Introduction: Film before and after New Media, Anec-notology, and the Philological Uncanny

Reviewed by: Race before Race Symposium 2019 Ana Schwartz (bio) Race before Race Symposium 2019 Center for Renaissance and Medieval Studies, University of Arizona Tempe, 01 18–19, 2019 One need not be in the methodological vanguard of early modern studies to notice that the early modern period has significant bearing on the experience of race in the American present. Many field-transforming scholars in early modern and medieval studies are, in fact, making this claim, such as those present in person or in citation at Arizona State University's Race before Race Symposium in late January 2019. Others, such as those who participated at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in Chicago two weeks prior in a late and methodologically conservative panel, "The Island Nation and Its Discontents: Transnationalism in Early Modern English Authors," all explicitly avowed in their comments during discussion and, for some, in the opening remarks of their papers the resonance they perceived between the themes of nationalism, dispossession, globality, and xenophobia appearing in their archives, on the one hand, and in daily political discourse, on the other. This resonance often emerged much more intimately and forcefully in the discussions at [End Page 872]Arizona State. Patricia Akhimie's talk on the emergence of conduct literature in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England, for example, observed how so quotidian an activity as walking might be transformed, by the pens of experts in self-fashioning in both the early modern era and the present, into an exercise of upward mobility and healthful flourishing, even as it might also be transformed, by the eyes of police coming to rest on persons marked by racial difference, into evidence of idleness, transgression, and cause for violent punishment (see Akhimie 187–91). If it seems plausible to early modernists that there exists a meaningful connection between the transformations of prior times and the exercises of power in the present, it seems equally plausible, though perhaps somewhat less obvious, that this connection is mediated directly and indirectly through the colonial settlement of America by these same Europeans and their descendants, as well as through the cultural artifacts they produced along the way. The urgent work of unpacking this plausibility within early modern studies, as expressed at the Tempe conference, encourages early Americanists to take up in our own research these questions and insights and to extend them to our unique archives. More specifically, as many of the talks at the Race before Race conference emphasized, this work prompts us to inquire into the subtler vectors—what Ann Stoler has called "the education of desire"—by which settlers brought their racism to America and normalized it. Race before Race was planned and hosted by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Ayanna Thompson and Jeffery J. Cohen, in their introductions over the course of the conference's two days, gave a history of the center and the conference. They described the center's mission, in alignment with the university's, to advance scholarship through inclusion rather than exclusivity. These organizers emphasized the aptness that such an urgently needed conference within their fields should be taking place at a public, access-minded institution rather than at the conventional (elite) venues for historical scholarship. They situated the current conference within ongoing work: there will be a second conference at the Folger Shakespeare Library on September 5–7, 2019, and the center has also debuted two new residencies for 2019–20, structuring them flexibly to be more accommodating to scholars unserved by typical residency and fellowship requirements. These reparative structures and events accumulated a critical mass in response to ongoing conditions within early modern and medieval studies made glaringly evident at conferences within those fields [End Page 873]over the past several years. 1Race before Race responded to these attacks on the legitimacy of early modern scholarship on race by affirming the intellectual necessity of projects that challenge the ability of white supremacists to cite the early modern and medieval periods of European history as pristine and exceptional examples of a blossoming civilization. This conversation has been going on for some time online, under the twitter hashtag #ShakeRace and on blogs like In...

Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England

Previous articleNext article FreeAnn Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton. Edited by Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. vii+306.William JunkerWilliam JunkerUniversity of St. Thomas Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton, editors Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton gather eleven essays (and an afterword by Nigel Smith) from established and up-and-coming scholars in early modern literary studies. The book opens with three theoretically oriented essays—by Andrew Hadfield, Michael McKeon, and Marshall Grossman—followed by a “series of focused historicist studies” arranged thematically under four subheadings: “Historicism and Theology,” “Dramatic Histories,” “Milton and the Problems of History,” and “Gendering Historicism” (12). As stated in the introduction, the goals of Rethinking Historicism are threefold: “to examine the potential problems of historicism in literary criticism, to provide a brief sense of the history of the practice from its roots in the Renaissance…and to offer examples of historicist work that will not only demonstrate the continuing vitality of this methodology, but also suggest new directions for research” (11). While every one of these essays illumines its object in new and interesting ways, in most cases the essays do not rethink historicism so much as provide exemplary instances of its current period style. A few essays examine “potential problems” in historicism, but only Marshall Grossman’s adopts a truly critical stance toward it, and only one essay—Fulton’s own—argues in sustained fashion for the Renaissance roots of historicism. Rethinking Historicism thus achieves its third goal most ably, while its pursuit of the other goals meets with less success. It is a mark of the volume’s strength, however, that its blind spots no less than its insights convey the “continuing vitality” of historicism, while underscoring two or three issues that continue to vex its methodology and practice.Of course, the realization that there are “potential problems” in historicism is not a new one. Some of the most trenchant criticisms of the New Historicism—a label that this volume tends to eschew in favor of the less contentious but correspondingly more vague “historicism”—had appeared well before the close of the last century. But aside from the occasional reference to Fredric Jameson and Alan Liu, the volume does not engage these earlier criticisms at any length.1 Rethinking Historicism does not respond to those scholars who, while skeptical of historicism, nonetheless claim to be resolutely historical in their own work.2 Nor, for that matter, does it address recent attacks on historical periodization itself.3 Rather, and a bit oddly, the book takes as its main target the New Presentism.At issue between the New Presentists and the historicists is the very availability of the past from the perspective of the present. Where historicists argue that historical difference is real and knowable, New Presentists argue that every discovery of a significant historical difference is motivated by the interests of the present. But as Andrew Hadfield points out in “Has Historicism Gone Too Far; or, Should We Return to Form?,” these claims are not logically exclusive (28–29). This observation, combined with the notorious difficulty in specifying when the present begins and the past ends, has rightly made New Presentism appear problematic to most scholars—even to those who are in other respects critical of historicism. In “The New Presentism and Its Discontents: Listening to Eastward Ho and Shakespeare’s Tempest in Dialogue,” Paul Stevens observes that not even the contributors to Grady and Hawkes’s Presentist Shakespeares are true believers in the movement.4 Presentist Shakespeares, Stevens writes, is “a collection quite extraordinary for the way in which the subversive asides of its contributors routinely deflate the larger claims of its editors” (136).At several points in the volume, though, New Presentist