Early Modern Context Research Articles

Medieval Representations of Change and Their Early Modern Application

The article investigates the role of symbolic means of knowledge representation in concept development using the historical example of medieval diagrams of change employed in early modern work on the motion of fall. The parallel cases of Galileo Galilei, Thomas Harriot, and Rene Descartes and Isaac Beeckman are discussed. It is argued that the similarities concerning the achievements as well as the shortcomings of their respective work on the motion of fall can to a large extent be attributed to their shared use of means of knowledge representation handed down from antiquity and the Middle Ages. While the interpretation of medieval diagrams was unproblematic in the scholastic context from which they arose, in the early modern context, which was characterized by the confluence of natural philosophy and practical mathematics, it became ambiguous. It was the early modern mathematicians’ work within this contradictory framework that brought about a new conceptualization of motion which, in particular, eventually led to an infinitesimal concept of velocity. In this process, the diagrams themselves remained largely unchanged and thus functioned as a catalyst for concept development.

Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age

Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age

The History of Ghosts in Early Modern Europe: Recent Research and Future Trajectories

AbstractAlthough some scholars in the 1970s and 1980s noted the frequent appearance of ghosts in early modern European society, only in the last fifteen years have ghosts received more systematic study and most synthetic works are products of the last five years. Beginning with a definition of “ghost” that considers the early modern context, this article examines ghostly apparitions in a wide variety of fields ranging from the history of crime, drama, and gender to the more expected realms of the history of death and demonology. It also describes how literary scholars have used the concept of the “spectral” or “ghostly” to deconstruct early modern genres and how folklorists have continued their traditional classifications of ghost stories and moved into interpretation of ghosts' generic and psychological roots. Following an analysis of the ghost’s role in modern understandings of demonology and witchcraft, this article concludes by arguing for the need to integrate manuscript, archival, and print material on ghosts and to attempt transnational and transconfessional analysis of European beliefs about apparitions.

Moroccan Acrobats in Britain: Oriental Curiosity and Ethnic Exhibition

I. Complex Beginnings: Colonial, Scientific, and Acrobatic Encounters Occidentalism and Orientalism continue to essentialize ahistorical differences between cultures, identities, histories, and civilizations, creating fixed taxonomies founded on clashing tropes and antagonistic signifiers. Both are prompted by establishment of epistemic hierarchies and fetishization of binary modes of thinking. Bernard Lewis's Muslim Discovery of Europe makes use of Manichean mode of analysis to define curiosity as an exclusive Western phenomenon. Inspired by an Occidentalist vision, Lewis assumes that Europeans demonstrate curiosity and interest toward other cultures and civilizations while Muslims show lack of interest and curiosity toward European Other. Accordingly, Lewis insists that there is a complete lack of interest and curiosity among Muslim scholars about what went on beyond Muslim frontiers in Europe. (1) It is important to note that Lewis is mainly concerned with an early modern historical context, discursive setting that he takes as pretext to make sweeping statement emphasizing Muslims' lack of interest. By creating such Manichean opposition, Lewis insists on fact that curiosity, mobility, and travel are exclusively European cultural practices. The other side of Manichean dyad is association of Oriental Other, namely Muslim, with lack of curiosity and stagnation, self-complacency, and apathy as signifiers of imagined cultural superiority. To emphasize this structural and cultural pattern, he asserts that Europe had little or nothing to offer, but rather flattered Muslim pride with spectacle of culture that was visibly and palpably inferior. (2) Edward Said's Orientalism, though inspired by vision of rereading Western humanism from perspective of Oriental Other, makes use of similar Manichean mode of analysis. Said deploys such poststructuralist concepts as Michel Foucault's discourse and Antonio Gramsci's hegemony to show way Orient has been discursively appropriated by various Western literary, cultural, and scientific forms of representation inspired by links between knowledge and power, exploration and conquest, imagination and appropriation. It is worth noting, however, that Said's critical practices in Orientalism set up binary opposition between colonizer and colonized, West and Orient, self and other. He reduces Oriental Other into silent interlocutor when he states that Oriental silence is the result of and sign of West's great strength, its will to power over Orient. (3) The underlying implications of this assumption are that Western colonizer enjoys an almost timeless position of authority, whereas native Other turns out to occupy, indeed, is reduced to position of almost total silence, entire submission, and overall subjugation. The Oriental Other in colonial forms of knowledge and hierarchy is frozen, ossified, and deleted from stage of history. By granting West total authority as subject, Said puts Oriental Other under sign of erasure and subject to elimination as an object of power and oppression. The North African context is rich with forgotten archives that can be deployed to disorient, challenge, and disrupt both Bernard Lewis's myth of Muslim lack of curiosity and Edward Said's assumption of Oriental silence. Moroccan interactions with Europe during early modern era elicit whole body of embassy travel narratives that continue to be overlooked. Ahmed Bin Kassim's Kitab Nasir al-Din ala al-Quawm al-Kafirin (1611-13), and Mohammed Bin Al Wahab A1-Ghassani's Rihlat al-Wazeer fi Iftikak al-Asir (The Journey of Minister to Ransom Captive; 1690-91) are Moroccan travel texts focusing on France, Holland, and Spain that epitomize both curiosity and agency, chronicling important moments in history of Morocco and Spain, Christian Europe, and Islamic North Africa. …

