Early Modern Discourse Research Articles

The role of the Praenotamenta of Jodocus Badius Ascensius in shaping early modern dramatic criticism

AbstractThis article examines the profound and enduring legacy of the treatise on classical drama known as Praenotamenta ascensiana in shaping early modern dramatic poetics. Written by Flemish scholar Jodocus Badius Ascensius (1462–1535) as a preface to his 1502 edition of the Classical plays of Terence, this work has been unjustly overlooked by the critics that have invariably credited Aristotle’s Poetics for foregrounding the debate on early modern dramatic criticism, following Alessandro de Pazzi’s first Latin translation (1536) and Francesco Robortello’s monumental commentary (1548). The purpose of Praenotamenta was to provide educators, students and playwrights with a concise and accessible compendium of ancient dramatic poetics. This treatise circulated widely across Europe and helped disseminate ideas that became central to early modern discourse on poetics, such as verisimilitude and decorum, as well as discussion on the didactic and civic role of poetry. Blended with Aristotelian doctrine, these concepts became the tenets of late sixteenth‐century poetics treatises in England, France, Italy and Spain.

Diaphanous bodies: projections of ecstasy, insolence, and yearning in Les États et Empires du Soleil by Cyrano de Bergerac

In Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac’s (1619–55) tale of a voyage to the sun, Les États et Empires du Soleil, a cosmic traveller’s physical body, as well as his light-propelled spacecraft, undergo eerie transformations. After the vehicle shines like enamel and gold in blazing sun rays, it fades to transparency. Meanwhile, the narrator’s body becomes diaphanous, revealing inner organs that gleam in hues of scarlet, vermillion, and garnet. This article develops a close reading of this passage. The authors analyse the passage’s narrative descriptions, first alongside Neoplatonic metaphors of saintly bodies as prisms for divine light, then in relation to early modern discourse about optics, magnetism, and anatomy, and finally as burlesque allusions to an infant’s conception and birth. At length, the authors suggest that these descriptions can inspire feelings of ecstasy, insolence, and yearning in readers, and that this array of sentiments can facilitate an experience of freeing the imagination.

Intention and Interpretation, Now and Then

Almost every interpretative university discipline in or adjacent to the Humanities makes routine, unproblematic appeal to intention as an interpretative move. By proscribing intentionalism as an instrument of interpretation, Literary Criticism is the outlier among adjacent and not so adjacent disciplines. The introduction to the special issue “Intention and Interpretation, Now and Then” maps the prime features of the intellectual landscape concerning intention and literary criticism in Anglo-American and French traditions since the late eighteenth century. It then highlights the losses that Literary Criticism incurs by its repudiation of intention as a heuristic tool. Apart from its loss of intellectual esteem by peers, any interpretive practice that refuses to intuit intention also loses significant cognitive and ethical purchase. The nature and magnitude of these losses can be measured in many ways. Articles in this special issue measure these losses by looking to the later medieval period in particular (with contributions also from the early medieval and early modern periods), when intention rose dramatically as a heuristic tool in many discursive fields, notably in criminal law, penitential ethics, and biblical hermeneutics. The contributions also explicate the way a premodern or early modern discourse deploys and sometimes defines intentionalism.

On the sources and authorities in Planine by Petar Zoranić

Summary The rise of ecological awareness in recent decades corresponds to the emergence of the increasingly reputable and significant field of ecocritical studies, which has resulted in the publication of many valuable literary discussions devoted to the study of the relationship between humanity and the environment. In this context, a visible shift has been made towards the study of earlier periods in literature, so scholars prone to an ecocritical approach in recent years have been discovering great potential in the corpus of older literary texts. Renaissance literature, both European and Croatian, the latter following the literary trends of the time, combined with certain national characteristics conditioned by the socio-political situation of the time, proves to be very fruitful for this type of analysis. This article therefore addresses the Croatian Renaissance text of Petar Zoranić’s Planine to analyze: 1. problems of source and originality, 2. the historical and allegorical potentials of the text, 3. nature as a place of consolation as well as a source of cognition, and for the acquisition of various types of knowledge that were sought after by the people of the Renaissance, 4. the relationships between different types and levels of authority (mythological, folk, ancient, religious, contemporary, esoteric). Also, the author's position is examined, since it changed significantly at that time, especially regarding the writer's anxiety in relation to the authorities, the task and position of literature itself, and the right/yearning for knowledge. All this makes Planine an interesting early modern discourse, very amenable to an ecocritical analytical approach.