objections to historicism are conflated with the very different objections of Stanley Fish. Unlike the New Presentists, Fish’s objection to historicism is not that it holds historical difference to be real and knowable but that it tends—in theory and in practice—to forget that what literary critics discover about the past should be ancillary to, rather than substitute for, their illumination of the “aesthetic structure” of the text or performance (135). In fact, Fish’s argument is conceptually closer to that of the historian Gabrielle Spiegel, who is quoted in the volume’s introduction. For Spiegel, the fundamental problem in New Historicism is the “refusal to differentiate text from context or to establish an intelligible relation between them that does not lead to their mutual implication in a textually conceived universe” (7).5 In other words, literary critics who repudiate the primacy of aesthetic structures in their pursuit of historical knowledge are likely to approach history itself as though it possessed its own kind of aesthetic structure. Downplaying the poetic integrity of individual texts paradoxically gives rise to the “textually conceived universe” of cultural poetics.Perhaps Rethinking Historicism directs itself against this strange hybrid of New Presentism and Stanley Fish’s brand of formalism because historicist scholarship has already assimilated most of the earlier charges that have been leveled against it. Several of the essays suggest as much. In “Historicizing Satisfaction in Shakespeare’s Othello,” for example, Heather Hirschfield begins by arguing that a classic complaint about the New Historicism—its “neglect of the role of religion in the daily life as well as in the politics of the period” (113)—is belied by the “recent cottage industry of studies on literature and religion” that have emerged over the past two decades (114). In the remainder of her insightful essay, Hirschfield proceeds in supererogatory fashion to show how Reformation controversies over the theological concept of satisfaction inform the language and plot of Shakespeare’s Othello. Likewise, essays by Martin Dzelzainis and Michael McKeon show that contemporary historicist practice has moved beyond the old contention that New Historicism depends on a synchronous or structuralist depiction of history in which social energies are circulated but change is never made. In his provocative essay, “Milton, Foucault, and the New Historicism,” Dzelzainis acknowledges the partial truth of this contention but argues, following Catherine Belsey, that it reflects the influence of Talcott Parsons and Clifford Geertz rather than, as is usually maintained, the Foucault of The Order of Things (1973) and Discipline and Punish (1977).6 And Michael McKeon, whose “Theory and Practice in Historical Method” is the most challenging of the volume’s essays and one of its best, offers a subtle reconstruction of Marx’s own historical method in which “diachronic and synchronic analyses are not ‘absolute’ but dialectically intertwined” (59).Finally, the two most intellectually rewarding essays of the volume show that historicist literary scholarship does not preclude, but draws strength from, plain old-fashioned close reading—what Reuben Brower called “reading in slow motion.”7 Thomas Fulton’s piece, “The Politics of Renaissance Historicism: Valla, Erasmus, Colet, and More,” traces the fascinating process whereby the humanist reception of classical authors, and Seneca in particular, gave rise to a series of novel interpretations of Romans and other politically sensitive biblical texts that, in turn, informed Erasmus’s and More’s theorization of panegyric. And Sharon Achinstein’s “Medea’s Dilemma: Politics and Passion in Milton’s Divorce Tracts” looks to “the rhetoric of citation in one of Milton’s polemical title pages” (182). The passage from Euripides’s Medea that precedes Milton’s Tetrachordon, she argues, implies an entire “aesthetic of citation” that bears directly on Milton’s passionate defense of human freedom (182).These two essays impress not only because of the analytic pressure that Fulton and Achinstein bring to bear on their texts. Additionally—and relatedly—both authors stretch the temporal boundaries of these texts’ “historical context,” a phrase that the volume as a whole might have subjected to greater scrutiny. We discover that Paul, Nero, and Seneca are as much a part of Erasmus’s world as are Henry VIII and Thomas More and that Euripides’s words weigh as heavily on Milton’s mind as do those of his more temporally proximate opponents. The radical extension of context in these two essays never loses sight of the contemporary pressures of the early sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. Instead, Fulton and Achinstein persuasively demonstrate the complexity and range of ideas communicated by authors of the caliber of Erasmus, More, and Milton. And so when Fulton, in an obvious rejoinder to Fish, claims near the end of his essay that “neither historicism nor politics is guilty of diminishing the value of the text as an interpretive object,” it is hard to disagree with him, at least in theory (105).In practice, however, the truth of Fulton’s assertion is less certain. For a historicism that emphasizes “the text as an interpretable object” to the extent that Fulton’s and Achinstein’s does lays bare the inadequacy of what, in other historicist scholarship, continues to pass for the historical context of the text itself. Fundamentally, this tension within historicism arises from two different approaches to literary or poetic form, which Michael McKeon helpfully defines as “the more or less ostensible patterning of…language” within a text (44). To be sure, one of historicism’s chief accomplishments has been to alert us to the ways in which a text’s form registers and responds to the historical pressures surrounding its time of composition. But, as Fulton and Achinstein illustrate, it sometimes happens that closely attending to the form of a text results in our having to alter, rather than simply appeal to, what we thought we knew about its context. On the basis of the essays collected in Rethinking Historicism, though, I think it is fair to say that mainstream historicist scholarship continues to privilege the explanatory resources of context over the formal capacity of texts to test its adequacy. Why should this be the case?The volume suggests that an adequate response to this question requires that we understand contemporary historicist scholarship both in light of its own methodological development and in light of the disciplinary and institutional contexts within which its practice is embedded. I will treat each in turn. As has often been noted, the ambitious claims of New Historicist work in the 1980s and 1990s depended on a constriction of both the temporal and ideational aspects of context. This allowed the New Historicists to discover a small but compelling set of issues that, at a given moment in time, were said to have structured the cultural productions of a society at every level. Later, in response to criticism issuing from within and without the field, New Historicism limited the scope of its argument and gradually abandoned its theoretical basis in the historiography of early Foucault (pace Dzelzainis). The earlier New Historicist conception of con-text as formally indistinguishable from text came to be replaced with a much weaker, but simultaneously more determinative, conception of context as the set of conditions that preexists the text and yet is temporally contiguous with the moment of its creation—what used to be called its background. Contemporary historicism is thus marked by recurring attempts to specify a conception of context that neither is overly determined by a particular theory of historiography—structuralist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, queer, feminist, and so on—nor reduces to a naive appeal to the brute facts.Something of the resulting dynamic is captured in Paul Stevens’s nimble discussion of the interplay between theory and fact in recent interpretations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest—a play that looks very different when read through a historicism informed by Edward Said’s Orientalism rather than through one informed by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British travelogues. Stevens’s essay excellently models what he calls the “dialogic relationship between historical research and theory,” in which each is employed to offset the limitations of the other (153). However, without minimizing his achievement, I think it bears noting that it is