Early Modern Ottoman Coffeehouse Culture and the Formation of the Consumer Subject

We examine the sociohistorical formation of the consumer subject during the development of consumer culture in the context of leisure consumption. Specifically, we investigate how an active consumer was forming while a coffeehouse culture was taking shape during early modern Ottoman society. Utilizing multiple historical data sources and analysis techniques, we focus on the discursive negotiations and the practices of the consumers, the marketers, the state, and the religious institution as relevant stakeholders. Our findings demonstrate that multiparty resistance, enacted by consumers and marketers, first challenged the authority of the state and religion and then changed them. Simultaneously and at interplay with various institutional transformations, a public sphere, a coffeehouse culture, and a consumer subject constructing his self-ethics were developed, normalized, and legalized. We discuss the implications of the centrality of transgressive hedonism in this process, as well as the existence of an active consumer in an early modern context.

Manoel de Moraes - Spelen met de grenzen van de eigen identiteit in Nederlands Brazilië

During the Dutch reign in Brazil (1624/30-54) the country was inhabited by a heterogeneous population, which included Europeans of different religions and origins, but also African slaves and native Indians. Manoel de Moraes was a product of this ethnic and social diversity. As a mixed-race Portuguese he spoke different languages and possessed a thorough knowledge of his homeland. This was a valuable asset in colonial Brazil: he could circulate and bridge between conflicting colonial spaces and became a go-between. But Manoel was also known as a traitor – at different times by the Portuguese and by the Dutch – and had to appear twice before the Inquisition. Through an analysis of his life and work, I investigate how his mixed origin gave him the tools to play with the boundaries of his identity and to succeed in the colony. The concept of the go-between, as elaborated by Alida Metcalf, helps to cast a new light upon betrayal in an early modern colonial context.

Law and Sovereignty in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (review)

