2011 Abstracts
Mira Assaf (Ohio State University):
“‘He Called Us Israelites’: The Jewish Threat in Andrew Marvell’s Upon Appleton House”
Andrew Marvell’s Upon Appleton House narrates a story of succession and endurance amid the political and social instabilities of the English Revolution. While some critics see the representations of the mowers in the British fields as emblems of the armies of the civil war and others read them as a parodic response to the political, social, and religious polemic created by the Levellers and Diggers movements, I argue in this paper that the Mowers episode, particularly with its focus on the figure of Thestylis and its references to the Israelites, sheds light on the overriding anxiety towards the imminent return of the Jews to England in the mid-seventeenth century.
Cassandra Auble (University of Nebraska):
“Bejeweled Majesty: Queen Elizabeth, Precious Stones and Statecraft”
Queen Elizabeth showed a keen perception of the underlying tensions accompanying a woman’s ascension to the throne. Throughout her reign Elizabeth remained acutely aware of male anxieties over her female sovereignty and she employed various political and symbolic measures to support and maintain her royal authority and sovereignty. One of these measures included her appropriation of precious stones as tools of statecraft. Elizabeth used gemstones not only to create an image of royal authority in person and in portraiture, but also as a means of asserting her sovereignty and affirming and consolidating the political loyalty of her subjects.
Heather Aziere (Northeastern State University):
“Divine Right and Machiavellianism in Measure for Measure”
Scholars have drawn many parallels between the character of the Duke in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and King James I of England. Yet the Duke is depicted as rather Machiavellian, scheming and manipulating his subjects in order to reaffirm his power. This paper analyzes the divine and Machiavellian qualities of the Duke as well as how the parallels between him and James elucidate Shakespeare’s treatment of the divine right and nature of the play’s Duke and rulers in general.
Charles Beem (University of North Carolina–Pembroke):
“Why Elizabeth Never Left England”
The final three Tudor monarchs Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I, never physically left England to visit other realms in the British Isles and the European continent during their reigns. This kept Elizabeth in a position of power from the beginning of her reign until its end and allowed her control over other forms of representation that revealed her to Europe and the rest of the world.
Ilona Bell (Williams College):
“Elizabeth and Alençon—From Myself Another Self I Turned”
No abstract available.
Marlo Belschner (Monmouth College):
“The Alternative Spiritual Authority of Mary Ward”
The potential unruliness of the recusant woman mirrors the Protestant representation of the Catholic Church as a dangerous, seductive, and disobedient woman resisting the rule of her Protestant state/husband (Marotti 36).The Catholic enemies of Mary Ward, the founder of the English Ladies, often used the same strategies against her used by Protestants against disobedient Catholics. Despite her unwavering devotion to the controversial tenets of her institute, Ward defined her own obedience to the Catholic Church even as it disavowed her visions and suppressed her institute. My paper examines the methods of authentication and redefinition by which Ward established her spiritual authority, allowing her Institute to survive its suppression.
Sean Benson (University of Dubuque):
“A Local Habitation Lends a Name: Thomas Arden’s Tragic Stature”
Arden of Faversham is the first extant domestic tragedy to use a nonaristocratic tragic protagonist. I examine divergences between John Stow’s and Raphael Holinshed’s accounts of Arden’s life: Holinshed suppresses or otherwise omits some of the same material that Stow used in his own account of Arden, and these omissions have the effect of gentrifying Arden, rendering him a suitable subject for Holinshed’s chronicle account and, ultimately, for tragic representation. I also discuss how the Arden playwrights use Holinshed’s Chronicles in order to place Thomas Arden, a commoner, as a tragic protagonist on the early modern stage.
Greg Bentley (Mississippi State University):
“Emilia and the Politics of Cuckoldry”
As I illustrate in this essay, Emilia, from Shakespeare’s "Othello," perhaps more than any other character on the Renaissance stage, tries to walke the fence between two comepeting idological spaces. More specifically, I aruge that Emilia is caught in the tensions between trying to conform to the behaviors and attitudes of atraditionally obedient wife and at the same time she deisres to embody and assert her private, autonomous subjecctivity rooted in independent consciousness and conscience. The paradox of her subjectivity stems, in the broadest sense, from her need to fulfill the pleasure principle while simultaneously desiring to embody the positive phallus and enact the reality principle.
Anna Riehl Bertolet (Auburn University):
“‘But Yet a Union in Partition’: Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart”
Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots have been considered as polar opposites in virtually every aspect of their personal and political beliefs, preferences, styles, and achievements. Despite—and perhaps even because of—this accepted dialectic opposition, however, these two queens had a great deal in common: not only did they face similar challenges, but each of them also needed the other for self-definition. This paper explores the nature and extent of this need, as well as the instances when the differences between the two queens collapse in a paradoxical confusion of their identities.
Craig Bertolet (Auburn University):
“‘Mortality and mercy in Vienna / Live in thy tongue and heart’: The Problem of Sovereignty and Exception in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure”
This paper applies Giorgio Agamben’s theory of sovereignty to Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Agamben defines the sovereign as the dividing line between violence and law. Citing Carl Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign as the power able to grant exceptions, Agamben theorizes that a sovereign power can choose to impose or not impose punishment on the body of a miscreant. With the Duke and Angelo, Shakespeare questions the nature of exception by juxtaposing the Duke’s initial leniency and Angelo’s cruelty and by creating, at the end of the play, a complex enactment of sovereignty that nevertheless falls short of the ideal.
Claire Bordelon (University of Louisiana at Lafayette):
“The Aged Sire, the Despairing Pastor, and the Divine Lady: the Many Faces of Contemplation in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene”
This paper discusses the role of Contemplation in Book I of The Faerie Queene as a capstone character who embodies particular elements of other figures of Book I, most notably Archimago, Despair and Una. Spenser, in infusing Contemplation with the traits representative of the various virtues and vices of these characters, alludes to the complexity of the relationship between sin and virtue and the necessity of divine awareness. The correspondence between Contemplation and the figures of Archimago, Despair, and Una is representative of the subliminal connection between sin and virtue, and the need for divine assistance in human affairs.
Renee Bricker (North Georgia College and State University):
“Queen Elizabeth I in Pungent Times”
People smelled in the sixteenth century. Smell equated with sickness. Though Elizabeth I’s sensitive nose may be a trifle amusing, as a childless monarch, who had faced sickness and assassination attempts, her health was no laughing matter. Medical guides situated health and disease in bad air, among other areas, and bad air meant bad smells. Elizabeth’s sensitivity to smell therefore was critical both to her sense of aesthetics and her preservation of good health. Absent laws that regulated pollution, and appropriate infrastructure the Queen’s personal olfactory preferences led to specific court protocols. This presentation therefore takes up two scholars’ related, but different claims about space, power, and olfactory perceptions to explore Queen Elizabeth’s sensitive sense of smell in the context of politics and power. Doreen Massey asserts that space is "a product of interrelations" and "at issue is spatialized social power," while Dominique LaPorte maintains that, "[t]he same olfactory/excremental factors that transformed body, bed, and tomb into distinct spatial units" is equated with "emerging modern space...[a] feature of which is...[the] consistent compartmentalization and fragmentation of space into discrete components." The water-closet and the limitation of access represent spheres of separate space and provoke opportunity to ask about space, power, and smell.
Francis Bright (University of Redlands):
“Undressing Emblems: Anacharsis, Angerona, Harpocrates”
One finds a wide range of calls to parler peu & venir au poinct in French Renaissance emblem books. This study analyzes three paragons of silence: Harpocrates in Alciato, Anacharsis in La PerriËre’s Morosophie of 1553, and Angerona in Coustau’s Pegme of 1560. Emblems’ theatricality and their thematization of decoding generate self-referential allegories. In each case here the woodcut represents a statue--how better to portray dignified silence?--and yet, in a characteristic irony, each image needs its gloss. Anacharsis’s emblem is one of several which characterize silence as repression of desire. Revelation through logos is sexualized; the text undresses the picture.
Meg Lota Brown (University of Arizona):
“Bodies in Labor: Female Prostitutes, Healers, and Midwives in Early Modern Europe”
Women’s bodies were the site of many forms of labor in early modern Europe. This paper examines the cultural work of female prostitutes, healers, and midwives in the period; a primary focus is on the social and economic value of women’s labor, particularly in relation to their bodies. In all three of the professions under consideration, bodies are objects of both commodification and contestation in various labor markets. Western European countries responded differently to women’s corporeal work, imposing regulations and penalties with varying degrees of severity. Common to all governments, however, was a keen interest in the revenue that women’s bodies generated and in the potential threat that their labor posed in the marketplace.
Brad Campbell (Mississippi State University):
“Hide, hide thy snaky head!: Reconstructing the Medusa Narrative in The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois”
This essay will explore the subversive power of female characters in George Chapman’s The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois. The essay explores the process by means of which the women in the play deconstruct a patriarchal Medusa narrative and provide a commentary on the cultural movement of nunneries or cloisters during the period in which the play was written. This cultural movement, then, provides the impetus necessary for females to subvert conventional notions of masculinity and re-create a narrative reflective of female agency. Though some critics of the play may view the cloistered female characters as an endorsement of conventional masculinity, I will argue that these characters successfully liberate themselves by proactively constructing their own narrative and taking on the role of female activists.
Jill Carrington (Stephen F. Austin State University):
“The Raniero degli Arsendi Professor Tomb in Context”
The Raniero degli Arsendi tomb in Padua is highly significant as the first monumental figural tomb of a Paduan university professor and the first of what becomes a series of Paduan professor tombs unique in their display of multiple books with the effigy. The present paper briefly treats the iconography of the tomb and the historical context for its likely patronage. The Arsendi tomb respectfully imitates the mid-fourteenth-century tombs of the Carrara lords, Ubertino and Giacomo II, while incorporating significant motifs from other monuments. The tomb’s patron and date are unknown, aside from its execution following Raniero’s death in 1358; however, the most likely date is the 1360s or 1370s and probable patron his son Arsendino, who served in these decades as the most trusted legal advisor and diplomat to the Carrara family.
Liana De Girolami Cheney (University of Massachusetts, Lowell):
“Giorgio Vasari’s "Sala degli Elementi": Symbolism of Richness”
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 Earth, symbolized with The First Fruits of the Earth Are Offered to Saturn. Using Vasari’s I Ragionamenti as a guide, the complex alchemical symbolism of fire is unveiled.
Stephanie Christodoulou (Northeastern State University):
“Measure for Measure as a Reflection of a Dynastic Shift”
It has been suggested that Measure for Measure has more in common with the realpolitik of Shakespeare’s histories. This feeling of history and unease reminds us that the play is a reflection of the time surrounding its composition; England was experiencing a time of uncertainty and change. The death of Elizabeth ended the Tudor dynasty, which had been in power for 118 years. Measure for Measure reflects this dynastic shift from the brutality of the Tudor reign to the manipulation of Jacobean rule, as the representation of the Duke in Measure for Measure echoes the governance of James I, while Angelo’s surrogate rule is reminiscent of a Tudor authority.