only after Stevens adjudicates the claims of theoretical sophistication and historical fact that he mentions “the rhetorical constitution or ‘literariness’ of texts,” which, it turns out, is also important for our discipline (153). Stevens’s essay reaffirms “what makes our discipline so distinctive” at the same time that it relegates—not, I think, intentionally—the problems posed for historicism by the “‘literariness’ of texts” to second place.Indeed, in the current volume only McKeon seems fully to acknowledge that the methodological problem of context is both intrinsic to and yet potentially debilitating for historicist literary scholarship. He admits, for example, that there exists within literary studies a burgeoning dissatisfaction with “the reifying tendencies of periodization,” but he responds by attributing such dissatisfaction to a misconception of historical contextualization or categorization, which—he explains—is not a “dogmatic strategy for closing down understanding” but is rather “the first step in opening it up to questions that otherwise would never be asked” (60). McKeon’s summation of the important role of contextualization is as good as we are likely to get, but it might itself be accused of idealizing the professional context within which historicist scholarship actually takes place.This point is brought home in Andrew Hadfield’s realist assessment of the disciplinary pressures at work in historicism’s continuing dominance over the field. Some opponents of historicism, Hadfield notes, claim that the ongoing production of narrowly historicist scholarship is a function of junior academics’ “anxious quest for intellectual honors and preferment” (24). After all, part of the power of historicist methodology is that “it can be learned, repeated, and endlessly reproduced,” so that anybody needing another publication on her curriculum vitae might, for example, “rea[d] through The Faerie Queene one more time to find yet another possible allusion to kern, gallowglasses, or a crannog in Coleraine that Spenser might once have seen when he possibly traveled north with Lord Grey who might have taken him with him” (24–25). This wonderfully absurd hypothetical concludes with an equally wonderful quip: “The logic of the past conditional can become very wearying” (25). But is Hadfield here speaking in the voice of his opponents or in his own voice? It is difficult to tell.Hadfield presents the opposition as holding that “young academics” trained by historicists “realize that they should not rock the boat if they desire a foot on the lowest rung of the ladder, let alone professional success” (24). And yet, on the next page, we encounter a much bolder set of academics: “The need to find obscure allusions in texts in order to get published, the need to specialize too narrowly, and the absence of the bigger picture has led many to revolt against what they see as the prevailing professional ethos in the present” (25). The tension between these two sentences resolves itself in the realization that those who are in “revolt” against “the prevailing professional ethos” are a different class of scholars from those “young academics” who—the revolutionaries claim—realize they should not rock the boat. Those in revolt are themselves senior members of the profession, scholars who at least approximate the status that Hadfield (rightly) enjoys. On the one hand, it is not surprising that the battles waged over historicism should be fought by senior scholars—for these scholars are, all things considered, better equipped to fight them. On the other hand, though, the instability of Hadfield’s voice over these pages might suggest that, whether or not those senior scholars who are in revolt against historicism are right about its methodological limitations, their perception of the institutional conditions that reinforce its present influence—especially on younger academics—is truer than we would like to admit. The conservative effects of professionalization combined with the ever-increasing expectations of scholarly production might very well ensure the continuing relevance of historicism regardless of whatever problems it faces or avoids having to face.As I noted above, the single essay in the volume that does not end up defending historicism is penned by Marshall Grossman, who passed away before Rethinking Historicism was published. It seems fitting, then, to conclude by acknowledging the challenge posed by Grossman’s “Limiting History” for contemporary historicist scholarship. In large part a development and refinement of “the ethics of reading” Grossman has long championed, “Limiting History” posits a qualitative distinction between “understanding the historical nature of literary texts”—a task that requires placing “renewed emphasis on an artistic hearing of literature that attends to the exigent and nonsystematic experiences of writing and reading”—and “the recent preoccupation with historicizing literary texts,” which, Grossman states, “renders art documentary and instrumental when it should be proactive” (66).8 This distinction turns, finally, on the question of agency: understanding the “historical nature of literary texts” requires that we affirm their capacity to act on us in the present, whereas “historicizing” a literary text requires that we bracket the capacity of the text to so act. The historicized text is reduced to an “instrument” or “document” that “witnesses, records, and pretends to transparency” but that is no longer proactive for us readers (70).One of Grossman’s concerns is that a pedagogy dominated by historicist concerns is self-defeating. As he puts it, “helping students become aware of” Paradise Lost’s deep investment in seventeenth-century political and religious controversy is “part of the substance and pleasure of teaching them, but the case for them taking the trouble to learn these things must stand on the premise that, embedded though the poem may be in the time and place of its production, there remains also a poem to be read in our time and place” (68). Why should students bother learning to read Milton in the first place, in other words, if all that his poetry does is “witness the context of its own creation” (68)?More important, though, is Grossman’s argument that historicist methodology often ignores what is perhaps the central mystery of a literary text’s actual “historical nature.” The mystery is that texts like Paradise Lost and the Odyssey continue to move us when we read them in the present and that they do so even if we have no particular stake in the controversies of seventeenth-century European Christianity or in the development of archaic Greek paganism. “What is it,” Grossman asks, “about literary works that remains active and potent after the historical facts have been naturalized?” (69). To ask such a question is not, for Grossman, to seek out an ahistorical formalism; quite the opposite, it is to inquire after the conditions—in the literary work, in us, and in the history of each—that make possible our experience of being moved, intellectually and emotionally, by a piece of writing from the past. To do this is to practice an ethics of reading: “What I am proposing as the proper work of literary criticism makes an ethical turn toward understanding the mechanisms that facilitate the transfer of the seductions of the will at the limit of history, from writer to text to reader and to writer as reader” (77). Grossman’s own account of these “mechanisms,” which emerges through his microanalysis of Milton’s language, is not always fully persuasive. But in a volume in which the project of rethinking historicism often becomes the project of it, Grossman’s essay out simply for having posed a question that no one thought to Liu, “The of The New Historicism,” The argument of this essay is in on Historicism and the of Press, Fredric of the New Historicism may be in or, The of York: and Renaissance of Press, in Renaissance and Its York: For a discussion of the issues by and see “What New “The in After and of and is the most of the many essays in this issue of the of and also and and Renaissance in University Press, Grady and Presentist Shakespeares, on Shakespeare York: editors from Gabrielle Spiegel, Historicism, and the of the Text in the “Historicizing New Historicism,” in Grady and Presentist Shakespeares, in in In of A to Reuben Brower and York: Marshall Grossman, Renaissance in Renaissance Marshall Grossman York: Previous articleNext article by on this For to no articles this