Reviewed by: Law and Sovereignty in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance Nicholas Brodie Sturges, Robert S., ed., Law and Sovereignty in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 28), Turnhout, Brepols, 2011; hardback; pp. xviii, 302; 13 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €70.00; ISBN 9782503533094. It is hard not to like a volume that devotes an entire chapter to a couple quarrelling over which one of them farted. This reviewer, for one, did not realise the antiquity of the legal principle that ‘he who smelt it, dealt it’ (p. 100). Apparently, though, this was a concept familiar to the author of the fifteenth-century French farce, The Fart, printed in full in this volume. This farce, translated by Sharon King, highlights the broad range of contexts where discourses about law and sovereignty may be found. Yet the contributions to this volume do not generally touch on the singular topic of ‘law and sovereignty’ – with a few notable exceptions – but rather address the twin topics of ‘law’ and ‘sovereignty’. It does not really fulfil the jacket’s claim to ‘constitute a valuable overview of the history of medieval and Renaissance law and sovereignty in several disciplines’. It does not pose a coherent overview of a developing sense of ‘sovereignty’, nor does every contribution provide a definitive sense of how pre-modern sovereignty was conceived, constructed [End Page 237] and/or projected. Scholars looking for this will be disappointed. Law and Sovereignty rather explores these themes within certain medieval and early modern European contexts. Like much research of the period itself, it is a patchwork of aligned concepts and subjects, drawn from a variety of sources, and demanding a range of methodologies. It is perhaps more interesting for this than if it had fulfilled its claim. A number of the chapters explore these themes within literature, or use literature to explore contemporary conceptions and practices. For instance, Albrecht Classen’s analysis of thirteenth-century Tristan romances highlights how fictionalized political contexts provide parameters of behaviour for their actors and limit the narrative outcome of those same fictions. At the centre of Erika Hess’s exploration of the argument between Nature and Nurture, found in thirteenth-century Arthurian romance, is the character of ‘Silence’, some cross-dressing, and a literary warning for contemporary readers against sovereigns breaking natural rights generally, or the right of female inheritance specifically. In another Arthurian analysis, Lee Manion argues for a ‘fluid sort of sovereignty’ (p. 79), but also raises the role of documentary evidence in medieval claims of sovereignty generally. Some chapters touch on very particular historical discussions of sovereignty. Catherine Loomis highlights the role that poetry written upon the death of Elizabeth I and the accession of James I had in facilitating and explaining what may have been an otherwise difficult succession. Spanish conceptions of sovereignty are the subject of Aurelio Espinosa’s chapter where several perceptions of sovereignty ‘from below’ are presented, and the chapter provides interesting nuance and detail to the narrative of the Habsburg rise in the sixteenth century. Also Iberian, Harald Braun’s reanalysis of the Spanish Jesuit Juan de Mariana’s 1599 De rege – ‘denounced as a radical theory of popular sovereignty’ (p. 47) – achieves a fascinating de-legalization of that text. Braun argues effectively that this text was not focused on sovereignty as such, but rather on political prudence. A similar attempt to reconfigure a text is provided by Torrance Kirby, who revisits the English theologian Richard Hooker’s ‘theory of sovereignty’ and argues against what has been seen as an irreconcilable logic inherent in Hooker’s conception. The interdisciplinary nature of the volume is furthered by Adrienne Williams Boyarin’s art-historical analysis of ‘symbolic and historical instances of feminine legal authority’ (p. 258), which draws on a number of texts and illustrations. Detailed document studies, with important methodological implications, are a particular treat in this book. Retha Warnicke’s detailed analysis of a particular diplomatic exchange between the Scottish embassy and Elizabeth [End Page 238] I’s Court in 1583, as reported by the Spanish ambassador, highlights the problems with using early modern diplomatic reports uncritically. Any...

The historical anatomy of a contact zone

Founded in 1690 as an entrepôt by the English East India Company, Calcutta has been at the intersection of a number of heterogeneous long- and short-range networks of trade, finance, diplomacy, law, crafts and learning. This article explores the history of the first century of its existence during which it grew from insignificance to become the second most important city of the British Empire. During this period Calcutta also emerged as a world-city of scientific knowledge making in botany, geology, geodesy, map-making, geography, history, linguistics and ethnology. Calcutta thus provides an excellent case study of the co-construction of knowledge and urbanity in the early modern context of globalisation. As a contact zone between different ethnic, professional and religious communities, each with their specific knowledge practices, this article shows that new forms of knowledge, many at the heart of the second scientific revolution, were produced in this city through attempts at recognising and managing difference in this cosmopolitan context.

Across Cultures

The ‘tongue’ of Shakespearean shrews offers a crux of diverse cultural discourses, referring to early modern gossips and shrews, the examination of which proves instructive both in synchronic and diachronic aspects, across geographical borders. The present paper focusses on cultural phenomena surrounding the figure and the etymology of the ‘shrew’ in sixteenth-century England and Hungary which provide intriguing parallels, while showing – as the social contexts of written and printed materials of the age differ radically – a breach in the cultural memory of the two peoples after the sixteenth century, with a concomitant influence on the translation and reception of William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew in Hungary in the course of the following centuries. Besides examining the early modern contexts of the ‘shrew’ both in England and Hungary, with a special emphasis on popular printed texts, the paper also reflects on how Jan Assmann's tenets regarding cultural memory may be applied in such research, and makes use of Bakhtin's carnival theory as practised in early modern studies.

