Early Modern Context Research Articles

Cash Is King: Timon, Diogenes, and the Search for Sovereign Freedom

Cash Is King: Timon, Diogenes, and the Search for Sovereign Freedom

Surviving The Tempest: Ecologies of Salvage on the Early Modern Stage

ABSTRACTThe opening catastrophe of Shakespeare’s The Tempest is not simply a providentially ordained storm and shipwreck, but neither is it the singular expression of Prospero’s will. Beginning with a reading of the storm and shipwreck, this article argues that the play produces and reproduces itself through salvage. The actors, costumes, properties and language that the Act One catastrophe disperses continually persist and recollect, forming the larger ecology of the play. This ecology of salvage extends from the fiction of The Tempest to its stage materials, as garments, hand properties and set pieces, which were recycled from prior early modern contexts into theatre storehouses and found their way onto the stage. What is emphasised by the constant recycling of the wreckage that the man-made storm leaves in its wake is that the past continues to exist in the present despite being transformed by human catastrophe. Ultimately, because the remainders left by the storm survive the very devastation they constitute, the play may be said to speak to a contemporary ecocritical desire to envision ways that people and things already endure man-made disaster.

Defensive Positions. The Politics of Maritime Security in Tokugawa Japan by Noell Wilson

Reviewed by: Defensive Positions. The Politics of Maritime Security in Tokugawa Japan by Noell Wilson Constantine N. Vaporis (bio) Defensive Positions. The Politics of Maritime Security in Tokugawa Japan. By Noell Wilson. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge MA, 2015. xiv, 244 pages. $39.95. Maritime security is one of the top issues on the minds of political leaders across the Indo Asia-Pacific region, particularly as it pertains to the South China Sea. It is also the topic, in its early modern context, of Noell Wilson’s fascinating study of Tokugawa Japan. This book engages with the theme of maritime space, especially in its connection to coastal defense. Its author [End Page 157] “reframes our understanding of early modern Japanese coastal defense, challenging its previous portrayal as a xenophobic reaction to Western pressure in the nineteenth century and instead casting it as part of a longer-term process, both shogunal and domainal, to extend military control to water spaces” (p. 13). Wilson argues that coastal defense has been largely overlooked in historical studies of Japan’s external relations because we think we already know the story—one that is defined by Japanese technological inadequacy relative to the various Western powers. Her study thus aims to reclaim maritime defense as a critical arena for understanding Tokugawa political development. In pursuing this agenda, Wilson applies the analytical lens of coastal defense to the story of Japan’s engagement with the outside world, mainly with the Dutch, the Chinese, and the major Western powers. While the nineteenth century naturally plays a major part in the story, by reconsidering the first century of Tokugawa rule, she is able to reveal a regime that from early on was not just intent on extending control over land but also “interested in extending military control into proximate water spaces” (p. 5). The book consists of two major parts. Part 1 deals with the development of Nagasaki defense as a complex system, from 1640 to 1840. One of the four so-called “gates” of Tokugawa Japan (in addition to the domains of Tsushima, Satsuma, and Matsumae), Nagasaki was the only one that was Tokugawa territory. This defense system aimed to protect Nagasaki from anticipated attack by Western ships, to enforce trade restrictions, and to protect the Dutch merchants in Nagasaki. In the three chapters that comprise part 1, Wilson traces the development of a fluid system of administration characterized by a shifting balance of power between the shogunate (primarily via allied daimyō and then its magistrate in Nagasaki) and domains. The burden of self-defense became increasingly concentrated in the hands of Saga and Fukuoka, but other domains such as Ōmura and Gotō were also charged with defending their own coastlines. In chapter 1, “Localizing National Defense to Nagasaki,” we see a shift from a concern with all of Kyushu to a prioritization of Nagasaki as the locus of attack, which was anticipated after the shogunate’s refusal to trade with two Portuguese ships in 1647. The fortified area of Nagasaki Bay was extended to more than ten miles. As a result, foreign ships entering Nagasaki’s harbor from the open sea passed through waters bordering several domains and faced a series of hillside garrisons lining the shore. Domainal forces were employed by the shogunate and acted under its authority but were delegated the authority—the Tokugawa monopoly on violence—to use force against foreigners. After another Portuguese vessel was turned away in 1685, there was a century-long hiatus in the interest of Western powers in Japan. Chapter 2, “Smuggling and the Chinese Interim in Coastal Defense,” examines the reconfiguration of the Nagasaki system to focus on wiping out Chinese smuggling [End Page 158] at the turn of the eighteenth century; coastal defense thus assumed a critical economic function. This is fascinating material, much of it new in English. Due to a combination of various Qing policies and the imposition of new restrictions on foreign trade by the Tokugawa, the climate became ripe for smuggling in the Genkai Sea in northern Kyushu. This illegal activity was able to penetrate through the “cracks” in the system caused by domains prioritizing independent, defensive action in areas that were clearly...

