language as a means of communication a concern similar to that of modern poststructuralisms.
Nigel Smith (Princeton University):
“Andrew Marvell Senior”
This paper considers Andrew Marvell senior’s career as a Cambridge undergraduate and Yorkshire divine. Marvell senior’s sermons, letters and other materials, bound in a single volume, in the collection at Hull Central Library, remain the largest unpublished collection of Marvelliana outside of the state papers. In addition to disputing both Laudians and separatists, Marvell senior modified his Calvinism with unusual, decidedly profane ancient learning, wit, antitrinitarianism and apocryphal textual authority, while remaining suspicious of creeds but drawn to oaths. What were the implications for his son, the future poet, secretary and politician?
Mary Sommers (Center for Thomistic Studies, University of St. Thomas (TX)):
“‘Out of the Fullness of Contemplation’: The Fate of Aquinas’ Innovations to the Concepts of the Vita Contemplativa and the Vita Activa”
In his Summa Theologiae Thomas Aquinas quietly invents a new form of the active life, one which “flows out of the fullness of contemplation”. He distinguishes it from a life which “consists entirely in exterior work” and argues that it is to be “preferred to [the life] of simple contemplation.” It is not clear, however, that anyone noticed.
Aquinas’ innovations can be considered a precursor of debates over the best life in the renaissance, civic engagement v. the cloister, negotium v. otium. However, his influence on them is problematic. I propose in this paper to examine reasons why Aquinas remains the defender of the priority of the contemplative life according to Salutati, Landino and Tommaso de Vio and whether his innovations, nevertheless, have an indirect impact on their argumentation.
Louis Charles Stagg (Emeritus, University of Memphis (English)):
“Caliban, Son of Devil-God Setebos”
Caliban explained the natural wonders of the island to Prospero, then tried to populate the "isle with Calibans" (I.ii.351), via Miranda. Next, he offered to help his newly discovered heavenly gods, humans swept ashore by Ariel's storm, find a way to murder Prospero and Miranda, so he could rule the island again. Prospero's powers prevented this, of course, forcing the would-be murderers to Europe to face laws there that they must obey. Caliban, in an unexpected-by-him turn of events, got control of his island again, once all those Europeans left it. Must people in this world, then, on Caliban's island or in civilized areas, take full responsibility for the consequences of their actions?
Catherine Howey Stearn (Eastern Kentucky University):
“Ceremonial Queens and Queenly Ceremony: Court Women Representing Elizabeth I ”
This paper examines a manuscript in the London College of Arm’s archive that delineates the christening of a child for whom Queen Elizabeth I was a godmother. As this manuscript makes clear, however, the queen herself did not attend the christening, but sent her good friend, Ann Russell, Countess of Warwick to act in her stead. Indeed, this manuscript records in detail when the countess was acting as herself and when she was acting as the queen. This document brings to life when and how female courtiers who served Queen Elizabeth I were able to represent the queen and extend her royal presence outside of the palace walls. Indeed, this document in conjunction with government expense records sheds light on how Elizabethan female courtiers participated in courtly politics in ways that scholars have thus far been overlooked. Most scholars have only examined to what extent Elizabeth I constructed her iconography and her politics in relation to her male courtiers and officials, but this paper will bring to light that court women also participated in fashioning the queen’s image and politics.
Brian Steele (Texas Tech University):
“Leonardo's Angelic Baptist”
I examine Leonardo’s half-length painting of John the Baptist (Louvre) against concepts articulated by Jacobus da Voragine (Golden Legend), whose explication of the Baptist’s angelic nature provide an interpretive base comprising significance, fiery nature, and relationship with Christ. This widely disseminated source constitutes perhaps the best guide to ways in which contemporaries probably èread’ the image, and Jacobus’ ideas can be elaborated with exploration of 16th century artistic concepts, Leonardo’s representations of generative females, and his own observations. Androgyny, emphasis on hair, gesture, and expression thereby assume coherent meaning as elements of a devotional image, while the rationale for syncretistic incorporation of leopard-skin cloak can be inferred from scrutiny of Florentine artistic practice. The Baptist, in this examination, is more unearthly than erotic.
Murray Steib (Ball State Universtiy):
“The Multi-Authored Mass: Thoughts on Editorial Recomposition in the Renaissance ”
It is widely believed that during the Renaissance, masses were the work of a single composer. In this paper, I will challenge this assumption by examining the sources and variants of two masses: Caron’s Missa Clemens et benigna and the anonymous Missa O rose bella III. I will show that new sections in both masses were specifically composed for use in Modena, and that they were composed by Johannes Martini, possibly to reflect his employer Ercole d’Este’s desire to have the music as liturgically orthodox as possible. I suggest that masses were occasionally reworked by later composers either to modernize them or to make them conform to local liturgical practices.
