Early Modern English Literature Research Articles

Vita Haroldi and Hamlet—a flight of the imagination

This discursive article was inspired by a reading of Vita Haroldi and in seeing similarities to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In the introduction, I examine the possible links between the medieval survival story Vita Haroldi and Hamlet. Part One explicates three potential approaches to a study of early modern English literature: the traitorous letter trope, the historiography of the death of medieval English kings, and the interest of leading lights in Elizabethan England in Anglo-Saxon law and the church. Part two implements these approaches in a brief reading and interpretation of Hamlet. Both the play Hamlet and the character of Prince Hamlet are situated in a transition from the medieval to the early modern; from a faith-based world to a rational one, from a focus on revenge to one on justice.

Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

Daniel, Drew. Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

Daniel, Drew. Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

Carol Mejia LaPerle, ed. Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press, 2022. Pp 221.

Review of Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature edited by Carol Mejia LaPerle

Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England. By Heather James

Heather James, by examining a number of Tudor- and Stuart-era authors through the twin lenses of Ovidian reception and early modern concerns about autocratic pressure on literary expression, offers an intriguing perspective on the period’s restless ferment of poetry and political philosophy. Through a series of close readings of selected works by Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, James focuses on Ovid as both these authors’ inspiration and, more daringly, the springboard for their own potentially perilous verses about speech and silence in a wider world inescapably overshadowed by the authority of the Crown. The towering status of Ovid in early modern English literature is of course well-established in scholarship; what James does is argue for a better appreciation of Ovid’s importance for the political ramifications of poetic work. After a somewhat desultory introduction, James considers Spenser in her first chapter, “Flower Power: Political Discontents in Spenser’s Flowerbeds.” She begins to build her theme of Ovidian influence not by choosing an overtly political work, but by taking “the counterintuitive position that Spenser is in fact deeply political when he invites his readers to wallow and get lost in lush flowerbeds of poetry” (20). James posits that when Spenser indulges in long, descriptive floral catalogues that seem to have no relation to external politics, he is in fact offering an escape from such politics with a “poetic aromatherapy” (21) of blooms “all flagrantly irrelevant to moral use or political encomium” (27). The heart of the chapter is a close reading of Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterflie: in it, the butterfly Clarion flutters through a lush garden, but is killed by the spider Aragnoll, who embodies “the darker passions of the court and Crown, namely Envy” (40)—for in Spenser, Aragnoll is the son of Arachne. In a “seismic change” (43), however, Spenser’s Arachne deviates from her Ovidian predecessor by spontaneously becoming a spider due to her envy of Athena’s art. Spenser’s confection of a poem becomes in James’s reading a metaphor for reading for pleasure and “an ideal of imaginative and expressive freedoms” that is ultimately “a gorgeous but doomed fantasy” (50).

:Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewRace and Affect in Early Modern English Literature. Edited by Carol Mejia LaPerle. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) Press, 2022. Pp. xxviii+221.Michal ZechariahMichal ZechariahMax Planck Institute for Human Development1 Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreRace and Affect in Early Modern English Literature is a collection of essays reflecting, as indicated by its title, on the interconnection of race and affect in early modern texts (one essay focuses on print culture). The anthology, edited by Carol Mejia LaPerle, is an exciting addition to the field of premodern critical race studies (PCRS), as well as to the growing body of work on Renaissance emotions. In relation to the materials its essays examine, this anthology brings out nuanced emotional dimensions of early modern racial formation through questions such as what race feels like; what remains unfelt in order to enable racializing logics; how affects are harnessed to perpetuate and disseminate racist ideologies; and what roles desire and disgust play in early modern thinking about race. In addition to these textual concerns, the book also has the ambitious aim of influencing the state of early modern studies at large. LaPerle’s project resists what she describes as “the field’s compulsion to undermine race scholarship” (xi), and as Margo Hendricks writes in her foreword, it “emerges as next gen PCRS” (vii). Proudly continuing the works of scholars such as Kim F. Hall, Ayanna Thompson, Imtiaz Habib, Ian Smith, and others who have argued persistently for the vitality of studying race in premodern cultures, the authors in this volume offer galvanizing ways for thinking about early modern notions of race through the lens of affect. Finally, Race and Affect is not only a book about the premodern past but also of and about the present. In LaPerle’s introduction and in many of the essays, there is a burning activist care about how contemporary racial formation is illuminated by its early modern predecessors, how teachers should address texts containing racist content with their students, what linguistic choices are appropriate for cultivating a just discourse, and other concerns of the present day. The result is a book that is not only invested in early modern discourses about, for example, complexion or miscegenation, but also attentive to contemporary discourses about “white feelings” (151) and “toxic positivity” (202). The collection’s commitment to social justice in the present is complemented by its welcome inclusion in the ACMRS and Arizona State University Library open access program, which allows readers to access the book in its entirety online.The book falls into three sections. The first, “Racial Formations of Affective Communities,” focuses on the affective aspects of forming and designating collectives. The first essay, “Imagining Islamic Worlds: Race and Affect in the Contact Zone” by Ambereen Dadabhoy, analyzes the racialization of religious difference in Philip Massinger’s play The Renegado and coins the term “staged Mediterranean” to describe dramatic representations that aimed to domesticate the foreign for white English audiences (5). Next, Mira Assaf Kafantaris’s “Desire, Disgust, and the Perils of Strange Queenship in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene” discusses how Spenser’s epic poem uses affect to shape the racial knowledge of its readers. To exert its “affective control” (25), Kafantaris argues, the poem channels readers’ emotions in response to desire between racialized bodies into disgust, and contrasts the fair, sentimental Una with the racialized, “foule” Duessa (30), who is characterized as either unfeeling or feeling the wrong things. The third essay in this section is Meghan E. Hall’s “New World Encounters and the Racial Limits of Friendship in Early Quaker Life Writing.” Looking at the journal of English Quaker and itinerant missionary Alice Curwen, this essay shows how the usually intrepid Curwen nevertheless documents feelings of fear from the Black and Indigenous people she was to encounter. Hall explains lucidly how Curwen’s fear serves to unify white individuals against a designated fearsome object, therefore excluding Black and Indigenous people from the institution of Quaker friendship despite Quaker belief in their spiritual equality, and overlooking the legitimate fears of dispossessed or enslaved people. Finally, Drew Daniel’s “Early Modern Affect Theory, Racialized Aversion, and the Strange Case of Foetor Judaicus,” beginning with an engaging anecdote (in Drew Daniel fashion) that illustrates the difficulty of capturing the meaning of affect, goes on to show how the very elasticity of affects fueled the premodern fantasy that Jewish bodies issued forth a distinctive bad smell.The second section, “Racialized Affects of Sex and Gender,” opens with an essay by Sara Coodin. In “Conversion Interrupted: Shame and the Demarcation of Jewish Women’s Difference in The Merchant of Venice,” Coodin offers a nuanced analysis of shame’s role in racial formation as it emerges in Jessica’s ambivalent conversion to Christianity. She concludes that shame was a technology for limiting the mobility of Jewish bodies that, like Jessica’s, were “imagined to be amenable to whitening” (94). Kirsten N. Mendoza’s “Navigating a Kiss in the Racialized Geopolitical Landscape of Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West” reveals the affective constructions of “white, Christian, and English superiority” subtending the play’s evaluation of its heroine (118). Bess Bridges’s sexual behavior, Mendoza shows, while held suspect at home, becomes acceptable when she uses her white femininity to enthrall the King of Fez and advance English interests abroad. Closing this section is Mario DiGangi’s “Branded with Baseness: Bastardy and Race in King Lear,” an essay that traces the racial rhetoric of Edmond’s act 2 soliloquy, whereby Edmond attributes to the “race of bastards” an inherent fierceness rather than the baseness he wishes to reject (120).The third section is dedicated to essays on “Feelings and Forms of Anti-Blackness.” In “Black Ink, White Feelings: Early Modern Print Technology and Anti-Black Racism,” Averyl Dietering brings together early modern print culture and Afro-pessimism to show how print practices furthered an association of Blackness with negative emotions, lack of dimensionality, and the position of a readability that is nevertheless poor in signification. It is followed by Matthieu Chapman’s “‘Away, You Ethiop!’: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Denial of Black Affect—A Song to Underscore the Burning of Police Stations.” The only essay in the volume to contain content warnings, this is a moving meditation on how Blackness is continually positioned outside the scope of affective resonance and empathy, occasioned by Chapman’s perception of his own failure to address anti-Blackness in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when directing a student performance of the play. Cora Fox’s essay “Othello’s Unfortunate Happiness” positions Othello in what Sara Ahmed has called an “unhappiness archive” (189). In Fox’s powerful reading the play offers a “struggle against happiness” (189), as its tragic hero realizes the promise of happiness through Christian marriage to Desdemona will not be available to him. The volume concludes with an essay by LaPerle: “The Racialized Affects of Ill-Will in the Dark Lady Sonnets,” which argues that the lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets 127 to 154 is racialized through her attributed disobedience and ill will, affective traits that threaten white kinship and white futurity in the sonnets.If I have any criticism at all of this rich and, yes, affecting collection, it is about the few instances in which the role of affect in an author’s argument seems either secondary or insufficiently elaborated. But those instances are few. I think the book offers both keen insights for scholars of early modern race and affect and useful thoughts on their application in teaching. Its diversity of arguments bears out the pragmatic intuition concluding Drew Daniel’s essay, that “we can best know ‘what affect means’ by tracing the particular histories of what particular affects have made possible, and at whose expense” (75).Notes1. My work is supported by a Minerva Fellowship of the Minerva Stiftung Gesellschaft für die Forschung mbH. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Ahead of Print Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/724655 Views: 36Total views on this site HistoryPublished online March 16, 2023 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Notes on Contributors