“Obedience doth not well in parts”: Jonson, Shakespeare, and the Atlantic Archipelago

ABSTRACTBy considering Shakespeare’s Henry V through an archipelagic comparison with Jonson’s subsequent The Irish Masque at Court, this essay participates in the recent reconsideration of English literature’s early modern inter-island context. Considering Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s different reflections on Ireland and the Irish in the Atlantic archipelago provides access to changing early seventeenth-century differences in English, metropolitan attitudes toward Ireland. While there has been more discussion of English literature understood archipelagically over the last two decades, including some consideration of Shakespeare and Jonson in inter-island contexts, there has been little reference to this slim text by Ben Jonson. In it, Jonson takes up the question of Ireland with all the playfully cruel benefit of hindsight not available when his rival, Shakespeare, wrote Henry V, his play that most famously and directly addresses Irish geopolitics within a new, emerging inter-island kingdom. Jonson’s later masque, with its four principal characters, offers a re-reading of Shakespeare’s earlier Four Captains scene, particularly of the role of MacMorris.

Did Harrington’s cats catch Harvey’s chick? Vitalistic imagery in early modern republican political theory

ABSTRACTIn an early modern context, ‘vitalistic’ natural philosophies had been associated with antiauthoritarian political theories. Whilst mechanical philosophy has been characterized as amenable to (or even, sometimes, inspired by) conservative politics on account of the structural analogies between passive and inert particles that can only be organized by externally imposed strict mechanical laws on the one hand, and similarly passive citizens, on the other, vitalism understood as a monistic, dynamic materialism purportedly implicated alternative modes of agency and organization. This alternative model incorporated inherently active, self-organizing agents allegedly capable of bringing about higher structures in a bottom-up fashion both in the natural and in political realm. In this paper, I focus on James Harrington’s appropriation of William Harvey’s physiology and examine whether the republican philosopher actually made use of the political potential said to be inherent in vitalistic discourse. I intend to show that Harrington, rather than boldly capitalizing on vitalism’s decentralizing and democratic potential, adapts his physiological imagery to his wider set of ideas concerning human nature and moral psychology underpinning his politics. Simple analogy between vitalism and antiauthoritarianism is then lost in Harrington’s writings, pointing to a more complex relationship between early modern natural and political philosophy.

Imagining the Unimaginable: Parricide in Early Modern England and Wales, c.1600-c.1760.

This article explores the ways in which parricide was comprehended in England and Wales, c.1600–1760, and shows that while some parallels exist with modern explanatory models of parricide offenders, they had very different meanings in the early modern context. While both lunacy and the cruelty of parents were understood as possible contexts for parricide, neither were common. The dominant explanation was the gratuitous violence of a selfish individual who lacked compassion and who saw the parent as an obstacle—to an inheritance, riches, marriage, and freedom—to be removed. The article explores these three categories and suggests ways in which this began to change in the mid-eighteenth century.

Towards the Panopticon: School Building and Discipline in Early Modern Russia

This article explores the notion of discipline in Russia since the late 17th century and up to the accession of Catherine II. Discipline and disciplining occupy a central place in our thinking about early modern state, and the reconstruction of debates about school building helps to illuminate the ways in which this notion has been articulated. The article traces the emerging concern with using the school building as an instrument of confinement and surveillance, and demonstrates unexpected links between the Noble Cadet Corps in St Petersburg and Bentham's 'Panopticn' via the Ecole Militaire in Paris. It argues that the peculiarly modern understanding of discipline was rooted in specific religious sensibilities that had not been developed in seventeenth-century Orthodox thinking. Rather, it stresses the central role of Pietism and the Pietists in introducing these notions in post-Petrine Russia, as well as the ways in which these notions have been appropriated, 'domesticated,' and 'secularized' by a variety of Russian palters. At the end, the article reflects on the relationship between discipline, religious sensibilities, was, and the estate in a non-Western early modern context.