Toward an Early Modern Theory of TraumaConscience in “Richard III” Zackariah C. Long (bio) The title of this essay presents a paradox, the implications of which have yet to be explored in early modern literary studies. The use of the term trauma (from Greek “wound”) to describe a mental rather than physical injury is a relatively recent phenomenon.1 Early modern medical and philosophical texts do not speak of trauma in explaining the perturbations of the mind.2 In a literal sense, then, there is no such thing as an “early modern theory of trauma.” On the other hand, increasing numbers of critics have turned to contemporary trauma theory to interpret early modern works afresh.3 While few would question the validity of applying contemporary theory to early modern texts, usually such efforts are accompanied by an attempt to historicize the terms and concepts in question. Thus Alan Bray, in using “homosexuality” to describe male same-sex relations in Renaissance England, is careful to distinguish his use of the term from modern notions of sexuality, and Barbara Freedman, in adopting postmodern film theory to analyze “the gaze” in Shakespearean comedy, begins by considering the views of Renaissance polymath Leon Battista Alberti on perspective.4 However, no critic has yet considered how early moderns explained, or even if they recognized the symptoms that we now classify as “traumatic.”5 What follows is an attempt to explore some of the prehistory of contemporary trauma theory from the ruins of what we might anachronistically call “early modern psychology.” Specifically, I examine early modern [End Page 49] casuistical literature—religious writings about conscience—to show that much of what is now discussed in psychiatric and scientific circles concerning trauma once belonged to different lexical territory, literature about the soul.6 Indeed, in exploring a particular species of trauma—“perpetration-induced traumatic stress,” or trauma experienced by those who have inflicted suffering on others—one discovers that early modern casuistical literature offers surprisingly evocative accounts of the damage done to the soul by harming others.7 Our guide to this literature is the most influential of the English casuists, William Perkins, whose works inaugurated an explosion of casuistical texts in the seventeenth century.8 I aim to show that Perkins’s reflections on conscience can illuminate representations of trauma in early modern literature, as demonstrated through an analysis of Shakespeare’s Richard of Gloucester in Richard III. The Wounded Conscience In early modern psychology, humans were believed to be the conjunction of an immortal soul a mortal body.9 To the body belonged those things humans had in common with beasts, such as sensation; to the soul belonged those things humans held in common with God, such as understanding. Conscience was a faculty of the soul and part of understanding.10 Perkins defines conscience as “a thing placed by God in the midst between him and man as an arbitrator to give sentence and to pronounce either with man or against man unto God.” In this sense, conscience is “a little god sitting in the middle of men’s hearts” or “another person within.”11 This notion of an internalized other is nicely captured by the term itself, which combines con (with) and science (knowledge). Literally speaking, conscience is “knowledge-with”: the being with whom conscience shares knowledge is God, and the knowledge shared between them is the moral law as expressed in the biblical injunction to love God and neighbor. For Perkins, this is true even for those who have never been exposed to Scripture. Following the Pauline dictum that even the Gentiles have “the law written in their hearts” (Romans 2:15), Perkins insists that “conscience is in all reasonable creatures” lest anyone “imagine that some men by nature have conscience in them, some none at all.”12 Conscience performs its role as “arbitrator” in two main ways. First, it records the soul’s thoughts and deeds; and second, it judges them in accordance [End Page 50] with God’s law. “In this respect,” says Perkins, conscience “may fitly be compared to a notary or a register that hath always the pen in his hand, to note and record whatsoever is said...

Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in the Medieval and Early Modern Imagination

Reviewed by: Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England Dan Mills Jennifer C. Vaught, Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England (Surrey, UK: Ashgate 2010) 243 pp., ill. Jennifer Vaught’s new collection, Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England, includes ten essays that engage with canonical and non-canonical sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts in the context of their depictions of disease rhetoric. The authors of these essays are very prominent early modern literary critics and their essays demonstrate, firstly, their expertise with the texts they discuss, and secondly, very illuminating examinations of how these texts expose “rhetorics” of illness and disease. Moreover, these potentially arcane analyses of yet another literary trend lead to a much more important understanding of early modernity. As Vaught mentions in her introduction, “writers from antiquity to early modernity often created bodily metaphors, analogies, and allegories demonstrating links they perceived between the microcosm and macrocosm” (6). Indeed, the essays collected in this volume do a fine job illustrating how these literary devices reflected greater concerns beyond those of the literature and literary circles in early modern England. In light of the increasing interest in monstrosity and monstrous births in early modern literary studies, this volume is timely and a must-read for anyone working in these sub-fields as well as for anyone interested in new developments in scholarship on major literary texts. Vaught has divided the ten essays in this collection into four parts, the first of which is entitled “Reading the Instructive Language of the Body in the Middle Ages.” In the first essay of this section, “Episcopal Antinomies of the Early Middle Ages,” Lisi Oliver and Maria Mahoney examine anatomy in the early medieval world through the writings of St. Ambrose and Hrabanus Maurus. Next to the ideas of these clerics, Oliver and Mahoney examine approaches to describing the body from physical and spiritual perspectives. As is the case with many of the essays in this collection, this article successfully negotiates the connection between inner worlds of subjectivity and their manifestations in outer appearance. In “‘This Disfigured People’: Representation of Sin as Pathological Bodily and Mental Affliction in Dante’s Inferno XXIX–XXX,” James Nohrnberg engages with the inner/outer motif in a brief section of Dante’s Inferno by arguing that “leprosy is a figure for all sin, and fever is a symptom of a host of potentially mortal diseases. Thus Dante’s comparison re-licenses a common enough medieval reading of physical ills as symptomatic or moral ones” (48). Nohrnberg shows great facility in close reading this very brief section of the Inferno, and the essay demonstrates greater significance than merely literary analysis in its discussion of moral theories contemporary to Dante. In “‘My body to warente ...’: Linguistic Corporeality in Chaucer’s Pardoner,” Laila Abdalla argues that “Through the body and linguistic performance of the Pardoner, Chaucer debates whether a mal-intentioned but eloquent speaker may nevertheless be a vehicle for the numinous message” and analyzes this within the context of Augustinian hermeneutics of “language meaning and body” (65, 66). Together these three essays do a fine job introducing the reader to the legacy of “disease rhetoric” left before the early modern period began in England. The essays in part 2, “Imaginative Discourses of Sexuality, Delightful and Dangerous,” address the early modern reception of sexualized healthy bodies (12). In “Spenser’s Crowd of Cupids and the Language of Pleasure,” Spenserian [End Page 294] William Oram argues that a specific stanza in Edmund Spenser’s Epithalamion “is at once an attempt to valorize sexual pleasure, and to demonstrate how poetry concerned with sexual love can nonetheless remain chaste” (88). In “Cordelia’s Can’t: Rhetorics of Reticence and (Dis)ease in King Lear,” feminist critic Emma L. Rees argues that in Lear, “Cordelia’s inability to speak in the face of her father’s direct entreaty is ... problematical [because] in the world of the play, soma, psyche, and language are imbricated in a taxingly provocative relationship such that (dis)ease in both microcosm and macrocosm is the only logical outcome of the tragedy” (105, Rees...