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreCharles Cathcart is an honorary associate in English with the Open University. He has published—often as an independent scholar—since 1999. He is intrigued by the processes through which multiple writing contributions may cohere within a single early modern text. His recent subjects have included the publication history of John Marston’s writings in the years after he ceased drafting plays, the stationer Leonard Becket and his publications, and the canon of Thomas Heywood.Jeffrey S. Doty is an associate professor of English at the University of North Texas and the author of Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere (Cambridge University Press, 2017). His essays on Shakespeare and ethics can be found in Shakespeare Quarterly and Shakespeare and Virtue: A Handbook (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and his work on Shakespeare, social class, and popular politics in Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners: Digesting the New Social History (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Literature Compass. His essays coauthored with Musa Gurnis on the early modern London “theater scene” and its interactive public have appeared in the journal Shakespeare and in Publicity and the Early Modern Stage: People Made Public (Palgrave, 2021). He is currently preparing a critical edition of Coriolanus for Cambridge University Press.Margo Kolenda-Mason is a visiting assistant professor of English-Literary Studies at Hendrix College. Her first book project, Fruitless Labor in Early Modern English Literature, explores rhetorics and representations of subverted, thwarted, and frustrated labor in poetry and drama. She is also contributing a chapter on “Work, Play, and Solitude” in A Cultural History of Solitude in the Early Modern Age, forthcoming from Bloomsbury’s Cultural History series.Scott Maisano is an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His essays and reviews have appeared in numerous venues, including The Tempest: A Critical Guide (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare), Early Modern Theatricality (Oxford University Press), Configurations, Extrapolation, Shakespeare Studies, and Shakespeare Quarterly. His current book project—“Labouring with Shakespeare—is both a reconstruction of Shakespeare’s lost comedy, Love’s Labour’s Won, and a critical engagement with academe, race, and speculation in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 51, Number 1Spring 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/726061 © 2023 Northwestern University. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Networking Print in Shakespeare’s England: Influence, Agency, and Revolutionary Change

How do new methods make their mark on a field? As activity around an emerging methodology grows, a signal of maturity is the appearance of book-length treatments of the subject. For network analysis in early modern English literature, Blaine Greteman’s Networking Print in Shakespeare’s England is such a book, moving the field forward by taking seriously both the affordances of networks as a method for literary study and the discoveries and inquiries about print culture that a network approach can facilitate. Readers invested in digital methods, English book history, or both will find much to admire in this book, which argues that networks allow us to better see important shifts and figures in the world of early modern print while affirming that authors and readers were “aware of and involved in radical structural changes to the print network” in the period (2).Greteman takes care to establish the place of this book in early modern studies and network analysis by tracing the lineages of these fields and arguing persuasively that they should be linked. Network analysis is entwined with many other fields, and contextualizing it is not easy. Greteman situates his argument within a history of network analysis in the humanities that is longer than many readers may expect. He covers not only the rich scholarship of current network analysis—cataloged and extended by the recent publication of The Network Turn (Ahnert et al. 2021)—but also the long-standing concerns of participatory, networked culture in book history, exemplified in well-known work by Natalie Zemon Davis, Jerome McGann, and D. F. McKenzie. Greteman also discusses theoretical interventions, most notably actor-network theory, that can give scholars a way of thinking about the work of a network. In a short conclusion he addresses the larger world of digital humanities, arguing convincingly that network analysis is distinct from other quantitative approaches, particularly text analysis, in its emphasis on social knowledge, a concept whose importance cuts across the varied fields of digital literary study.One of the chief benefits of network analysis is its mesoscopic perspective: by attending to systems of entities and connections, networks facilitate a view of historical and social phenomena that is neither close nor distant in any pure sense. Greteman takes full advantage of this middle ground, using network data to highlight a large-scale phenomenon and then moving to a small-scale example of a group, text, or person for analysis. In refusing the dichotomy of micro and macro, Greteman builds arguments likely to satisfy scholars with diverse approaches. Much of the book’s flexibility in this regard comes from the project’s underlying data, the result of Greteman’s extensive analysis and curation of the records of books, authors, and booksellers in the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC). In his first chapter Greteman cogently details his work with the database. He first creates a bipartite network—a pairing of node types or “partitions,” in this case books and people—and then analyzes a derived, projected network of the people alone. Greteman uses this network model throughout the book in different time periods, subsets, and configurations. The main reward of this approach is how ultimately simple the arrangement of data is: if two individuals worked in any role on a book together, they are connected to each other. This simplicity gives Greteman an unmatched range over the subjects and areas on which one might focus, highlighting how networks can answer a wide variety of literary and historical questions.Greteman organizes his chapters by network principles or concepts. While these may be unfamiliar to readers in literary studies, Greteman is patient and instructive. Each chapter acts as an introduction to a concept in addition to leading a deep investigation into that concept’s implications for early modern print culture. The first concept Greteman tackles is “phase transition,” the moment when a network reaches a critical mass of nodes and edges, going from a relatively disconnected environment to a closely connected “small world” where information can be shared efficiently. He gives convincing evidence that the moment of phase transition in the early English print network happened just at the turn of the seventeenth century, and he connects this finding to debates over the revolutionary nature of print going back to the work of Walter Ong and Elizabeth Eisenstein. Greteman suggests that this phase transition shows a more sudden change than the current gradualist account of the printing revolution admits. The next two concepts he addresses involve the network’s entities or nodes. Greteman uses degree to count the connections that a person has in the network, in order to determine whether a person is a “hub,” highly connected and therefore important. He uses “betweenness” to count the paths that pass through a node, which lets him determine whether a node is a “bridge,” a person who brokers between two or more groups in the network. The hub Greteman identifies in this chapter is the printer Nicholas Okes, who it turns out had an underappreciated role in the print culture of the early seventeenth century. For betweenness, Greteman turns to the other part of his bipartite network, the texts. He identifies networked publications by Eleanor Davies and Mary Cary and then delves into the radical work of these two female prophets, detailing the ways their importance to the social world of their time has been overlooked. Greteman punctuates these analyses with reflections on the potential of network analysis to uncover what has been hidden. In a final chapter he introduces the principle of weak ties—casual relationships in a network that in fact hold disparate groups together—to analyze aspects of the social world of John Milton. Greteman shows that Milton cultivated weak ties that strengthened his career, particularly with two very different print professionals: the literary publisher Humphrey Moseley and the radical printer Matthew Simmons. In all these chapters Greteman relies on network techniques and principles that are well established in the social sciences, developed by scholars such as Mark Granovetter, and his arguments benefit from being grounded in methods that, while new to some areas of literary and historical scholarship, are well tested in other disciplines.Greteman’s study poses a fascinating set of questions for future scholarship in this area. The main one, certainly, is how scholars using network analysis, and experimenting with the digital humanities more broadly, will combine close analysis of literary texts with broader data-focused investigations to generate new insights. Greteman’s boldest claim in the book—that phase transition in the ESTC network demonstrates revolutionary change in English print culture—issues from broad-scale treatment of the data and as a result may not convince those who have committed themselves to studying gradual change or individual texts and figures. Likewise, Greteman focuses on Davies and Cary through the mirror image of his network of people—the network of books—which may raise doubts about the significance of these registers: Davies and Cary each have texts that achieve the status of important bridges, but their betweenness as people in the network may not rise to that scale. These are small matters, however. The book skillfully shows that network analysis can be incorporated into a serious engagement with the particularities of early modern print culture. The central principle of networks is connection, and the connections Greteman makes among fields of study and among the many agents of early modern print culture are a powerful illustration of the utility of this kind of analysis in literary criticism.

:Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewJoy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature. Drew Daniel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. viii+279.Corey McEleneyCorey McEleneyFordham University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIt is a testament to the sheer brilliance of Drew Daniel’s new book—and by “brilliance” I mean not only its impressive intelligence but also the delightful sparkle of its prose—that I found myself, while reading it, frequently giggling with glee over his meditations on the topic of … suicide. Or perhaps I should write “self-killing” instead, since one of Daniel’s goals is to effect a trial separation between the two terms on the grounds that “‘self-killing’ includes a wider array of forms of voluntary death than ‘suicide,’ because it is not saddled with overfamiliar connotations of pathology and mood disorder” (7). Noting that the word suicide enters the English language in 1643 with Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (which forms the focus of a brief but insightful interlude in the middle of Daniel’s monograph), Daniel uncovers in early modern English literature what he dubs a “counterarchive” (12) of scenes and passages that collectively provide a picture of voluntary death quite different from the gloomy connotations, psychiatric baggage, and moral injunctions that have accrued around the term suicide in modernity. What he discovers instead are “surges of positive affect, humor, and pleasure found within textual representations of self-harm, self-sacrifice, and violent death” (10), a complex “pleasure-in-destruction” (224) that he gathers under the rubric “joy of the worm,” after the comic valediction that the clown in Antony and Cleopatra offers to the queen of Egypt in the moments before she kills herself with the fatal asp. Despite Daniel’s disclaimer that his “analysis does not seek to relay ‘joy of the worm’ but, more modestly, to anatomize it” (27), it is undeniably the case that the book performs the pleasures it analyzes, much to the (discomfiting) joy of its readers.Naturally enough, in light of the book’s interest in discordant positive affects amid scenes of tragic self-killing, questions of genre—particularly comedy—are central to Joy of the Worm’s investigations. This is particularly the case in the first half of the book, where Daniel explores scenes of slapstick and failed seriousness in canonical texts by Sidney, Lyly, and Shakespeare. As Daniel signals in the introduction, Joy of the Worm “becomes increasingly sorrowful” as it tracks shifts in positive attitudes toward self-killing; the study moves “away from comedic representations of ‘joy of the worm’ as the pleasures it makes possible lose their tone of levity and take on the mantle of sobriety and sublimity” (27). The chapters on Donne, Milton, and Joseph Addison precisely evince this transition. Another key preoccupation of the book is the materialist (Empedoclean/Lucretian) understanding of self-killing “as an elemental merger with the universe” (17), which pops up in several of the texts he discusses, running counter to Christian notions of suicide as sacrilegious annihilation, rupture, and trauma. Daniel helpfully attends, too, to the racial implications of war slavery doctrine (a concept he borrows from Mary Nyquist), according to which self-killing “becomes charged with an aura of self-possession as ethical dignity whose inverse condition is the ongoing debasement of the slave” (68).These are just a few of the main strands that tie together the intricate, nuanced tapestry that the book weaves around scenes of self-killing in early modern English literature. Throughout, Daniel consistently situates the early modern texts he reads in relation to a variety of crucial intellectual and political contexts in the period. At the same time, though, it is worth noting the unabashedly presentist bent of Joy of the Worm. Seeking to cultivate what he calls, troping on D. W. Winnicott’s notion of the “good enough mother,” a “good enough presentism” (128), Daniel provocatively reads early modern texts in light of modern concepts, events, and personages that would otherwise seem to be at a far remove from the historical past. Thus the Old Arcadia and Gallathea are refracted through the queer notion of camp, while Hamlet, in Daniel’s analysis, begins to sound like a modern “RIP troll,” a person who engages in the “online humiliation of the parents and friends of someone who died in tragic circumstances” (106). The chapter on Paradise Lost is perceptively structured along the lines of the mnemonic device created by the American Association of Suicidology for suicide-risk assessment: “IS PATH WARM?” (161). And the range of contemporary references is as delightful as it is impressive: Dorothy Parker (1), Cyndi Lauper (30), Christopher Isherwood (34), Monty Python (44), Thelma and Louise (61), Huey P. Newton (138), Snoop Dogg (158), and even Gwyneth Paltrow’s “personal book curator” (192) all make cameo appearances in the pages of Daniel’s book. Daniel, to be sure, is a scholar responsible enough to pad these references with qualifications and, in some cases, with honest admissions of their quasi appropriateness—disclaimers that (to my mind, at least) no scholar should feel they must make. Because of the stern antiquarian tendencies of early modern studies, such contemporary shoutouts, however irresponsibly anachronistic they may seem to others, contribute much to the joy of reading this remarkable and relevant piece of scholarship.Above all else—even beyond the persuasiveness of its arguments and sharp-eyed close readings—the enjoyment the book generates stems largely from the wit and eloquence of its writing. The thought and care that Daniel has put into crafting each sentence is quite evident; the book is filled to the brim with puns, alliteration, rhymes, tonal shifts, and vocabulary both erudite and colloquial. Especially moving and meaningful are the occasional moments when Daniel recounts his own experience with the assisted suicide of his terminally ill stepfather. I cannot remember the last time I read a work of scholarship that made me laugh and think in such profound, if at times deliberately uncomfortable, ways. While it may be true that the “‘joy of the worm’ that we find within literature can be a crucially stabilizing handhold that keeps us from leaping” (222), such joy of the worm, like Joy of the Worm itself, is certainly an assemblage from which we will continue reaping pleasure no less than insight. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 120, Number 3February 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722333HistoryPublished online November 04, 2022 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Janel Mueller, 1938–2022