Anthony Cirilla (Saint Louis University):
“The Ebbing Neptune: Shakespeare’s Rejoinder to Virgil and Ovid in The Tempest”
I will present the argument that Shakespeare uses classical representation of Neptune, drawn from Virgil and Ovid, in order to create the figure of Prospero. For Virgil, Neptune is an image of the hero, a powerful statesman who is able to assert his authority through diplomacy rather than force and represents a stoic mastery of the passions through reason. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid draws upon this image of Neptune to subvert it and create a far more disturbing god who cannot control his passions well at all. In the Tempest, Shakespeare creates a fusion of both Virgil’s and Ovid’s Neptune in the character of Prospero, who rejects his Neptunic stoicism and authority in favor of a humanist appreciation for the passions.
Barbara Cobb (Murray State University):
“As You Like It As They Like It: Shakespeare for Sixth Graders and Others”
Lauren Coker (Saint Louis University):
“There is no suff’ring due: Undressing the "Sick Dress" in Volpone”
This paper explores fraudulent illness in Volpone as an early modern representation of what Tobin Siebers refers to in Disability Theory as "disability drag"—a term describing a performance by a healthy or able-bodied actor playing a character with a disease or disability that undercuts the permanence of a bodily condition. In Volpone’s case, though, the metatheatrical construction of his "sick dress" early in the play heightens the perception of impermanence regarding the suffering body, and the imposture of illness as a form of deceit in Volpone also satirizes the ailing body’s credibility in terms of how it is understood in contexts of wealth and greed among onlookers.
Louise Cole (University of Arkansas):
“Loyal English Catholics, Heretics and Traitors: Negotiating Religion and Cultural Identity in Elizabethan England”
During the reign of Elizabeth I, English Protestants and Catholics engaged in a form of othering. During the 1580-1581 mission to England, the English Jesuit missionaries appropriated print production and Protestant print tactics in order to counter Protestant printed attacks. In the first two publications of the clandestine printing press, A briefe discours contayning certayne reasons why Catholiques refuse to goe to Church and A brief censure vppon two books written in anwere to M. Edmonde Campions offer of disputation, Robert Persons (as John Howlet) challenges the hegemonic English cultural identity and its othering of the English Catholic.
Judith Coleman (University of Iowa):
“‘The motion’s good / And of the spirit’: Antinomian Puritans in Thomas Middleton’s The Puritan”
This paper explores the way in which Thomas Middleton’s 1607 play The Puritan, while utilizing the mainstays of anti-Puritan satire—hypocrisy, bombastic self-righteousness, etc.—also taps into deep-seated concerns about religious truth and the potential for religious anarchy. By casting some of his Puritans as antinomians, Middleton not only reveals the cracks he perceives in the Puritan facade, but also those in the religious identity of early modern England itself. This paper works to tease out the antinomian moments in The Puritan and contextualize them with other works to demonstrate the centrality of an understanding of antinomian belief to an understanding of the early modern English religious landscape.
David Cormier (Saint Louis University):
“‘Why don’t you kill yourself?’: Samson’s Search for Meaning”
In the introduction to Victor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, he recalls a question he frequently asks his clients who seek him out for psychotherapy: "Why don’t you kill yourself?" The answer to the question is meant to lead the client to the realization that they have something to live for, that they believe they have a reason to be. The question I explore in this paper is this: Has Samson lost meaning in his life, his reason to live? I argue Samson was in a state of mind that would have led him to suicide and that the pillars and festival of Dagon simply provided a means and opportunity to accomplish this end.
Catherine Cox (Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi):
“Plague like Cats: Our First Gothic Novel, William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat”
In his enigmatic novel "Beware the Cat," Baldwin emphasizes the seductive and dangerous power of cats, and by association Catholicism, by including at every level of his narrative references to plague. The contaminated atmosphere that permeates the narrative intermingles with humor, fantasy, and intrigue to create not only our first novel but our first gothic novel. As it satisfies our longing for storytelling, the narrative hints of plagues and disasters to come, especially the terror and bloodshed that will be unleashed at the accession of England’s Catholic queen. The imminent return to an age of gothic superstition and religious persecution, that Mary’s reign will undoubtedly herald, is, for Baldwin, to enter the dreamy, pestilential, and suffocating world of cats.
Daniel Crews (University of Central Missouri):
“Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Lazarillo de Tormes, and Charles V’s Conciliar Diplomacy, 1541-1554”
I will briefly discuss the background to the origins of the Venetian Cardinal Gasparo Contarini’s doctrine of double justification agreed upon by Catholic and Lutheran representatives at the Diet of Regensburg, 1541 and ambassador Diego Hurtado de Mendoza’s support of it during the first two sessions of the Council of Trent. The discovery and publication of a document by the Spanish bibliophile Mercedes AgullÛ y Cobo identifying Mendoza as the corrector of the 1573 expurgated version of Lazarillo in March 2011 makes the connections of double justification, Mendoza’s diplomacy, and Lazarillo particularly timely.
Laurent Curelly (Université de Haute Alsace):
“These Weeping Eyes, Those Seeing Tears: The Language of Tears in Seventeenth-century Metaphysical Poetry”
The tear motif is frequently used by the English metaphysical poets, consisting of writers with different religious backgrounds and persuasions such as Richard Crashaw, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan and, Andrew Marvell, whose "Eyes and Tears" - though one of his few poems where tears actually flow - is an especially laudatory recognition of the superiority of tears over eyes. This paper purports to look into why the metaphysical poets make such extensive use of tears in their poetry. Tears do not only act as mediators between the poets and God but they prove to be the very essence of a full-blown language - that of the eloquent body enduring passions. This "grammar of the heart" will be analysed especially as it challenges the nature of poetic writing.
Jasmin Cyril (Benedict College):
“Portraits of Bianca Capello, True Daughter of Venice and Grand Duchess of Florence: Identity by Design”
Bianca Cappello, Venice 1548 - 20 October 1587, brought Venetian sixteenth-century fashion to Florence through her elevation to Grand Duchess following her marriage to Francesco I de’ Medici I, Grand Duke of Florence in April 1578, following the demise of Johanna of Austria, first wife of Francesco I. Bianca, with Isabella de’Medici and Eleonora of Toledo, wife of Cosimo I de’ Medici, first Grand Duke of Florence, were known as the Three Graces, of Florence.Bianca Cappello, based on the Venetian opulence of textiles and the Cypriot court style of Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus, 1468-1489, whose garments were copied and borrowed for Venetian state weddings, influenced the manner of Florentine women’s dress as evident in state portraits, such as Scipione Pulzone’s 1583, and by Lavinia Fontana c. 1580, in the Dallas Museum of Art. Her identity and sense of style were interwoven to reflect both her origins in the Veneto, and her accession to the title of Grand Duchess of Florence. From a girl eloping with a suitor to the Grand Duchess of Florence, Bianca Capello constructed a public identity in portraiture that revealed an intentional design for prestige and acceptance.
Jessica Dell (McMaster University):
“Divided They Fall: (De)constructing the Triple Hecate in Spenser’s Cantos of Mutabilitie”
My paper explores Spenser’s treatment of the Triple Hecate in his Mutabilitie Cantos. The characters of Cynthia (the moon goddess), Diana (the Earthly huntress) and Mutabilitie (the bringer of death) create three centers of power within the Mutabilitie Cantos which perfectly reflect the locations of power occupied by the Triple Hecate. What is perhaps unique about Spenser’s treatment, however, is that rather than depicting her as powerful and unified, his Triple Hecate is impotent and divided. By evoking the idea of the Triple Hecate in the Mutabilitie Cantos, Spenser dismantles and disempowers her to make way for a more standard model of patriarchal authority.
Frank DeStefano (Independent Scholar):
“Giorgione’s La Tempesta”
This paper identifies the subject of the Tempesta as “The Rest on the Flight into Egypt.” The nude woman nursing an infant is the Madonna. The man is St. Joseph with his staff. The broken columns are commonplace in depictions of the “Rest.” The city in the background is Judea from where the Holy Family has fled but could also be Padua during the Cambrai war. The scraggly plant in the foreground is “belladonna,” a plant associated with witchcraft and the Devil. The paper also examines the relevance of a heretofore misidentified copy of a “lost” Giorgione.
Marilyn Dunn (Loyola University):
“Defining Themselves or Defined by Others?: Nuns’ Art Patronage and the Construction of Identity ”
In the decorations of their churches both male and female religious orders constructed their identities and celebrated their particular missions within Catholicism, but the role of male and female religious sharply differed particularly in the post-Tridentine era when strict enclosure secluded women from an active public apostolate. This paper examines how through their art patronage Roman nuns fashioned their identity in their public church embracing a church-sanctioned ideal image of female religious yet subtly challenging this ideal in other ways. While proclaiming their spiritual authority as prayerful intercessors, their decorations present multi-faceted identities important to the nuns and assert the public presence of these hidden, cloistered women.
Susan Dunn-Hensley (Wheaton College):
“Real Presences: Protestantism, the Body, and the Virgin Queen”
This paper examines representations of Elizabeth I in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book II, Lyly’s Endymion, and Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. I am interested in exploring the residual elements of medieval Catholic culture found in these representations. I will argue that dramatic representations of Elizabeth I reveal the instability of the image of the sacred feminine in post-reformation culture and art. Further, representations of Elizabeth I as sacred virgin evoke the tension between the bodily expressions of spirituality popular in late medieval piety and post-reformation Protestant spirituality, which tends to focus on the reading of the Word and the renewing of the mind and spirit.
Martin Dzelzainis (University of Leicester):
“‘The Sport of Bishop Hunting’: Marvell’s Anticlericalism”
No abstract available.
Yael Even (University of Missouri¬–St. Louis):
“Bacchus and the Florentine Commoners”
In Medicean Florence, commoners could familiarize themselves with the identities and exploits of popular mythological gods and heroes. Barring images of Hercules, which had appeared in public before Cosimo I de’ Medici’s reign, those of Bacchus may have become the most accessible. During the 1560s, spectators were able to view at least three such statues: two in processions which meandered through the streets of the city and one in a niche near the Ponte Vecchio. The present paper examines these little known or/and forgotten artworks. It forms part of an ongoing study on the visual literacy of Florence’s so-called ordinary citizens.
Ryan Farrar (University of Louisiana at Lafayette):
“The Power of Absence and Contradiction in Sidney’s New Arcadia”
Sir Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia features identity transformations that highlight early modern literature’s use reliance on themes of disguise, desire, and compounded selves. The constant renewal of identity featured in characters such as Musidorus and Pyrocles finds its roots in ideas proposed by Renaissance thinkers such as Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola who proposes that one can be the "free and proud shaper of [one’s] own being." However, the proposed study examines the catalysts for the transformations on the grounds that the characters initiate each identity change by contradicting their current belief system; each contradiction springs from a perceived absence in their own personal qualities which they see present in others.
Joan Faust (Southeastern Louisiana University):
“‘Carpe ante diem’: Marvell’s ‘The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers’”
Even a cursory reading of Marvell’s lyric poetry indicates a fascination if not admiration for naÔve characters who clearly enjoy the closeness with nature for which Marvell yearns yet who lose that unity through the advent of sexual love which forces the figures to cross the margin between innocence and experience. But "Little T.C." reveals that even catching love right at the beginning of the liminal state, well before the necessity of crossing the threshold into maturity with its accompanying complications of physical passion and sexuality, cannot prevent ominous thoughts of future pain.