Reassesses Cartesian subjectivity as an important critical lens for the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries A comprehensive discussion of the importance of late medieval philosophies on mind and human causality, and early modern Cartesian rationalism, as they apply to early modern drama Contextualizes early modern drama within these intellectual histories Draws particular focus on theories of subjectivity and materiality Most scholars of early modern English literature consider Cartesian rationalism to be a poor theoretical lens. Though René Descartes figures as one of the most important philosophers in the early modern period, and in the history of philosophy itself, he has received scorn from literary scholars of the Renaissance who have become skeptical of “heroes of subjectivity.” Cartesian Theaters, Shakespearean Minds challenges the commonplace dichotomy between Cartesian subjectivity and early modern material culture and reconsiders Descartes as a foundational figure in early modern literary studies. It corrects outdated readings by scholars that would position him as a champion of disembodied mind. Instead, Nathan Pensky argues that both Descartes and Shakespeare, as well as several of the latter’s contemporaries, draw from overlapping philosophical histories, and that the mind-body problem as evident in early modern drama clearly anticipates Cartesian thought.

Early modern writers (such as John Donne) were fascinated by space: literary, textual, urban, rural, global and cosmic. This fascination is reflected in a growing interest in the concept of space in early modern literary studies. Encompassing literature that depicts both rural and urban environments this has been called the ‘spatial turn’. Although it developed from an historicist approach to literature the spatial turn shares common concerns with ecocriticism such as a commitment to interdisciplinary studies and an interest in the relationship of literature to its environment. Historicist critics are most concerned with the cultural environment while ecocritics are interested in the natural world and the ways in which literary texts express humanity’s relationship with it. Examining the development of ecocriticism from its inception in the 1990s reveals productive cross‐fertilisation between the two critical approaches. Ecocritics perceive the 16th and 17th centuries as the period when representations of humanity’s relationship with the natural world changed from a model of unity to one of separation, leading directly to the environmental degradation of the earth and the present ecological crisis. The combination of an ecocritica perspective with historicist readings resonates with the preoccupations of early modern writers such as Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick and William Shakespeare and (in particular) gives fresh insights into the genre of pastoral and the relationship between culture/art and nature.

This essay surveys recent work by literary critics on early modern English history writing and attempts to provide a perspective on the relatively marginal status of historiography within early modern literary studies. In associating the emergence of humanism closely with the beginning of early modernity, historians and literary critics have created a division within early modern historiography that elevates the “humanist” history at the expense of the chronicle, often dismissively characterized as a “medieval” literary form and neglected as a focus of study. This division has in turn produced a narrowly specific understanding of the forms of writing that qualify as humanist histories, omitting drama, philosophical dialogues, and much of the period's Latin‐language historiography. Many contemporary critics, however, have undertaken projects that attempt both to broaden current understandings of humanist historical thought and to integrate chronicle texts more fully into the study of early modern literature. These projects include formal analytical studies that survey more and more genres of writing as well as new editions of early modern historiographical texts, produced across a wide range of media.

Steven Wagschal’s Minding Animals in the Old and New Worlds. A Cognitive Historical Analysis is an essential volume, the first in Hispanism to combine and apply Cognitive and Animal Studies approaches to literature of early modern Spain and the New World. The meticulous analyses reveal Professor Wagschal’s command of pertinent theoretical literature on animal cognition, which he applies skillfully to a wide range of primary sources from both continents.This study’s objectives are stated clearly in the introduction and reiterated at critical junctures: “The overarching thesis of this book is simple: People tend to conceptualize the minds of animals in ways that reflect their own uses for the animal, the manner in which they interact with the animal, and the place in which the animal lives. Often this has little if anything to do with the cognitive abilities of the animal as understood scientifically” (4). This premise is deceptively straightforward and well known in Animal Studies, a wide-ranging multidisciplinary field that in many ways predates studies of animal cognition. A foundational tenet of Animal Studies is that human views and the resulting treatment of non-humans cannot be uncoupled from our historically often utilitarian, culture-bound attitudes toward animals as companion species. Minding Animals delves into these perceptions in early modern Hispanic writings and gives prominence to the complementary notion that human conceptualizations and attitudes are rarely founded on science-based discoveries in animal cognition.Wagschal examines fictional and non-fictional texts from a historical perspective for their implicit and explicit ways of “minding” or considering animals. He heeds both the modes of interaction between animals and humans (such as farmer/farmed, hunter/hunted), as well as the animals’ habitational parameters, such as the location and conditions under which the species generally lives. By reading a series of medieval and renaissance writings to learn how people regarded animals and animal minds, Minding Animals opens up original lines of inquiry on canonical texts, such as medieval fables, the Cantigas de Nuestra Señora, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Sahagún’s Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, and other works. MindingAnimals also examines non-canonical texts, among them early modern treatises on husbandry and hunting, as well as works of natural history. These approaches are especially innovative among cognitivist literary scholars, who tend not to include non-human animals within their purview.Composed of an introduction, four substantial chapters and a brief epilogue, Minding Animals constructs and fleshes out a history of writers during the chosen period who created the “first realistic, scientifically-plausible representations of non-human animal phenomenal consciousness” (9). The concise introduction lays the theoretical foundations from animal cognition “in order to ascertain which are realistic or plausible representations of animal minds and which are not” (5). Wagschal thus presents the concepts that guide the subsequent analysis. “Constructive anthropomorphism” makes informed, careful inferences about animals’ minds based on knowledge of their species-specific behaviors, a process defended in recent years by ethologists and philosphers such as Frans De Waal and Kristin Andrews. In contrast, “anthropectomy” completely denies to animals anthropomorphic traits such as cognitive abilities. “Gratuitous anthropomorphism”, on the other hand, is scientifically inappropriate