Completing the Virgilian Marriage Plot: Ariosto and the Broken Flowers of Epic

This paper explores the continuation of the Virgilian marriage plot in works such as Mapheus Vegius's Supplement to Virgil's Aeneid, showing how the reintegration of erotic love and dynastic marriage responds to particular cultural concerns of the late medieval and early modern period. My argument culminates in a reading of Ariosto's treatment of this late-Virgilian legacy, focusing narrowly on his complex revision of one of Virgil's signature themes: the eroticized death of a young warrior. In light of this material, I argue that Brandimarte emerges in Ariosto's poem as a crucial figure whose eroticized death signals a decisive shift towards a Virgilian fragmentation of love and duty, and away from the compromise formations of Vegius's romance ending. The entombment of Brandimarte with his beloved Fiordiligi casts a long shadow over the dynastic marriage that closes the poem, prefiguring not only Ruggiero's premature death but also the mutual imbrication of marriage and violence in this early modern context.

What's on the Map?: re-assessing the first urban map of Torneå and early map-making in Sweden

Maps can arguably provide a wealth of information about various aspects of historical landscapes and societies. While it is clear that not all information on historical maps is reliable, some basic assumptions about the nature of maps tend to go unquestioned. There is thus a need to scrutinize scholarly assumptions about historical maps and map-making, especially in early modern contexts, in order to correct certain modernist biases and gain new perspectives on early cartography. This paper first offers a new interpretation of the earliest known urban map of Torneå (Tornio), considers some implications of the reinterpretation, and proceeds to discuss the nature of early Swedish cartography and problems of interpreting cartographic material on a more general level.

Early Modern Communism: The Diggers and Community of Goods

Early Modern CommunismThe Diggers and Community of Goods Ariel Hessayon Freedom is the man that will turn the world upside downe, therefore no wonder he hath enemies. —Gerrard Winstanley, A Watch-Word to the City of London and the Armie (1649), preface I. Positioning the Diggers within a Communist Tradition Since their rediscovery in the nineteenth century—first by Liberal, Socialist, and Marxist historians and then by Protestant nonconformists—the English Diggers of 1649–50 have been successively appropriated; their image refashioned in the service of new political doctrines that have sought legitimacy partly through emphasizing supposed ideological antecedents. In a previous article I demonstrated that recent attempts to incorporate the Diggers within a constructed Green heritage are unconvincing and that at worst these emerging “Green narratives” are insensitive to historical context.1 Similarly, here I want to show how, either through lack of understanding the finer points of Protestant theology or deliberate distortion, most explanations of the Diggers’ implementation of the doctrine of community of goods have been misleading. [End Page 1] Although the term “Communism” is anachronistic in an early modern context—the Chartist Goodwyn Barmby apparently coined it in 1840—Friedrich Engels nonetheless used it in his study of The Peasant War in Germany (summer 1850). Engels, at that time a journalist and political activist with republican sympathies, linked the revolutionary struggle of the German people in 1848 with the defeated uprising of their forebears.2 Moreover, since the 1890s a number of scholars writing in the wake of the emergence of British socialism and burgeoning trade union movement have used the word to describe an ideology that burst forth during the English Revolution. This recurring fascination with the antecedents of communism and concomitant positioning of the Diggers with a constructed if multifaceted communist tradition stretching continuously from the German Peasants’ War to the Russian Revolution—Gerrard Winstanley’s name appears eighth on a list of 19 European radicals commemorated on a twentieth-century obelisk known as the “Column of Revolution” erected in Alexander Garden, Moscow3—has, however, largely obscured an important theological aspect of the discussion. For although the Diggers’ radical activities are best understood as a practical response to the ravages of the English Civil Wars, widespread poverty, desperate food shortages, economic decay, and outbreaks of plague, their adoption of community of goods was based on a proscribed reading of a biblical text: And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. (Acts 4:32) Communal ownership of property and belongings had been a characteristic feature not only of several ancient Christian heresies but also of certain Protestant sects, all of whom envisaged themselves as communities imitating apostolic practice. Probably influenced by Baptist precedents,4 and perhaps aware of the examples of a handful of separatist congregations and even some teachings espoused by members of the Family of Love (a heretical sect founded in the mid-sixteenth century), Winstanley, who like his fellow Digger William Everard had been a believer in adult baptism, envisaged his little group as both a spiritual and temporal community of love and righteousness, members of Christ’s mystical body living in the last days before the destruction of Babylon and coming of the Lord, the King of Righteousness, who would [End Page 2] remove the curse placed upon the Creation and make the earth a common treasury. Indeed, although the Diggers welcomed newcomers who would willingly submit to their communal precepts, Winstanley thought that only those who had undergone an illuminating spiritual transformation could willingly dispense with their possessions and have all things common. Yet Winstanley was also careful to stress that his notion of community did not extend to sharing women; a stigma that had attached itself to the Anabaptists after their forerunners had seized the town of Münster in 1534, proclaiming it the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21:2) and forcefully establishing polygamy. Accordingly, Winstanley distanced himself from the perceived sexual excesses of the “Ranters,” condemning their conduct as carnal rather than spiritual. This emphasis on morality links...

