:Women and Early Modern Cultures of Translation: Beyond the Female Tradition

In my dissertation, Contagious Animality: Species, Disease, and Metaphor in Early Modern Literature and Culture, I close read examples of Renaissance drama alongside their contemporary cultural texts to examine anxieties around social differences as constructed and mediated through what I call “contagious animality” in early modern English culture. Animal metaphors circulated anxieties around social differences on the early modern cultural stage in English drama where animality elicits uncertainties about identitarian constructions of difference. In this vein, I close read formal elements and their interactions with early modern culture to argue that animal metaphors transmit modes of speciating difference in examples of Renaissance drama and cultural artifacts. Whiteness exploits this fluidity between animal-human classifications as a power differential. Metaphors of animal-human speciation elicit anxieties around difference through a poetics of contagion. Spread through animal metaphors, animal-human distinctions circulate dehumanizing constructions of race, gender, and sexuality via affective influences in early modern English playhouses and by extension, affects cultural constructions of identitarian difference. England’s emergent settler-colonialist logics in the Renaissance positioned animal-human differences on hierarchies such as the Great Chain of Being where crossing the porous boundary between human and animal constituted a form of contagion. Actors’ imitations of animality through material performance and metaphor on stage spread through spectators’ senses—in other words, theatergoers felt animality as an affective, embodied, and material experience. In this vein, I approach animal studies in dialogue with pre-modern critical race studies, queer theory, and affect studies to address the circulations of difference through contagion and animality in early modern English literature and culture. By close reading dramatic and cultural materials, I argue that animal metaphors in early modern literature and culture represent forms of racial, sexual, and gendered difference in early modern England as something transmittable, showing their incredibly flexible and exploitable capabilities. In other words, the uncertain distinctions between what constructed an “animal” and a “human” were dangerously transmissive in early modern contexts.

Compassion, Love, and Happiness:Positive Emotions and Early Modern Communities Linda Pollock (bio) Barclay, Katie, Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2021; hardback; pp. 240; R.R.P. £72.00; ISBN 9780198868132. Fox, Cora, Bradley J. Irish, and Cassie M. Miura, eds, Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2021; hardcover; pp. 240; R.R.P. £85.00; ISBN 9781526137135. Steenbergh, Kristine, and Katherine Ibbett, eds, Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Feeling and Practice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021; hardback; pp. 290; R.R.P. £80.00; ISBN 9781108495394. Wood, Andy, Faith, Hope, and Charity: English Neighbourhoods, 1500–1640, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020; paperback; pp. xvi, 306; R.R.P. £64.99; ISBN 9781108814454. Up until recently, much of the work in the history of emotions in early modern Europe has focused on those strong passions that rend individuals, families, and communities asunder: anger, jealousy, envy, and grief, for instance.1 But the tide is turning away from negativity, suppression, and destruction and towards those passions crucial to the creation and preservation of communities. The four books under review all grant passions and affections a constructive role in individual lives and social relations, delineating how emotion was woven into the fabric of early modern society. In Faith, Hope, and Charity: English Neighbourhoods, 1500–1640, Andy Wood examines the building and experience of neighbourhood for all ranks of English society for the period 1500 to 1640 through the trifecta [End Page 131] lens of faith, hope, and charity. Katie Barclay explores in Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self the meaning of community for ordinary people in eighteenth-century Scotland through the belief and enactment of caritas. The essays in Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture, edited by Cora Fox, Bradley Irish, and Cassie Miura, augment the 'happiness turn' and seek to redress the imbalance in current scholarship by bringing to light the existence of positive feelings in daily life, the active pursuit of pleasure, and how literary structures elicit and encourage affective attachments. The contributors to Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Feeling and Practice, edited by Kristine Steenbergh and Katherine Ibbett, concentrate on compassion but take a broad-brush approach to the concept, as well as moving beyond England. The essays delve into interrelated concepts along with compassion's multiple forms and complexities, in the hope that such entanglements will be productive and lead to new understandings. Andy Wood's meticulously researched and deeply felt book investigates how early modern English people, rich, middling, and poor, did their best to make their communities operate. The three biblical tenets of faith (in God, neighbours, and friends to provide pleasure and support), hope (for a future with economic security and political empowerment), and charity (which both rendered help to those in need and granted a right to assert claims to aid) structured and guided the workings of early modern neighbourhoods, rural and urban. By examining the idea and definition of neighbourhood, the obligation to live in harmony and help others, the nature of disputes and reconciliation, as well as who was included and excluded, he shows that notwithstanding problems, challenges, inconsistencies, and changes, neighbourliness endured as an ideal and practice. Barclay's Caritas, based on around two thousand court cases, supplemented with personal correspondence, and replete with moving stories of those of lowly social status, places love at the centre of eighteenth-century Scottish society. She considers the centrality of marriage to the foundation of a loving community, how young people were socialized into upholding caritas, and how caritas promoted harmony and underpinned hospitality, as well as investigating the costs involved in this model for those who would not or could not conform. Deploying practice theory—the concept that emotions are engrained in body and mind through repeated practice—she lays out how caritas restrained violence, promoted peacekeeping, shaped social interaction, and offered a model for ethical relations. The interdisciplinary Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture brings together the insights of affect theory and historical studies of emotion in order to reconsider which emotions mattered to early modern culture, and their...

