In Niccolò Machiavelli's La mandragola, one of the first performed erudite comedies, the ethics of medicine and medical practitioners are continuously called into question. This thesis explores the ...way in which medicine and medical men are represented in Machiavelli's comedy, taking into account the time and place in which this comedy was written and performed: early sixteenth-century Florence. I will examine the tropes of the doctor which are represented in the comedy, and draw a link between the negative representations of these common tropes and the humanist medical skeptics.
"In and Out of Sequence: Lyric and its Narrative Engagements, 1560-1621" contends that Renaissance authors exploit a friction between narrative and lyric discourses in both lyric sequences and in ...poetry embedded within prose fictions to problematize the ostensible instrumentality of lyric. New historicist readings that offer rich accounts of the political and social agendas encoded in Renaissance love lyric have tended to slight its formal and generic innovations. "In and Out of Sequence" works to redress this lack by reading cultural context in texts' formal dynamics. In both prosimetrum texts and formally hybrid lyric sequences, what is at stake is often narrative authority—what story is being told and how. The relationship of genre and form to narrative in hybrid texts can reveal authors' preoccupations about their own projects and, by implication, about the developing literary categories in which they write. The authors this dissertation considers make complex formal and generic choices to encode a debate about the relationship of form to meaning. George Gascoigne in The Adventures of Master F.J., Philip Sidney in Astrophil and Stella, and Mary Wroth in the Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus simultaneously showcase poetic projects that seek to manipulate their readers for very particular ends and relocate those projects within complicating narratives. Lyric's political/social efficacy emerges in these prosimetric and mixed-genre texts as a troubling aspect of their authors' practice as reflected by their own "counter-narratives." By demonstrating how authorial ambivalence about the purposes of lyric emerges in the poems themselves, my dissertation proposes a more complex account of "lyric instrumentality" even as it suggests an alternative and poly-generic history of early modern English lyric experiments.
This dissertation posits a literary history for the skepticism that Stanley Cavell identifies as ailing Shakespeare's jealous protagonists. Building on the work of feminist critics, who have ...demonstrated that the conventions of Petrarch's lyric and those of his English followers dismember the bodies and silence the voices of the very women they pretend to address, I argue that the logic of courtly love poetry lends itself to the very kinds of denials that Cavell discerns. The courtly lover focuses on the beauty of his cruel mistress, reading her body and disregarding her mind. In an equally reductive gesture, the jealous husband emphasizes the ambiguous virtue of chastity, which pretends an interest in feminine intentions, but insists that women's worth resides in the carnal. Cavell crucially notes that husbandly jealousy is never justified in Shakespeare, and he therefore views it as the dramatization of men denying what they know. But Shakespeare's plays do more than diagnose a general skeptical alienation, for these characters reject the specific knowledge that their loved ones are other minds. In close readings of "The Rape of Lucrece," Much Ado about Nothing, Othello, and The Winter's Tale, I show that Shakespeare consistently locates the origins of male sexual jealousy--and its reductive focus on feminine chastity--in the habits of language and thought embraced by speakers of courtly love lyric. Shakespeare's works repudiate the courtly mode, realizing the jealous husband's courtly objectification by representing women's deaths--final in tragedy, feigned in comedy. Revealing and correcting masculine errors, these deaths force characters and audience to confront the fundamental question of whether they can be satisfied with a beloved's fully objectified body. In addition to tracing the ties between these objectifying tropes, I explore the surprising instances of recognition and connection that the plays deliver. Accurately interpreting the body's honest signals, asking open-ended questions and attending to the answers, and even practicing subtle deception (such as the gulling of Benedick), depend upon and display the characters'attention to their kin, friends, and lovers as other minds.