Margaret Flansburg (University of Central Oklahoma):
“The Augustinian Oratory at Sant’ Agostino in Fabriano”
No abstract available.
Laura Flaspohler (Emporia State University):
“The Creation of an Icon”
Queen Elizabeth I contributed to the creation of her icon in many ways. Early in life, she learned that "maleness was what counted." When she became queen, Elizabeth ruled as a man would rule, keeping in mind that her femininity remained an issue for her people. Elizabeth strove to appease Parliament while holding on to her own values, and she used the people’s love for her as a political strategy, drawing on the people’s loyalty to England. She touched people with her speeches and became real to them in her portraits. Elizabeth presented herself as an individual who deserved to rule England. Though her iconography continued to change after her death, Elizabeth, with help from her courtiers, originally created the image of the icon.
Brett Foster (Wheaton College):
“Shakespearean Presences in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem”
This talk will first present a relatively new play, Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, and make clear its salient features and its linguistic and theatrical achievements noted by various critics. There will follow a study of the deep, diverse Shakespearean resonances throughout the play, making the talk ultimately a project in the spirit of reception studies: how does Shakespeare and his writings continue to live and be interpreted in the later dramatic works of contemporary authors? In this particular case, how do both textual resources -- Renaissance and contemporary -- dramatize the mythic conception of "Deep England"?
Raymond-Jean Frontain (University of Central Arkansas):
“The "change to evennesse": Donne’s A Litanie and the Orality of Salvation”
Donne’s A Litanie balances between Protestant and Catholic theology in an attempt to achieve what the poem terms a "change to evennesse"- -that is, a state in which any antithetical state is to be shunned. And, as part of this "change to evennesse," Donne carefully positions the poem between the extremes of print and speech, choosing a liturgical form traditionally recited in public by a communion of believers, but emphasizing in his cover letter to Sir Henry Goodyer that his is intended "for lesser chapels, which are my friends." Donne joins with his intimates, not with a public congregation, in the recitation of the litany, elicting from them some form of reciprocation. Thus absent friends speak and, in this case, pray.
Terry Gamel (Northeastern State University):
“The Dog’s Bite: Usury and Foucault’s "Resemblance" in The Merchant of Venice”
According to Foucault, in the sixteenth century there was an epistemology at work that operated through the resemblances between different things to show how different things could have similar properties. This principle is at work in The Merchant of Venice in the constant use of imagery related to Shylock biting Antonio. For this reason, the entire "pound of flesh" plot of The Merchant of Venice is actually an analogy for how usury can seem like biting, to show the audience the dangers of taking out loans. However, because this is a comedy, the analogy cannot be completed with Antonio’s death. The play instead becomes a warning to the lender to be careful with rhetoric.
Alex Garganigo (Austin College):
“Marvell as Miltonist”
It has recently been argued that Milton’s Lycidas exercised a decisive if not formative influence on Marvell. I will complement this claim by demonstrating that Marvell, along with Samuel Johnson, was one of the poem’s first and best literary critics. Many identifications have been offered for Lycidas’s notorious "two-handed engine." While the trope’s power clearly lies in its gnomic polysemy, I submit that a cluster of identifications tightens the poem’s connection to its immediate context: the two-handed printing press; the two hands of the clergymen who censor the press; and the oaths of entry to the clergy.
Ryan Gregg (Webster University):
“The St. Louis Art Museum’s Reclining Pan as Eclogue”
The St. Louis Art Museum’s statue Reclining Pan, attributed to Francesco da Sangallo, depicts the god of Arcadia in slumber. The statue may present Sangallo’s lament over the death of his mentor, Michelangelo. Upon viewing the work, the spectator enters into the poetic landscape of the pastoral. Pan’s sleep marks the moment as noon, and the viewer then becomes a participant in the statue’s eclogue, transformed into a shepherd listening to the artist’s lament. By considering the poetics of the bucolic genre, the statue is seen to announce not just Sangallo’s grief, but also his aspirations to succession.
Anita Hagerman (Washington University):
“Henry V, "This England," and the Anxiety of Opposition”
Edward Hall’s Henry V, produced for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s "This England" histories cycle (2000-2001), has been largely ignored by critics who prefer instead the overt politics of the National Theatre’s explicitly anti-Iraq War Henry V (dir. Hytner, 2003) and the influential stagings of the RSC’s millennial Henry VI plays (dir. Boyd). But Hall’s version was a salient expression of the insecurities of its own time, revealing the pungent and often confusing blend of patriotism and self-hatred that has marked English national identity in the era of devolution. I argue the production’s critical value lies in those very ambiguities, echoing precisely the muscular insecurities of British England at the millennium.
Sharon Hampel (University of Denver):
“Leone Hebreo and Hebraic Desire”
Leone Hebraeo’s 1535 Dialogues of Love , which concerns the nature of love and desire, has been both influential and controversial. Its author, Judah Abrabanel, who named himself Leone Hebraeo, was a refugee from the Inquisition. Given the chaotic times, confusion exists as to whether the Dialogues were originally written in Hebrew or in Italian. Both versions were published in 1535. Although "Mosaic teachings" underlie the work (Pesctore 16), the nature of those teachings is unclear. The essentially Hebraic nature of the Dialogues can be seen in their stylistic relationship to Leone’s Hebrew poetry and in the Dialogues’ distinctive and dialectical Hebrew diction used to depict an Hebraic marriage.
Thomas Herron (East Carolina University):
“An Elemental-Purgatorial Scheme in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus”
Titus Andronicus has a hellish conclusion. This fiery scenario is in fact predicted by previous Acts, which are organized according to a structural scheme whereby principle events in each of Acts 2-5 highlights one of the Aristotelian elements, after Rome descends to Chaos in Act 1. Hence the fiery, hellish retribution in Act 5 serves as a transcendent moment of elemental ascension, concluded also by the arrival of heaven-sent "Lucius." What appears as Titus’ damnation can be read instead as a purgatorial cleansing according to a related scheme found in Virgil’s Aeneid and in Augustine’s concept of purgatory, as well as related to neo-platonic artistic fashions in the 1590s (including in Spenser, an acknowledged source of the play).
Andrea Hewitt (Saint Louis University):
“Hearing Britomart’s Call in The Princess and Aurora Leigh: Spenser Among the Victorians”
For most scholars, Spenser, Tennyson, and Barrett Browning do not invite comparative study. While Dorothy Mermin has claimed, "Spenser’s Britomart has no Victorian Granddaughters," Barrett Browning calls Spenser "a cheerful ideality." She also shares literary, social ties with Tennyson and his Spenserian Medievalism. Barrett Browning’s characterization of epic female heroism further raises the possibility of her connection to Spenser’s conception of feminine strength. By examining Spenser’s Britomart alongside Barrett Browning’s Aurora from Aurora Leigh and Ida from Tennyson’s The Princess, I will argue that these heroines’ voices dialogue with one another in a transcendent, cross-period, dialectic, call-and-response.
Derek Hirst (Washington University in St. Louis):
“Entry into Service”
For one who was, as poet, so drawn toward solitude and, as political broker, so practised in the arts of accommodation, Marvell showed a fitting interest in the paradoxes of entry into the world. The dilemma of entry formed the most important and troubled juncture on which he meditated. Its traces are to be discovered throughout his work: not only did he position ‘the forward youth’ on the edge of action, he repeatedly projected that crux onto all those whom he serviced in verse. Such fascination with the limiting conditions of action in the world, and with forever youthful figures caught on the thresh-hold, finds its analog in a life of self-effacement from the world, and of pliability in a career of service.
Scott Howard (University of Denver):
“E-Journals & Interactive Design: Re-mediating Renaissance / Early Modern Literary & Cultural Studies”
This presentation will examine recent developments in electronic journals. The crux will concern intersections among matters of research, authorship, publication, audience construction, and information access—that is, how and why e-journals are working within and against the field of knowledge, generating possibilities for traditional and innovative research, writing, reading, and teaching practices. A selection of e-journals will be investigated (including Journal of the Northern Renaissance, among others) in comparison with the accomplishments of APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, an open-access, independently managed, peer-reviewed e-journal that I have been developing since 2007.
Melissa Hudler (Lamar University and Anglia Ruskin University):
“‘Weaving and Unweaving’: Rhetorical Failure and Success in Sir John Davies’ Orchestra”
Sir John Davies’ poem Orchestra is a rhetorically-conscious verse study of cosmic order that reinterprets the relationship between Homer’s Antinous and Penelope. In his reinterpretation of Homer’s poem, Davies promotes the crude Antinous of Homer to a civil and verbally graceful suitor whose rhetorical goal is to woo Penelope to dance. Although Antinous’ rhetoric fails to persuade Penelope to embrace him in a dance of love, the dancing that the queen observes at the end of the poem unquestionably pleases her and moves her to question the virtue of her own art: the cunning preservation of her chastity. Dancing accomplishes, then, what verbal rhetoric could not and thus functions as a visual rhetoric quite persuasive in its silence.
Brett Hudson (Middle Tennessee State University):
“Competing Idioms: Andrew Marvell’s "On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost" and the Restoration Reader”
Using Andrew Marvell’s dedicatory poem "On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost" as an example of an early critical reading of Milton’s epic, this paper examines the connection between idioms of dissent and the Restoration reader. As Nigel Smith’s commentary on the poem explains, the reader-persona which Marvell creates is aware of the aesthetic, political, and religious controversies of the day, and Marvell incorporates this awareness into his close reading of Milton’s epic. In doing so, Marvell’s critical response utilizes competing idioms used in the religious and political debates in English print culture in the early 1670s.
Carlton Hughes (University of South Carolina):
“Titian and Petrarchan Painting”
Elizabeth Cropper and others have shown that Titian’s paintings of ideal female beauty echo Petrarch’s lyrics in praise of Laura’s charms, poems likening the beloved’s blond hair, pale skin, and red lips to honey and gold, milk and ivory, rubies and roses. This paper argues that there is also a deep structural similarity between Petrarch’s poetry and Titian’s artistic style. It is particularly evident in the painter’s fascination with veiling and unveiling motifs which create a heightened sense of tension between the revealed and the withheld, the almost touched and the intangible. Indeed it is a logical product of Titian’s milieu, one in which painting/poetry paragoni were ubiquitous and literary Petrarchism was highly fashionable.
Maurice Hunt (Baylor University):
“Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Human Worth”
Shakespeare’s representation of human worth in "The Tempest" reflects traditional, relatively enduring assumptions rather than contemporary, period-bound ones posited by commentators investigating this subject in Shakespeare’s plays. Paula Blank, for example, in Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man, argues that the classic Shakespearean exposition of human worth in Troilus and Cressida reflects "a context of emergent, modern capitalism." Analysis of human worth in "The Tempest" however underscores the importance for Shakespeare of the Christian Humanist tradition associated with the Renaissance Neoplatonists and Erasmus rather that that of a new line of inquiry associated with Montaigne, Bacon, and Calvin.