The dangers of prudence: salus populi suprema lex, Robert Sanderson, and the ‘Case of the Liturgy’

The Ciceronian maxim salus populi, suprema lex was regularly invoked by writers justifying Parliament's war against Charles I. Quentin Skinner has seen this axiom as integral to the notion of ‘neo‐Roman’ liberty. However, as Johann Sommerville has recently demonstrated, in both early modern and classical contexts, salus populi was often used to justify the ‘arbitrary’ power of the sovereign. This essay traces the implications of one absolutist reading of this classical tag in Robert Sanderson's ‘Case of the Liturgy’: a case of conscience justifying amending the church liturgy in order to conform to the requirements of the Parliament's Directory (1645). The posthumous publication of Sanderson's case in the Restoration period reveals the ambiguity of this axiom, which was used, via Sanderson, to justify both the dispensing and suspending power of James II and giving obedience to William and Mary in the wake of the Revolution of 1688–9.

<i>Class Matters: Early North America and the Atlantic World</i> (review)

Class Matters: Early North America and the Atlantic World. Edited by Simon Middleton and Billy G. Smith. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Pp. 344. Cloth, $49.95.)Reviewed by Charles R. FoySimon Middleton and Billy G. Smith have deeply enriched our knowledge of colonial workers, Middleton with his work on New York artisans and craftsmen and Smith with numerous publications considering the lives of Philadelphia's sort. No idlers, Middleton and Smith have not been content to let their monographs nudge other historians to acknowledge and integrate class with their own work. Instead, from the hills of Sheffield, England, to the mountains of Montana, Middleton and Smith have set out like itinerant preachers to gather Early Americanists together under a revivalist's tent to hear the glories and wonders of class analysis. They have organized conferences, edited special issues of journals, and now have brought forth this compilation of essays on class in early America. In short, Class Matters is the culmination of an ongoing effort by Smith and Middleton to make class, often disparaged during the past two decades as of little use, once again a relevant category of historical analysis.1 Does Class Matters further their cause? In a word, yes.Middleton and Smith do not preach a single dogmatic approach to class analysis. Rather, they seek to encourage scores of different approaches, recognizing that the variety of early modern contexts makes a unified approach inapt. Their intent is reflected in the diversity and scope of the essays in Class Matters. Applying a multitude of approaches, each of the collection's authors agrees that socioeconomic inequality re- mains critical to understanding the lives of all those who lived in the Atlantic world during the transition from the early modern to the modern era. The essays are transnational, ranging across the Atlantic from Glas- gow to West Africa, the West Indies, North American ports, and interior regions occupied by Native Americans and tenant farmers. The essays apply class analysis to the lives of diverse groups of peoples: women, Native Americans, slaves, laborers, the middle class, and the elite. The wide range of these writings reinforces the editors' point that class analy- sis is applicable to all geographic regions and groups.The collection's opening section considers the dynamics of class rela- tions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Daniel K. Richter's chapter on Eastern Native America provides fresh insights concerning modes of stratification among peoples to whom class analysis is infre- quently applied. Daniel R. Mandell explores the changing nature of race among Native Americans as increasing numbers of black and white sea- men sought to create alternative ways of life by living with northern coastal tribes. Ty M. Reese's consideration of Cape Coast laborers dem- onstrates the significant variations among the Atlantic working class as race and ethnicity often separated those whose economic status was simi- lar. Natalie Zacek addresses class through an analysis of how changing imperial control of St. Kitts resulted in increased wealth for a few land- owners. New York artisans are shown by Simon Middleton to have col- laboratively asserted privileges to counteract elites who sought to use the growing English state in the seventeenth century to assert control of resources in the Americas. Readers will complete this section both with a better appreciation for the Atlantic proletariat, as well as the immense diversity among the region's lower sorts.Class Matters' second section examines the growth of an American middle class in the era of the American Revolution and its articulation of corporate and industrial ideologies. Lawrence A. Peskin's and Andrew M. Schocket's essays on industrialization and the creation of an elite class in the early republic stress institution building to illuminate class concerns. …