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreMatthew Ancell received his PhD from the University of California, Irvine, and is assistant professor of humanities and comparative literature at Brigham Young University. His interests include baroque literature and art, early modern skepticism, Montaigne, and deconstruction. His publications include articles on Góngora, Velázquez, and Derrida. Currently he is working on a study of art and theology in Calderón.Valerie Billing is a doctoral candidate and provost’s fellow in the English department at the University of California, Davis. She has published on Margaret Cavendish and collaborative authorship in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies and is currently finishing a dissertation titled “Big Women, Small Men: The Erotics of Size in Early Modern Literature and Culture.”Michelle M. Dowd is associate professor of English and women’s and gender studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is the author of Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (2009), which won the Sara A. Whaley Book Award from the National Women’s Studies Association. She is also the coeditor of Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (2007), Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama (2011), and Early Modern Women on the Fall: An Anthology (2012), and her articles on early modern drama and women’s writing have appeared in journals such as Modern Philology, English Literary Renaissance, and Shakespeare Studies. She is currently completing a book on inheritance on the early modern English stage.Kent R. Lehnhof is associate professor of English at Chapman University, where he teaches courses on early modern literature and culture. His essays have appeared in several edited collections as well as in journals such as ELR, ELH, SEL, Modern Philology, Shakespeare Bulletin, Milton Quarterly, and Milton Studies. At present, he is editing a multiauthor volume on Levinas and Shakespeare and researching twinship in the Renaissance.Amy Rodgers is assistant professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, where she teaches courses in early modern literature and culture, film, and audience and popular culture studies. She has published essays on representations of Shakespeare’s audiences in film and contemporary fiction, early film and serial fiction, and is a codirector of the Shakespeare and Dance project. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 42, Number 1Spring 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/675940 Views: 19 © 2014 Northwestern University. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

170 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE individual buildings, and the quarries from which the material came. Here Protzen discusses the form and probable uses of the various buildings and examines reasons for their specific configuration. The second part contains the main focus of the study: how the various types of masonry were quarried, transported, dressed, fitted, placed, mortared, and finished. Protzen and his team tried out some of the techniques they postulated in order to convince themselves and us of their plausibility and we share his delight when he finds similar techniques obviously used in other cultures. The final part of the work then discusses construction episodes and proposes a chro­ nology. The book is illustrated by informative and beautiful photographs, some of which could have been reproduced better. These are supple­ mented by the author’s analytical sketches, and many excellent mea­ sured plans, sections, and details, most of them by Robert Batson. Protzen’s analysis uses a combination of historical research methods, including astute Quellenkritik and visual analysis of older drawings and accounts wherever appropriate, archaeological methods of docu­ mentation and analysis (even though his study was restricted entirely to what was visible aboveground), and the observation, drafting, and experimentation of the professional architect looking with a questing and sympathetic eye at the work of bygone colleagues. This makes the work a complex essay in method that could be developed in future studies in the history of building technology. Protzen promises us more, and I hope that he will continue his discoveries in Inca architec­ ture in order at some future point to present us with a complete analysis of their building culture. Tom F. Peters Dr. Peters is professor of architecture and history of technology and director of the Building and Architectural Technology Institute at Lehigh University. His new book, Building the Nineteenth Century, on the development of the modern building pro­ cess and technological thought, is published by the MIT Press. Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. By William Eamon. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni­ versity Press, 1994. Pp. xvii + 490; illustrations, notes, appendix, bibliography, index. $49.50. William Eamon’s ambitious study of collections of craft recipes, medicinal formulas, and practical instructions for a great variety of tasks ranges from late antiquity to the 17th century. He concentrates particularly on the first century of printing, when such books enjoyed great popularity. Eamon argues that these books of secrets constitute an essential background to 17th-century experimental philosophy. He elaborates Paolo Rossi’s notion that the venatio, or hunt after the TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 171 secrets of nature, emerged as a new view of scientific activity in the early modern period. As secrets were transformed into commodities, in Eamon’s view, “a new definition of the function of experiments in science” came to the fore (p. 11). The book includes much material previously published as articles, which has been revised and shaped into a more broadly conceived whole. In my view, part 2, “The Secrets of Nature in the Age of Printing,” is both the substantial center of the book and its strongest part. Here, Eamon presents detailed studies of some of the most important “professors of secrets” of the mid- to late 16th century, such as the pseudonymous “Alessio Piemontese,” Leonardo Fioravanti , and Giambattista Della Porta. He successfully expands and elaborates Elizabeth Eisenstein’s thesis of the importance of printing for technical and scientific developments by showing the rich variety of recipe and formula books, their great popularity, and the numer­ ous printed editions and translations in which they appeared. Eamon draws on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources to elabo­ rate copiously detailed pictures of early modern empirical culture. He argues for the significance of popular interest in medicinal and other kinds of empirical remedies, suggesting that the dissemination of books of secrets and the use of recipes included an experimental aspect that ultimately contributed to the positive valuation of experi­ mentation in 17th-century science. Eamon’s attempt to synthesize this center into a broader picture is less successful, for several reaons. First, “secrets” as a category is rather a...