Black and White Comedy: Trade and Race in Bredero's Moortje (1617)

Moortje ( Little Moor, 1617) is an adaptation of Terence’s The Eunuch, in which the Dutch playwright Gerbrand Adriaensz Bredero replaced the castrate with a ‘Moor’. Scholars have demonstrated how Moortje renders an early modern discourse of race that, at the threshold of Dutch participation in colonial trade, facilitated the enslavement and trafficking of African people. This article aims to do justice to the polyphonic discussion on colonial trade in the seventeenth-century Republic, arguing that Moortje can also be read as a foreshadowing of postcolonial shame and ‘white innocence’. It does so through an analysis of race at the intersections with gender, focusing on the distinct processes through which two women in the play – one black and one white – are commodified on the market and appropriated by their new owner. It also analyses two paratexts in which Bredero compares the cultural appropriation of classical comedy to colonial appropriation. Together, the analyses indicate that racial thinking, although closely intertwined with the discourse on trade, does not in all respects facilitate the commodification and appropriation of the black woman. Rather blackness in Moortje represents the unknown, both in terms of colonial trade and its effects for the conscience of the white merchant.

Horatio in Pieces: Or, How to Deal with Ghosts

ABSTRACT From the early moments in Hamlet when he offers a ‘piece’ (1.1.18) of himself to his readiness to consider a range of folkloric narratives, Horatio’s approach to the supernatural is one marked by fragmentation. Rather than critiquing the disparate pieces of Horatio and his philosophy, I explore how his spiritual discernment intersects with the early modern discourse on belief as dispositional and open to revision. In tracing Horatio’s different pieces, which I argue can never be collected into an integrated whole, I interrogate the notion of belief itself as one marked by extremes. Of course, these extremes have captured our critical attention, from Hamlet’s staging of The Murder of Gonzago to the intense passions that almost all the other figures in the play express when confronted with the inexplicable or the uncanny. Instead, I argue that Horatio offers us a way to read discernment on the early modern stage as a viable method, in which one’s belief relies not only on ‘your philosophy’ (1.4.166) or religious doctrine, but combines an array of ‘pieces’ for encountering the potentially demonic figure of the Ghost of Hamlet.

:Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature

:<i>Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature</i>

Texturen der Zukunft

Abstract This article focuses on the relation between early-modern discourses on the interpretation of dreams, esp. prophetic dreams, and the novel. Rabelais’ Tiers livre, Sorel’s Histoire comique de Francion and Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus Teutsch all betray a detailed awareness of this type of prognostic knowledge, on whose epistemological claims, however, they launch severe, often comical attacks. Instead, they implicitly advocate for a different conception of the future, whose inherent unpredictability finds itself at odds with the idea of knowing it in advance (pro-gnosis). At the same time, this new temporality constitutes a chief characteristic of the genre of the novel itself.

Envy, Leanness, and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

One of the most famous lines in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is Caesar’s ominous claim that ‘Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look’ (1.2.193). Understanding the implications of this line requires appreciating the extent it activates the early modern discourse of envy. Because Shakespeare makes his Cassius dispositionally envious — an invention not found in Plutarch — comprehending the full import of the enviousness his ‘lean and hungry look’ entails is vital to grasping the playwright’s characterization. Unpacking the association between leanness and envy in Renaissance literary culture reveals how Shakespeare’s handling of his source had immediate thematic resonance for his audience.

:Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater

:<i>Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater</i>

VOLUME 52 (2022)

VOLUME 52 (2022)

The Business of Conquest: Empire, Love, and Law in the Atlantic World

Nicole Legnani's The Business of Conquest is an intriguing examination of the rhetorical constructions of law and empire in the Spanish Atlantic world. Legnani argues that conquest, although it had real consequences, was a type of fiction or artifice. She reads polemical texts by Felipe Guáman Poma de Ayala, Bartolomé de Las Casas, José de Acosta, and others, as well as chivalric novels and legal documents such as the Requerimiento and contracts, within the framework of the “Capitalocene.” Drawing on the work of Jason W. Moore, she locates the origins of planetary destruction in the long sixteenth century and explores the anxieties created by economies of both moral and material values. Legnani is most interested in slippages and tensions between love (caritas) and greed (cupiditas) in what she describes as a joint venture between crown and church.The Business of Conquest adroitly demonstrates how authors used contingency. They struggled to tell history right and to depict themselves as moral actors in their own narratives. Some of this was done through erasure. For example, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo omitted his past as a slave brander in the prologue of his chivalric novel Claribalte, which in turn erases the New World and its peoples (p. 110). This leads Legnani to pose the question of how abolishing Indigenous slavery might have helped to render it invisible—at least to some segments of imperial society. Meanwhile, Las Casas used syntax. For him, ignorance—described in the subjunctive and conditional—was what led to the horrors of the conquest.Legnani also considers the ways that Lascasian advocacy for self-determination diverged from the arguments of José de Acosta, even as both authors used similar organizational methods in their texts and as both treated love and interest as synonyms. While Las Casas promoted Indigenous self-determination and the idea that evangelizers should be willing to embrace perilous missionary work and go into Indigenous communities unarmed, Acosta saw himself as missionizing among barbarians and contended that evangelical activities deserved armed protection. Legnani argues that, for Las Casas, plundering tombs was of questionable legitimacy at best. She shows how Acosta condemned unbridled rapacity but viewed grave robbing as an activity that could fulfill God's work. In his cost-benefit analysis, Acosta saw martyrs as a limited resource and blamed Las Casas for pitting the church against the crown. Because her argument hinges on how the ideas of Las Casas haunted Acosta's work, this is an asymmetrical treatment that gives greater space to Lascasian notions.The final chapter returns to Indigenous authors. Here Legnani examines the attempt by Peru's curacas to create an Indigenous aristocracy by ending the encomienda system and preventing Indigenous lands from being given to Spaniards. In what she terms “a bidding war,” the curacas and their advocates, Las Casas and Domingo de Santo Tomás, offered over 2,000,000 ducats “to purchase something from King Philip II [that they also argued] was not his possession to give or take away: namely, sovereignty over the lives, livelihoods, and lands of the Indians of Peru” (p. 185). She returns to her framework of love and contends that the text denies either shared love or common interests. This chapter also veers into the Inquisition case of a heretical friar and culminates in a discussion of the pishtaco as “an unnatural creature” that “gestates within the empire's reliance on the (ab)uses of biopower and terrorizes by rendering the human body for consumption” (p. 217).One of the perplexing things about this book is its omission of some kinds of love from the analysis of how amor became an umbrella term that “reconciled cupiditas and caritas” (p. 71). Since marriage, especially for elites, might be seen as another kind of joint venture with stakes in both the moral and material economies, it seems odd that there is no consideration of this. There is no real contextualization of the borrowed term “loving violence” in the second chapter. During the sixteenth century, Europeans were widely engaged in what Reformation scholar Alexandra Walsham called “charitable hatred” in her 2006 book. One wonders how this broader willingness to persecute in order to save might have influenced authors like Acosta. This same chapter might have also benefited from further development in its treatment of Charles V's guilt and engagement with recent scholarship on the emperor, including the historiographical debates about his vision of empire.Nonetheless, this is a fascinating study of early modern discourses. Literary scholars and historians of colonial Latin America and global Catholicism, as well as advanced graduate students in those fields, will find this study thought provoking and full of interesting information about tropes and ideas.