Viewing the World: Women, Religion, and the Audience for Maps in Early Modern Venice

Marietta Morosini’s home contained seven maps among her collection of over fifty images. Elisabette Condulmer displayed a map of the world next to images of the Madonna and Mary Magdalene. Cornelia Bellon also paired her map of Italy with religious images. These women lived in sixteenth-century Venice, the center of the cartographic world. This article assesses women as an audience for cartographic and geographic works by placing maps into their early modern context: the home. As this article will show, living with maps in early modern Venice often meant reading them through a religious lens.

Shakespeare’s Curse: The Aporias of Ritual Exclusion in Early Modern Royal Drama by Björn Quiring

Bjorn Quiring. Shakespeare's Curse: The Aporias of Ritual Exclusion in Early Modern Royal Drama. Trans. Michael Winkler and Bjorn Quiring. Discourses of Law. New York: Routledge, 2014. Pp. ix + 268. $145.00. For Bjorn Quiring's Shakespeare's Curse: The Aporias of Ritual Exclusion in Early Modern Royal Drama, curses are not simply stuff of Lear's theatrical howls or Margaret's vituperative pronouncements. Rather, Quiring aligns curse with Derrida's concept of supplement, defining as that which can complement and represent law, but also threatens to dissolve and replace it (2). This foundation leads him to posit that curses mark point where absolute power and complete impotence blend and become indistinguishable: curse is speech act that demonstrates impossibility of speech acts (3). In post-Reformation England, curses function as vestiges of defunct Catholic Church, paradoxically illegitimate yet potent insofar as they integrate themselves into other institutions that include theatre and law. Early modern theatre has particular affinity for performances of curses such that, as Quiring contends, the ritual of execration might be seen as dark precursor of theater (14). To unpack all that is contained within curse, then, is to learn something of early modern theatre. And in his attention to juristic themes in his selected plays, Quiring traces foundations of Western law to curse as well. Though anchored to an early modern context, study ultimately aims to remedy absence of scholarship regarding nature of curse in modern era, arguing that traces of curse persist in contemporary speech acts. Quiring's study brings an ambitious assemblage of literary, juridical, religious, theological, theoretical, and political sources to bear on three of Shakespeare's royal plays--Richard III, King John, and King Lear--in three chapters of varying length. With new historicist methodology, Quiring interprets episodes of cursing as ideal index fossils of secularization overpowered by its mythic latencies (17). Although chapters themselves are organized from Shakespeare's early to later plays, project also features retrograde movement through time as begins with proximate present of Richard III and concludes with King Lears ancient Britain. For Quiring, this structure is purposeful, subtle addition to an argument concerning curses peculiar temporality in which past and future collapse into each other. Yet chapter organization, interrupted by numerous subsections, sometimes obscures overall argument, although there is no shortage of refreshing analysis and incisive claims. Even for scholars intimate with plays, Quiring's careful readings are as pleasurable as they are erudite. After generous orientation to his theoretical scaffolding, Quiring turns his attention to Richard III and to analogs of curse (e.g., excommunication, oath, prophecy) in first chapter, which comprises nearly half of book. Even as he catalogs these analogs in detail, chapter is preoccupied with question of irony, and Richard himself is read as emblematic of phenomenon. Commencing play as malevolent yet captivating chameleon, Richard deploys irony to consolidate his power but, by its end, finds himself subject to irony he had once so skillfully wielded. Only ironic structure of representation itself is truly sovereign (125), Quiring concludes, and what Shakespearean theatre reveals is aporetic structure of curse, a irony that acknowledges autonomous field of representation, defined by endless sliding of signifier, as true sovereign (142). Put simply, Richard III demonstrates that irony, characterized by infinite play of meaning-making, animates early modern curse. Interpreting King John as display of hollowness in which concepts such as history and sovereignty are emptied of their significance (163), Quiring begins his brief second chapter. …

The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558–1660 ed. by Simon Smith, Jackie Watson, and Amy Kenny (review)