Prague workshop, Pietà, c. 1400, from amongst the sculptures found beneath Bern Minster, 1986. Limestone, original height c. 85–90cm. Bern: Historisches Museum. Photo: Bernisches Historisches Museum/S. Rebsamen. The religious turmoil of the sixteenth century constituted a turning point in the history of Western Christian art. The iconoclasm precipitated by the Protestant Reformation was unprecedented in its scope: throughout northern Europe sculptures, altarpieces, paintings, stained-glass windows and ecclesiastical treasures fell victim to the purifying zeal of evangelical reformers. Images that had been venerated for generations were labelled as idols, and smashed to pieces (plate 1). Churches that had been filled with representations of sacred history were stripped bare. In response, the Catholic Church reaffirmed the value of visual representations. Theologians provided detailed guidelines for their production and use, and wealthy patrons stimulated the revival of religious art. While Protestantism devalued images and privileged hearing over seeing, the importance that Catholicism accorded to the visual was made manifest in the art and architecture of the baroque. The broad outlines of this history are familiar and incontestable. With regard to religious images, the Reformation certainly brought about a dramatic bifurcation, both at the level of theological debate and at the level of lived piety. Yet the Protestant destruction and the Catholic defence of images were merely two parts of a more complex story. The essays gathered together in this volume analyze the myriad ways in which both Protestant and Catholic reform stimulated the production of religious art during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The special issue examines the nature of images produced during the early years of the evangelical movement, asking how both theologians and artists responded to a new understanding of Christian history and soteriology. It traces the rich and diverse Protestant visual cultures that developed during the confessional age, and explores the variety of Catholic responses to pressure for reform. At the volume's heart lies a desire to understand how religious art was shaped by the splintering of Western Christendom that began five hundred years ago with Martin Luther's Reformation. Luther's own position with regard to religious images was far from straightforward. From 1522 he was a determined opponent of iconoclasm. Yet for Luther images were peripheral to true piety. In 1545, towards the end of his life, he preached a sermon in which he spoke of the two kingdoms present upon earth, ‘the kingdom of Christ and the worldly kingdom’. Christ's kingdom, through which we achieve salvation, is ‘a hearing-kingdom, not a seeing-kingdom; for the eyes do not lead and guide us to where we know and find Christ, but rather the ears must do this’.1 Here Luther privileged hearing above seeing – word over image – in a manner characteristic of evangelical teaching. Reformed theologians went much further. John Calvin undertook a thorough attack on the ‘superstitions of popery’. Idolatry – understood as a diminution of the honour due to God – occupied a more prominent place in his thought that in Luther's. Reformed Protestantism rewrote the Decalogue, making the prohibition of images a decree in its own right, and directed Christian worship towards a God who transcended all materiality.2 Yet Protestant piety was not fundamentally opposed to the visual. Even in his 1545 sermon, Luther accepted ‘visual sensation as part of the work that must be done to create religious conviction’.3 The Reformation, at least in its Lutheran manifestation, sought not to reject religious seeing, but rather to control it and the other senses (including hearing) through faith. The Catholic Church's defence of religious imagery was similarly nuanced. At its twenty-fifth session (3 December 1563) the Council of Trent stated that images were to be honoured, but not in a superstitious manner. Holy images – as opposed to idols – were of great value because through them Christians were moved to adore Christ, to remember the examples of the saints, and to cultivate piety. Theologians – most notably Johannes Molanus (1533–85) and Gabriele Paleotti (1522–97) – expanded on these themes.4 Catholic patrons commissioned illustrated books, devotional prints, paintings, sculpture and architecture, seeking to use images, as well as words, to awaken the senses and to engage Christians’ hearts and minds.5 Catholics continued to trust in the sacred power of images and relics. During the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the cultic use of images – the veneration of paintings and sculptures of Christ and the saints – flourished throughout Catholic Europe.6 No Protestant image – not even a miraculous portrait of Luther – was a place of holy presence akin to the Jesuit reliquary examined in this volume by Mia Mochizuki.7 Yet Catholic belief in immanence, in the intermingling of the spiritual and material, always coexisted with scepticism about the value of the visual. Catholic reform, from the late Middle Ages onwards, emphasized the importance of inner contemplation.8 During the sixteenth century Catholic commentators wrote, like their Lutheran counterparts, of images’ pedagogical value and affective potential.9 In the seventeenth century new devotional practices encouraged meditation on images as well as texts, and spread amongst Protestants as well as Catholics.10 In this volume, these new devotional practices provide the backdrop for Bridget Heal's investigation of the later history of Lucas Cranach's Schneeberg Altarpiece, and for Christine Göttler's analysis of the Catholic Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria's religious patronage. What of the visual cultures that evolved across Protestant Europe? Lutherans, driven by their desire to distinguish themselves from radical iconoclasts, allowed many images to survive intact and in situ in churches. They were convinced that God's Word would triumph over idolatry and superstition.11 Luther and his fellow Wittenberg reformers made extensive use of visual propaganda and illustrated key religious texts (the Bible and catechism, most notably), a reflection of their belief in the value of seeing for acquiring religious knowledge and understanding. The copious religious output of the Cranach workshop – altarpieces, epitaphs, portraits and prints – defined Lutheran visual culture for much of the sixteenth century, in Germany and beyond. Elsewhere – in Swiss and Southern German cities during the 1520s and 1530s, in France and in the Northern Netherlands – Protestantism's relationship with art was much more strongly shaped by iconoclasm. Yet memories of recent destruction did not prevent the production of new objects and images. In Calvinist churches Protestantism redirected rather than removed congregations’ desires to adorn and to commemorate.12 The domestic use of religious imagery also continued. Even in Reformed areas – for example in seventeenth-century Zürich, examined here by Andrew Morrall – religious iconographies were used in the home to foster a sense of confessional consciousness.13 The nature of these Protestant visual cultures – the position of art during and after iconoclasm – is an important theme of this volume. Christopher Wood has suggested that ‘Protestant iconophobia … permanently affected the ways in which images were made, exhibited and judged’. He writes of the ‘insulating strategies’ devised by artists in order to avoid charges of idolatry.14 In terms of medium, Protestants tended to favour black and white prints over sculptures and brightly coloured paintings that might seduce the eye. The 1519 woodcut known as Karlstadt's Wagen (wagon), analyzed here in an essay by Lyndal Roper and Jennifer Spinks, and the seventeenth-century Tischzucht (table discipline) broadsheets examined by Morrall exemplify this tendency. In terms of content, Protestant art is most readily associated with polemic, pedagogy, and allegory, and, in the case of the Northern Netherlands, with landscape, still life and everyday scenes filled with moralizing content. Regarding style, Protestant artists supposedly strove for plainness, for a visual culture ‘stripped of conspicuous artifice and deceptive pictorial rhetoric’.15 Here recent scholarship on Cranach is key: Joseph Koerner, for example, has argued that the art produced by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his son in the service of the Lutheran Reformation deliberately eschewed aesthetic pleasure and affective power in favour of communicating evangelical doctrine.16 He speaks of the ‘mortification of painting though text, gesture, and style’.17 But not all religious art was polemical; not all religious art defended itself, as much of Cranach's did, from its enemies, the iconoclasts. Iconoclasm does not, Shira Brisman argues here, help us to read graphic studies of the period. Brisman asks us to dismiss iconoclasm from the privileged position that it has held in studies of sixteenth-century art. We need, she suggests, to erase our knowledge of images’ fall from grace in order to understand the works of Albrecht Dürer and others. Iconoclasm also played remarkably little part in the story of Lucas Cranach the Elder's first evangelical altarpiece, installed in the parish church in Schneeberg in 1539 and eventually, after a traumatic interlude during the Thirty Years’ War, reset in a magnificent baroque frame in the eighteenth century. The creators of some images certainly did respond to contemporary fear of the ‘uncontrolled nature of iconic representation’:18 Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt's Wagen, for example, in which Cranach's woodcut images are overburdened with explanatory texts. Others, however, continued to rely on very different modes of viewing: on ambiguity, as with Sebald Beham's small engraving of Moses and Aaron examined by Mitchell Merback; or on the restrained use of the imagination, as with Jan van Goyen's skyscapes, analyzed by Amy Powell. Their creators seem to have recognized, as Dürer did, that ‘pictures are, at best, mediators, affecting without determining what their viewers see in them’.19 The supposed bifurcation between a Protestant aesthetic of plainness and a Catholic effusion of colour and ornament can be seen by juxtaposing Morrall's Tischzucht prints with Mochizuki's seventeenth-century Portuguese reliquary. Yet it leaves in interpretative limbo the baroque incarnation of the Lutheran Schneeberg Altarpiece, which presents its central Cranach crucifixion panel as a relic, held aloft by angels and encased within an elaborately carved and gilded frame. This special issue brings together art historians and historians to consider the relationship between art and religious reform. The divisions between disciplines are no longer rigid, as they were in the days when Aby Warburg established his Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek. Historians make effective use of visual and material evidence (though perhaps still not as often as they might); art historians ground their work in detailed historical understanding. For both, the Reformation, with its image disputes and iconoclasm, has acted as an intellectual lodestone since the 1960s.20 The essays assembled in this volume show how porous traditional disciplinary boundaries have become, but highlight the healthy plurality of methodological approaches that the religious art of the early modern era continues to inspire. Some of these essays tie images firmly to the religious, social and political contexts in which they were produced and received, reconstructed through close readings of texts. Others