Repurposing Rhetoric:

The division between male and female Classical scholars, articulated in early modern discourse, presents a real tension between female scholarship and the humanist movement’s claims of cultivating male leaders. Such rhetorical difference, however, underplays the extent to which female Latinists were able to access and utilise Latin as part of a dynamic and distinctly sixteenth-century sociocultural code. The education and humanistic activity of Lady Jane Lumley (1537–78) are a valuable case study for our understanding of the use of Latin as a cultural resource for both men and women in sixteenth-century England. Through the interrogation of Lumley’s personal library, this article claims that, in addition to her well-researched translations from Greek, her education in early modern Latin provided her with a set of skills and practices which had significance beyond a public, political context. Outlining the development of reading practices, collecting, and network-building, this study demonstrates the extent of intellectual reciprocity between supposedly male and female humanist curricula, and the cultural value to both sexes of the practices taught.

Representation of Authority Over Ireland in the John Lynch’s “Cambrensis Eversus” (1662)

The paper analyzes the forms of representation of authority over Ireland in John Lynch’s “Cambrensis Eversus” (1662). In polemic with Gerald of Wales and the English/British tradition of representation of Ireland, Lynch constructed his own view on history of Ireland and authority over this land. The first level of representation is the authority of ancient Irish kings. In this sense Lynch emphasized the contract between Irish kings and people. Moreover, Lynch modernized the image of power of ancient Irish kings, using the terms and concepts of early modern intellectual discourse. The second level is the papal authority and in this case Lynch denied any claims of Rome. The third level are the issues of legitimacy and values of authority of Anglo-Norman and Old English. In Lynch’s view, English kings before Stuarts haven’t had enough loyalty from Irish people. And the last level is Stuart’s authority over Ireland. On this level Lynch synthesized the discourse practices of other levels to construct the legitimacy of restored dynasty and to prove loyalty of whole Irish people without ethnic and confessional divisions.

Food and Social Politics in Early Modern Ireland: Representing the Peasant in The Parliament of Clan Tomas

Recent historiography has demonstrated the immense material and metaphorical importance of food to representing social distinction in medieval and early modern Europe. To date there has been no effort to explore the Irish experience in this context. This article approaches the “meaning” of food in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Ireland through a focused gastro-political analysis of Irish literary and material satire. It will examine representations of low-born food consumption in relation to broader early modern discourse around dietary classification, manners and food consumption. It will also explore the basis of Irish social food stereotypes by locating them in contemporary nutritional theories, philosophical and “scientific” ideas and by comparing imagined Irish foodways with a broad range of comparative European visual, literary and material examples. The “meaning” of food will be considered thematically, exploring dietary codification; the physical and moral embodiment of peasant foods; and the relationship between food association and sexual generation. This approach will demonstrate the highly sophisticated conceptual integration of European ideas and symbols in Irish culture, whilst developing a new tool for understanding the metaphorical intricacy of this period in Irish history. The article will move food, for the first time, into the arena of early modern Irish history, opening a window for future comparative studies of Irish and European food cultures.

Early Modern Wetlands: A Brief Literary History of the Unfast

In western literary history, wetlands often appear as nature’s ugly mistakes. Key to understanding humans’ widespread animus toward wetlands is the perception, rooted in a teleological and anthropocentric understanding of history and enshrined in early modern discourse of wetlands, that these locales are inimical to human movement and progress. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as England and Spain, in particular, experienced an expansion in mobility that rendered the world more accessible and traversable than it had ever been, their wetland encounters threatened to destabilize their global enterprises. Taking examples from the early modern Atlantic world, this essay argues that the perceived slowness of wetlands often runs athwart the circulation of dominant cultural and religious attitudes, the fast violence of conquest, and imperatives for technological progress. These “unfast” countercurrents invite reading strategies better attuned to the categorial and temporal impurities of wetlands. I offer such a reading of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s History of Florida (1605), where explorers’ disorientation in swamps shows the limitations of colonial mastery, and indigenous habitation practices demonstrate how humans might accommodate themselves not just to the unique ecomateriality of the terraqueous, but also to the augmenting shakiness of planetary and intellectual life. [H.E.]