`The bodie and the letters both': `blending' the rules of early modern religion

The role of conceptual integration or blending has featured significantly in analyses of contemporary texts. To date, no-one to my knowledge has applied this theory in an early modern context. In the sixteenth century, a historical juncture rich in innovative forms of textual expression, the Reformation generated cognitive and ideological discordances between conceptions of the spiritual and the material, or more specifically, between word and image. These tensions were made manifest in physical acts of iconoclasm by Reformers in response to the `idolatry' of early modern Catholicism. Many poetic texts of the period attempted to validate and perpetuate the Reformed position, denouncing carnal representations of divinity, focusing instead on the spiritual incarnation of Christ as the `Word'. Taking one such text, Herbert's poem `JESU', as the focus of my analysis, I trace the path of a blend through to its emergent structure. I will argue that while the blend coheres conceptually in that it appears to make `plausible' the Reformed worldview, the reality is that it generates an ideological implausibility. As such, this article aims to demonstrate the greater efficacy and scope of blending than would otherwise be available through strictly metaphorical analyses. I will focus specifically on the correspondence between conceptual and formal integration of expression and meaning. My analysis leads to insights that more impressionistic, literary analyses of the period have not addressed, and that stylistic analyses have only briefly outlined, in that I will consider the material effects of this cognitive linguistic phenomenon in the significantly literary theological context of early modern England.

Post-medieval Breton earthenwares in Newfoundland

Archaeological investigations of early modern European contexts at Ferryland and St John's, Newfoundland, produced sherds of a previously unidentified coarse earthenware. Petrological study, stylistic matching and ICP–MS/ICP–AES analysis indicate that they come from kilns at Saint-Jean-la-Poterie in south-east Brittany. Pottery from the same centre also reached early modern migratory fishing stations in Newfoundland's Great Northern Peninsula, where sherds closely resembling 17th-century wasters from kilns at Pabu-Guingamp in northern Brittany have also been found. The recovery of earthenwares from these areas is thought-provoking; the archaeological evidence offers a way to trace the intricacies of a vernacular economy which is only fitfully recorded in commercial records.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Moral Rationalism Vs. Moral Sentimentalism: Is Morality More Like Math or Beauty?

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Moral Rationalism Vs. Moral Sentimentalism: Is Morality More Like Math or Beauty?