Rome has long been known as a physical locus, an imperial power, and a myth, but to the English in the 16th and 17 th century, Rome was also a very present threat. Rome was a larger-than-life, ...multivalent signifier. It offered, for example, a positive historical precedent for aesthetic achievement as well as a model for how to inherit successfully and integrate a prestigious past. As a model for nationhood, Rome signified ingenuity and advancement and supreme power. But present Rome was also a barbarian, an oppressor and modern-day Antichrist. In the abstract, however, Rome was first and foremost an idea. The title of this dissertation, Eternal Palimpsest: Milton's Rome, alludes to the mutable quality of John Milton's own treatment of the ‘Eternal City’ in his works. For Milton, Rome is a palimpsest—something upon which he continually inscribes changing ideas about personal legacy, politics, and religion.
I observe three closely related functions of speech in the early modern period, communication, persuasion, and expression; and postulate theories about each in order to understand the mechanisms of ...discursive suppression. Drawing on a wide range of literary and cultural texts, including the works of Shakespeare, Sidney, and Milton, I argue that there was a rivalry between literary authors and religious authority over certain valued modes of speech.In the chapter on communication, I devise a normative taxonomy of speech that reflects religious orthodoxy; then, I reconstruct models of persuasion based on several recurring figures (speech as a food, drug, child, and messenger, to name a few); and last, I look at two concepts: expression, or speech that reflects a self capable of ordering things independently, in the burgeoning essay; and suppression, or speech that wishes to promote a divine order, in the form of Le Catalógue Des Livres Censurez, the first modern index of prohibited books.
This dissertation reexamines Baudelaire's aesthetics in his theory and argues that unlike what critics have established he did not contest Romanticism or found a new literary movement. Baudelaire's ...romanticism is reflected not only in his theory but also in his poetry, as the study of the theme of Eros in Les Fleurs du Mal demonstrates. Although the study of Eros has received considerable attention from critics, I argue that they have often distorted the meaning of Eros in Baudelaire's poems by viewing them through a narrow lens of either thematic criticism or theories of modernity, the psychoanalytic interpretation, and limited acknowledgment of literary history. As I will argue, the common element in critical orientations that take such approaches is the exaggeration (or diminishment) of elements that are in Baudelaire's poetry, as if those elements could provide an explanation of the aesthetic or critical interest of his work. The critical challenge is to resist such partiality and, free of special pleading, to read Baudelaire more comprehensively. I use the formalist approach to read Baudelaire's love poetry and I also contextualize Baudelaire in the literary field, comparing him with poets starting with the Troubadours. I argue that Baudelaire's originality is to be found in the poems that “petrarchise on the horrible” and frequently present a male subject who as a result of erotic victimization describes brutal vendettas against his idealized lovers, unlike any other contemporary lyric subject.
This dissertation argues that the remarkable persistence of Chaucer's fame in early modern England owed as much to the historic, linguistic, and nationalistic narratives in which his life and work ...could be situated as to the poetic regard in which his writing was held. Though diverse in focus and less widely-studied than literary tributes and adaptations, these narratives constitute their own tradition of response to Chaucer in Tudor England, one which draws heavily on the interpretive practices associated with antiquarian scholarship. This commentary shapes the terms in which English nationhood finds its voice, making not just Chaucer, but also commentary upon him, absolutely central to Renaissance ways of knowing the medieval. Chaucer's writing occupied a unique position in early modern England: while increasingly identified as historically distant, it was also celebrated as fundamentally and foundationally English, proof of the antiquity and excellence of a native literary tradition. Taking Thomas Speght's 1598/1602 edition of Chaucer's collected Works as a starting point, this dissertation examines how commentators addressed this dualism and its wider implications. My first chapter focuses on Chaucerian lexicons and glossaries, exploring how these reify a sense of linguistic difference between the past and the present and arguing, in particular, that the hard word list added in Speght's Works takes some of its strongest cues concerning the treatment of archaic language from the E.K. glosses in Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar. The second chapter turns to Speght's Life of Chaucer, comparing its investments in Chaucer's genealogy (literal as well as literary) with that of one of its most significant antecedents, John Leland's Latin account of Chaucer's life, written in the 1540s. The third chapter takes up the work of antiquarian Francis Thynne, situating his commentary on Chaucer within the larger context of his writings on heraldry, alchemy, and English history. My fourth and final chapter considers how the post-Reformation view that Chaucer was a proto-Protestant shaped his canon in sixteenth-century editions, encouraging the inclusion of spurious and anti-clerical works and occluding or delaying the inclusion of genuine works that display an affinity with more traditional religion.