focus their attention primarily on images’ non-verbal means of communication, suggesting that the power of art can never be fully captured through words. Brisman's and Powell's essays in particular invite us to pay proper attention to artistic processes and to art's tendency to develop through visual conversations. They remind us that art, like music, requires us to exercise our historical imaginations differently.21 The volume has been timed to coincide with the five-hundredth anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, yet Martin Luther himself is more or less absent from its pages. He appears in the analysis of Karlstadt's Wagen, but he did not design this first piece of Reformation visual propaganda. He appears in Merback's discussion of Beham's 1526 engraving, but his thought does not explain the iconography. His theology offered a qualified endorsement of religious images, but cannot account for the flourishing of Lutheran art in parts of the Holy Roman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At a moment at which twenty-first-century anniversary culture celebrates ‘The Reformation’, focusing its attention on a particular date and on a particular man, this volume does the opposite. It adopts a broad chronology, ranging from the first decade of reform, the dawn of a new era in northern Europe, through the confessional age to the early eighteenth century. Three essays focus on the period of Umbruch – upheaval – during the early Reformation; five move into the seventeenth century, juxtaposing Protestant with Catholic, Lutheran Saxony and Reformed Zürich with Bavaria and the Jesuits’ overseas missions. These later essays show that although images played an important role in creating confessional consciousness, devotional art did not simply reflect theological divisions. It crossed confessional borders, and also evoked much broader cultural landscapes, landscapes that were being transformed during the early modern period by historical forces other than religion. The essay by Lyndal Roper and Jennifer Spinks that opens this collection focuses on a woodcut produced by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his Wittenberg colleague Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (see plate 1, page 258–259). It was almost certainly the first piece of visual propaganda for the Reformation, produced in January 1519 at a moment at which the evangelical movement was still finding its way. It is a fascinating image: it draws on well-established visual formulae to present a procession of figures, and prefigures later Lutheran propaganda in its use of binary opposition and mockery. Its design is, however, overly complex. Its images are hard to make out because of the abundance of texts, and these texts are hard to decipher and understand. The woodcut was so cryptic, in fact, that Karlstadt had to produce a lengthy written tract to explain it to his supporters. Despite its apparently sequential structure, the woodcut was intended to be read, Roper and Spinks argue, not as a polemical narrative but as part of a devotional exercise. Karlstadt's written explanation suggests that he intended it to be used as a series of discrete points for meditation, as an invitation to reflect on key aspects of Augustinian theology. The woodcut is also intriguing because it was produced at a moment at which the early evangelical movement was still coloured by mystical piety, before the rupture between Luther and the more radical reformers – the Schwärmer or fanatics, as he labelled them – that shaped the 1520s so decisively. Karlstadt himself went on to publish, in 1522, the first evangelical defence of iconoclasm, On the Removal of Images. The 1519 woodcut provides, therefore, vivid testimony of the extent to which iconoclasts understood the religious and psychological power of images. It helps us to understand why image makers became image breakers. Hans Sebald Beham's 1526 Moses and Aaron, examined in Mitchell Merback's essay, is a very different type of image, one of the small-scale engravings for which the Beham brothers were famous (see plate 1, page 288). It is labelled with MOSE and AARON, and signed and dated, but that is all: it suffers from none of the textual overburdening of Karlstadt's Wagen. It shows two half-length figures seated on a mountainside with an open codex on their laps and the blank stone tablets of the Law resting beside them. The image's narrative and its doctrinal message resist easy interpretation, but this time such an opacity is intentional. Merback situates the engraving in the context of the debates about Mosaic Law that followed the Peasants’ Revolt of 1524–25, at a time when the split between the Wittenberg theologians and radicals such as Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer had become irrevocable. The engraving was also, however, he suggests, a personal reflection on religious exile, on Beham's own experiences as a ‘non-aligned evangelical’ who had been expelled from Nuremberg in 1525, and labelled a ‘godless painter’. The image testifies to Beham's familiarity with Lutheran teachings on the relationship between the Law and Gospel. But Luther's writings – even his 1525 sermon How Christians Should Regard Moses – offer no simple key for its interpretation. Rather, the artist produced his own reading, an allegory of the parting of ways between the Lutherans and Spiritualists. The priestly Aaron reads the codex before him while Moses, the lawgiver in Luther's interpretation, gazes out, seeking illumination beyond the Word. Beham has, Merback suggests, ‘subtly reasserted the hero's prophetic vocation and charisma’. The image can be read as veiled polemic against Wittenberg, or perhaps as a warning to both sides at a time of discord. Both of these first essays explore the relationship between image and word. The visual cannot, it seems, be reduced to an expression of the verbal, even in the case of Karlstadt's Wagen, with its inscriptions and detailed they are to with their must be allowed to for as Lutheran Shira Brisman's essay on graphic studies made the time of the Reformation these in a very different The she suggests, prophetic of the destruction that images during the most of But we resist seeing them as and iconoclasm from the of Christ's with a piece of and of the Christ with a beside it (see plate 1, page and plate page that cannot be in words. We see Brisman as of a visual that the through a of Images she suggests, their own the by the of the artist to to resist the narrative by or we might by and engravings such as examined by Spinks and we a different type of interpretative – one that not, as for Sebald from to the of the Reformation, but rather from the artistic processes of the While the first essays in very different art's role at the of a new the two us into the confessional Bridget Heal's essay focuses on Lutheran on a Protestant in from the early of the Reformation the eighteenth century, religious art It examines Cranach's Schneeberg and its This has a it was installed in 1539 but by during the Thirty Years’ Its were in Schneeberg in but the was in when the church was were in a and frame that in situ (see plate 1, page The Protestant of which the is a example, our of Lutheran art. Heal's the within the context of two broader the of Lutheran confessional and the of Lutheran piety. in particular the importance of historical not for the image's original and but also for its The of the made use of the visual of the baroque – perhaps not the cultural of the It also, however, a understanding of images’ devotional a new perhaps to them a role in the by which the intellectual (the knowledge of became the affective presence in the Protestants the with Cranach's image through the of and dramatic Andrew Morrall's essay us to Zürich, to a very different religious Morrall his discussion a painting of the of a Hans seated at a The of and a life are here in the of the and and in the domestic that them. The painting Morrall an expression of a Protestant and was part of a broader visual of Tischzucht that to the Morrall also explores the of of the of images by the for Protestantism he suggests, an It the of art, made it and and stripped it of or was by its to and its The images used by Morrall in the to by Brisman – for the image is a message must be out through In Zürich the Reformation brought he suggests, the of images. In the seventeenth-century art flourished in the of iconoclasm, as Amy shows in discussion of the paintings of Jan van argues that of iconoclasm, its of and in the works examined here and in like them. explores van Goyen's his use of and which did not, as art of the period did, filled with like the on the in church a of images that never fully These suggests, be seen as images of the by as to In a however, artistic had to be with – van who van Goyen's in him for not far from the Goyen's paintings were also – he is thought to have been a Catholic, but his works across the confessional responses to iconoclasm have been in through the of church and through the analysis of the religious and of and Here adopts a different one that art recent in and in the found in and early modern art. she van Goyen's of a particular she also against a that images within their historical brings seventeenth-century painting into with modern art, in particular to the use of which later played a role in of Here van Goyen's paintings from their own time and themselves to the With Christine Göttler's essay we move to a Catholic to the Bavaria of the Duke Wilhelm V examines the and the and cultural of within an Catholic focuses on the that the at his and and on a series of engravings of by Jan and that were to Bavaria's and made extensive use of images, and to their and religious from the to the The examined here however, a It not on but on reform, on on or from the – a for the after his in This by the but it was to move beyond confessional It in some Despite the that the on and the was in the at for example, were and that sacred scenes or They suggests, to the that to the religious of the The of the of the religious was key to both Protestant and Catholic reform, but in Duke and it was to be through In the essay of the volume Mia a detailed of one particular a Portuguese reliquary from the of the seventeenth century (see plate 1, page Here the of Catholicism that were present in Göttler's of into a account of the importance of overseas and for early modern religious At the of Mochizuki's reliquary is a of the from in the that the with them on their missions. It is in a that was to and and evoked The image is in this with of It is, suggests, seeking to through its of sacred It is an through its and its brings together two that of the of Western Christendom and the polemical that and that of with the The essay us that while iconoclasm did, without the ways in which religious images were made, exhibited and received, image or also a much cultural In his Joseph the essays within this volume in a broad The Protestant Reformation of merely one in the history of iconoclasm, a history that to the present art to both image making and image how and why iconoclasm to be accorded an important place within the history of art. he a tendency – certainly in this volume – to focus not on of destruction but rather on the in their It was the of iconoclasm that the attention of social history and art history during the and however, against the backdrop of image in and we seem more by the ways in which early modern cultures – both Protestant and Catholic – responded to the of iconoclasm, and were transformed by the that it The workshop that to this special issue was by the and the are very for the also to for to the for their help and and above all to for the