Ineke Huysman (Huygens Institute of Netherlands History):
“‘A man with a mission’: Richard Flecknoe in Service of Béatrix de Cusance, Duchess of Lorraine”
In Rome in 1646 Andrew Marvell met the poet, playwright and alleged priest Richard Flecknoe (1605?-1673?). About this event Marvell wrote his famous poem Flecknoe, an English priest at Rome, in which he described Flecknoe’s poor lodgings and emaciated appearance. In his poem Marvell makes no mention of the fact that Flecknoe travelled to Rome as an agent on behalf of his mistress Béatrix de Cusance (1614-1663), Duchess of Lorraine, in order to plead her case with the Pope about her controversial marriage. This paper will try to establish the precise nature of Flecknoe’s mission to Rome.
Ioana Jimborean (University of Karlsruhe):
“The Development of the Loggia at the Princely Courts of Italy during the Quattrocento”
Around 1450 the loggia becomes constituent in Italian princely residences. Introduced in the faÁade it becomes the main focus. It is no longer an annexe but an instrument of representation with emblematic character and it displays the ruler as the legitimate potentate and as an erudite humanist. Sovereigns are the King (Aragon), Condottieri (Montefeltro, Sforza), Bankers (Medici) and the Pope. Determinant are the exaltation of the ruler and the staging of the residence, the tradition of the vita rustica creating a contemplative attitude towards nature, and order pervading the landscape. The scale of the loggia is determined by the prince, its orientation indicates the axis in the territory and thereby occurs the appropriation of space.
Shannon Meyer Jones (University of Nebraska, Lincoln):
“Fallen Angels: The Origin of the Demonic Familiar”
The origin of the familiar in early modern English popular culture can be traced to beliefs in fallen angels acting under the direction of the Devil. When looking at the familiar as a fallen angel, we see women communing with a creature of respect and awe, thus elevating the woman to a position of power. The familiar was understood as being one of the angels that fell with Satan when he chose to leave heaven. Angels, in popular culture, often appear in animal form, have been known to test the goodwill of the average person, and have the ability to heal diseases. Familiars appear in animal form, test the faith of witches, and cause diseases and illnesses, thus signaling significant similarities between angels and familiars.
Michael Kelley (Saint Louis University):
“Richard and the Camera: A Monstrous Marvel”
For hundreds of years now, actors, directors and commentators have lamented that William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Richard the Third tests the limits of performance and scholarly examination. As psychological and cultural insights into Richard’s person have changed—especially in regards to his physicality—I maintain that no stage performance can rescue us from our confusion. Instead, in our modern culture, Richard and his audience are better served by the artistic powers of film, which can tailor Richard in a way that a stage production cannot. Used skillfully, elements of camerawork and cinematic mise en scene will twist an audience’s perception and favor in a way that leads to a greater modern understanding.
Amanda Kellogg (University of North Texas):
“‘Divers schedules of my beauty’: Portraiture as an Allusion to Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night”
Because of their association with the Elizabethan court, Shakespeare’s use of miniature portraits in the comedies such as Twelfth Night may have alluded to Queen Elizabeth I. By likening Olivia to the queen, Shakespeare illustrates Elizabeth’s dexterous management of complex courtly and political practices. Elizabeth strategically employed miniature exchanges—coupled with an understanding of how such courtship rituals affected the women engaged in them—to avoid a marriage that would have deprived her of power over both her subjects and her own body. In Twelfth Night, as in Elizabeth’s court, control of one’s image and the reproductions of it has not only romantic implications, but also political and economic significance.
Susan Kendrick (Emporia State University):
“Constancy and Faithlessness: The Female Lover in Mary Wroth’s "Pamphilia to Amphilanthus"”
Mary Wroth’s sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, employs the traditional Petrarchan mode in order to subvert it. The speaker in the sonnets, Pamphilia addresses her love for the faithless Amphilanthus. The sequence evolves from a struggle between surrender and affirmation to a traditional viewpoint of Cupid as a mischievous boy. The corona establishes the god of Love as a majestic king, but the persona of Pamphilia ends Section 4 with musings over the ambiguous nature of love. Pamphilia to Amphilanthus is Lady Mary Wroth’s version of the Renaissance woman’s view of love, in which the formerly passive beloved asserts her role as a lover.
Brian Kett (University of Colorado):
“Tom of All Trades: The Writings of Thomas Powell as a Tool for Lower Branch Lawyers in Early Modern England and Wales”
In early modern England, litigation rose at an alarming rate, which also led to a rise in lawyers, clerks and legal professionals. A Welsh lawyer, civil servant and writer named Thomas Powell (d. 1635) wrote several works designed to help these ‘lower branch’ legal practitioners. Because of the demand for lawyers and clerks, there was concern that these practitioners were not properly trained and that mistakes happened. Powell wrote his works to empower lower branch practitioners to better do their jobs and get ahead in the competitive legal trade. In an age where lawyers trained by watching trials and attending lectures, ‘textbooks’ did not exist, and Powell’s works filled a gap between provincial lawyers and the central courts.
Mitzi Kirkland-Ives (Missouri State University):
“Iconic Narratives and Narrative Icons in Netherlandish Art and Devotional Life”
This essay seeks to explore the character of such "narrative icons" as the arma Christi in the context of devotional practices in which the distilled individual elements served as devotional mnemonic devices for a reconstruction of the narratives concerned. A body of devotional literature led readers through a carefully structured narrative meditation for which such imagery served as a visual aid, and through early modern prayer books from the Low Countries manuscripts the context of such imagery is further clarified.
George Klawitter (St. Edward’s University):
“Little T.C.: Just an Ekphrastic Poem or Another Political Commentary?”
That the poem could be ekphrastic seems obvious, but analysis of its painterly qualities has never been vigorously pursued, readers distracted, perhaps, by the delicate scent of a predatory narrator hiding behind a tree and scribbling sensuous iambics about a little girl. The cult of the Marvell voyeur never seems to die whereas, in reality, the narrator of the poem may be driven more by the excellent quality of the painting than by salivation over an underaged noli me tangere. Behind any strongly imagistic poem, of course, is the Horatian dictum "ut pictura poesis, " but the strength of the imagery in this little poem cannot stop with titillation of the senses—that is the purpose of any basically sound poem that follows Philip Sidney’s sine qua non for poetry: imagery (87). No, the Little T. C. poem goes beyond imagination because we can posit for it an actual mise-en-scËne: the narrator (Marvell?) plants himself in front of an actual portrait and proceeds to mediate on its subject and meaning.
Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich (Ohio State University – Mansfield):
“Elizabethan Women and the Politics of Royal Entertainment”
The entertainments performed at country estates for Elizabeth’s progresses enabled aristocratic women to serve as political advisors. Women wrote, sponsored, and performed in pageants throughout the genre, but female devisers become increasingly visible in the second half of the reign. This paper posits that Elizabeth’s lengthy rule inspired or enabled other elite women to engage in political performances. It takes as its case study the Harefield entertainment, hosted and organized by Alice Egerton, Countess of Derby in 1602. This entertainment aligns Egerton with the Queen by representing both as proficient, powerful housekeepers, and it implies that noblewomen’s effectiveness at managing large estates can validate their political power outside the home.
Ken Kurihara (Fordham University):
“Georg Major as Comforter: Pastoral Cares and Eschatology in 16th-century Wittenberg”
For many years, Georg Major (1502-1574) was viewed as a notorious Lutheran theologian who triggered the "Majorist Controversy" by his thesis "Good work is necessary for salvation." The purpose of this paper is to help restore Major’s reputation by analyzing his piety as expressed in his devotional books. I also examine the influence of the Lutheran eschatology on his pastoral cares. In his works, Major repeatedly quotes Paul’s word "whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s" and emphasizes that true comfort in both life and death comes only from Christ’s death on the cross; it is the only foundation of hope in the apocalyptic age. These works reflect Major’s mature piety, gradually shaped despite his troublesome life.
Kevin Laam (Oakland University):
“Andrew Marvell’s Ovidian Consolations”
While "The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn" has served as a natural gathering point for investigations into Marvell’s Ovidianism, Marvell’s funeral elegies have been comparatively neglected. Peter Sacks identifies in Ovid a scheme of elegy in which tropes of consolation are generated through metamorphosis. Ovid’s funeral elegies modify this logic by prolonging the work of mourning, by laying bare the formal artifice through which tokens or signs of loss are constructed. Marvell’s elegies follow much the same pattern. He is patently concerned with elegy’s capacity to contextualize loss, but like Ovid, he understands that the figurative compensations and traumatic fixations that derive from loss are not easily separable.
Marie Ladino (University of Maryland):
“Western Imagery in the Ottoman East: Süleyman the Magnificent’s Combination of Politics and Art”
During the first third of his reign, the Ottoman Sultan Süleyman I earned renown throughout Europe for his magnificence. He garnered this reputation in large part because of his artistic patronage and consumption of luxury items, particularly those from Europe. Through the possession and control of these objects, Süleyman strove to present himself as the universal ruler, omnipotent and superior to all. Figuring into Süleyman’s motivations was the fact that his greatest rival, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, believed that he himself was the one universal ruler. In response, Süleyman transformed his Western-style works of art into messages about his supremacy expressly intended for a European audience.
James Lambert (University of Iowa):
“Joyful Ornament: Spenser’s Epithalamion and the Expression of Religious Joy”
Edmund Spenser’s autobiographical marriage ode Epithalamion attempts to fuse public proclamations of joy culled from the Book of Common Prayer and the Psalter with private expressions of marital joy and sexual union. The poem celebrates the joy of public, ordained marriage as well as the "private joy" of the bedchamber, but does so in specifically sacramental language, which restores marriage to its sacramental status while recognizing the private, individual experience of the marital blessing. Marriage is the pinnacle of Protestant joy, Spenser’s poem seems to be saying, and that joy can only be appropriately expressed through the fused language of public blessing and inward, private experience.
Kelcey Lamer (Independent Scholar):
“Female Subjugation in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew”
William Shakespeare explores many social issues in his many plays and sonnets. These issues range from public drunkenness to marital discord to female subjugation. Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew explores female subjugation with the male-dominated world and Petruchio continually exercising their will over both Katherine and Bianca in order to achieve submission. More interesting is Petruchio’s not only systematic physical break down of Katherine with starvation and sleep deprevation, but also mental breaks her as he subjects her to a barrage of mind tricks. With Katherine’s strong will, it remains to be seen whether or not his methods actually prove true or Katherine played a trick on him during the last scenes of the play.
Norman Land (University of Missouri):
“Errors and Flaws in Vasari’s Tale of Michelangelo’s Florence Pietà”
Large and small errors, both artistic and personal, and material flaws are topics that run throughout Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (Florence, 1568). One especially important treatment of those topics appears in the vita of Michelangelo Buonarroti and particularly in the story of the unfinished Pietà of ca. 1550, which was carved in Rome, and is now in the Museo dell’ Opera del Duomo, Florence. Vasari’s story of the Pietà appears in three separate parts scattered through the vita. Vasari first explains why Michelangelo began to carve the sculpture, which was intended for his tomb. Later Vasari describes how the artist attacked the Pietà , and partially destroyed it. He also recounts the salvation and restoration of the work by Tiberio Calcagni. Near the end of the vita Vasari tells an anecdote about a visit he made to Michelangelo as the latter was carving the Pietà . The story of the creation and destruction of the Pietà has served as a basis for numerous interpretations both of the sculpture itself and of Michelangelo’s attack on it. This paper, essentially an appreciation of Vasari as a writer, examines the tale of the Pietà as literature and within the context of the Lives. When understood from a literary perspective, Vasari’s tale becomes more than a simple account of an important event in Michelangelo’s life; the tale may be understood as a defense of Michelangelo’s "absolute judgment" — his famous ability "to see the finished figure in the original block of marble."