Chaucerian Works in the English Renaissance: Editions and Imitations articulates the connection between editorial presentation and authorial imitation in order to solve a very specific problem: why ...were the comedic aspects of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer—aspects that appear to be central to his poetic sensibilities—so often ignored by Renaissance poets who drew on Chaucerian materials? While shifts in language, religion, politics, and poetic sensibilities help account for a predilection for prizing Chaucerian works of sentence (moral gravity), it does not adequately explain why a poet like Edmund Spenser—one of the age’s most unabashedly Chaucerian poets—would imitate comedic, works of solaas (literary pleasure) in a completely sententious manner. This dissertation combines bibliographic approaches with formal analysis of literary history, leading to a fuller understanding of the “uncomedying” of Chaucer by Renaissance editors and poets. This dissertation examines the rhetorical and aesthetic effects of editions of the works of Chaucer published between 1477 and 1602 (Caxton through Speght) as a means of understanding patterns of Chaucerian imitation by poets of the period. Although the most obvious shift in textual presentation is the change from printing single works to printing “Complete Works” beginning with the 1532 Thynne, I argue that choices made by the printing-house (in terms of layout, font, and, most specifically, editorial directions) had a gradual, cumulative effect of highlighting Chaucerian sentence at the expense of solaas. The ways in which Chaucerian texts were presented to be read throughout the Renaissance determined, to a great degree, how these texts were imitated. The evidence of this cumulative effect on poetic reception is seen in a thorough examination of the early editions of the poetry of John Skelton and Edmund Spenser, revealing that not only did the editorial rhetoric of Chaucerian editions in the English Renaissance mold the ways in which poets responded to Chaucer, but that in the case of Edmund Spenser, Spenser’s poetic imitations of Chaucer led to major shifts in editorial presentation of Chaucer’s works in the beginning of the seventeenth century.
Readings in Common: Assimilation and Interpretive Authority in Early Modern Spain examines how sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Iberian scholars negotiated the meanings of shared narratives ...and parallel rituals across ecumenical and linguistic lines. By rendering Iberian scholastic modes of demarcating Christianity more humanistic, and by comparing these theological arguments with the reading practices of Northern European reformers, I question the conventional genealogy of modern, secular interpretive strategies. My project thus proposes a revised history of religious tolerance and textual historicism on the one hand, and of medieval and early modern Iberian convivencia, scholasticism, and evangelism on the other hand. The first half of the dissertation, which examines patristic texts, scholastic commentaries, and humanist essays in Latin and Spanish, argues that sixteenth-century Iberian reformers defended a moderate politics of peaceful conversion and New Christian assimilation by reformulating established scholastic categories of difference. Emphasizing a model of religion defined by obligatory practice, scholars such as Francisco de Vitoria, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Ignacio de Las Casas, and Pedro de Valencia acknowledged the epistemological limitations of knowing and regulating the faith of indigenous Americans, Iberian Moriscos, and other potential or recent converts to Christianity. The second half of the dissertation, which investigates the Sacromonte “lead books,” a series of forged holy texts composed in Arabic, as well as several Spanish, French, and Latin philological treatises, moves from an examination of ritual to an analysis of early modern dispute over the nature of language. I demonstrate that a radically formal approach to philology, exemplified by orthodox modes of translation and an evangelical pedagogy of linguistic usage, broadly transformed understandings of cultural and religious similitude and difference. By underscoring the parallel epistemological conditions of early modern Iberian theology and philology, I both present a nuanced account of conversion and reform in the early modern Hispanic world and show how this account can be helpful for rethinking the changing relationship among religion, scholarship, and politics in the present.