Myths and stories offer a window onto medieval and early modern musical culture. Far from merely offering material for musical settings, authoritative tales from classical mythology, ancient history and the Bible were treated as foundations for musical knowledge. Such myths were cited in support of arguments about the uses, effects, morality and preferred styles of music in sources as diverse as theoretical treatises, defences or critiques of music, art, sermons, educational literature and books of moral conduct. Newly written literary stories too were believed capable of moral instruction and influence, and were a medium through which ideas about music could be both explored and transmitted. How authors interpreted and weaved together these traditional stories, or created their own, reveals much about changing attitudes across the period. Looking beyond the well-known figure of Orpheus, this collection explores the myriad stories that shaped not only musical thought, but also its styles, techniques and practices. The essays show that music itself performed and created knowledge in ways parallels to myth, and worked in tandem with old and new tales to construct social, political and philosophical views. This relationship was not static, however; as the Enlightenment dawned, the once authoritative gods became comic characters and myth became a medium for ridicule. Overall, the book provides a foundation for exploring myth and story throughout medieval and early modern culture, and facilitating further study into the Enlightenment and beyond.

Violent liminalities in Early Modern Culture is a methodologically innovative book combining the twin disciplines of queer theory and disability studies. It investigates the violence feared from, and directed at, inhabitants of the 'betwixt and between' spaces of early modern literature and culture, through a focus on the perpetuated metamorphic states of Shakespeare's and Spenser's liminal figures including Lavinia, Puck, and Britomart. With chapters on gender, sexuality, adolescence, madness, and physical disability, Kaye McLelland applies a bi-theoretical lens to interrogate the ways in which being simultaneously 'neither' and 'both' brings to bear the non-normative disruption identified by queer theory in ways that use binary systems against themselves. For many of Spenser's and Shakespeare's characters, the 'in-between' state, whether ritually or otherwise induced, transforms the instantaneous binary threshold of the limen into a permanent 'habitation'. This created space is one of great power that is feared and violently countered by those who would shut it down. Set against the literary history of Spenser's and Shakespeare's Ovidianism and festivity, and the historical context of the post-Reformation transformation from a tertiary to a binary model of the afterlife, this volume identifies a persistent positioning of liminal literary figures in proximity to the liminality of the dead and dying, whilst simultaneously tracing the positive ways in which these inhabitants of the powerful 'betwixt and between' are depicted.