Reviewed by: The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558–1660 ed. by Simon Smith, Jackie Watson, and Amy Kenny Briony Frost The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558–1660. Edited by Simon Smith, Jackie Watson, and Amy Kenny. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Pp. xii + 243. $105 (Hardback and Ebook). “What can texts, performances, and artworks tell us about the senses in early modern England?” (1). This stimulating collection poses, and offers some insightful answers to, this provocative question. Evolving out of the scholarship that fueled the October 2011 Globe Education series, which “challenge[d] the idea that Shakespeare’s first audiences went only to ‘hear’ plays or that they were either auditors or spectators,” the volume’s editors posit that early modern theatrical performance was a “multisensory phenomenon” that engaged whole-body audience responses (219). Studies of sensory performance, such as Simon Smith’s chapter on Antony and Cleopatra’s visual music and Lucy Munro’s sampling of tasting scenes, are situated alongside readings of poetry, conduct books, objects, and dances, including Hannah August’s study of “paper pictures” and Darren Royston’s chapter on dance and courtship (212). Departing from previous collections in this area through the range of artistic media that it explores, this volume brings together imaginative and thought-provoking contributions from a range of established and rising scholars. It raises penetrating questions about, and offers fresh understandings of, “the culturally specific role of the senses in textual and aesthetic encounters in early modern England” (9). Beginning with the belief articulated by Constance Classen that the “senses do not operate in fixed and universal ways,” The Senses in Early Modern England seeks to illuminate a variety of sensory encounters encoded in early modern works, within the context of the wider cultural moments in which they were produced and circulated (5). The volume is divided into three sections, each of which focuses on a spectrum of early modern textual, performative, and artistic forms. Each section also pivots on a specific question that engages with and adds layers to the main thrust of the enquiry: how do each of the individual senses appear in particular artworks; how were the senses understood in particular early modern contexts explored in works of art; and what sensory experiences might have been enacted when early modern subjects were actually engaged with works of art? The first section spans the five familiar “external” senses: taste, sight, touch, hearing, and scent. Incorporating work by Lucy Munro, Jackie Watson, Darren Royston, Eleanor Decamp and Holly Dugan, this section has three drama-centric chapters (one, two, and four), one on performance (three), and one on material [End Page 699] objects (five). The drama-focused chapters show a delightful diversity in their consideration of playwrights and playtexts that sustains the current trend for recognizing Shakespeare as one among many remarkable writers of his time; in doing so, it provides a more comprehensive understanding of the portrayal of sensation on stage. Munro’s “Staging Taste,” like many of the contributions, offers a “sample” of the ways in which taste is performed. She discusses taste’s divided reputation as “solid, material and reliable […] synonymous with the experience of life itself” and as corruptly corporeal and sinful (21). She uses this potted history to offer play-specific examinations of examples of material tasting (as physical action) and immaterial tasting (figurative and semi-figurative presentations), finally uniting all of these elements to posit a “theatrical aesthetics of taste” (20). This chapter pleasingly pulls away from the familiar metaphorical associations of appetite to nibble at taste’s treatment in relation to salvation, sexuality, and touch, and to chew over the dramaturgical implications of simultaneously perceiving this sense as “fleshly” while disembodying it through of the unavoidable “fe[e]d[ing of …] spectators […] a substitute experience” (35). Watson’s chapter pits “dove-like looks” against “serpents eyes” and pivots around the question: how far can an early modern playgoer trust the evidence of his or her own eyes? Drama, diarists, and scholars are all mined for their presentations of episodes of ocular perfection and ocular distrust to explore the ways in which visual clues could be used, adapted, and abused on stage and...

Nobility and Schooling in Russia, 1700s–1760s: Choices in a Social Context

This article explores the role of formal schooling in the social mobility and social reproduction of the elite in the early modern context of post-Petrine Russia. An analysis of career and educational choices made by Russian nobles in the 1730s–1740s and recorded in the registers of the Heraldry and petitions for enrolment into the Noble Land Cadet Corps demonstrate that the members of the post-Petrine elite had very clear preferences regarding their service trajectories. As the choices made by noble families were shaped by the specific combinations of resources and threats each of them faced, there emerged deep cleavages within the elite in terms of the attitudes towards schooling. While wealthier nobles tended to join state schools, especially the Cadet Corps, the poorest nobility overwhelmingly ignored educational requirements and service registration rules imposed by the government, avoiding schools and preferring instead to enlist directly into regiments as privates. Despite numerous attempts, the government failed to force these poorer nobles to follow the new rules for entering schools and state service, codified in 1736–1737, and had to regularly issue collective pardons to the offenders. While wealth was one crucial factor shaping the nobles’ service trajectories, their social connections and cultural endowments were no less important in channelling their educational and career choices and pushing them to embrace or reject the post-Petrine educational regime. As a result, the early modern “Westernization” of the Russian elite emerges as a dynamic social process driven by the choices made by the nobles themselves.