William Levin (Centre College):
“Toward a Fuller Understanding of Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise”
Admiration for the unmatched beauty and up-to-date formal characteristics of Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise at the Florentine Baptistry has led most scholars to ignore the question of the iconographical program governing their ten Old Testament narratives. Several previous attempts have correctly understood typology and salvation as key elements. Equally credible is the Krautheimers’ proposal that reconciliation between the Eastern and Western Churches explains the unusual presence of the final event portrayed. But these three notions embrace the other narratives, too, joining familial conflict and, conversely, the rewards of communal endeavor as the themes—universal as well as topical—expressed here.
Katlyn Lewicke (Smith College):
“The Moon Above and the Water Below”
This presentation gives a literary-historical analysis of Ralegh’s Ocean to Cynthia. The poem reads as a plaintive appeal from a cast-off lover who cycles through the necessary stages: desperation, dissection, regret, assignation of blame. Ralegh concludes that there is no way out other than death, for which he fervently wishes. He will not, however, blame himself or Elizabeth for his predicament; instead, the assignation of blame in falls on a surprising third party. The poem has incredible drama and implications for Ralegh’s historical predicament, while also portraying him (rather paradoxically) as a lamb for sacrifice, a suitor having besought without reward, and a conflicted, discarded, heartbroken lover.
Ellen Longsworth (Merrimack College):
“The Remarkable Tomb of Abbot Meli”
Sometime in late 1478 or early 1479, Antonio Meli, abbot of the Cremonese church of San Lorenzo, contracted with Giovanni Antonio Meli for a memorial dedicated to the four martyred saints whose bones had been housed at San Lorenzo since the 11th ot 12th century, and which remains the abbot intended to enshrine along with his own in an imposing double sepulchre. Meli’s remarkable tomb stood in the family chapel the abbot constructed to house it until the 1798 suppression of San Lorenzo and the subsequent dispersal of the tomb. This paper intends a nominal reconstruction of the monument, a discussion of its unprecedented nature, and a fresh scrutiny of several of the sculptures from the tomb now in Milan, Philadelphia, and Sarasota, Florida.
Jon Lux (Saint Louis University):
“Infants and the Battle for the Future in The Faerie Queen”
A group of historians spearheaded by Linda Pollock has demonstrated that, in opposition to the old Aries thesis, children born before the seventeenth century occupied clear theoretical space. The infants of The Faerie Queene display that significant theoretical space and deep, emotive connections with their elders in their symbolic roles as representatives of the future. They become pathetic spectacles of familicide in the image of Rudymane wallowing in his mother’s blood, and familial place-holders in the child Calepine rescues from the mouth of a bear. Furthermore, Spenser adopts the term "infant" to reference several of his central characters. Spenser’s "Infants," (Arthur, Britomart) represent the future greatness of the English state, a fate Spenser treats with uncertainty. A common theme links together these infants, reminding Spenser’s readers of the enormous potential held by these fully human representatives of the future.
Frances Malpezzi (Arkansas State University):
“Anne Bradstreet and the Greening of the Heart ”
? The speaker in Anne Bradstreet’s "As spring the winter doth succeed" rejoices that amidst the afflictions of her "Pilgrimage" (17) she has found the refreshment of many pools of water in her Valley of Baca (20). Bradstreet uses a seasonal metaphor to celebrate physical and spiritual renewal. Like many other devotional writers in the period, she finds the greening of the year an apt metaphor for the physical and spiritual vivification that occurs when her "Suns returned with healing wings" (5). In dealing with the spiritual value of affliction and praising the Son/Sun whose indwelling brings a vernal season to the soul’s landscape, the poem as a companion to the prose meditation it follows clearly places Bradstreet in the literary tradition of a number of British devotional poets, especially George Herbert and underscores the influence of Guillaume de Salluste, Sieur Du Bartas, a French poet whom she admired and elegized. "As spring the winter doth succeed" especially bears close comparison with George Herbert’s "The Flower." "As spring" and "The Flower" have much in common as Bradstreet and Herbert transform the conventions of genre. Both poems function as a spiritualized reverdie, that medieval lyric of regreening and renewal. Both Herbert and Bradstreet adapt the genre to religious purposes. Functioning as a Du Bartasian poet Anne Bradsteet in "As spring" appropriated and transformed the voice of David, of the Song of Songs, and of Herbert, just as she appropriated and transformed the reverdie. In the tradition of Du Bartas and Sidney, she lyrically sought to delight, teach, and move her early modern readers to virtuous action.
Nathan Martin (Charleston Southern University):
“Friendship of Consequence: The Relationship of Helena Snakenborg and Elizabeth I, 1565-1603”
This paper examines the friendship between Helena Snakenborg and Elizabeth I. Helena descended from a noble family in Sweden and had come to England with Princess Cecilia Vasa on her journey to England and served as one of Cecilia’s Maids of Honor. Helena received attention from the nobility for her beauty and eventually married William Parr, the Marquis of Northampton. She quickly became one of the main personal and political confidants of Elizabeth. After the death of Northampton, she subsequently married Thomas Gorges, of whom the queen did not approve. The friendship survived, however, and Helena even served as the Chief Mourner at Elizabeth’s funeral. In the end, Helena did much to establish personal and political contacts between Sweden and England during her years of influence with Elizabeth.
Nabil Matar (University of Minnesota):
“Henry Stubbe and the Arabic Christian Portrait of Muhammad (c. 1671) ”
This paper examines the Christian Arabic sources for the portrait of Muhammad in Henry Stubbe’s "The Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism." The text presents the first positive biography of the Prophet in English and European writings.
Sean McDowell (Seattle University):
“Marvell in the ‘Tiring-room’”
This paper will investigate a specific element of Andrew Marvell’s engagement with the Restoration comedy of manners: the curious indulgence of the satirist in the stylistic mode of those held up for critique. Rather than simply condemn the style or manner of the courtiers and their adherents, the satirist instead strives to outdo them according to the same aesthetic terms. While Marvell wrote no plays of his own, his ?The Second Advice to a Painter? outdoes Waller?s ?Instructions to a Painter? by attributing to Hyde, Coventry, Clifford and others a humoral single-mindedness reminiscent of the fops and coxcombs then already emerging as major points of interest in comedies at the Duke?s Theatre and the Theatre Royal. Marvell uses the courtly mode of humoral comedy to trump Waller?s earlier courtly mode of panegyric. More than simply a shift from praise to blame, however, ?The Second Advice to a Painter? explores how the problems associated with the Battle of Lowestoft derive from the passion-induced corruptions of individuals, who behave more like comedic characters than like the true heroes the nation needed. Marvell subsequently deepened his reliance on the psychological assumptions of Restoration aesthetics in his subsequent satirical poems and later works.
Caitlin McHugh (University of Minnesota):
“The Unnamed Island: Prospero, Caliban, and Possession in The Tempest”
One of the most prevalent themes of in the criticism of The Tempest (1611) is the play’s relation to colonial expansion. However, no critic has addressed the fact that the island itself has no name. In order to address this oddity, I explore the actions of colonization (naming, repopulation, building, fencing, and planting) to determine The Tempest’s stance on colonization. This comparison suggests that the absence of a name for the island demonstrates that the text offers no definitive answer to colonization, that Prospero is not setting up a colony and that Caliban himself has no claim to the island.
Catherine Medici-Thiemann (University of Nebraska):
“‘A Very Goddess of Persuasion’: Representations of Elizabeth’s Privy Chamber Woman, Mary Sidney”
As a central figure at Elizabeth’s court, sister to the politically powerful Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and wife of the Lord Deputy of Ireland and President of the Welsh Marches, Mary Dudley Sidney was a well-known and important woman. Memorials to her son, Philip Sidney, and Holinshed’s Chronicles overwhelmingly paint Mary Sidney as an impressively intelligent and uncommonly persuasive. Mary Sidney’s uncommon attributes were not shunned but accepted and allowed her a role in the politics of Elizabeth’s court. Mary Sidney used her intelligence and persuasion to serve the needs of both Elizabeth, and her own family.
John Mercer (Northeastern State University):
“The Making of a Terrorist: Universalizing Shylock in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Merchant of Venice”
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2011 production of The Merchant of Venice, directed by Bill Rauch, presented Shylock not as a Jewish villain but as a universal Other whose persecution explained his cruelty. In the words of actor Anthony Heald, who played Shylock, this production portrayed "the making of a terrorist." The production began with a moment from the trial scene that emphasized the similarities between Antonio and Shylock. Although Shylock originally suggested the "pound of flesh" as a joke, he later saw evidence of Antonio’s complicity in his daughter’s elopement, and he descended from victim to villain after his "I am a Jew" speech.
Greg Miller (Millsaps College):
“Andrew Marvell, Lyric Vision, and the Heroic: "An Horation Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland" and "On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost"”
Andrew Marvell’s poems about the heroic revolutionaries Oliver Cromwell and John Milton are notoriously ambiguous in their laudatory strategies. Both "An Horation Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland" and "On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost" ask us to wonder at heroism’s grandeur within resplendent, yet haunted, little rooms. Both poems make use of musical irony and wit in ways that call into question the fundamental value of the heroic itself. Both poems create a sense of wonder at the lyric poet’s full registration of the complexities and moral ambiguities of these two heroic revolutionaries’ achievements, a wonder that competes with the putative subjects of praise. Marvell’s distinctive wonder in turn calls readers to temper their responses to these two creators of revolutionary new forms and modes of political and literary mastery. Marvell’s lyrics present us with consciousness and conscience as clear vision:through a small, private space--the privately circulated Ode on Cromwell--or through a small, public space--the printed and widely circulated lyric commenting on, and ostensibly commending, a national heroic epic to which the lyric stands as a mediating preface.