“A Thing Most Brutish”: Depicting Shakespeare's Multi-Nation State

In recent years, anglocentric and royalist readings of Shakespeare have yielded to colonial and republican perspectives. The placing of the plays within a problematic early modern British context has been a distinctive feature of this criticism. This essay surveys recent work on the British and Irish dimensions, addressing the broad issues entailed in situating Stuart Shakespeare: succession, union, plantation, the reinvention of Britain, and the expansion of England. This criticism, concerned with questions of colonialism and nationalism in the context of British state formation, focuses on the Nine Years War in Ireland (1594-1603), the succession crisis that led to the Union of Crowns (1603), the Flight of the Earls (1607), and the Ulster Plantation (1609). Although this work touches on all of Shakespeare's corpus, it tends to centre on a group of plays, namely the “British tetralogy”-Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and Cymbeline-book-ended by Henry V and The Tempest. This work, part of the “new contextualism”, a revised and enlarged version of new historicism and cultural materialism, mixes the empirical methods of the old historicism with the theoretical insights of the new, and adds the urgency, the “very now” of Presentism. Four related features emerge: the rethinking of genre, in the extending of the category of history play to include tragedies such as Macbeth and King Lear, and romances like Cymbeline and The Tempest; the rethinking of history, in a concomitant extension of the terms “Jacobean” and “Stuart” to all of Shakespeare's late and post-Elizabethan work; the rethinking of the relation between new historicism and cultural materialism in the twinning of topicality and presentism as critical approaches; and the reorientation of the field in the recollection of, and reconnecting to, an earlier tradition of (old) historicist criticism preoccupied by geography and place. By going beyond the histories and reorienting the tragedies and romances, this new criticism is challenging genre boundaries as well as national borders.

The Allures of Forgetting in Renaissance Drama

The Allures of Forgetting in Renaissance Drama William E. Engel (bio) Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster by Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. (Cambridge University Press, 2005. 184 pages. $75) Characters in Renaissance drama often are cautioned not to forget themselves. A typical instance is Hubert's admonishment of Salisbury in King John to sheathe his sword: "I would not have you, lord, forget yourself, / Not tempt the danger of my true defense / Lest I, by marking of your rage, forget / Your worth, your greatness, and nobility" (4.3.83–86). In many respects this aspect of self-forgetting is the crux of Antony and Cleopatra, for it will take more than a "Roman thought" to keep Antony from returning to Egypt where his "pleasure lies." In the pitch of excitement characters such as Antony and Salisbury say or do things that go against their better judgment. They forget or forsake their places in the scheme of things, often with disastrous consequences. Garrett Sullivan's latest monograph is concerned with such matters, especially as they pertain to the construction of subjectivity in Shakespeare's day. The goal of this book is to "historicize forgetting." What this means in real terms is that the author is at pains to suggest how "forgetting appears in a distinctly early modern context"—a cultural context that will change significantly with the Cartesian revolution. Renaissance forgetting generates what Sullivan argues are "certain subjective possibilities" seen as alternatives to the claims made by memory. Sullivan's self-appointed task is to indicate the extent to which this accounts for dramatists, imagining possible futures for their characters that are not identical to what social position, genre, or chronicle history finally demand of them. The study hinges on the premise that forgetting in early modern literature and culture frequently was associated with the "resistance to or the retooling of normative models for behavior." The argument begins with a cogent consideration of memory's significance in the period and then goes on to propose a threefold taxonomy for differentiating types of memory and recollection. While this approach may have helped the author sort through the various ways memory's role was construed and represented in Renaissance thought, his insistence on using the term forgetting* (with an asterisk) is bothersome. Moreover it is not clear how these new labels achieve the author's putative aim, for, in the long run, his analysis of the plays holds up without needing to defer to them. While the definition of forgetting* provides an heuristic way to think about this special aspect of the continuum of memory and forgetting, surely there are sixteenth-century texts that provide a suitable substitute, or perhaps there is an acceptable term in contemporary neuroscience that covers this case. Forgetting* is defined by Sullivan as "a specific act that refers to the unavailability of memory traces to recollection"; while forgetfulness is used to denote "a mode of being and a pattern of behavior linked to forgetting* but [End Page xxxix] more broadly to specific somatic phenomena—lethargy, excess sleep, inordinate sexual desire." Notwithstanding this idiosyncratic taxonomy, the ensuing analysis of the plays is sensible and, at times, stunning. Most impressive is Sullivan's sensitive reading of telling scenes from Renaissance drama that draws on his intelligent way of discussing the individual in terms of a seventeenth-century understanding of the term propriety, meaning both property and knowing one's place. Indeed throughout Sullivan stresses that memory and forgetting are "inevitably social; that they are less purely cerebral processes than modes of behavior and kinds of bodily deportment." The first chapter, "Embodying Oblivion," charts the relationship between forgetting and theater. It examines the significance of lethargy and sleep, seen both as determinants and symptoms of "the forgetful body" in Macbeth and Hamlet, Ford's 'Tis Pity, and Webster's Duchess of Malfi. The next chapter focuses on "erotic self-forgetting" by offering a subtle reading of All's Well in terms of the play's ending as a failure to induce forgetting. In his central chapter, perhaps the strongest in terms of critical rigor, Sullivan focuses on the end in which Dr. Faustus urges the members of...