Marketing and consuming flowers in the Ottoman Empire

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate the marketing and consumption of flowers as a commodity from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century in the Ottoman context, a non-Western context, and to identify the specificities and similarities to the wider regional context with which it interacts. Design/methodology/approach – Through utilising secondary historical data a two-level analysis is conducted. The first level provides information on the institutional actors such as flower merchants, the state, the flower research institutes, market channels and popular culture and their practices. The second level of analysis concerns the flower consumer. Findings – The paper shows that flower consumption and marketing in an early modern non-Western context was not totally divergent from its “Western” counterparts which share the same regional context, i.e. the Mediterranean. As part of the late Renaissance Mediterranean world, the flower cultivator as a leisure-time consumer is reminiscent of the “Renaissance man”, characterised as someone who consumes science, aesthetics and writing in his leisure time. However, Ottoman markets diverge from their counterparts through the formation of an institution, similar to a modern-day accreditation institution, which had an active role in generating standards, brands and norms for the flower market. Research limitations/implications – The paper is mainly focussed on Istanbul, the capital of the empire and a large city by contemporary standards. Generalisation to the Ottoman context would require further studies. Originality/value – The paper is original because marketing and consumption in non-Western histories, such as the Ottoman context, have been a neglected area, mainly because of a tendency to locate progress and modernisation in early modern west.

FRI-05 CURIOSITY OR CURE? THE CASE OF SURGICAL CASTRATION

You have accessJournal of UrologyHistory of Urology Forum I1 Apr 2015FRI-05 CURIOSITY OR CURE? THE CASE OF SURGICAL CASTRATION Barbara Chubak and Paul Gittens Barbara ChubakBarbara Chubak More articles by this author and Paul GittensPaul Gittens More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.juro.2015.02.483AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES While the singing castrato and court eunuch defined the castrated male as an exotic curiosity in the early modern period, orchiectomy was routinely performed as a surgical treatment for disease in otherwise normal men. This paper considers how surgeons and patients negotiated the tension inherent in an apparently beneficial therapy that compromised a man's normative identity. METHODS Close reading and analysis of relevant primary and secondary source literature regarding castration and masculinity, for both the early modern period and today. RESULTS Early modern men, surgeon and patient alike, were acutely aware of the psychosocial hazards of curative castration, but any attempt at a normalizing discourse was undermined by extant ontological and political structures that were grounded in biologically functional masculinity. CONCLUSIONS Therapeutic castration was uniquely harmful in the early modern context, which placed (pro)creative masculinity at the center of all natural order. Since then, the meaning of manhood has changed, but the duality of castration as both curiosity and cure continues to complicate patient identity and urologic treatment today. © 2015 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 193Issue 4SApril 2015Page: e583 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2015 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.MetricsAuthor Information Barbara Chubak More articles by this author Paul Gittens More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement Advertisement PDF downloadLoading ...

The Ingenious Simpleton: Upending Imposed Ideologies through Brief Comic Theatre by Delia Méndez Montesinos (review)

Delia Mendez Montesinos. The Ingenious Simpleton: Upending Imposed Ideologies through Brief Comic Theatre. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2014. Pp. xvi + 146. $29.99. In The Ingenious Simpleton, Delia Mendez Montesinos analyzes the subversive potential of brief comic theater and popular performance, and documents its persistent ability to resist submission to hierarchical, social stratification. Through comedy, lower and marginalized classes, who often are subjected to a negative self-concept imposed by hegemonic power interested in sustaining itself, find outlets to transgress socially prescribed norms. Mendez Montesinos's valuable study concerns itself particularly with popular performances that feature a buffoon or comic simpleton, and develops case studies from three geographical regions (Spain, Mexico, and California) across disparate chronological periods. Ultimately, this study reveals a heritage of subversive comedy in twentieth-century Hispanic popular performance that can be traced to the origins of the comic simpleton figure in sixteenth-century Spain. The authors main contention is not that these kinds of politically subversive performances arise only under particular or special social circumstances, but that they can and do exist in a variety of historical, social, and political environments. The subversion of norms through comic performance is a common denominator that reveals a pervasive and enduring tradition across time. Proposing that theatre can be a powerful tool to provide marginalized groups with a needed sense of solidarity and self-worth (xi), the book's brief introduction establishes its central argument by way of the specific historical examples of Lope de Ruedas pasos as mass entertainment in sixteenth-century Spain, post-Revolutionary Mexican satirical public performance (a tradition the author sees dating to pre-Columbian times), and the Teatro Campesino among the grape-harvesters of California's San Joaquin Valley in the 1960s. The book's first chapter outlines the theoretical parameters of the study, introducing definitions of laughter and comedy in both social and theatrical contexts. Here, Mendez Montesinos provides a brief historical overview of the comic figure of the fool, its relationship to laughter (particularly in the context of the carnivalesque), and its social and theatrical roles, beginning in the early modern period. The author cites Erasmus and Shakespeare as examples of early modern authors who developed the figure of the fool; she might also have discussed equally important Spanish writers, such as Cervantes, or the popular tradition of performed entremeses and teatro breve of early modern Spain in order to provide a firmer foundation for her otherwise sound historical analysis. Mendez Montesinos's approach to laughter is largely Bakhtinian, although she also includes references to Henri Bergson, Jacques LeGoif, Thomas Hobbes, Sigmund Freud, and others. This relatively schematic overview of the history of theories of laughter summarizes well-known scholarship on the topic and highlights an important connection between the fool's marginalized perspective and the figure's ability to express or reveal truths through comic illusion, in keeping with Aritsotle's conception of eutrapelia. Throughout this chapter, Mendez Montesinos relies on a distinction between artificial and natural fools in an early modern context, claiming that the ruling classes allowed social transgression by fools because they considered their mockery to be unintentional, or because they accepted fools as mentally and/or physically inferior beings. While this discussion seems overly essentialist at times, it does serve to articulate the importance of the fool's freedom to speak, and often to speak the truth, which characterizes this stock type from its earliest appearances on the comic stage. Mendez Montesinos then defines various types of comedy, largely following the six points of Maurice Charney's metaphysics of comedy: 1) the discontinuous, 2) the accidental, 3) the autonomous, 4) the self-conscious, 5) the histrionic, and 6) the ironic. …