Previous articleNext article FreeObituaryJanel Mueller, 1938–2022Joshua ScodelJoshua ScodelHelen A. Regenstein Professor of English, University of Chicago Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreCourtesy of Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointI am deeply honored to pay tribute to Janel Mueller, who died on October 21, 2022. From 1988 to 1998 Janel edited Modern Philology with a characteristic blend of broad vision and incisive attention to detail. As a journal editor, award-winning teacher, and inspiring mentor of younger scholars, Janel energetically advanced literary scholarship by nurturing and improving the work of others. I gratefully remember many drafts of my own work in progress laden with her acute blue-penciled suggestions.The fitting coeditor of the 2002 Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, Janel was a magnificent scholar of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature. She combined immense erudition, particularly in the history of Christian thought; passionate dedication to expanding our literary canon by revealing the expressive power of underestimated early modern women authors and religious writings; and bold yet historically contextualized accounts of what made individual authors and texts new in style, argument, and vision. With rigorous stylistics grounded in linguistics, Janel’s Native Tongue and the Word (1984) traced with revisionary vigor how Protestant scripturalism and the imitation of biblical parallelism shaped early modern English prose, which had previously been analyzed in relation to classical models or modern science.Throughout her career Janel focused with piercing intensity on two major male authors, Donne and Milton. Attentive to Donne’s sources but above all to his ever-surprising imagination, Janel published as her first book an edition of Donne’s prebend sermons (1971) and as her last an Oxford selection of his oeuvre (2018). Janel was at the forefront of scholarship exploring early modern constructions of gender, and her numerous publications on Donne include her learned, brilliant, and influential 1992 article articulating Donne’s lesbian utopianism in “Sapho to Philaenis.” Her many articles on Milton included important 1980s and 1990s analyses of his reinvention of the political sonnet and of his first prose tract’s radical reformulation of English apocalypticism and vanguard articulation, well before other scholars had recognized it, of a “nascent English republicanism.”In numerous editions and articles, Janel examined how early modern English women authors found their literary voices by engaging with scripture and with traditions previously defined by men. Her 1994 article elucidating the way that Aemilia Lanyer’s 1611 Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum reimagined Christ’s crucifixion in gendered terms was characteristically revelatory. Having coedited Elizabeth I’s writings and translations (2000–2009), in 2011 Janel published her magisterial edition of the writings of Elizabeth’s stepmother Katherine Parr, the first Englishwoman to publish a work of her own under her own name. Janel’s luminous introductions and copious notes revealed precisely how and why Parr produced a distinctive feminine vision of reformed spiritual devotion. Her praise of Parr’s “richly expressive legacy” might fittingly be applied to Janel’s own scholarship, the enduring expression of an unforgettable mind. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 120, Number 3February 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/723649 © 2023 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Bird-Catching as a Love Allegory: A Comparison of Greco-Roman and Early Modern English Literature

Abstract: In the literature of early modern England, particularly Lyly, Shakespeare, and Spenser, love and sexual desire are commonly allegorised in terms of luring, trapping, and shooting birds. This paper investigates the classical origins of this symbolism, revealing how authors used Greek and Roman metaphors of love-as-fowling to inform their own works, with Cupid himself often imagined as a bird. It reconstructs technical and terminological aspects of fowling, arguing that we can only understand why bird-catching was used to express desire once we have answered fundamental questions of how, when, and by whom birds were traditionally caught.