David Strong (University of Texas at Tyler):
“‘As a Shadow, a light and body must be here’: Reading Donne Through Duns Scotus”
A devout belief in the human indebtedness to higher goodness underlines “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day” as well as other love poems by Donne, but explaining how this indebtedness manifests itself in the speaker’s love remains liminal as a textual hermeneutic. Part of the reason lies in the fact that Donne’s thought extends beyond the conventional strains of Renaissance philosophy. Instead of prioritizing politics and rhetoric as promoting a social good, he centers his attention on the speaker’s decision to act individually and share his knowledge only with those willing to heed his wisdom. The result engenders an affective connection between the human and the ineffable which transcends mere acknowledgement of a metaphysical hierarchy. This connection apotheosizes the potential innate within each person to break free from social strictures. Thus, examining how love generates this feat both accentuates the profound nature of the speaker’s natural ability and situates Donne in a philosophical context distinct from his Humanistic forebears. Specifically, the medieval voluntarism of Duns Scotus illuminates this intrinsic worth of each individual and explains how the speaker’s desire for nothingness attests to a transition from the earthly to the empyrean.
Joshua Thompson (Mississippi State University):
“Floating ‘the Elephant’ in Twelfth Night”
In Twelfth Night, two seemingly marginal characters, Sebastian and Antonio, eroticize the play. Participating as engaged listeners in each other’s narratives, each character identifies his own desires while recognizing the hidden signs that constitute the other’s desire; furthermore, they prove capable of exchanging roles in the master-servant dialectic that structures their relationship, which requires acknowledging the relative difference between one another’s desires. Each represents his desires without annulling the difference between the reality of those desires and the symbolic network that structures them; rather than annihilating it, they maintain and eroticize the space between self and other.
Timothy Raylor (Carleton College):
“Marvell’s ‘The Definition of Love’: A Definition of Love”
“The Definition of Love” is one of the more perplexing of Marvell’s elusive lyrics. There is strong critical disagreement over the poem’s method and meaning. This paper addresses the three major interpretative cruxes, arguing, first, that Marvell’s poem does indeed provide a Definition, as that genre was understood within the university logic of Marvell’s time; second, that the imagery of the central stanzas is consistently celestial, rather than, as has often been argued, terrestrial; and third, that the poem’s conclusion follows directly from the arguments and images of those stanzas.
Beverly Van Note (Texas A&M University):
“Resisting Submission: Elizabeth Cary’s Articulation of the Forbidden Voice”
This paper explores Cary’s strategies of resistance to domestic and legal controls on early modern women in selected letters from 1627, her 1630 petition to the Privy Council, and The Tragedy of Mariam (1612). In their studiously submissive rhetoric and their reliance on the convention of letters as embodied speech, Cary’s letters and petitions act as a substitute for the forbidden voice of the married woman in both domesticity and politics. Read backward in light of her later resistance, Mariam negates the possibility of a physical space in which married women may speak freely and posits instead a transgressive textual space for female readers who will engage the questions Cary voices and who will refuse their own silencing.
Jacqueline Vanhoutte (University of North Texas):
“Old Men in Love: Falstaff at the Court of Elizabeth I”
This paper argues that a web of references ties Shakespeare’s “fat paunch” (1 Henry IV, 2.4.144) to Elizabeth’s “minions.” I trace Shakespeare’s characterization of Falstaff more particularly to anti-government tracts that depicted the Earl of Leicester, the Queen’s leading favorite, as an unnaturally oversexed old man, a bestial, cowardly and lubricious “Munsur Fatpanche” (“News from Heaven and Hell”), a would-be soldier distinguished only for his sexual swordmanship. By situating Falstaff within a pattern associating Elizabeth I with the indecorous figure of the old man in love, I am able to comment on problems that have long vexed Shakespeare scholars, including the relationship between the Falstaff of The Henriad and the Falstaff of The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Mary Villeponteaux (Georgia Southern University):
“A Goodly Musicke in Her Regiment: The Elusive Harmony of Mercy and Justice in Elizabeth's Reign”
Elizabeth I was often urged to be more punitive, especially during the 1570s and 1580s when a number of threats to the Protestant realm emerged, such as the Northern Rebellion and other plots that revolved around Mary Stuart. These cases inspired sometimes harsh assessments of the queen's propensity for mercy. I argue that achieving a balance between mercy and justice that would satisfy her subjects is particularly difficult for a female monarch and that Shakespeare, through the figure of Portia in Merchant of Venice, reflects and reconciles some of these gendered tensions between justice and mercy.