Shakespeare’s Irrational Endings: The Problem Plays by David Margolies (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare’s Irrational Endings: The Problem Plays by David Margolies Joel Benabu Shakespeare’s Irrational Endings: The Problem Plays. David Margolies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. P. vii + 183. $90 (Hardcover) -According to Palgrave Macmillian, both a hardcover ($90) and an Ebook ($104) exist. This book presents a study of the so-called problem plays, exploring the dramaturgical means that Shakespeare used to construct their endings. The analysis, rather than focusing exclusively on how the playwright channels audience response, reflects on how he stimulated audience awareness about the hypocrisy and injustice of contemporary society. The book engages with the scholarly debate over what constitutes a “Shakespearean problem play,” asserting that contradictory endings are a distinguishing feature that serve to create “doubts and questions about the world in which his audience live” (111). The author has included in the category Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello, titles not typically classified as problem plays. In developing an analytical reading of All’s Well that Ends Well, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, Troilus and Cressida, and Othello, Margolies relies on a methodology that can be described as formalist and literary historical. Its building blocks comprise two parts: structural ideas of closure in relation to the plot as a whole and semiotic ideas of closure in relation to audience reception. His readings of the plays selected for analysis may not offer a new interpretation so much as a way of approaching them as performable entities. This proves to be a valuable approach that attempts to trace how Shakespeare communicates the theatrical effect of a work through the particular organization of his dramatic material. Regrettably, however, this study does not define the “problem” implicit in this rather unorthodox grouping of so-called problem plays. Furthermore, it is entirely self-referential, failing to engage with any earlier scholarship on the subject of endings, in spite of there being a rich critical history and important points of contact. The book’s principal argument is that the endings of Shakespeare’s problem plays work on the spectator through a series of unresolvable contractions: [End Page 179] Part of the effectiveness of Shakespeare’s construction is that these contradictions cannot be reasoned away or balanced out as a mediocre relationship. They arise from the same event but are attached to different aspects (the form and the content) and thus exist effectively in different dimensions. (2) To scholars familiar with the subject of Shakespearean endings, Margolies’s thesis may appear, at first glance, to rehash familiar rhetoric, because “closure and contradiction” have been the dominant paradigm in earlier scholarship on Shakespearean endings, as demonstrated, for example, in Barbara Hodgdon’s The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare’s History (Princeton, 1991). But Margolies’s point of departure is emotive, not structural, offering a valuable contribution, especially to reception theory in Shakespeare Studies: “the approach to the plays that would seek to make most sense is to look at them in terms of the response they generate, and how Shakespeare engineers this response” (9). The author assumes judiciously that the task of plot construction in the early modern context depended on a playwright’s intimate familiarity with audience psychology and its manipulation—acquired in Shakespeare’s case through daily contact in the theater. By tracing evidence of this “practical knowledge” in the playtext, the author explores how Shakespeare organized his dramatic material, creating and then reversing expectation in the course of performance on the early modern stage. This is just one of the many strengths of Margolies’s book. Another is its challenging of the assumptions derived from the application of exclusively literary parameters to the study of Shakespeare’s playtexts, to which the lion’s share of the introduction is devoted. In it, Margolies outlines a number of fallacies of interpreting Shakespeare. He criticizes, for example, the scholarly tendency to privilege the meanings of words over action, to assume that the plays are naturalistic, to consider them as purveyors of intellectual ideas rather than entertainment, and to perceive textual difficulties necessarily as Shakespeare’s errors rather than components integral to his dramaturgy: A further idea of the...