Madhuparna Mitra (University of North Texas):
“The Legends of Amity: Three Versions of the Titus and Gysippus Story”
The discourse of friendship in the Renaissance repeatedly invokes several pairings of amity including Damon and Pythias, Orestes and Pylades, and Titus and Gysippus. All three are mentioned in Sir Thomas Elyot’s highly influential The Boke Named the Governour (Book II, Chapters XI and XII), with the Titus and Gysippus story being accorded a chapter-long retelling. As Laurie Shannon in Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago, 2002) and Tom MacFaul in Male Friendship in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Cambridge, 2007) have noted, these humanist fantasies of idealized classical friendship celebrate a transcendent emotional bond that rests on similitude, equality and reciprocity. The stories have certain elements in common: an abiding bond between two young men, the strength of which is tested either by a tyrannical monarch (as in Damon and Pythias and in Orestes and Pylades), or by a woman (Titus and Gysippus). Indeed, Titus and Gysippus functions as a paradigmatic tale that is repeatedly reworked by Elizabethan writers; see, for instance, John Lyly (Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit) and Shakespeare (The Two Gentlemen or Verona). The Titus and Gysippus story was part of Boccaccio’s Decameron. A Latin translation by Filippo Beroaldo was printed in 1498, and is widely considered to be the source text for the best-known English version of the story, the one presented by Elyot in the Governour. Lesser known, and garnering almost no critical commentary, are two other verse renditions. The first, written by Wyllyam Walter ("Ye Hystory of Tytus and Gesyppus"), was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1525. The other, by Edwarde Lewicke ("The Most Wonderful and Pleasaunt History of Titus and Gisippus"), almost certainly a versification of Elyot’s narrative, was printed in 1562. My paper will analyze all three texts, English retellings of the key narrative of the friendship trope, dwelling in particular on the ramifications of Elyot’s radical revision of the ending of the story, a conclusion reproduced in Lewicke’s verse narrative. Though Elyot’s tale has been analyzed by various critics (Lorna Hutson, Laurie Shannon, Mary Polito), its invented ending has garnered no commentary. In the Boccaccio, Beroaldo and Walter versions of the story, Gysippus initially gives up his fiancé to Titus; at the culmination of the story, the plot threads are neatly tied up with Gysippus marrying Titus’s sister Fulvia, and the tetrad live happily together. In Elyot’s and Lewicke’s version of the story, however, there is no culminating marriage. Instead, Titus helps to re-instate Gysippus to his lost property with the aid of an invading army. My paper will argue that Elyot’s revised ending radically alters the tenor of the story, nudging the friendship trope into the realm of the political, a trajectory consonant with Elyot’s overall project of viewing friendship as a virtue to be practiced by political functionaries, the so-called "governors."
Zsolt Mohi (University of Kansas):
“A Crisis in Vision: Division and Unity in Gammer Gurton’s Needle”
This Edwardian play raises questions of perspective, the organization of knowledge according to the principles of visual perception, and the changing limits of understanding. The audience’s perspective on a dramatic world, divided between two households in conflict, is determined by Diccon’s actions, impersonations, and interpretations. Since Diccon creates this division in front of our eyes, his act mimics the physiological process of stereoscopic perception through the eyes ñ sensory organs that double the putative unity of the world for us. This is how the theater, besides feeding our perception with substantial data about a fictional world, duplicates a fundamental feature of visual perception.
Bradley Mollmann (Tulane University):
“Illicit Healing in 17th-century Spain”
In this paper, I will investigate changing attitudes towards popular healing practices by investigating the figure of the saludador, a ritual healer who increasingly earned the scorn of seventeenth-century authorities.In 1631, the influential theologian Gaspar Navarro characterized saludadores as "vain, superstitious, and having pacts with the devil." In this paper, I will juxtapose Navarro’s Tribunal de Supersticion Ladina with the transcript of the 1648 Inquisition trial of saludador named Ambrosio Montes. Through a close reading each, the paper will shed light on the chaotic world of popular medicine, and the the Church’s attempt to impose intellectual and regulatory authority upon it.
Valerio Morucci (University of California, Davis):
“Behind the Emblem of the Golden Oak: Politics and Patronage of Sacred Music Under the Della Rovere”
The role of the Della Rovere family, in particular of Guidobaldo II and his brother Giulio Feltrio, in the patronage of sacred music during the sixteenth century, has eluded scholars. This paper considers the organization of the cappelle musicali established by the Della Rovere for the performance and creation of polyphonic music, along with their direct involvement as sponsors of printed music, the compilation of musical manuscripts, and their patronage of various composers. This study illuminates the importance of the Marche-Umbria region for the composition of sacred music and reveals the Della Rovere as significant patrons of the religious arts.
Grant Moss (Utah Valley University):
“Sexy Tudors and The Real Housewives of Windsor: Elizabeth I in Twenty-first Century Media”
During the twenty-first century, the Tudors have enjoyed considerable popularity in film, television, and perhaps most interestingly, in web comics. Many scholars have bemoaned the ahistorical themes of Kapur’s and Blanchett’s Elizabeth films, Justin Chadwick’s adaptation of The Other Boleyn Girl, and the Showtime series The Tudors. Notably, it is in comic form that we often see some of the most perceptive (albeit tongue-in-cheek) depictions of the Tudor monarchs. In particular, Kate Beaton’s Hark: A Vagrant and Pab Sungenis’ The New Adventures of Queen Victoria re-present the Tudors quite differently. Their satirical cartoons not only skewer modern media but also reward the reader who is knowledgeable about British literature and history.
Tim Moylan (St. Louis College of Pharmacy):
“From Queen’s Champion to "She ‘threatens a progress’: Sir Henry Lee and Elizabeth”
Sir Henry Lee famously avoided a progress visit by Elizabeth in June of 1600. Yet Lee had been for many years her Champion and one of the principal architects of the mythography, allegory, and entertainment practices that both represented and addressed Elizabeth in her progress entertainments. What does the trajectory of Lee’s creative encounters with Elizabeth reveal, not only about his personal relationship with her, but also about the relative influence of performance art on her and her subjects? This paper examines Lee’s performance correspondence with Elizabeth from the early institution of the Accession Day tournaments to the end of the reign and details Lee’s lifelong experience of relationship negotiation with Elizabeth.
Laura Mucenski (Ohio State University):
“Deadly Beauty: Cosmetics in Early Modern England”
No abstract available.
Samantha Murphy (University of Tennessee-Knoxville):
“Charles I, John Ford, and the Pathology of Incest”
John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore critiques the pathology of incest at the base of Stuart paternal absolutism, perversely reflecting the ideological functions of marriage – from its basis in patriarchal law to its use by the monarchy to describe a healthy social contract. Reflecting the anxieties of Charles’s subjects, Ford exposes the symbolic incest practiced within Stuart ideological systems to be contradictory and dangerous. ’Tis Pity’s sibling incest removes the authority of the play’s father as his children remove the power of directed reproduction from his hands. Nonetheless, while the siblings represent a challenge to the law of paternal absolutism, they also imitate one of its key figures, reiterating the law and its danger.
Julie Newberry (Texas A&M University):
“Giving and Thanksgiving: Gratitude and Its Contraries in A Mask and Paradise Regained”
Milton begins his Second Defence of the English People (1654) by stressing the universal importance of gratitude: "In the whole life and estate of man the first duty is to be grateful to God." Peter Medine has shown the prominence of gratitude in Paradise Lost ("Gratitude in Paradise Lost." Milton and the Grounds of Contention), but the role of this virtue in A Mask, Paradise Regained, and De Doctrina has not been fully appreciated. By focusing on gratitude and its contraries, this paper provides fresh insights into Milton’s masque and brief epic, complicating De Doctrina’s treatment of God-ward gratitude and suggesting tentative explanations for Milton’s lifelong engagement with this virtue.
Andrea Nichols (University of Nebraska):
“‘I was not I?’: Tracing the Representations of Cleopatra in English Drama, 1592-1626”
Representations of Cleopatra and Elizabeth have shifted frequently over the centuries—starting with their own efforts and continuing with postmortem reinterpretations. Familiarity with Roman history, and its propagandist links to the Tudor dynasty, no doubt helped England easily see Cleopatra as a critique of contemporary worries about Elizabeth. However, comparison of the queens has been sparse, particularly when using early modern English dramatic sources, often overshadowed by Shakespeare. Merging these avenues of research into a cultural and representational analysis of early modern Cleopatra plays showed Elizabeth’s recurrence throughout and the Egyptian queen’s evolution into a culturally recognized symbol of monarchial critique.
Kara Northway (Kansas State University):
“‘The hazeard of w[hi]ch Scylla to incur’: Drama and Determination on the Brink of Disaster at Sea”
In the English East India Company’s first voyages to open new spice trade options in Asia (1600-07), sailors suffered pirates, alligators, boat-leaks, thirst, disease, and even the loss of a ship. Focusing on eyewitnesses’ journal descriptions of the experience of undergoing the verge of devastation, I argue that while writers not surprisingly justified their experiences in religious terms, they also revealed fear of shame, wonder, practicality, and a determination to fulfill their missions. This same longing to fulfill the quest or die manifests itself in the drama these sailors chose to perform at sea in 1607: Hamlet.
Margaret Oakes (Furman University):
“Consolation and Confirmation: The Dual Role of Elizabeth’s Translation of Boethius”
Elizabeth’s translation of Boethius’
Martha Oberle (Frederick Community College):
“Leonardo’s Bridge”
In 1502, Leonardo planned a bridge to span the Golden Horn. The bridge was not built, but the plan survived. This paper wishes to examine who solicited the plan; why the plan was cancelled, and what implications of 16thC. Byzantium we may draw from the incident.
Christopher Orchard (Indiana University of Pennsylvania):
“The Marvel of Peru’: "The Mower against Gardens," Horticultural Politics and the Legitimacy of the Republic in 1649-1650 England”
This paper suggests that Marvell’s poem "The Mower against Gardens" can be read as an integral part of political discourse in 1649-1650 concerning the legitimacy of and obedience to the new Commonwealth government following the regicide. In particular, Marvell’s reference to the flower "the Marvel of Peru" within the context of an argument against hybridity positions him as an opponent of those supporters of the Commonwealth who favored the kind of political experimentation that had abolished monarchy. He stands most clearly in opposition to Francis Rous whose pamphlet, ëThe Bounds and Bonds of Publique Obedience" referenced " that famous flower the Marvell of Peru, which changes the colour of its leaves every day" in order to argue that the flux in government systems was a natural state. Consequently, I will argue that such a reading suggests a Marvell who was disconcerted by political experimentation and who looked askance at this replacement for monarchical rule.
Rahel Orgis (University of Neuchâtel):
“‘[A] story very well woorth readinge’: Why Early Modern Readers Enjoyed Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania”
To date Lord Denny and John Chamberlain’s negative reactions to the Urania dominate accounts of its early modern reception and obscure more positive responses to Wroth’s work. Yet traces of early modern readers’ responses suggest that it was read from cover to cover, enjoyed and valued. I will discuss the implications of these readerly traces in the context of historical reading practices, focusing especially on the endings added to the text and the annotations by William Davenporte. This will show that the Urania was not necessarily read as a roman à clef. Readers rather concentrated on the many stories, on emotions and moral sentiments—at times appropriating the work in strikingly different ways from modern critics.
Randi Pahlau (Malone University):
“Bread from Heaven: Manna as Symbol in the Work of Donne and Marvell”
Manna, the bread of heaven God provided for the Israelites in the wilderness, holds several symbolic meanings in the Bible. It is not only a symbol of the miraculous sustenance of life, but also a symbol of God’s punishment of the Israelites when they complained about their monotonous diet of manna. The symbol is complicated in the New Testament when Jesus proclaimed himself the bread of life and when Revelation refers to spiritual manna, help for suffering believers. John Donne and Andrew Marvell used manna as a symbol in increasingly complex ways in their poetry.
A. Scott Pearson (Vanderbilt University):
“Iconography in the Anatomical Art of Vesalius’ De Humani Corporis Fabrica”
In the year 1543, Andreas Vesalius, an anatomist from Brussels, published a manuscript of human dissection that changed the study of anatomy and the course of medicine for the next four and half centuries. His text, De Humani Corporis Fabrica , challenged the teachings of the ancients, namely Galen, which until that year had stood firm for fourteen centuries. This paper examines how the iconography in a single wood-cut illustration from the title page of the Vesalius’ masterpiece revealed the transformation of anatomical understanding that had persisted since antiguity and predicted the modern, scientific medicine that exists today.