THE twinned ideas of music and disability – particularly madness and melancholy – shaped pre-Enlightenment views of gender, disability and conceptions of normativity, through both performances on the stage, and also performances during literary characterisation and narrative. The dramatic works of Shakespeare and other playwrights performed stories of disability and music, illuminating early modern cultural tropes of gender and disability through music. This chapter begins with consideration of Ophelia as an archetype of madness and femininity, and then expands to other examples of performing stories of femininity, madness and disability in early modern English culture. The first section describes the connections of madness and melancholy to disability, explaining how theoretical perspectives from disability studies can enhance our understanding of music, myth and story in early modern English culture. The second section illuminates the relationship between music, story, disability and gender in the character of Ophelia, while the third section examines female madness and melancholia in Desdemona, followed by male madness and melancholia in Richard II and Duke Orsino, and ends with a consideration of the ambiguously gendered Viola. The chapter closes by deconstructing the seventeenth-century understanding of melancholy and relating it to concepts of disability in early modern English culture. MADNESS, MELANCHOLY AND DISABILITY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH CULTURE This chapter relies upon the framework of disability studies. This is a relatively new methodology of history, literature, cultural studies and musicology, which constructs a historical narrative that recognises the relationship between music, impairment, gender and (dis)ability in late Renaissance culture. The field of disability studies is significant for providing a language and a framework for understanding non-normative ways of being, and for relating closely to Neoplatonist theories of music and the body. Music and being also have similarities to the soul. According to the philosopher Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, both ‘imperceptible’ and ‘perceptible’ harmonies affect the soul's ability to comprehend beauty: The harmonies in sounds, too, the imperceptible ones which make the perceptible ones, make the soul conscious of beauty in the same way, showing the same thing in another medium. It is proper to sensible harmonies to be measured by numbers, not according to any and every sort of proportion but one which serves for the production of form so that it may dominate.

Long considered marginal in early modern culture, women writers were actually central to the development of a Protestant literary tradition in England. Kimberly Anne Coles explores their contribution to this tradition through thorough archival research in publication history and book circulation; the interaction of women's texts with those written by men; and the traceable influence of women's writing upon other contemporary literary works. Focusing primarily upon Katherine Parr, Anne Askew, Mary Sidney Herbert, and Anne Vaughan Lok, Coles argues that the writings of these women were among the most popular and influential works of sixteenth-century England. This book is full of prevalent material and fresh analysis for scholars of early modern literature, culture and religious history.