Nicholas von Maltzahn (University of Ottawa):
“Marvell and the Regions”
A recent emphasis on “three-kingdoms” or “archipelagic” issues in Early-Modern British studies invites closer scrutiny of the cultural situation of the border regions between those kingdoms. This paper turns on Marvell’s literary expression of the tensions that resulted when borderers had at once to police differences and to sustain commerce and civil association between kingdoms. Marvell’s relation to the ruling elite that the Tudors had installed in Yorkshire made him an expert client also of other like aristocrats with major northern and/or Irish holdings. His role colours his representations of Scottish, Irish, and also English concerns, reflecting the complexities that have animated the New British History.
Mickey Wadia (Austin Peay State University):
“Neither Ridiculous nor Incoherent: A Reassessment of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure”
Historically speaking, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure—often characterized as a dark comedy or problem play—has been somewhat unfairly criticized on multiple counts. John Dryden, who provided the first explicit attack on the play in 1672, referred to Shakespeare's play as a "ridiculous, incoherent story...grounded on impossibilities, or at least, so meanly written, that the comedy neither causes your mirth, nor the serious part your concernment." In fact, Dryden could hardly even determine what the play was, referring to it as neither "fish nor fowl." This paper challenges Dryden’s negative assertions; evaluates this perplexing comedy’s merits; and investigates the specific nature of the peculiar marriage contracts in this play including the concepts of de praesenti and de futuro, arguing all the while that Measure for Measure firmly takes its place among Shakespeare's dramatic triumphs, clearly deserving of more stage and film performances and adaptations.
Katherine Walker (Texas Christian University ):
“Rue the Tears I Shed: Titus's Weeping Body ”
During the Renaissance, medical and moral texts provided disparate and ambiguous analyses of the various physical and emotional reasons for why an individual cries. In the midst of these discussions on the lachrymal flows of the body, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus features a male protagonist who continually sheds tears. While the play exhibits many acts of violence, Titus’s voluntary tears are just as physically damaging as any dismemberment. Titus willingly allows his body to become feminized and this act undermines his authority as a patriarchal leader. This paper seeks to examine early modern anxieties surrounding the crying body. I argue that Titus’s crying permanently marks him as a feminized, grotesque physicality.
William Weaver (Baylor University):
“Corynna's Garden: George Chapman's Critique of the English Minor Epic”
This paper concerns George Chapman’s use of ecphrasis in Ovids Banquet of Sence (1595) to critique the poetics of the English minor epic (or “mythological erotic verse narrative”). By framing the “banquet” within an ecphrasis of Corynna’s Garden, Chapman inverts the typical economy of literary form and social occasion. Ecphrasis, which would ordinarily ornament a feast, becomes here the un-occasioned grounds of a purely subjective feast, franchised from social context. Ovids Banquet thus exposes a serious problem of the minor epic as conceived by Marlowe and Shakespeare and may suggest reasons for the genre’s dramatic rise and fall, not only in Renaissance poetics, but also in modern scholarship.
Elspeth Whitney (University of Nevada, Las Vegas):
“Chaucer and the Complexions: The Case of the Pardoner”
This paper proposes a return to the usefulness of medieval categories of medical diagnosis with respect to the Pardoner and argues that the Pardoner can be best understood as a phlegmatic man. Male phlegmatics were described as beardless and were associated with impotence, same-sex desire, hermaphroditism, excessive or misdirected sexuality, “womanish” behavior, deceit and lack of self-discipline Understanding the Pardoner as a phlegmatic thus provides an economical label encompassing the complexities of the Pardoner’s physical and moral condition that medieval readers would have recognized, even if modern ones have failed to do so.
Lee Williames (University of St. Thomas):
“The Galloglass”
Ireland and the Irish are a puzzle with many pieces, some of which fit together easily and others are more difficult to fit into a traditional conception of Irish identity and history. The group I am interested in illuminating are the Galloglass. They are frequently described as Scottish-highlanders who were mercenary soldiers in Ireland in the Middle Ages and the early modern period and become a decisive force in struggles between the Irish Lords in the North of Ireland among themselves and against the expansion of the Norman English. They are incorrectly viewed as aliens, part of the heritage of the Reformation and the Plantation epoch. My focus falls on the story of a prominent Galloglass Clan, the Mac Sweeney, their history and self-perception that are different than the popular conception, even among Irish-Americans of the Sweeney surname. What has been their roll in Irish History especially in the Medieval and Early Modern period? Are the Mac Sweeney Irish or Scotts or perhaps both?