Katherine Powers (California State University, Fullerton):
“Fra Serafino, the Lauda, and Contemplazione”
No abstract available.
Timothy Raylor (Carleton College):
“The Socio-Literary Context of Marvell’s "Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers"”
Marvell’s "Picture of Little T. C." is often read as a direct expression of the poet’s own psycho-sexual desires. There is, however, a socio-literary context for the poem, which suggests that the celebration of the future sexual attractiveness of a prepubescent girl was a means of testifying to her eventual marriagibility.
Michael Reese (Northeastern State University):
“Falcons and Fables and Floggings, Oh My! Finding Katharina in The Taming of the Shrew”
Techniques from four schools of Shakespearean criticism create a multi-faceted approach to understanding the characters of Katharina and Petruchio, and the relationship that develops between them. Kate as a falcon, not a shrew, is the unifying image of the play. The fables of "folk ritual" define the play’s form. Historical context reveals options and limitations on the outcomes that Shakespeare can contrive. Performance adds the intangibles. Using several critical disciplines, and identifying common threads between them, avoids errant interpretations of the play. Kate is revealed as a self-realized, socially reconciled individual.
Dave Reinheimer (Southeast Missouri State University):
“Done in by Color: Deconstructing Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130”
The several readings applied to Sonnet 130—encomium for love that sees past physical unattractiveness, an attack on poetic conventions, or a meaningless joke—indicate the poem’s ripeness for deconstruction. Starting with Shakespeare’s use of color, deconstruction suggests that the poem may be inspired by, rather unexpectedly, a horse. This conclusion, in turn, suggests an additional, quotidian nature of the inspiration for Shakespeare’s sonnets individually; it also leads to the possibility that the sequence as a whole may follow the rhetorical model of Boccaccio rather than that of Petrarch.
Monica Santini (University of Padua):
“Elizabeth I’s Letters to Ireland”
Modern editions of Elizabeth I’s works have included very few of her official letters, so that most of them are available only in manuscript or in the short entries of the Calendars of State Papers. In the present paper I intend to offer a review of the corpus of surviving letters from Queen Elizabeth to her Lord Deputies in Ireland and to discuss a selection of them from the palaeographical and rhetorical point of view. The first part of my discussion will consider how these letters were composed and copied and try to determine what role the Queen had in their composition while in the second part I will offer a rhetorical and political analysis of some of these letters by trying to identify an official rhetoric of Elizabeth I.
Lise Mae Schlosser (Northern Illinois University):
“A Happy New Year? Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender”
The late sixteenth century was a zenith in the controversy over calendar making. Edmund Spenser could not have avoided making a statement when he entered into the religious, social, and political milieu with The Shepheardes Calender in 1579. As one might expect from an author as talented and intelligent as Spenser, his allusions are often subtle, but The Shepheardes Calendar nonetheless comments upon some of the most pressing calendric questions of the day not the least important of which was when the new year began.
Glenn Schudel (Mary Baldwin College):
“Maiden, Mother, Warrior, Witch: Renaissance Representations of Margaret of Anjou”
Near the beginning of his career, William Shakespeare created the largest feminine role he would ever write: Margaret of Anjou. The character appears in four of his plays, in no small part as a cautionary tale against overly ambitious and transgressively masculine women. Her popularity during the reign of Elizabeth I, who so often felt the need to defend or mask her own femininity, seems to be culturally important, but little emphasis has been given to the role of the literary Margaret in Elizabethan notions of female rulership. This paper examines the gaps between the historical and fictional Margarets, and shows the ways that early modern depictions of the medieval queen illuminate the reign of Elizabeth I.
Dana Schumacher-Schmidt (University of Minnesota):
“Remembering the Fear of Tangier in Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson”
In the Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson Lucy Hutchinson repeatedly recalls her fear that her husband will be transported from his prison in England to Tangier. This paper considers what Tangier would have meant for Lucy Hutchinson and how her fear works as a vehicle for remembering her husband. As part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry, Tangier cemented the marriage of Charles II and his Portuguese bride. However, for Lucy Hutchinson, Tangier represents the power of the Restoration government to shatter her family. Although John was never sent to Tangier, Hutchinson uses her fear to access and textualize her memory of John’s imprisonment. Recalling her fears provides a means for her to claim the truth of her experience.
Linda Shenk (Iowa State University):
“Elizabeth’s Most Internationally Powerful Persona and Her Progress to Norwich”
To a degree unparalleled in any other civic progress, the festivities at Norwich celebrated Elizabeth I as a learned queen. This royal image had become the queen’s most internationally powerful persona: it emphasized her right to assert sovereignty over not only her own nation but all of Protestant Europe as well. Focusing on this unacknowledged emphasis in the Norwich progress—and its contemporary popularity in Anglo-Dutch exchange—reveals that the writers at Norwich chose not to critique Elizabeth’s potential marriage to the politically unpredictable (and Catholic) Duc d’Alençon. Instead, they encouraged her to remain the transnationally powerful queen who could create stability in Europe by fulfilling her promise to aid the Dutch.
Julie Singer (Washington University in St. Louis):
“Windmills and Wordmills”
The poetic corpus of the grand rhétoriqueur Jean Molinet (1435-1507) contains a handful of anatomical rebus poems, in which Molinet’s partitioning of the female anatomy moves far beyond a conventional fragmentation of the beloved’s body. The rebuses posit an interchangeability of speech sounds and anatomical structures: the woman so described becomes a cyborg of sorts, a posthuman construct assembled from fleshly organs and their phonemic replacements. This effect is compounded by Molinet’s frequent self-identification as a machine (molinet, little mill) and his rebus-like depiction in frontispiece illustrations with the image of a windmill. In this first wave of Early Modern French poetry, conventional descriptions of the female anatomy become grist for an innovative lexical machine.
Kinda Skea (University of Leicester):
“Identities and Networks of Restoration Nonconformist Ministers (1658-1674)”
In 1802, Samuel Palmer published his version of Edmund Calamy’s biographies of over two thousand ejected Nonconformist ministers, forced out of their positions in 1662. At the time, this multi-volume set was considered the most comprehensive treatment of individual ministers available. Calamy’s purpose was to document the godly, rational character of these men as well as their loyalty to the King in order to provide inspiration to the Nonconformists. Palmer edited the biographies researched by the Calamys and added to the lives of the ejected ministers where more detail was needed. However, little consideration was given to the Congregational ministers not ejected from parish churches. After Calamy, denominational historians compiled biographies of these "forgotten" men in order to build a foundation for Nonconformist denominational history. Other biographers have competently written on individual Nonconformist ministers such as Richard Baxter and John Goodwin. What has not been attempted is a comprehensive and detailed compilation of Nonconformist ministers that would provide a more definite profile of them as an identity group. This paper will seek to find commonalities from general information gathered on the Restoration Nonconformist ministers. Analysis will focus on age-related details, education, ecclesiastical identities, familial ties, and networks. The data is not intended to provide an answer every question, but to refocus the attention of the historian on Nonconformity practiced among the largest three ecclesiastical identities during the Restoration reigns of Charles II and James II (1660-1688).
Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler (Texas State University-San Marcos):
“Meet and Happy--and Unhappy--Conversations in Paradise Lost”
If Adam and Eve’s relationship was ideal, then how could the Fall have occurred? Recent critical thought continues to suggest that Milton presents the Fall as somehow attributable to flaws in Eve. Rarely have scholars examined the nature and quality of Adam and Eve’s conversation. Milton conceived of conversation in a distinctive way, understanding it as a process that gave form to qualities that already resided within, described by Petrus Ramus as "polishing the mirror." Through verbal exchange, we become who we are. In Paradise Lost, polishing the mirror is, like work, an integral part of unfallen humanity. To be who we are, even in a fallen state, human beings must continue to speak and listen.
Zbynek Smetana (Murray State University):
“Titian’s Triumph”
Titian’s earliest known independent self-portrait (1550) reconstructed through copies and abridged versions is re-evaluated within larger context of its original location.
Randi Marie Smith (University of Tennessee, Knoxville):
“Performance Anxiety: Sidney, Donne, and the Criteria for Poetry”
I will focus on the presence or absence of authorial anxiety in the work Sir Philip Sidney and John Donne in order to think through the broader cultural trends that created it. Because critics like Sidney defined the responsibility of the author and set the expectations of the readers, they influenced the production of literature for the period. By reviewing these criteria, I can investigate whether poets like Donne and Sidney experienced anxiety about meeting those standards. Considering the potential for anxiety enables deeper understanding of how authorship and its responsibilities were defined in the Renaissance.
Nigel Smith (Princeton University):
“Andrew Marvell and Hull Radicalism”
This paper explores the developing political and religious atmosphere of Marvell’s hometown of Kingston-upon-Hull in his lifetime, and in particular the evolution of radical political views - republicanism and millenarianism among family friends and close associates. What was Marvell’s relationship with these views. The paper proceeds to discuss the significance of anti-trinitarianism in Marvell’s family in the context of his influence upon his nephew William Popple, later associate of John Locke, and one of the most significant tolerationist and Socinian thinkers in the later seventeenth century. Throughout this paper I use material that does not appear in my recently published Marvell biography.
Selina Souza (University of Louisiana at Monroe):
“The Power of Marginal Feminine Discourse: Queen Margaret in Richard III”
Margaret is a prominent player in Henry VI parts 1-3, but she is physically present in only two scenes in the sequel, Richard III. Though historically she is not present, why does Shakespeare decide to include her? Is he attempting to counteract Richard’s masculine traits with the feminine discourse of using language to cause harm? Is Margaret the only character who can inspire the others to break down the conventions of Richard’s evildoing through use of language and womb imagery? Margaret is a marginal character in Richard III, but she serves as an unruly woman to inspire the other females. Without Margaret, this play would be rife with masculine language and ideas, so her inclusion is necessary for Shakespeare’s version of history.
Louis Charles Stagg (University of Memphis):
“But Why Did Ophelia Drown Herself?”
Was it because Hamlet killed her father after vowing his love for her? Had she discovered what her father and brother were really up to, in the current king’s scheme to seize ultimate power? Was it out of sheer frustration that nothing she did seemed to make anything any better? Was she distressed at the thought of never marrying a Crown Prince, namely Hamlet, and then becoming Queen, or was this simply an attempt to shock those in power into a sense of reality, at least making them pause to reconsider their "evil looking actions"? Or, in an example of hysteria in action, was she simply averse to being buried in holy ground, from which suicide cases were usually excluded?
Hristomir Stanev (University of Louisville):
“On Brothel Alimentary Consciousness and the City Devoured on the Early Modern Stage”
This paper studies an iconic form of urban malady, prostitution, in relationship to ideas of appetite, the sense of taste, and the expansion of London’s suburbs in two city comedies, Thomas Dekker’s Honest Whore (1604-5) and Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614). I argue that in depicting the brothel as a space of material and gustatory excess both plays index the perils of suburban topographic expansion and social polarization in the metropolitan terrain, and further serve as peculiar vehicles through which novel and fashionable urban identities could be substantiated and reconstituted.