Melancholy is rightly taken to be a central topic of concern in early modern culture, and it continues to generate scholarly interest among historians of medicine, literature, psychiatry and religion. This book considerably furthers our understanding of the issue by examining the extensive discussions of melancholy in seventeenth- and eighteenth- century religious and moral philosophical publications, many of which have received only scant attention from modern scholars. Arguing that melancholy was considered by many to be as much a 'disease of the soul' as a condition originating in bodily disorder, Dr. Schmidt reveals how insights and techniques developed in the context of ancient philosophical and early Christian discussions of the good of the soul were applied by a variety of early modern authorities to the treatment of melancholy. The book also explores ways in which various diagnostic and therapeutic languages shaped the experience and expression of melancholy and situates the melancholic experience in a series of broader discourses, including the language of religious despair dominating English Calvinism, the late Renaissance concern with the government of the passions, and eighteenth-century debates surrounding politeness and material consumption. In addition, it explores how the shifting languages of early modern melancholy altered and enabled certain perceptions of gender. As a study in intellectual history, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul offers new insights into a wide variety of early modern texts, including literary representations and medical works, and critically engages with a broad range of current scholarship in addressing some of the central interpretive issues in the history of early modern medicine, psychiatry, religion and culture.

This book analyses the drama of memory in Shakespeare's history plays. Situating the plays in relation to the extra-dramatic contexts of early modern print culture, the Reformation and an emergent sense of nationhood, it examines the dramatic devices the theatre developed to engage with the memory crisis triggered by these historical developments. Against the established view that the theatre was a cultural site that served primarily to salvage memories, Isabel Karremann also considers the uses and functions of forgetting on the Shakespearean stage and in early modern culture. Drawing on recent developments in memory studies, new formalism and performance studies, the volume develops an innovative vocabulary and methodology for analysing Shakespeare's mnemonic dramaturgy in terms of the performance of memory that results in innovative readings of the English history plays. Karremann's book is of interest to researchers and upper-level students of Shakespeare studies, early modern drama and memory studies.

The introduction analyzes the various historical and contemporary significances of early modern cultural representations of children and childhood in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries through the lens of queer theory. It lays the groundwork for a discourse of early modern queer childhood studies, engaging with current critical discussions about queer children in the works of queer theorists such as Lee Edelman, James Kincaid, and Kathryn Bond Stockton. Interrogating the significance of premodern constructions of childhood queerness, the editors analyze the respective relevances of narratological, performative, and linguistic ideals and functions; categorical blurring and liminality (age, complexion, physiological development, etc.); temporal and spatial alterity; erotic subjectivity, objectivity, and agency; and differentiations as well as transformations of sex, gender, genre, class, status, race, (dis)ability, humanity/animality, and more. Ultimately, the chapter asserts that queer childhood studies might usefully maintain a productively anachronistic openness both to how children and childhood might have signified as queer for early modern culture, and how those representations might strike us as queer today.

MLRy 99.1, 2004 157 early modern specialists [. . .] who began their professional careers in the late 1980s and early 1990s' (pp. xi, xv). The essays within it span a wide range of authors and issues. Some offernew interpretations oftraditionally canonical texts, such as Gordon McMullan's reading of the homosocial economy within The Two Noble Kinsmen in the context of its shared authorship. Others argue for reconsideration of neglected works: in her essay on Mary Sidney, Suzanne Trill identifies a modern 'prioritising of oppositional writing' by women at the expense of genres, such as translations ofthe Psalms, that were more central to early modern culture (p. 197). Still others, such as Michael Pincombe' s discussion of early modern notions of (geographical) Lesbianism and (sexual) lesbianism, explore topics usually marginalized in the literary culture of the period. In fact, however, the essays are not so diffuse as they might at firstappear. Those that engage with female-authored texts often highlight problems of self-expression, and their solution: Susan J. Wiseman shows how female poets found an authorita? tive voice by using the figure of echo (or Echo), while Helen Hackett argues that Pamphilia's withdrawal into privacy in Urania is paradoxically enabling forher (and by extension Mary Wroth) as a writer. Ros Ballaster finds in works by Margaret Cavendish and Katherine Philips idealized, feminocentric constructions of a preCivil War order, and notes the irony that it was the collapse of that same patriarchal order that enabled their own writing. Contributors repeatedly explore how power relations affect conceptions of the self: James Knowles relates Marlowe's theatrical play upon notions of secrecy and publicity to post-Armada surveillance and paranoia; Amanda Piesse attributes contrasting notions of selfhood in The Comedy of Errors and Pericles to divergent Elizabethan and Jacobean strategies of monarchical selfpresentation . Mark Thornton Burnett links early Jacobean political anxieties?the unification of the kingdoms, the monarch's relation to his predecessors on the Eng? lish and Scottish thrones?and Marston's The Dutch Courtesan, with its imagery of bodily collapse and its contrasting fantasies of femininity. A final unifying theme is the contributors' engagement with the criticism of the previous decade. Trill's essay is mentioned above; Sasha Roberts accepts the commonplace of early modern women as associated with the private sphere, but shows how privacy could often be enabling; Kate Chedgzoy argues, in her discussion of early modern 'white women's stake in the construction of racially and sexually marked identities', that criticism has tended to focus on blackness and difference (p. 111). Throughout the book, this engagement tends to be with methodology and conclusions , rather than underlying premisses. At times the younger scholars are almost blase' about theory, notes Ann Thompson in her Afterword (p. 254); in her own Epilogue, Rose disquietingly attributes changing notions of heroism to 'the usual suspects' of socio-economic change (p. 114). It is to be hoped that the theoretical revolution which has inspired three such diverse and intelligent books will continue to interrogate itself rather than solidifying into orthodoxy. University College London Tom Rutter Write or be Written: Early Modern Women Poets and Cultural Constraints. Ed. by Barbara Smith and Ursula Appelt. Aldershot, Burlington, VT, and Singapore: Ashgate. 2001. xxiii + 28ipp. ?40. ISBN 1-84014-288-x. Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class, and Genre in theEarly Modern Closet Drama. By KarenRaber. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2001. 338 pp. ?38. ISBN 0-87413-757-8. Write or be Written is a satisfying collection of essays, organized around addressing 'the meaning of poetry in the lives of Early Modern women and the importance of 158 Reviews writing as an act of cultural engagement and commentary'. It is divided into four sections, each essay complementing the others and reinforcing the impact of the work as a whole. The collection opens with Pamela Hammons's concise historical and textual overview of the writing of Katherine Austen, showing her awareness of her role as widow and prophetess, in each case allowing her to be one step removed from the ostensible sources of her power as a writer. This essay will encourage a re-examination of Austen's work within this context. Margaret...