Emma Annette Wilson (University of Western Ontario):
“‘What is a kiss?’ (Herrick): Early Modern Logic at Work in Herrick and Carew’s Pastoral Poetry”
I will use the precepts of early modern logic, the discipline at the heart of discourse in this period, to analyze the styles and structures of pastoral poems by Robert Herrick and Thomas Carew to examine their literary strategies in the historical context of early modern discursive culture. Both poets have largely been overlooked in modern criticism; when they are examined this tends to be in light of their political affiliations rather than the quality of their poetics. This paper engages with early modern logic as a means of analyzing their pastoral poems to provide a new reading of these, and to draw them into more centralized critical consideration by situating their stylistic operations within seventeenth-century discursive culture.
Miranda Wilson (University of Delaware):
“Uncertain Ghosts: Poisoning, Autopsies, and the Speaking Dead”
In this paper, I explore the ways English fears of poisoning shape cultural and literary representations of the autopsy, or what William Harvey calls “morbid anatomy.” The practice of formal autopsy arises in England in response to a particular historical moment, the sudden, and to many eyes, suspicious death of Prince Henry in 1613. It gains wide-spread attention again in 1625 when James I’s body, like his son’s, is opened to quell rumors of death by poison. Through these and other high-profile autopsies, medical practitioners present themselves as in conversation with the flesh of the dead. Their attempts to translate this conversation for the benefit of the general public contribute to new, and contested, images of physicians as legal and political participants.
Lori Witzel (St. Edward's University):
“The Sites of Her Sin, the Sites of Her Salvation: ‘Verba Invisibilia’ in Donatello’s Penitent Magdalen”
In the act of carving the penitent Mary Magdalen, Donatello created areas of negative space. These openings were made to address technical challenges as well artistic challenges; could they also have been made to deliberately recast the physical places of the Magdalen’s former sin into a sacred verba visibilia—or, as I will show, into something we could call “verba invisibilia”? This paper will examine what we know and what we can surmise about Donatello’s choices in his Penitent Magdalen, and how these decisions were not simply made in the service of art/craft, but were intentional openings made by the artist towards something more transformative—remembrances of the Magdalen’s sin, transmuted into the sites of her salvation.
Sarah Youree (Texas State University, San Marcos):
“Gascoigne's Master F.J.: Elizabethan Literature's Biggest Loser”
Gascoigne’s Hundreth Sundrie Flowers draws on his personal experiences as a failed courtier, law student, soldier, and writer to inform a subtle yet scathing social critique that caught the attention of voyeuristic readers and censors alike. Not only did his literary skill ultimately garner the attention and favor of Elizabeth I, but his keen observations of the rhetoric of courtly life permit examination of the intersection of discourses in the culture of the Elizabethan court. The purposeful ambiguity of the language of friendship and romantic relationships and the lack of moral closure in “The Adventures of Master F. J.” suggest that Gascoigne's supposed failure as a writer was actually the cause of his success.
Janet Pollack (Colorado State University):
“Anne Boleyn: Women, Music, and Gender Politics at the Tudor Court”
Abstract not available.
Marguerite Tassi (University of Nebraska – Kearney):
“Wounded Maternity and Sharp Revenge: Shakespeare’s Representation of Margaret and Tamora in Light of the Hecuba Myth”
Abstract not available.
John Watkins (University of Minnesota):
“Drinking from Your Father’s Skull: Late Antique Pre-history of Renaissance Queenship”
In the early seventeenth century, two northern playwrights--Ulrik Hjarne in Sweden and William Davenant in England--revived the story of Rosemund, Queen of the Lombards. Rosemond was a Gepid princess. In a famous story chronicled by Paul the Deacon and other Carolingian writers, Alboin, King of the Lombards killed her royal father in battle and captured Rosemond herself. Alboin then forced her into marrying him and fashioned her father's skull into a drinking cup that he wore on his belt. After three years of marriage, he got very drunk at a feast and ordered Rosemond to a drink a toast to her father's memory. She later murdered him in his sleep and eloped with her accomplice to Byzantium. This paper ponders the role Rosemond's story plays in the larger history of interdynastic marriage. It also questions whether it was a coincidence that Hjarne and Davenant revived the story shortly after the death of two powerful queens who both expressed, in the words of Queen Christina, "an insupportable distaste for marriage."
Rollen Houser (University of St. Thomas):
“Christian Conversion in the Humanist Age”
The “little book” entitled Summa on the Virtues and Vices, or Illumination coming from Salvific Science, by Dionysius (or Denis) the Carthusian (1402-1472), was a work for “converting” laymen. Denis uses the traditional list of seven capital vices, the three theological virtues, and the four cardinal virtues. In addition, he makes use of the four senses of the cardinal virtues he had found in Aquinas, who had it from Plotinus: “exemplary”, “political,” “purgative,” and the virtues “of the purged mind.” Denis then develops his own “way” of virtue, designed in the humanist spirit of the age to make available the heights of Christian spirituality to Christian bourgeois and peasant.