Compassionate Perception and Touching Experiences in Shakespearean Drama

This article explores examples of emotion and perception in a number of Shakespearean dramas. It discusses compassionate perception as a process of synaesthesia, referring to recent theoretical strands from fields such as the cultural history of emotions and historical phenomenology, and consults early modern sources, such as Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall (first published in 1601). Focusing especially on the relation between compassion – here literally defined as shared emotion – and tactility, it discusses what the familiar notion of being emotionally ‘touched’ (or ‘moved’) implies in an early modern context. Locating ‘touching experiences’, potentially produced by performances of plays such as Titus Andronicus, the article, at the same time, places such experiences in the context of contemporaneous contesting cultural discourses on whether such experiences might be considered beneficial and instructive to the minds and bodies in the auditorium or whether they might have the reverse effect as both morally and physically corruptive.

“In Everything Illegitimate”: Bastards and the National Family

“In Everything Illegitimate”: Bastards and the National Family

Winning a War with Words: oaths as means in military conflict in early modern Scandinavia

From a distance, the many wars that took place during the early modern period were fought by kings and armies, conquering territories and losing them, signing peace treaties and breaking them. Wars fought with armies were, however, costly and, if possible, the rulers did what they could to avoid them while still trying to acquire and protect territories. One strategy employed was to persuade the people of a disputed territory to surrender to the conquering state by swearing an oath of allegiance to its king. Seen in this perspective, territories could be acquired and lost by using the oaths as means in military conflict. The following article discusses the role of oaths in keeping and conquering territories in the early modern Scandinavian countries, with a special focus on Sweden and to some degree Sweden’s constant enemy during this period, Denmark-Norway. It also studies the same oaths from the people’s point of view, and what happened after an oath was sworn and the war ended. By taking examples from areas under dispute, the article investigates how oaths could be used by both authorities and subjects in warfare and after in the early modern context.

Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England by Jeffrey S. Shoulson (review)

Reviewed by: Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England by Jeffrey S. Shoulson Esther Liberman Cuenca Jeffrey S. Shoulson, Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2013) 263 pp. The sixteenth century witnessed a tempest of religious change for English people across all social and political divides. The country had undergone three dramatic “conversions:” the deepening of confessional divides between the Church in England and Rome during the reign of Henry VIII, the subsequent fissures between Protestants and Catholics under Mary I, and eventually the growing sectarian differences among Protestants themselves during the Elizabethan era. The great literary works of the early modern period, from Shakespeare [End Page 329] to Milton, reflected these social and cultural tensions, oftentimes in the figure of the Jew. Expelled from English society since 1290, the Jew cast a long shadow over early modern poetics and the rich tradition of biblical exegesis in this period. Jeffrey Shoulson argues that representations of Jews in literature and exegetical commentaries did not derive their symbolic power from realistic or complex depictions of the Jewish people or their religion; rather, archetypal tropes of the Jew stood in for the religious anxieties of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and were deployed in a variety of “fictions” of conversion as commentary on broader political and religious changes during these tumultuous centuries. A lesser book might have focused solely on Jewish figures in the great works of early modern literature (Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta immediately comes to mind), but Shoulson’s ambitious meditation also examines two other types of conversion, the translation of classical texts and the science of alchemy, as a result complicating and deepening our understanding of conversion during this particularly fractious period. The introductory chapter spends little time on historiography, instead focusing on understandings of conversion in its various early modern contexts and meanings. One of Shoulson’s primary concerns is fear, particularly fears about social cohesion as manifested in literature and attesting to a deep anxiety about the authenticity of religious conversion. In the early modern Spanish context, the concern over the sincerity of the converso (or the Jewish or Muslim convert to Christianity) was one that intermingled with the general unease over miscegenation and disloyalty to the newly unified Catholic state. In the early modern English context, absent contact with actual Jews, English anxieties over conversion revolved around whether the authenticity of an individual’s conversion experience was sufficiently genuine to merit redemption and divine reconciliation, especially in a climate of millenarian angst. Whether insincere or false, conversions were phenomena whose implications stretched far beyond questions of individual salvation; the spiritual welfare of the realm and the political directives of the state-sponsored English Reformation also hung in the balance. While Jews were far removed from English society in both time (as distant biblical figures) and space (the nearest communities were in Holland), and thus ultimately posed no threat to the precarious status quo, the Jews, because of their unique position as biblical ancestors and antagonists, stood in as proxies for many of theological debates about conversion. The first two chapters of the book focus mainly on biblical conversion narratives that shaped exegetical commentaries. Chapter 1 treats Christian writings on conversion that predated the early modern period, and subsequently influenced the fictions of conversion that form the main focus of this book. The central and early figure of Jewish conversion is St. Paul, whose spiritual redemption on the road to Damascus represented the ideal for most early modern commentators, who sought exemplary models for conversion experiences. Other well-known non-Jewish figures whose conversion narratives influenced the discursive framework upon which early modern literature and commentaries drew included Augustine of Hippo, Martin Luther, and John Calvin. The chap-ter’s most provocative contribution is an analysis of the deep and abiding English interest in the marrano, a derogatory Spanish term for a Jewish convert to Christianity. This term was rarely used in England, but the marrano came to [End Page 330] represent the frightening possibility that conversions could be inauthentic and thus indicative of a larger rot...