or impossible, such as when in fables animals speak and act as humans in disguise.Chapter one explores how medieval Christian and didactic texts such as Marian and hagiographic narratives, bestiaries, fables and exempla do not conceive animals exclusively as symbols, as has been conventionally maintained. As Wagschal asserts, “To reduce the writing on animals of this vast swathe of textual and artistic practices from many places over ten centuries to the merely ‘symbolic’ overlooks important ways in which symbolism reveals significant aspects of human cognitive functioning and in which the various kinds of symbolic representation reveal a plethora of ideas about animal cognition” (23–24). Consonant with that view, Wagschal points out many instances in which medieval authors take the perspective of animals, paying attention to their mode of being and way of life.The next chapter examines how real living animals are considered and exploited and their minds conceived in early modern treatises on animal husbandry and hunting. This chapter focuses on animals’ modes of interaction with humans—as fellow hunters, prey, food or farm laborers—and habitational parameters to determine how writers on the topics of hunting (Argote de ­Molina, Miquel Agustí, Martínez de Espinar) and husbandry (Alonso de Herrera) anthropomorphize non-human animals according to their perceived cognitive strengths or lack thereof, as well as according to their familiarity. Among these non-human animals, dogs and horses are the most written about at the time. Wagschal richly details how they were prized for their superior intellect and human-like emotions, therefore evoking greater empathy, respect and even love.Chapter three travels from Spain to the New World, and its analysis of Gessner’s Historia animalium, Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias, Fernández de Oviedo’s Historia natural and other texts is illuminating in terms of how New World animals entered into the consciousness of Old World conceptualizations. Wagschal analyzes with profound originality the process by which Spanish and criollo authors conceptualized the minds of animals they had never encountered before, such as the jaguar, sloth and monkey. Persuasive here and in other parts of the book are Wagshcal’s observations regarding the invisibility of fish due to their habitat. In other words, because fish live underwater and thus are out of sight (as well as being a tasty source of nutrition to humans), they “are literally out of mind and entirely anthropectomized, regardless of any actual abilities” (182). This chapter is a necessary follow-up to Abel Alves’s foundational book, The Animals of Spain (2011).Minding Animals’ findings and beliefs held over the centuries about animal cognition converge in the final chapter on Cervantes and animal cognition, which is a fine introduction to the topic. Wagschal is an established Cervantes scholar, and chapter four’s analysis of that author’s implicit anthropectomy and constructive anthropomorphism adds a new facet to his expertise. Wagschal does not examine all the animals in Don Quixote, and that is not his focus. Instead he concentrates on selected episodes in that novel and other works (Persiles y Sigismunda, El coloquio de los perros) that place animals in the foreground. His centering on the various animals’ sensory experience (olfaction, vision, and so forth) and agency represents an informed, groundbreaking development within Cervantism. Wagschal thus builds a convincing case for claiming that Cervantes creates the first embodied animal minds in literature.Echoing Mark Bekoff’s Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions, and Heart, Wagschal’s Minding Animals is an empathetic book from a compassionate scholar who obviously “minds” animals, in the sense that he not only constructs their cognitive faculties but that he also calls attention to their condition and treatment. Wagschal is true to his initial position: “I hold that scientific cognitive models of animals, informed by folk animal psychology and constructive anthropomorphism, ultimately make the best case for animal studies and animal rights and protections” (16). This insertion of the author’s own ethical parameters and engagement with animal welfare (as opposed to the more conventional critical or theoretical distance expected in literary studies) is a hallmark of Animal Studies and is welcome in Minding Animals, especially in the Epilogue. As Wagschal concludes there, “Once the research into the cognitive abilities of so many non-human animals becomes even more nuanced, an object of reflection by moral philosophers, and better assimilated by the public, it is possible that we will look back in horror at how so many animals were treated as mere property throughout history and today” (247). Harking back to Jeremy Bentham’s famous statement, “The question is not, ‘Can they reason?’ nor, ‘Can they talk?’ but ‘Can they suffer?’”, Wagschal concludes that “A major step in recognizing this potential moral wrongdoing is carefully considering the Umwelt and the sensorial and cognitive abilities of non-human animals, and exploring through writing their consciousness, suffering, thoughts, motivations, and emotions” (247).A consideration this reviewer has in mind that does not detract from this study’s ample relevance is that similar to other cognitivists, Wagschal at times appears reluctant to grant theory of mind to animal behaviors (admittedly, this is a controversial topic). For example, in the discussion of deer in chapter two, why is it surprising that deer use the evasion tactics noted in Agustí’s Llibre del secrets d’agricultura, casa rústica y pastoril? It would have been productive for the author to carry his observations of early modern writers’ use of constructive anthropomorphism into an explicit statement that would show greater faith in animals’ perceptions and cognitive capacities.This pioneering study, written by a respected expert in other aspects of early modern Spanish literature, helps to re-center the animal in the Middle Ages and Renaissance by bringing Hispanic Literary Studies, Cognitive Literary Historicism and Animal Studies into an extremely productive dialogue that will be of considerable relevance to specialists in those disciplines. Not only does Minding Animals help to privilege animals in research on cognition and early modern literary studies, but by suggesting appropriate ways in which to mind animals—modes that adopt an animal-centric perspective—it is also a robust call for constructive anthropomorphism, following the lines of explicit animal rights advocacy that has matured since the 1975 publication of Peter Singer’s controversial Animal Liberation. Wagschal has thus contributed to a specific refocusing that will enhance our appreciation of early modern Spanish-language literature and inevitably introduce it to wider audiences.