“O'erwhelmed with noise”: Abject Female Speech in Epicene; or, The Silent Woman

This article discusses Ben Jonson's 1609 play Epicene; or, The Silent Woman, with a particular focus on Morose's excessive solitude and aversion to noise. The article begins by demonstrating how Epicene ostensibly relies on early modern discourses of female speech. The ideal woman of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conduct literature was silent, a quality inseparable from the associated virtues of chastity and modesty. Morose takes this imperative to its extreme in his search for a bride of “thrifty speech,” who “spends but six words a day” (1.2.28-9). In contrast, excessive female speech is associated with women's proverbial corporeal leakiness, “hermaphroditic” or “epicene” gender, and uncontrolled sexual desire. Above all, the play insists that noisy, desiring, masculine women are a product of the emergent consumer culture located in the city. This raises a contradiction: are women all inherently prone to noisiness, or does female noisiness trouble the boundaries of gender? If women are naturally noisy, what is it about early modern London that, according to the play, exacerbates this? How we understand the nature of noise has profound implications for our reception of Morose. Rather than defining Morose solely in terms of his apparent agoraphobia and miserly character, as earlier criticism tended to do, attention to the ways in which both Morose and Epicene attempt to construct intolerable noise as an innate feature of urban womanhood can illuminate the structure of social abjection at work in policing the boundaries of masculinity and male communities.

Der Atheismus in Enzyklopädien der Frühen Neuzeit

Abstract This article examines definitions and evaluations of as well as alternative terms for ‘atheism’ in encyclopedias of the early modern period. In a representative overview it will be shown that the early modern discourse about atheism must be interpreted in the light of the history of concepts, of ideas and of knowledge: Not only was the scope of the term ‘atheism’ much broader in the 16th and 17th centuries than it is today, but the sometimes highly ambitious attempts to classify the phenomenon of atheism according to the early modern orders of knowledge remained influential during the 18th and well into the 19th century.

Thomas Hobbes and ‘gently instilled’ conscience

ABSTRACT This article engages with a key interpretive puzzle in Hobbes’s political thought – his seemingly contradictory view of liberty of conscience – and argues that Hobbes theorizes civic education as a powerful tool to confront and refashion prevailing views of conscience in early modernity. While influential accounts have recovered more ‘tolerant’ arguments in Hobbes’s political thought, recent revisionist accounts have argued that Hobbes does not merely advocate for the compulsion of outward conformity but also subjects’ inward persuasion. Yet this nuanced attention to the sovereign’s role in cultivating obedient, peaceful subjects does not attend fully to his shaping of the consciences of his subjects. Situating Hobbes in the early modern discourse on casuistry, as well as political debates on educational reform, reveals that the sovereign can and should try to shape the consciences of subjects, specifically returning to a view of conscience as a kind of ‘knowing with’ others. Reframing Hobbes’s project of civic education as a strategy to ‘gently instill’ the consciences of subjects does not merely shed light on the interpretive puzzle of Hobbes’s ambivalence towards toleration but also draws attention to one of the most powerful and arguably underappreciated ways to overcome the threat of conscience to sovereignty.

‘For Fear to Be Infect’: Reading the Female Body in Early Modern Revenge Drama

The article examines representations of female revenge within early modern drama. While much scholarship frames revenge as a primarily masculine form of expression, the article argues that revenge is not solely a male-specific endeavour. Rather, there is an interconnectedness between female revengers’ modes of vengeance and their identities as women. This is present across multiple comedic and tragic works, with the bodies of female characters becoming the instruments of their revenge. Accordingly, these characters’ quests for vengeance signify not a departure from, but an embracing of female agency and nature. However, while this may suggest that revenge helps empower and showcase female characters, the language used to define their actions is often filled with imagery of disease and suffering. Thus characterised as agents of infection, female revengers are often more vilified than they are empowered. And, as female bodies are integral to the expression of female revenge, so too are feminine identities deemed transgressive. The article develops this argument over three sections: a discussion of early modern discourses on bodies, gender and infection; an analysis of how female bodies are implicated in dramatic depictions of female revenge; and a discussion of how such representations conflate female bodies with infection, subversion and violence.