Treading the Digital Turn: Mediated Form and Historical Meaning

Treading the Digital Turn:Mediated Form and Historical Meaning Jen Boyle (bio) This essay offers a framework for thinking about the active mutability of form in an early modern context. My purpose is to illuminate a potential point of intervention in emerging relationships between the digital humanities and historical scholarship. As Henry Turner has recently pointed out, many of our current understandings about the materiality of form are drawn from contemporary assumptions about the limits of disciplinary practice. Turner identifies rich influences from both contemporary historians of science and early modern poetics that work to inflect a "notion of form [that] is not a static architecture or an immanent, closed idea," but which flourishes as a "renewing, relational network" (5). I am particularly interested in following this idea as a way back into our prevailing sense of what historical work can offer to the "digital turn" (including the new institutional hegemony of the digital humanities) and, conversely, what the digital turn can offer to historical work. My principal contention is that we are yet to see a thoroughgoing consideration of the deeper impacts of historical methodologies on digital practices and theories. I close with a brief demonstration of how attention to "renewing, relational" networks of form, using the works of Margaret Cavendish as an example, have the potential to transform our investigations into the practical and theoretical implications of the digital. As a scholar, teacher, and practitioner of both new media-digital studies and early modern studies, I am particularly attuned to the trajectory of historical studies as the digital humanities gains prominence across disciplines. Apart from a few exceptional examples, the majority of early modern digital projects [End Page 79] are still very much concerned with digital access to and distribution of early modern texts.1 This observation is in no way meant to imply that there is something deficient about such a priority; the digitization of early editions and archives has had a tremendous impact on the range and reach of early modern scholarship and pedagogy.2 That said, both the digital humanities and historical scholarship stand to benefit dramatically from a more nuanced discussion about their constitutive influences upon one another. Such an exchange seems particularly relevant at a moment when traditional humanities programs are increasingly defunded, while, as an emerging field, the digital humanities continues to gain prominence and add new funding sources. Scholarly historical approaches have gained much from the digital humanities as a source for the development of augmented media that distribute and deliver early texts and archives. However, there is perhaps a deeper and more critical relationship to be forged in thinking about how our digital methodologies might be inflected by earlier models of material and procedural form. I draw here on some pertinent specifics to Turner's discussion of how we might re-define and re-animate approaches to form, transhistorically and across contemporary disciplines. Turner emphasizes that literary study has integrated into its various methodologies an increasing repertoire of ideas and concepts of form: stylistic form (semiotics, syntax, and semantics); structural form (the component descriptions of "meaningful systems," and interrelationships among parts and whole); material form (textual and paratextual elements of format); and social form (models and modes of relationship that extend beyond the textual).3 He further points out that even with the last category of social form taken into account (inclusive of work from Claude Levi-Strauss to Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu) that one significant problem facing literary critics is the need to extend formal models beyond language and text. Interestingly, this becomes not just a question of adding more categories to or expanding the epistemological foundation of form, but of rethinking form as an kind of ontology, as a moving, "shaping principle" (584) that is temporally in-process as opposed to a static model that defines and delimits. Turner highlights some perspectives and influences from both literary studies and the history of science that contribute to an understanding of form as a mutable in-process event.4 Yet early modernists—poets, rhetoricians, and natural philosophers—provide him with some of the most provocative and insightful examples of form as mediating action. Such principles, for example, can be...