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewTimothy Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England. Timothy Rosendale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. x+237.Hannibal HamlinHannibal HamlinOhio State University Search for more articles by this author Ohio State UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAmong subjects overlooked in early modern literary studies, surely one of the most egregious oversights is the Book of Common Prayer (BCP). As well as shaping English religious belief and practice from 1549, this was perhaps the best-known anthology of English literature in the period, if we include as “literature” prayers, responses, collects, Psalms and biblical readings, and liturgies. Thomas Cranmer, the author of much of this literature (authorship here involving also translation, adaptation, and compilation), was one of the greatest prose stylists in English. He also had a brilliant sense of drama: the liturgies of morning and evening prayer, the Communion service, burial, and Ash Wednesday constitute powerful participatory performances, and they are second only to the Bible in shaping the English language and its literature. Timothy Rosendale is right to underscore the importance of the BCP as well as to decry its critical neglect.1Rosendale's Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England is in part a response to the central argument of the only other recent literary study addressing the BCP, Ramie Targoff 's Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (University of Chicago Press, 2001). While Targoff aims to correct earlier overstated claims for Protestant individuality and inwardness, Rosendale aims to correct what he perceives as Targoff 's overstated claims about the centrality to English Protestantism of outward performance in public worship and its shaping of individual belief. So the critical pendulum swings. Targoff is right that Protestants were not just isolated individuals and that the common experience of worship through the BCP services shaped belief as well as practice. But Rosendale is right to swing the pendulum back toward the middle, an appropriately Anglican position, pointing to the “ways in which [English Protestant] reform both subjected people to new structures of authority and recognized them as autonomous subjects” and demonstrating that the “textual matrix” for this complex centrifugal and centripetal movement was the BCP, which “held in productive tension both the imperatives of the hierarchical nation and the prerogatives of the evangelical soul” (4–5).The first half of Rosendale's book focuses on the BCP itself, and the second examines its influence on English secular writers. Rosendale summarizes the history of the BCP in several “interludes.” Chapter 1 explores the role of the BCP in creating an English national identity. Rosendale describes the role of the BCP in furthering Henry VIII's Erastian program to establish an English church, equating church and state, and subordinating private belief to public conformity. The use of the English language in the BCP was also crucial in establishing a national identity, as John Foxe recognized in his Actes and Monuments. (Here Rosendale challenges Richard Helgerson's Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England [University of Chicago Press, 1992].) Chapter 2, by contrast, focuses on individual identity, beginning with the “explosion of self-authorizing discourse” generated by English Bibles (Rosendale paraphrasing Robert Weimann, 76). Rosendale shows how the use of English in the BCP (which he argues everyone could understand) allowed everyone to participate in worship but also encouraged individual interpretation. The BCP's Communion service, which rejected both Catholic transubstantiation and Zwinglian literalism, relocated the sacrifice of the Mass inward to the heart of the individual believer. And although the wording of the service, especially the consecration of the elements, preserved a “conservative ambiguity,” it effectively turned transubstantiation into trope (93–95). For Rosendale, this is perhaps the most important feature of the BCP, its “figural, interpretive, readerly conception of the sacrament,” which turned sacraments into signs that demanded interpretation (107).Chapters 3 and 4 explore the literary ramifications of the BCP's radical focus on representation or signification. Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poetry (1595), in Rosendale's view, argued for the redeeming power of the figurative and derived this understanding of fiction and interpretation as “vehicles of truth” from the BCP (140). Rosendale believes Shakespeare's English histories were indebted to the BCP's “reconfiguration of representation, authority, and national identity,” moving away from notions of divine right toward a celebration of the successful kings (like Henry IV and V) who could play roles and “manipulate signs” (176). In Paradise Lost (1667), as elsewhere, Milton absolutely rejects liturgy as popish and evil, but Rosendale proposes that he nevertheless owes to the BCP his reconception of the Fall as a failure of reading. What must be read is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, a “pure sign” (borrowing from Gilles Deleuze) “of the hierarchical difference between God and humanity” (185). Satan, Eve, and Adam all misread the tree as having to do with actual knowledge, a notion that derives from the Catholic misreading (as understood by Protestants) of the Bread and Wine as actual flesh and blood. Rosendale's final literary example is Hobbes, whose “rigorous separation of belief and action” required outward conformity to preserve the order of the state but nevertheless allowed for freedom of inward belief (196). This, Rosendale argues, is exactly the dynamic of the BCP.This is a provocative book that makes a useful contribution to our understanding about the interdependence of outward conformity and individual freedom in English Protestantism. Rosendale's focus is neither exactly literary nor historical, however, and the resulting argument is therefore somewhat superficial from both perspectives. From the literary perspective, relatively little of the BCP is actually analyzed in detail (a summary of the 1549 contents is confined to an appendix). As for its literary influence, the sections on Milton and Shakespeare in particular are not likely to satisfy specialists on these authors. Shakespeare's Henry V, for example, is hardly an unambivalent celebration of secular realpolitik, and to argue that the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. 2:9; Paradise Lost 4.221 has “Tree of knowledge”) has nothing to do with knowledge seems itself a failure of reading. Rosendale's arguments for the dependence of these various authors on the BCP are also not fully convincing, depending purely on analogy. On Henry V, for example, he suggests, “The hero-king's authority, like the Prayerbook Eucharist, is thus constructed fundamentally on an inclusive and unifying sense of signification, and on the communal participation of subjects in these representations” (173). A better case could be made on the basis of shared language or other more concrete links. Rosendale's interpretation of the BCP also seems to shift according to the needs of particular claims. In chapter 2, for instance, Rosendale recognizes that the English theology of the Eucharist, as expressed in the BCP, was essentially ambiguous, denying Catholic transubstantiation but allowing for a range of views between Lutheran “real presence” and Zwinglian memorialism. But Rosendale's arguments about Sidney, Shakespeare, and Milton depend on an entirely Zwinglian reading, reducing sacraments to tropes. For most English worshippers, the eucharistic elements were never merely tropes or signs, at least not in the sense understood by modern semiotics. Finally, Rosendale's analysis of the BCP focuses largely on the 1549 edition and its cultural context, but the religious, ecclesiastical, and political situations in the 1570s, 1590s, 1640s, and 1660s, when Sidney, Shakespeare, Hobbes, and Milton were writing, were quite different and demand a more historicized examination of changing ideas of sacramental theology and liturgical practices.As history, Rosendale's study is also problematic. For one thing, treating the BCP exclusively as a written text fails to recognize that only in performance was it actually experienced in church. Much of the BCP was sung, for instance, so one ought to consider the experience of singing and its various forms