Brian Steele (Texas Tech University):
“Reframing the Context: Giovanni Bellini’s Frari Triptych (1488) as Salvific Wisdom”
Bellini’s Frari Triptych has received scant investigation since Goffen’s interpretation of its relation to theology of the Immaculate Conception and Hope’s refutation based upon identification of the biblical text displayed within the painting as Prologue and Chapter One of Ecclesiasticus. I examine the work in relation to its funerary context, as a triumphal gate of redemption opening onto a visual "relic" of the Porta Coeli in which details index a conception of a cosmic scheme embracing past and present. The commission may have been as concise as "the Madonna, showing how she embodies the Wisdom of Ecclesiasticus, that is, the eternal divine scheme of salvation, together with our name saints Benedict, Nicholas, Mark, and Peter."
Dorothy Stegman (Ball State University):
“Density and Scéve’s Durable Love for Délie”
La Délie by Maurice Scéve, is a compilation of compressed emotion and desire which demands precise analysis. The dizains and their emblËmes present enduring physical, emotional and spiritual desire and refer both to the feelings for a beloved and the poet’s relationship with his art. The text manifests a specularity which is evident in the use of language and metaphoric reflection. My analysis focuses on linguistic and semantic associations of "dur" ( hard: dur/durté/endurer/endurcir) and their thematic, stylistic and metaphoric reflections. These are found in conjunction with mineral metaphors, often that of marble. I will examine the mineral images and the thematic and linguistic elements within the dizains in order to underscore the persistence of the lover’s feelings and his search for satisfaction.
Cynthia Stollhans (Saint Louis University):
“Spiritual Patronage and Intellectual Identity: Benedictine Nuns and the Fresco Cycle of St. Catherine of Alexandria at Sant’Agnese”
In the late thirteenth century, the Benedictine Nuns at Sant’Agnese fuori le mura began a new campaign to update their church. They hired painters to fresco the upper balconies with two cycles of Sts. Catherine of Alexandria and Benedict. For Benedict, the cycle concentrates on his role as founder. The Catherine cycle is intriguing because it helps to mark her identity as a chosen saint for the Benedictines and because it denotes a certain popularity for her just before the papacy moves to Avignon. This paper will investigate how Catherine of Alexandria functioned as a learned and pious role model for the Benedictines. For pilgrim viewers, the Catherine cycle helped to establish a pious and intellectual identity for the Benedictines along the Via Nomentana.
Marguerite Tassi (University of Nebraska):
“Mistresses of Revenge: Feminine Vindication and Social Drama in The Merry Wives of Windsor ”
In Shakespeare’s
Iva Thompson (Southern Illinois University at Carbondale):
“Ideological Worlds at War: Exploring the Political Implications of Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies”
Margaret Cavendish’s 1653 publication of Poems and Fancies offers—both contemporary and (post) modern—readers a complex and distinctive perspective concerning evolving political thought during the English Civil Wars. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Cavendish infuses her poetry and her politics with philosophical explorations into the unknown scientific world Cavendish’s examination of persuasive war rhetoric, her advocacy for personal physical and intellectual freedom, and her uncompromising descriptions of the gruesome realities and psychological trauma of the battlefield not only sets her apart from many of her contemporaries, but marks her as a poet concerned more with the individual than with partisan politics and ideologies
Joshua Thompson (Independent Scholar):
“Ovid’s Elegies and Christopher Marlowe’s Erotic Verse beyond the “funeral fire””
On 1 June 1599 the “Bishop’s Ban” enacted an order prohibiting the publication of “divers copies books or pamhletts [which] have been latelie printed and putt to sale, some conteyning matter of Ribaldrie, some of superstition and some of flat heresie,” claiming the protection of “the simpler and least advised sorts of her majesties subjects [who] are either allured to wantonness, corrupted in doctrine or in danger to be seduced from that dutifull obedience which they owe unto her highness.” Among the censored texts, the order names “marlowes Elegyes,” and it oversaw the destruction of the volume in a book burning held three days later at the Stationers’ Hall. In his inaugural poetic endeavor, Marlowe inscribes his name and work into a future ideological event occurring six years after his death, redoubling the proleptic closing of elegy 1.15: “Then though death rakes my bones in funeral fire, / I’ll live, and as he pulls me down mount higher” (41-42). A matrix of misreading exists, in both early modern and contemporary registers, between Marlowe’s sensuous Ovidian translation and the erotic verse that emerges within Ovid’s Elegies, verse that echoes throughout his career.
Matthew Turner (Saint Louis University):
“‘Having No Law But Wit’: Lying Pictures and Visual Rhetoric in Sidney’s Arcadia”
The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney offers a brilliant verbal reenactment of visual rhetoric in the Elizabethan age. This paper is an attempt to explicate Sidney’s handling of visual rhetoric through two of the poets primary discussions of seeing. Toward this end, I highlight statements on the nature of vision that were available to Sidney and also ideas from epistemologists of our own day. Sidney wrote about portraiture in his nonfiction several times during his career as a courtier, and his knowledge of the genre seems to inform his magnum opus Arcadia, a work in which the protagonists’ disguises lead an entire country into social, familial, and governmental disorder.
Beverly Van Note (St. Edward’s University):
“Embodying the Female in Love’s Victory”
This paper examines Wroth’s Love’s Victory as a response to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Wroth’s play refigures the female’s role in courtship and, in its emphasis on the female characters’ material bodies, particularly their voices, registers her dissatisfaction with the "disfiguring" representations of women’s speech in Shakespeare’s play and on the male stage, more generally. If this play indeed was written for her sister’s nuptials, as Hannay suggests, this is a particularly empowering pronouncement, celebrating the discursive agency of the younger female generation and protesting both the disfiguring symptoms of patriarchy and the previous female generation’s passive complicity in it.
Mary Villeponteaux (Georgia Southern University):
“‘Proud and Pitilesse’: Elizabethan Mercy and the Sonnet Tradition”
Queen Elizabeth was often criticized for being too lenient, and her courtiers were sometimes outspoken critics of her mercy. But the same courtiers who might urge her to be more punitive would also expect their sovereign’s lenity when it came to their own transgressions. In this essay, I will propose that in both Amoretti and The Faerie Queene Spenser shows sympathy for the courtier/lover’s desire for his lady’s mercy, along with an awareness that mercy, whether personal or political, can make the woman who offers it dangerously vulnerable.
Spencer Wall (University of Utah):
“Tamburlaine’s Chaotic Geography”
Ovid’s Phaethon is a chaotic destroyer of nature, as well as the creator of an African desert. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (who compares himself to Phaethon)destroys places and subverts boundaries, but his plot brings foreign regions to the English stage. I examine the debt Tamburlaine’s chaotic geography owes to the geographic model the Tamburlaine plays inherit from medieval cartography, which divided the world into Europe, Asia and Africa. 1 Tamburlaine uses Africa, a traditional third of the tripartite medieval world, to disrupt clear dichotomies between Europe and a foreign world. Africa, as presented in the play, complements and figures the further discoveries and disruptions of geographic systems in early modern Europe.
Patricia Wareh (Union College):
“Spenser’s Metatheatrical Conclusion to The Faerie Queene”
In this paper I suggest a connection between the conclusion of Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the metatheatricality of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale. Considering the ways in which the poem offers a distinctly literary proof of Pastorella’s nobility, through a conventional recognition scene of the kind that Cave has termed a "problem moment," I argue that Pastorella’s emphatically literary recognition scene is a moment for the reader to question the place of proof in the recognition of noble identity. I further argue that the recourse to outrageous artfulness at the end of The Winter’s Tale may have been in part the result of Shakespeare’s engagement with the conclusion of the Faerie Queene.
Elissa Weaver (University of Chicago):
“Theater and Music in the Florentine Convent of San Girolamo”
Convent theater, documented in Florence beginning in the late fifteenth century, flourished especially in the seventeenth century under the patronage of the Medici grand duchesses. The Dominican convent of La Crocetta, which has been studied by Kelley Harness, and the Franciscan house of San Girolamo seem to have been the most celebrated centers of convent theater and music. Court musicians performed at La Crocetta, and, while the productions at San Girolamo may have been less lavish, the Franciscan convent had its own playwright, Suor Maria Clemente Ruoti, and several prominent singers, whose talents attracted the attention of the Grand Duchess and also of members of the prestigious Academy of the Apatisti. My paper will examine two plays written by Ruoti , the Giacob patriarca (1637) and the Natal di Cristo (1657) and the growing importance of music in seventeenth-century theater documented by these plays.
Joan Wedes (Wayne State University):
“Ducats and Bags or Daughters and Wives: Sustaining an English Christianity While away on Business in the Mediterranean ”
This paper explores how Jews and Muslims from Anthony Nixon’s travel narratives Newes from Sea (1609) and Travels of Three English Brothers (1607), are altered when they become dramatic characters in John Day’s The Travailes of The three English Brothers (1607) and Robert Daborne’s Christian Turned Turk (1612). Because the playwrights translated Nixon’s didacticism into a particularly evil foreignness, and, in the case of the plays’ Jewish characters, viciously patterned after Shakespeare’s character Shylock, the proposed paper will explore whether these playwrights were capitalizing on the popularity of the Merchant of Venice, the English identity crisis, something else, or all of these.
Julianne Werlin (Princeton University):
“Marvell and the Art of Fortification”
While recent scholarship has done much to illuminate the political and topical thrust of Andrew Marvell’s "Upon Appleton House," Marvell’s use of the language of warfare, culminating in his playful description of Nun Appleton’s fortress garden, has received less attention. Yet Marvell’s politics and his attitude toward war are deeply intertwined. This paper reveals how Marvell drew on the distinctive political and social meanings that had accrued to one portion of the technical military discourse of his day, the science of fortification and siegecraft, in order to endorse an imperialistic--and perhaps even Machiavellian--attitude toward international relations.
Emma Wilson (University of Western Ontario):
“Looking for Logic in All the Wrong Places: A Quest for Andrew Marvell’s Use of Early Modern Logic in his Poetry ”
I propose to explore Andrew Marvell’s use of early modern logic in his poetry, arguing that this is a key way in which he generates multi-vocalism in his work, both in his dialogue but also crucially his monologue poems. Logic was the core subject of early modern pedagogy, providing the foundation for all discourse, but it is striking within Marvell studies that there has been little research linking his education and his poetic output. Within historicist approaches, focus has been overwhelmingly on his political career, and here I aim to redress this by using early modern logical precepts to analyze his verse to argue for the benefits of engaging with his discursive education to achieve a new, verstehen understanding of his poetry.
Steven Zwicker (Washington University in St. Louis):
“Secrecies and Disclosures”
Marvell seems to have fashioned his lyric poetry from a hidden part of his life, but it was not only lyric verse that was imagined within such a preserve. He was also satirist and gazetteer, transcribing for public view sexual scandals, parliamentary work, and political corruption. This paper argues that both a sense of secrecy and the desire for exposure circulate nervously and productively everywhere in Marvell’s career, and that to grasp the unitary character of his work as lyric poet, political satirist, and religious polemicist we need to understand how central are the exchanges in Marvell’s writings between the conditions of privacy and publicity, between shamefulness and shaming, between, that is, a delicate lyric voyeuruism and the corruscating dislcosures that he made about the conduct of public life in Restoration England.