Erotic writing pervaded early modern English literary culture. It circulated in coterie manuscripts; it was bought and sold in printed books; it was declaimed on the public stage and embodied in private entertainments. A great deal of scholarly attention has been paid to certain manifestations of erotic writing, especially the eroticism of the public theater-an area this study addresses in later chapters. And there is no denying the eroticism of the great genres of Renaissance poetry-the Ovidian, the Petrarchan, the metaphysical.1 Although studies of Renaissance drama have not only examined the playtexts themselves but also recognized the importance of the theater as a social space, much analysis of poetic texts has paid insufficient attention to the social place of poetry in early modern culture. If one wishes to explore the nature of erotic poetry one must focus not only on texts but on the ways they circulated. Most erotic poetry in early modern England-including such now canonical texts as Donne’s elegies or Shakespeare’s sonnets-circulated primarily in manuscript, not print. Such texts were thus the product of a specific literary and cultural environment that remains unfamiliar to many modern readers who encounter these poems in anthologies of canonical texts or in carefully assembled editions of a given author’s oeuvre. An examination of surviving manuscript collections quickly reveals that in range of tone and subject matter erotic writing goes far beyond the Petrarchan discourses of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and the metaphysical wit of Donne’s “The Ecstasy.” As I will show, manuscript collections are enormously varied in their content, and their promiscuous mixing of texts creates fascinating juxtapositions-of tone, of genre, of subject matter, of poetic sophistication. An examination of the place of erotic poetry in manuscript culture not only clarifies the fundamental differences between early modern erotic writing and later forms but also leads to a better understanding of the larger social functions of erotic poetry in the early modern period. Two aspects of manuscript culture are particularly important in this context: the communal nature of manuscript production, and the role of literate women in manuscript circulation.

The editors invite your submissions to the following issues scheduled to appear in 2024. Send one hard copy of the manuscript double-spaced, including endnotes, along with an electronic copy (by e-mail attachment or in a shared folder online), following the style guidelines of the Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed., chap. 14 on documentation). More specific contributor guidelines may be consulted on the journal website. Manuscripts should not exceed 10,000 words inclusive of notes. Illustrations accompanying a manuscript should be submitted ideally in the form of TIFF digital files, and permissions for their reproduction must be provided before publication. Submissions pass through anonymous specialist review before publication. We do not consider articles that have been published elsewhere or are under simultaneous consideration with another publisher. Send to:Edited by Manuela Bragagnolo and John Jeffries MartinVolume 54 / Number 1 / January 2024Physiognomy was, as is well known, one of the most influential disciplines of the Renaissance. Based on the interpretation of bodily signs to read inner moral and intellectual inclinations, physiognomy developed in the West from the twelfth century and quickly acquired the status of a scientia normale in European universities. Drawing on both medical and divinatory origins, the science enjoyed great success in the sixteenth century, when, as Michel Foucault has famously demonstrated, the curiosity in decoding the secrets of nature placed physiognomic investigation in the framework of a new attention to signatures and sympathies. Physiognomy was grounded on the idea of a strong connection between body and soul. At its height, physiognomic pursuit functioned as a window opening onto the heart, lifting the veil of dissimulation and making visible invisible inner moral inclinations. The early modern period thus witnessed the emergence of a physiognomic mentality. But what has not been understood well so far is how jurists, judges, and more generally Renaissance legal culture theorized and made use of physiognomy and other related practices of reading the bodies or even the minds of those accused of crimes. This special issue seeks to show that late medieval and early modern culture was, indeed, deeply physiognomic not only in its literature and its theories but also in judicial practice. We invite contributions not only from scholars of the law but also from those working in any discipline (art history, history, literature, philosophy, or religion) whose work might cast light on this aspect of late medieval and early modern legal culture. Contributions may stress either courtroom practice or physiognomic theory more generally.Deadline for submissions: November 1, 2022Volume 54 / Number 2 / May 2024For this open-topic issue of the journal, the editors invite articles that are both informed by historical inquiry and alert to issues raised by contemporary theoretical debate. We expect that essays will be grounded in an intimate knowledge of a particular past and that their argumentation reveal a concern for the theoretical and methodological issues involved in interpretation. We are particularly committed to work that seeks to overcome the polarization between history and theory in the study of premodern Western culture.Submissions may be sent starting September 1, 2022Deadline for submission of manuscripts: March 1, 2023