found in practice (choral, congregational, responsorial). Rosendale is hardly alone among interdisciplinarily inclined literary scholars in ignoring music, but music is especially important to his argument. As Nicholas Temperley has shown, worship practice varied from church to church, especially between cathedrals and collegiate chapels and parish churches, but also from city to country. Congregants at St. Paul's, London, with its professional cathedral choir, participated to a much lesser degree than did those at St. Mary Magdalene, Stoke Lyne.2 Furthermore, in some churches, services were not performed in English; this challenges somewhat Rosendale's arguments for a single national identity created by worship in the vernacular. Judith Maltby points out that the definitive study of the “availability of the Prayer Book for the laity” has not yet been done, and this is true of both non-English and English editions.3 In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the BCP was translated into Welsh (1551), Irish (1551), and French (1553, for use in Calais and the Channel Islands). A Manx translation was made but not printed, since apparently Manx clergymen preferred to translate the BCP extempore.4 In the sixteenth century and even more so in the seventeenth, the English monarch ruled many non-English speakers (for instance, those in Cornwall who still spoke Cornish and refused to use the BCP partly for that reason). The 1549 Prayer Book Revolt was not just about religious differences but about the imposition of the English language.5The BCP was printed in Latin and Greek editions as well. The 1560 Latin edition is particularly interesting, since it generally follows not the 1559 but the 1549 English text and seems to reflect Elizabeth's desire for a more traditionally “Catholic” service.6 Indeed, contrary to Rosendale's claim that the BCP remained uniform and unchanged from 1559, it varied in significant ways. Sometimes the services of ordination and consecration were included, sometimes not. Sometimes a collection of private, nonliturgical “Godly Prayers” was included at the end. The Coverdale Psalter (from the Great Bible, slightly altered) was regularly, though not always, included, and the BCP was frequently bound with a variety of other books: Bibles, psalters (especially “Sternhold and Hopkins”), the Catechism, and the Thirty-Nine Articles. Closer examination of the history of the BCP as a book would illuminate many aspects of its use (intended and actual).Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England has a worthy goal in paying overdue attention to the BCP and its influence on English politics and literature, but the liturgy, its literature, and its influence await further, more intensive and extensive, study. Future scholars will be helped considerably by the 2006 Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer, which includes valuable articles on music, politics, church architecture, translation, printing, and more, and the Web site of Charles Wohlers, which provides online texts of the major editions from 1549 to the present, as well as some of the earlier Latin and English sources.7 Notes 1.Judith Maltby's Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Cambridge University Press, 1998) is alone in the field. Essential earlier works include G. J. Cuming, A History of the Anglican Liturgy (London: Macmillan, 1969); F. E. Brightman, The English Rite : Being a Synopsis of the Sources and Revisions of the Book of Common Prayer, 2 vols. (London: Rivingtons, 1915); and Francis Procter, A New History of the Book of Common Prayer, with a Rationale of Its Offices, ed. and rev. Walter Howard Frere (1855; London: Macmillan, 1902).2.Nicholas Temperley, Music of the English Parish Church, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1979).3.Maltby, Prayer Book, 25.4.David N. Griffiths's The Bibliography of the Book of Common Prayer, 1549–1999 (London: British Library, 2002), not in Rosendale's bibliography, is the best means of tracking translations and editions.5.Mark Stoyle, “The Dissidence of Despair: Rebellion and Identity in Early Modern Cornwall,” Journal of British Studies 38 (1999): 423–44.6.Norman L. Jones, “Elizabeth, Edification, and the Latin Prayer Book of 1560,” Church History 53 (1984): 174–86. See also Roger Bowers, “The Chapel Royal, the First Edwardian Prayer Book, and Elizabeth's Settlement of Religion, 1559,” Historical Journal 43 (2000): 317–44.7.Charles Heffling and Cynthia Shattuck, eds., The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer: A Worldwide Survey (Oxford University Press, 2006); Charles Wohlers, “The Book of Common Prayer: Church of England,” http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/england.htm. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 109, Number 2November 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/661526 Views: 15Total views on this site © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Whilst historians have led the way in the study of early modern food, literary critics are increasingly alert to the importance of this relatively new topic. This essay begins by tracing the context of early modern food studies by exploring what has been written by historians and what has been written on related subjects, such as the body and the role of women as producers and sellers of food. The essay charts important studies of food in early modern drama, poetry and prose by canonical and less well‐known authors from the period before ascertaining where we are today in early modern literary food studies and what we might expect from future criticism on the topic.

Water and cognition would seem to be unrelated, the one a physical environment and the other an intellectual process. The animating claim of this book shows how bringing these two modes together revitalizes our understanding of both. Water and especially oceanic spaces have been central to recent trends in the environmental humanities and premodern ecocriticism. Cognition, including ideas about the “extended mind” and other forms of distributed cognition, has also been important in early modern literary and cultural studies over the past few decades. This book contains contributions by influential voices in both early modern cognitive studies and the blue humanities, but its central project aims not only to think “water” and “cognition” as distinct critical modes, but also to combine them in what this introduction terms “watery thinking.”

This chapter of this book Dynamics of Neo-Latin and the Vernacular provides the conclusion to the book. The overall Multilingualism has recently turned into a very fruitful topic for both Medieval and Early Modern literary studies. The book departs from the idea of exchange and mobility between both the Latin and vernacular field, the processes of which have been split up into two categories: 'language and poetics' on the micro-level and 'translation and transfer' on the macro-level. The main idea, now, is to use dynamics as a general interpretation of all transfer processes observable. As both Van Hooijdonck's and Hintzen's contributions clearly show, translatio transfer of texts (from one language to another) has always been intimately tied up with imitatio/aemulatio . The book aims to transcend cursory study of cases of Early Modern multilingualism by combining a historical perspective with a generalized interest in the dynamics of Neo-Latin and the vernacular. Keywords: dynamics; Early Modern literary studies; multilingualism; Neo-Latin; vernacular

If we wanted to find out what it might have felt like to have lived at a certain time and place, then according to one popular way of understanding their value, autobiography and biography would be...