John Lydgate’s “Fall of Princes”: Narrative Tragedy in Its Literary and Political Contexts by Nigel Mortimer

REVIEWS templation and ethical action. Thus when readers are faced with the undecidability of the tale—marriage exemplum vs. spiritual exemplum —‘‘no explanation is totally persuasive, no decision sufficiently justified , no response good enough . . . so that responsibility will have about it an air of irresponsibility’’ (p. 135). The problem Mitchell delineates in the Clerk’s Tale might productively be extended to the rest of the book, to enrich that difficult problem of how one gets from text to action. Perhaps Mitchell’s answer, like that of Gregory the Great in his homilies, is that examples work on the mysterious energy of inspiration —an answer that might lend strength and complexity to his argument about the circumstantial nature of exemplary discourse. Gower is the governing presence in Ethics and Exemplary Narrative, even though Chaucer occupies more chapters. The book joins an ongoing critical exploration of contradiction in the Confessio: from systematic accounts in which particular tales resolve into moments of conversion (Olsson) or the conflict between reason and will brings about an integrated identity (Simpson), scholarship has moved toward an emphasis on Gower’s moral contingency (Bullón-Fernández, Watt, myself). Mitchell lays out a useful basis for this emphasis in philosophy and rhetoric , lends credibility to the medieval method of reducing stories to their moral nuggets, and makes a welcome contribution to the developing conversation about narrative and ethics in the Middle Ages. Elizabeth Allen University of California, Irvine Nigel Mortimer. John Lydgate’s ‘‘Fall of Princes’’: Narrative Tragedy in Its Literary and Political Contexts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. vx, 360. $110.00. A recent spate of critical productivity has placed Lydgate at the forefront of Middle English literary criticism and history, a position he has not occupied for almost six centuries, since his days as ‘‘Laureate Lydgate ’’ (Derek Pearsall’s memorable label), when he wrote poetry for kings, princes, abbots, lords, and ladies. In part this flowering of interest reflects a recalibrated understanding of the relationship between medieval and Renaissance literary cultures, with Lydgate now recognized not PAGE 531 531 ................. 16596$ CH13 11-01-10 14:08:42 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER only as a crucial link between Chaucer and Shakespeare but also as an important influence in his own right on sixteenth-century poetry and drama. Nigel Mortimer’s reassessment of the Fall of Princes adroitly places Lydgate in both his medieval and early modern contexts; it is a study that will be inestimably valuable, not only for medievalists but also for those Renaissance literary critics who take seriously the influence and persistence of medieval traditions in the early modern period. After an introductory survey of the state of play in Lydgate studies and a summary of Lydgate’s career, Mortimer turns to the major source texts for the Fall of Princes, Giovanni Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium and Laurent de Premierfait’s Des Cas des nobles hommes et femmes. In so doing, he sets in place a principle for reading the Fall to which he will adhere throughout the book: Lydgate’s text cannot be understood without a very precise knowledge of its sources, particularly Laurent’s Des Cas. We see this intertexual method begin to pay off in chapter 3, which addresses Lydgate’s position as a Lancastrian court poet and focuses on a varied assortment of texts, ranging from the Serpent of Division to Lydgate’s treatment of Lucretia to the role of Caesar more generally in the Fall of Princes. But it is in chapter 4 that Mortimer’s intertextual work and his concern for historical context come together and illuminate the Fall of Princes in an entirely new way. As he tells us, Lydgate was particularly concerned in the Fall to address the relationships between spiritual and secular authority, so much so that he altered his sources a good deal in order to emphasize the importance of Church hegemony over secular rule. Throughout the chapter, Mortimer builds a convincing case for this claim by painstakingly comparing Lydgate’s exemplars to his sources and showing minutely how those source texts were altered and reshaped in order to make the Benedictine case. Taken alone, these examples would be...