New Books across the Disciplines

“New Books across the Disciplines” is a bibliographic resource that facilitates a cross-disciplinary survey of recent publications. Its scope ranges from late antiquity to the seventeenth century. Coverage is comprehensive for the large majority of North American and British publishers. Other European titles are included whenever received. Books are classified under variable topical headings and listed alphabetically by author's name. Entries include complete bibliographical data and annotations, including availability in hardcover, paperback, or ebook (oa is indicatd for open access ebooks). For paperback reprint editions, original publication dates are given in parentheses. With some exceptions, books appearing here have been published within the previous two years. Many will be presented here before they are ordered and shelved by libraries. Thanks go to David Aers and Sarah Beckwith for their collegial editorial contribution.The topics for this issue include: Editions and translationsReformation scholarship, politics, and culturePhilosophical and theological legaciesWarfareDiplomacyRace and othernessAuthorship and textualityMusicAlbertus Magnus, Saint. De unitate intellectus / Über die Einzigkeit des Intellekts. Edited by Henryk Anzulewicz and Wolf-Ulrich Klünker. Translated by Wolf-Ulrich Klünker. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 2022. 184 pp., 1 illus. Hardcover, ebook. [Latin text with facing-page German translation.]Albertus Magnus, Saint. On Resurrection [De resurectione]. Translated and edited by Irven M. Resnick and Frankin T. Harkins. The Fathers of the Church: Mediaeval Continuation, vol. 20. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2020. xxii, 335 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Bindino, da Travale. Bindino da Travale: “Chronicle” (1315–1416). Translated and edited by Alison Williams Lewin. Renaissance and Reformation Texts in Translation, vol. 15. Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2021. 314 pp., 1 map, 2 color illus. Paperback. [Translation of the artist Bindino da Travale's chronicle of Italian history.]Boer, Wietse de. Art in Dispute: Catholic Debates at the Time of Trent with an Edition and Translation of Key Documents. Leiden: Brill, 2022. Brill's Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, vol. 59. xii, 416 pp., 12 color illus. Hardcover, ebook. [Editions of Latin texts by Martín Pérez de Ayala, Matthieu Ory, Jean Calvin, Ambrogio Catarino Politi, and Iacoppo Nacchianti, with facing-page English translations, along with a previously unknown draft of the Tridentine decree on the cult of images.]Bruno, of Merseburg. The Saxon War [Saxonicum bellum]. Translated and edited by Bernard S. Bachrach and David S. Bachrach. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2022. 232 pp., 2 maps. Paperback, ebook.Carle, Lancelot de. The Story of the Death of Anne Boleyn: A Poem by Lancelot de Carle [L'Histoire de la mort d'Anne Boulenc royne d'Angleterre]. Edited and translated by JoAnn DellaNeva. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 580. French Renaissance Texts in Translation, vol. 3. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2021. xi, 414 pp., 16 tables. Hardcover. [Critical edition of the French verse text with facing-page English verse translation.]Cartagena, Alfonso de. Alfonso de Cartagena's “Memoriale virtutum” (1422): Aristotle for Lay Princes in Medieval Spain. Edited and translated by María Morrás and Jeremy Lawrance. The Iberian Religious World, vol. 8. Leiden: Brill, 2022. xii, 446 pp., 6 color illus. Hardcover, ebook. [Latin text with facing-page English translation.]Cormack, Margaret, trans. and ed. The Saga of St. Jón of Hólar [Jóns saga Hólabiskups]. Introduction by Peter Foote. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 579. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2021. x, 218 pp., 3 tables. Paperback. [Translation of the early thirteenth-century Old Norse vita of the bishop of the diocese of Hólar in Iceland.]Descartes, René. “Discourse on Method” and “Meditations on First Philosophy.” Translated by Ian Johnston. Edited by Andrew Bailey. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2020. 160 pp. Paperback, ebook.Ha, Polly, Jonathan D. Moore, and Edda Frankot, eds. Reformed Government: Puritanism, Historical Contingency, and Ecclesiastical Politics in Late Elizabethan England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 272 pp. Hardcover, ebook. [A critical edition of the scribal publication Reformed Government (ca. 1594), which provides a unique point of entry into the history of puritan radicalism, representing the most extensive Reformed response to the onslaught of anti-puritan literature in the late sixteenth century.]Jansen, Cornelius. The Predestination of Humans and Angels: Augustinus, Tome III, Book IX. Translated by Guido Stucco. Early Modern Catholic Sources, vol. 4. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2022. vii, 322 pp. Hardcover, ebook. [First-ever translation of key chapters in Jansen's polarizing treatise on Augustine's view of grace and free will.]Ludolph, of Saxony. The Life of Jesus Christ, Part Two, Volume 2, Chapters 58–89; Comprehensive Index. Translated by Milton T. Walsh. Cistercian Studies Series, vol. 284. Athens, Ohio: Cistercian Publications; Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2022. 816 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Maestlin, Michael. Michael Maestlin's Manuscript Treatise on the Comet of 1618: An Edition and Translation of Manuscript WLB Stuttgart, Cod. Math. 4º 15b, Nr. 8. Edited by Miguel Á. Granada and Patrick J. Boner. Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy and Science, vol. 33. Leiden: Brill, 2022. xiv, 230 pp. Hardcover, ebook. [First critical edition of Maestlin's German manuscript treatise on the comet of 1618 within the broader context of political and religious conflict, with facing-page English translation.]Mallett, Alexander, Catherine Rider, and Dionisius A. Agius, eds. Magic in Malta: Sellem Bin al-Sheikh Mansur and the Roman Inquisition, 1605. Islamic History and Civilization: Studies and Texts, vol. 185. Leiden: Brill, 2021. xviii, 593 pp., 19 illus. and figs. Hardcover, ebook. [Latin, Italian, and Arabic text of the trial of a “Moorish” slave accused of practicing magic and teaching it to local Christians, with facing-page English translation, followed by a microhistorical commentary and studies of the trial and its contexts.]Manningham, Bridget. Rivall Friendship. Edited by Jean R. Brink, with Mary Ellen Lamb and William F. Gentrup. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 575. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2021. 672 pp., 8 figs. Paperback. [Edition of a post–English Civil War romance that examines proto-feminist issues.]Mathey-Maille, Laurence, and Damien de Carné, trans. and ed. L’Âtre périlleux: Roman arthurien du XIIIe siècle. Champion Classiques, Série Moyen Âge, vol. 55. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2022. 560 pp. Paperback, ebook. [Medieval French verse text with facing-page modern French prose translation.]McShane, Kara L., and Mark J. B. Wright, eds. The Destruction of Jerusalem, or Titus and Vespasian. Middle English Texts. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2021. x, 228 pp. Hardcover, paperback, ebook. [Edition of the fifteenth-century fictionalized version of the historical Roman siege of Jerusalem.]Metochites, Theodore. On Morals or Concerning Education [Ēthikos ē Peri paideias]. Translated by Sophia Xenophontos. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, vol. 61. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020. 320 pp. Hardcover. [Byzantine Greek text with facing-page English translation.]Munday, Anthony. The Honourable, Pleasant, and Rare Conceited Historie of Palmendos: A Critical Edition. Edited by Leticia Álvarez-Recio. TEAMS Varia Series. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2022. xii, 361 pp., 2 figs., 1 table. Hardcover, paperback, ebook. [First critical edition of the chivalric romance translated by Munday and published in 1589.]Nielsen, Melinda, ed. and trans. An Illustrated “Speculum Humanae Salvationis”: Green Collection MS 000321. With iconographical notes by David Lyle Jeffrey and description of the manuscript by Michelle P. Brown. Leiden: Brill, 2022. ix, 491 pp., 106 color plates. Hardcover, ebook. [First modern edition of the full Latin verse text with facing-page English translation, followewd by a facsimile of the Green manuscript, and accompanied by annotations tracing the biblical references and detailed notes explaining the visual iconography.]Nogarola, Isotta. Defense of Eve: A Latin Text of the “De Pari aut Impari Evae atque Adae Peccato” with Running Vocabulary and Commentary. Edited by Finn P. Boyle, et al. The Experrecta Series: Women Latin Authors, vol. 2. Pixelia Publishing, 2022. 116 pp. Paperback, oa ebook. [A student-produced edition of Isotta's treatise, published in 1563, arguing that women are not inherently inferior.]Noukios, Nicandros. Greek Eyes on Europe: The “Travels” of Nikandros Noukios of Corfu. Translated and edited by John Muir. London: Routledge, 2022. 202 pp., 1 illus. Hardcover, ebook. [First complete English translation of a travelogue written by Nicandros Noukios, who accompanied a diplomatic mission from Venice to England in the mid-sixteenth-century.]Peele, George. David and Bathsheba. Edited by Mathew R. Martin. The Revels Plays. Manchester: Manchester University Press, (2018) 2022. 200 pp. Paperback.Rigord. The Deeds of Philip Augustus: An English Translation of Rigord's “Gesta Philippi Augusti.” Translated by Larry F. Field. Edited by M. Cecilia Gaposchkin and Sean L. Field. Foreword by Paul R. Hyams. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2022. xxiv, 184 pp., 4 maps, 15 color figs. Paperback.Villani, Giovanni. The Eleventh and Twelfth Books of Giovanni Villani's “New Chronicle” [Nuova Cronica]. Translated from the Italian by Rala I. Diakité and Matthew T. Sneider. Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, vol. 31. Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, vol. 79. Berlin: De Gruyter; Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2022. xi, 481 pp. Hardcover, ebook. [Translation of chapters of the New Chronicle focused on the dangers of foreign enemies.]Beck, Andreas J. Gisbertus Voetius (1589–1676) on God, Freedom, and Contingency: An Early Modern Reformed Voice. Brill's Series in Church History and Religious Culture, vol. 84. Leiden: Brill, 2022. xiv, 616 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Ben-Tov, Asaph. Johann Ernst Gerhard (1621–1668): The Life and Work of a Seventeenth-Century Orientalist. The History of Oriental Studies, vol. 11. Leiden: Brill, 2021. xii, 252 pp., 25 color illus. Hardcover, ebook.Cogan, Susan M. Catholic Social Networks in Early Modern England: Kinship, Gender, and Coexistence. Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. 296 pp., genealogical tables. Hardcover, ebook.Constantinidou, Natasha, and Han Lamers, eds. Receptions of Hellenism in Early Modern Europe: 15th–17th Centuries. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, vol. 303. Leiden: Brill, 2020. xxii, 562 pp., 47 illus. Hardcover, ebook.Del Prete, Antonella, Anna Lisa Schino, and Pina Totaro, eds. The Philosophers and the Bible: The Debate on Sacred Scripture in Early Modern Thought. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, vol. 333. Leiden: Brill, 2021. xiv, 304 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Geoga, Margaret, and John Steele, eds. Allure of the Ancient: Receptions of the Ancient Middle East, ca. 1600–1800. Intersections, vol. 80. Leiden: Brill, 2022. xvi, 402 pp., 47 color illus. Hardcover, ebook.Gordon, Bruce, and Carl R. Trueman, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Calvin and Calvinism. Oxford Handbooks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. xvii, 692 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Griesel, Jake. Retaining the Old Episcopal Divinity: John Edwards of Cambridge and Reformed Orthodoxy in the Later Stuart Church. Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 256 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Ha, Polly, Jonathan D. Moore, and Edda Frankot, eds. Reformed Government: Puritanism, Historical Contingency, and Ecclesiastical Politics in Late Elizabethan England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 272 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Hardy, Nicholas, and Dmitri Levitin, eds. Confessionalisation and Erudition in Early Modern Europe: An Episode in the History of the Humanities. Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 225. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 426 pp. Hardcover.Helmer, Christine, ed. The Medieval Luther. Spätmittelalter, Humanismus, Reformation, vol. 117. Tübingen, Ger.: Mohr Siebeck, 2020. xii, 303 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Jorink, Eric, and Dirk van Miert, eds. Isaac Vossius (1618–1689): Between Science and Scholarship. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, vol. 214. Leiden: Brill, 2021. xiii, 352 pp., 31 illus. Hardcover, ebook.Levitin, Dmitri, and Ian Maclean, eds. The Worlds of Knowledge and the Classical Tradition in the Early Modern Age: Comparative Approaches. Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions, vol. 33. Leiden: Brill, 2021. x, 446 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Loop, Jan, and Jill Kraye, eds. Scholarship between Europe and the Levant: Essays in Honour of Alastair Hamilton. The History of Oriental Studies, vol. 8. Leiden: Brill, 2020. xiv, 398 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Macfarlane, Kirsten. Biblical Scholarship in an Age of Controversy: The Polemical World of Hugh Broughton (1549–1612). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 288 pp., 5 illus. Hardcover, ebook.Marshall, Peter, ed. The Oxford History of the Reformation. Oxford Histories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 240 pp. Paperback, ebook.Marshall, Peter. Reformation England, 1480–1642. Third edition. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. 304 pp., 9 illus. Hardcover, paperback, ebook.McDiarmid, John F., and Susan Wabuda, eds. The Cambridge Connection in Tudor England: Humanism, Reform, Rhetoric, Politics. St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Leiden: Brill, 2022. xiv, 346 pp. Hardcover, ebook.McGrath, Alister E. Reformation Thought: An Introduction. 5th edition. Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons, 2021. xv, 327 pp. Paperback, ebook.Mills, Simon. A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1600–1760. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 352 pp., 15 illus. Hardcover, ebook.Milton, Anthony. England's Second Reformation: The Battle for the Church of England, 1625–1662. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 450 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Muller, Richard A. Grace and Freedom: William Perkins and the Early Modern Reformed Understanding of Free Choice and Divine Grace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. xi, 232 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Philippides, Marios, and Walter K. Hanak. The Siege and the Fall of Constantinople in 1453: Historiography, Topography, and Military Studies. London: Routledge, (2011) 2020. 816 pp. Paperback.Quatrini, Francesco. Adam Boreel (1602–1665): A Collegiant's Attempt to Reform Christianity. Brill's Series in Church History, vol. 81. Leiden: Brill, 2021. xvi, 423 pp., 12 illus. Hardcover, ebook.Rittgers, Ronald K. The Reformation of the Keys: Confession, Conscience, and Authority in Sixteenth-Century Germany. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2021. 330 pp., 4 illus., 1 map. Hardcover.Rosenblatt, Jason P. John Selden: Scholar, Statesman, Advocate for Milton's Muse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 288 pp. Hardcover, ebook. [On Selden's debates in the Westminster Assembly, the rabbinic influence on his positions, and his influence on Milton's prose treatises.]Salazar, Greg A. Calvinist Conformity in Post-Reformation England: The Theology and Career of Daniel Featley. Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 304 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Scully, Robert E., SJ, ed. Companion to Catholicism and Recusancy in Britain and Ireland: From Reformation to Emancipation. Brill's Companions to the Christian Tradition, vol. 101. Leiden: Brill, 2022. 664 pp., 36 color illus., 5 maps, 1 table. Hardcover, ebook.Van Boxel, Piet, Kirsten Macfarlane, and Joanna Weinberg, eds. The Mishnaic Moment: Jewish Law among Jews and Christians in Early Modern Europe. Oxford-Warburg Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 432 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Watson, Nicholas. Balaam's Ass: Vernacular Theology before the English Reformation, Volume 1: Frameworks, Arguments, English to 1250. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. 640 pp., 5 tables. Hardcover, ebook.Yoder, Peter James. Pietism and the Sacraments: The Life and Theology of August Hermann Francke. Pietist, Moravian, and Anabaptist Studies, vol. 6. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021. 220 pp. Hardcover, paperback.Amsler, Mark. The Medieval Life of Language: Grammar and Pragmatics from Bacon to Kempe. Knowledge Communities, vol. 10. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. 264 pp., 2 tables, 2 figs. Hardcover, ebook.Caiazzo, Irene, Constantinos Macris, and Aurélien Robert, eds. Brill's Companion to the Reception of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Brill's Companions to Classical Reception, vol. 24. Leiden: Brill, 2022. xvi, 496 pp., 20 illus. Hardcover, ebook.Carter, Craig A. Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism. Foreword by Carl R. Trueman. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2021. xviii, 334 pp. Paperback.Cessario, Romanus, OP. The Godly Image: Christian Satisfaction in Aquinas. Sacra Doctrina Series. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2020. xxiii, 266 pp. Paperback, ebook.Colberg, Shawn M. The Wayfarer's End: Bonaventure and Aquinas on Divine Rewards in Scripture and Sacred Doctrine. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2020. x, 313 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Dealy, Ross. Before Utopia: The Making of Thomas More's Mind. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. xii, 400 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Del Soldato, Eva. Early Modern Aristotle: On the Making and Unmaking of Authority. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. x, 262 pp., 6 illus. Hardcover, ebook.Demacopoulos, George E., and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds. Orthodox Readings of Augustine. Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Thought. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. 314 pp. Paperback.Duncan, Stewart. Materialism from Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 248 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Edelheit, Amos. A Philosopher at the Crossroads: Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola's Encounter with Scholastic Philosophy. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, vol. 338. Leiden: Brill, 2022. x, 568 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Elior, Ofer, Gad Freudenthal, and David Wirmer, eds. Gersonides’ Afterlife: Studies on the Reception of Levi ben Gerson's Philosophical, Halakhic, and Scientific Oeuvre in the 14th through 20th Centuries. Studies in Jewish History and Culture, vol. 62. Officina Philosophica Hebraica, vol. 2. Leiden: Brill, 2020. xviii, 673 pp., 9 figs., 6 tables. Hardcover, ebook.Estrada, Paula Pico. Nicholas of Cusa on the Trinitarian Structure of the Innate Criterion of Truth. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, vol. 335. Leiden: Brill, 2022. xiv, 238 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Flood, Anthony T. The Metaphysical Foundations of Love: Aquinas on Participation, Unity, and Union. Thomistic Ressourcement Series, vol. 10. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, (2018) 2021. xvi, 148 pp. Paperback.Fuchs, Barbara, and Mercedes García-Arenal, eds. The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe: From Inquisition to Inquiry, 1550–1700. The UCLA Clark Memorial Library Series. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2020. viii, 294 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Gallagher, Lowell, James Kearney, and Julia Reinhard Lupton, eds. Entertaining the Idea: Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Performance. The UCLA Clark Memorial Library Series. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2021. x, 242 pp., 6 illus. Hardcover, ebook.Heidgerken, Benjamin E. Salvation through Temptation: Maximus the Confessor and Thomas Aquinas on Christ's Victory over the Devil. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2021. xiv, 316 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Hole, Sam. John of the Cross: Desire, Transformation, and Selfhood. Christian Theology in Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. xi, 221 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Hrynkiw, Hieromonk Gregory. Cajetan on Sacred Doctrine. Foreword by Andrew Hofer, OP. Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2020. xx, 330 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Hunter, Justus H. If Adam Had Not Sinned: The Reason for the Incarnation from Anselm to Scotus. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2020. xvii, 257 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Johnson, Ella. This Is My Body: Eucharistic Theology and Anthropology in the Writings of Gertrude the Great of Helfta. Cistercian Studies Series, vol. 280. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press; Athens, Ohio: Cistercian Publications, 2020. Paperback, ebook.Larson, Atria A. Master of Penance: Gratian and the Development of Penitential Thought and Law in the Twelfth Century. Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Canon Law, vol. 11. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, (2014) 2020. xviii, 553 pp., 3 figs. Paperback.Lauritzen, Frederick, and Sarah Klitenic Wear, eds. The Byzantine Platonists, 284–1453. Theandrites: Studies on Byzantine Philosophy and Christian Platonism. Steubenville, Ohio: Franciscan University Press, 2021. xvi, 322 pp. Hardcover.Leicht, Reimund, and Giuseppe Veltri, eds. Studies in the Formation of Medieval Hebrew Philosophical Terminology. Studies in Jewish History and Culture, vol. 57. Officina Philosophica Hebraica, vol. 1. Leiden: Brill, 2019. x, 285 pp., 1 illus., 19 tables. Hardcover, ebook.Levering, Matthew, Piotr Roszak, and Jörgen Vijgen, eds. Reading Job with St. Thomas Aquinas. Thomistic Ressourcement Series, vol. 15. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2020. vi, 414 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Marder, Michael. Green Mass: The Ecological Theology of St. Hildegard of Bingen. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2021. xiii, 167 pp. Hardcover, paperback, ebook.Mattila, Janne. The Eudaimonist Ethics of al-Fārābī and Avicenna. Islamic Philosophy, Theology, and Science: Texts and Studies, vol. 116. Leiden: Brill, 2022. 247 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Meli, Domenico Bertoloni. Mechanism: A Visual, Lexical, and Conceptual History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. xii, 188 pp., 58 illus. Hardcover, ebook.Ménager, Daniel. Montaigne et la “culture de l’âme.” Études Montaignistes, vol. 68. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2020. 275 pp. Paperback, ebook.Miller, Clyde Lee. The Art of Conjecture: Nicholas of Cusa on Knowledge. Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, vol. 64. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2021. x, 189 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Monagle, Clare, ed. The Intellectual Dynamism of the High Middle Ages. Knowledge Communities, vol. 9. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. 343 pp., 4 tables, 9 figs. Hardcover, ebook.Muceni, Elena. Malebranche et les équilibres de la morale. Lire le XVIIe siècle, vol. 64. Discours historique, discours philosophique, vol. 8. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2020. 337 pp. Paperback, ebook.Mursell, Gordon. The Bonds of Love: St. Peter Damian's Theology of the Spiritual Life. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2021. xiv, 294 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Ortlund, Gavin R. Anselm's Pursuit of Joy: A Commentary on the Proslogion. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2020. xv, 244 pp., 3 figs. Hardcover, ebook.Polloni, Nicola. The Twelfth-Century Renewal of Latin Metaphysics: Gundissalinus's Ontology of Matter and Form. Durham Medieval and Renaissance Monographs and Essays, vol. 6. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies; Durham: University of Durham, Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2020. xiii, 318 pp., 4 figs. Hardcover.Ramos, Alice M., ed. Beauty and the Good: Recovering the Classical Tradition from Plato to Duns Scotus. Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, vol. 62. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2020. ix, 415 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Rees, Valery, Anna Corrias, Francesca M. Crasta, Laura Follesa, and Guido Giglioni, eds. Platonism: Ficino to Foucault. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, vol. 320. Leiden: Brill, 2021. vi, 357 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Schrader, Dylan. A Thomistic Christocentrism: Recovering the Carmelites of Salamanca on the Logic of the Incarnation. Thomistic Ressourcement Series, vol. 17. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2021. xi, 265 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Schumacher, Lydia, ed. Early Thirteenth-Century English Franciscan Thought. Veröffentlichungen des Grabmann-Institutes zur Erforschung der mittelalterlichen Theologie und Philosophie, vol. 68. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021. vii, 334 pp., 5 color illus., 7 tables. Hardcover, oa ebook.Sherman, Anita Gilman. Skepticism in Early Modern English Literature: The Problems and Pleasures of Doubt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. ix, 270 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Sherman, Donovan. The Philosopher's Toothache: Embodied Stoicism in Early Modern English Drama. Rethinking the Early Modern. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2022. viii, 195 pp. Hardcover, paperback, ebook.Slotemaker, John T., and Eileen C. Sweeney, eds. New Readings of Anselm of Canterbury's Intellectual Methods. Anselm Studies and Texts, vol. 6. Leiden: Brill, 2022. xvi, 303 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Wood, Jacob W. To Stir a Restless Heart: Thomas Aquinas and Henri de Lubac on Nature, Grace, and the Desire for God. Thomistic Ressourcement Series, vol. 14. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, (2019) 2021. xvi, 472 pp., 4 figs., 4 tables. Paperback.Zocchi, Elisa. The Sacramentality of the World and the Mystery of Freedom: Hans Urs von Balthasar, Reader of Origen. Adamantiana, vol. 16. Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2021. 366 pp., 1 table. Hardcover.Brunning, Sue. The Sword in Early Medieval Northern Europe: Experience, Identity, Representation. Anglo-Saxon Studies, vol. 36. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2019. xvi, 213 pp., 29 figs., 1 map, 13 graphs. Hardcover, ebook.Capwell, Tobias. Arms and Armour of the Renaissance Joust. Arms and Armour. Leeds, West Yorkshire: Royal Armouries Museum, 2021. 96 pp., 100 color plates throughout. Paperback.Cazaux, Loïc. Les capitaines dans le royaume de France: Guerre, pouvoir et justice au bas Moyen Âge. 2 vols. Histoire et Archives, vol. 21. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2022. 1,016 pp. Paperback, ebook.Fagel, Raymond. Protagonists of War: Spanish Army Commanders and the Revolt in the Low Countries. Avisos de Flandes, vol. 18. Leuven, Belg.: Leuven University Press, 2021. 388 pp. Paperback, oa ebook.Groen, Petra, ed. The Eighty Years War: From Revolt to Regular War, 1568–1648. Military History of the Netherlands. Translated from the Dutch by Andy Brown, Helen Bannatyne, and Annette Mills. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2019. 497 pp., color illus. throughout. Hardcover.Haude, Sigrun. Coping with Life during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). Studies in Central European Histories, vol. 69. Leiden: Brill, 2021. xvi, 312 pp., 13 figs. Hardcover, ebook.Irujo, Xabier. Charlemagne's Defeat in the Pyrenees: The Battle of Rencesvals. The Early Medieval North Atlantic, vol. 11. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. 254 pp., 18 figs. Hardcover, ebook.Neuschel, Kristen B. Living by the Sword: Weapons and Material Culture in France and Britain, 600–1600. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2020. vii, 223 pp., 4 color plates, 18 black-and-white illus. Hardcover, paperback, ebook.Short, William R., and Reynir A. Óskarson. Men of Terror: A Comprehensive Analysis of Viking Combat. Yardley, Pa.: Westholme Publishing, 2021. xxvii, 324 pp., 300 illus. Hardcover.Anderson, Roberta, and Charlotte Backerra, eds. Confessional Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe. Routledge Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge. London: Routledge, (2020) 2022. 276 pp. Paperback.Bombi, Barbara. Anglo-Papal Relations in the Early Fourteenth Century: A Study in Medieval Diplomacy. Oxford Studies in Medieval European History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. xii, 273 pp. Hardcover, ebook.Ebben, Maurits, and Louis Sicking, eds. Beyond Ambassadors: Consuls, Missionaries, and Spies in Premodern Diplomacy. Rulers and Elites: Comparative Studies in Governance, vol. 19. Leiden: Brill, 2020. x, 223 pp., 2 maps, 1 table. Hardcover, ebook.Huber-Rebenich, Gerlinde. Jacques Bongars (1554–1612): Gelehrter und Diplomat im Zeitalter des Konfessionalismus. Spätmittelalter, Humanismus, Reformation, vol. 87. Tübingen, Ger.: Mohr Siebeck, (2015) 2020. xii, 148 pp. Ebook.Netzloff, Mark. Agents beyond the State: The Writings of English Travelers, Soldiers, and Diplomats in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. xi, 267 pp., 4 illus. Hardcover, ebook.O'Leary, Jessica. Elite Women as Diplomatic Agents in Italy and Hungary, 1470–1510: Kinship and the Aragonese Dynastic Network. Gender and Power in the Premodern World. Leeds, West Yorkshire: Arc Humanities Press, 2022. 127 pp., 2 illus., 3 line drawings. Hardcover, ebook.Rothman, E. Natalie. The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Routes of Orientalism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2021. xx, 419 pp., 3 tables, 57 figs. Paperback, oa ebook.Sáez-Hidalgo, Ana, and Berta Cano-Ech

Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature ed. by Carol Mejia LaPerle (review)

Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature ed. by Carol Mejia LaPerle (review)

Review of Anita Gilman Sherman’s Skepticism in Early Modern English Literature: The Problems and Pleasures of Doubt

Review of Anita Gilman Sherman’s Skepticism in Early Modern English Literature: The Problems and Pleasures of Doubt

Tiles and Tinctures: Interdependent Co-creativity in Early Modern English Literature

Tiles and Tinctures: Interdependent Co-creativity in Early Modern English Literature

Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England

Ovid and Renaissance literature. A tower of immensely rich bibliography awaits: Richard DuRocher, Milton and Ovid (1985); Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphoses and the Pursuits of Paganism (1986); Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (1993); Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Professions: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-nationhood (1997); Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (2000); Raphael Lyne, Ovid’s Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses, 1567–1632 (2001); Goran V. Stanivukovic, ed., Ovid and the Renaissance Body (2001); Syrithe Pugh, Spenser and Ovid (2005); Liz Oakley-Brown, Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Translation in Early Modern England (2006); Cora Cox, Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan England (2009); M. L. Stapleton, Spenser’s Ovidian Poetics (2009) and Marlowe’s Ovid: The “Elegies” in the Marlowe Canon (2014); Maggie Kilgour, Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid (2012); Dan Moss, The Ovidian Vogue: Literary Fashion and Imitative Practice in Late Elizabethan England (2014); Lindsay Ann Reid, Shakespeare’s Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval (2019); Lisa S. Starks, ed., Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English Literature (2020); John S. Garrison and Goran V. Stanivukovic, eds., Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature (2021).Heather James strides into this saturated market with grace and command. Choosing the most canonical of authors—Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Milton—she buttresses her unfailingly judicious, subtle readings with diligent attention to the particularities of early printed editions, typesetting, engravings, commentaries, and marginalia. The result is a wise, friendly, and learned book. Her main thesis is that the enormous outpouring of early modern English literature was inspired by Ovid, who above all prized the liberty of speech in his writing. (In Greek this is parrhesia and in Latin licentia, which could mean bold, frank, open speech, words said without fear of reprisal.) Armed with the writings of the ever-protean Roman poet, English authors had the confidence to say what they wanted to say.“When we read, interpret, adapt, and invent, we put our breath into poems whose existence very much depends on our participation and our belief in the power of breath and speech to oppose arbitrary rule,” James writes in the introduction (15). This luminous spirit permeates her text. Spenser, she observes in chapter 1, scatters his verses with botanical imagery. Her ideas coalesce into lapidary sentences: “He plants his flowerbeds in the morally positive terrain of the liberty of speech and poetic license. They make up the ingredients of what I call poetic aromatherapy, the sensual immersion in rhetorical flowers for therapeutic purposes” (21). In a beautiful reading of a stanza from The Faerie Queene in which the poet catalogs sad lovers such as Hyacinthus, Phoebus, Narcissus, Amaranthus, and Amintas, James writes: “One whiff—and a stanza is one whiff—revives the experience of elegiac longing as it stands at the threshold between having and losing, erotic promise and submission to the moral disciplines that require mythic, pagan lovers and even common, Protestant readers to rewrite their experience as a lesson learned” (34–35). This is one of many places in the book where James’s prose approaches Ben Jonson’s “liquid marble.”In chapter 2 James recasts the much-discussed dynamics of Renaissance literary rivalry and imitation. Here Marlowe gets his turn: Whether he is cast in wrestling matches with Spenser and Shakespeare or in a love-hate triangle with both, Marlowe manages to be intrusive, abrasive, and productive, like the grain of sand an oyster coats with pearl. . . . Gloriously unaware of the competition he inspires, Marlowe sets the gold standard for energy (energia) in speech and charisma in his authorial persona as it takes retrospective shape between his early death and the late publication dates of his work. (56)This established, James explores how Marlowe “unabashedly trifle[s]” with the “rhetorical, erotic, and social decorums” of the day (57) in his major plays and in his translation of the Amores (the first full rendition in any vernacular language). She concludes with a meditation on Faustus, who in his moment of perdition quotes not scripture but an erotic line from the Amores (“O lente, lente, currite noctis equi”).Then comes Shakespeare. Chapters 3 and 4 are readings of Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. James teases out how the former draws on headstrong Ovidian heroines who rebel against patriarchy and how the latter delights in “the artful, witty, and insouciant use of indecorum” of which Ovid is the master (17). Her forensic analysis of the changes in Q1 and Q2 of Romeo and Juliet is ingenious. She observes that Juliet is ever more luxuriant in her classicism, as she “takes more time with her Ovidian allusions and gets more from them, with the result that she seems to compress the whole universe of Ovidian metamorphosis into one elegy” (113). Thus Juliet becomes “the tragic protagonist who most fully inherits Marlowe’s bold Ovidianism despite being tender in years” (101).Whereas most readers will associate Jonson with the neoclassicism of Horace, chapter 5 uncovers how he was obsessed with Ovid, too. James analyzes the Ovidianisms in The Forest and shows how Jonson defends Ovid from charges of licentiousness in Poetaster, or The Arraignment. Jonson and James are both superb classicists. In the epilogue James returns to questions of gender and sexuality in exploring how John Milton’s Eve and Anne Wharton’s Julia fulfill the duties of parrhesia. “The full significance of Ovid’s poetic and political projects would not exist without the pervasively implied presence of woman readers and commentators,” James rightly notes (235).As a sign of generative scholarship, James’s book leaves me with a host of questions. Let’s put some pressure on parrhesia, for example. I wonder why James does not spend more time engaging with Michel Foucault’s Fearless Speech lectures (1983). While I understand that Foucault might seem passé in our post-post theory moment, he poses some problems that remain unresolved. For one, he points out that the citizen who takes on parrhesia always entails risks in truth telling. Ovid’s biography is certainly replete with risk, not least in his still mysterious banishment. How might this danger map onto the lives of the English poets? What specific threat did they face when they spoke the truth to power? Where does James locate this power? In the classical tradition writ large? The poet’s patrons? Parliament, jurists, censors, or ecclesiastical and civil ministers? The Star Chamber, privy council, or monarch? How can we understand the differences in open speech between print, theatrical, and legal spheres? Are the liberties of speech in Rome and early modern England equivalent, or are there incongruities that cannot be resolved by typology or imitation? Similarly, James mentions the aftermath of the Roman civil war and the imposition of Augustan order. What about the violence of the Protestant Reformation, the book- and people-burning, the uneasy peace of the Elizabethan reign?Returning to what James says about Juliet—she “takes more time with her Ovidian allusions and gets more from them”—is this Juliet, or Shakespeare? Does it matter? In our literary imagination, how would the stakes of the conversation change if we saw it not like the teenage girl in Verona reading her Amores in her bedroom but like a middle-aged professional in noisy London revising, again and again, choice bits of the Metamorphoses?In sum, this is a book written by someone who deeply loves her texts and is operating at the height of her powers. For several afternoons I bathed in the warmth of James’s prose and the brilliance of her analyses. It is manifestly clear that she has been delighting, teasing, luxuriating in the pleasures and perplexities of Latin and English poetry since Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (1997). Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England reaffirms James’s position at the forefront of the field. The last word of the Metamorphoses is the resounding vivam, “I shall live.” James makes the great poet live once again.

The Matter of Virtue: Women's Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare

At the very end of The Matter of Virtue, Holly Crocker disavows the notion that this might be “a book about philosophy's or theology's influence on literature,” or, on the other hand, “a book that argues certain poets are philosophers or theologians” (p. 269). These statements about what the book is not are helpful to keep in mind as one navigates its fascinating arguments about the power—and misfortunes—of feminine virtue in medieval and Early Modern English literature. Crocker is interested in uncovering “an alternative foundation for ethics” centered on bodies in community, on vulnerability to suffering and endurance of that suffering, and on protecting others. This mode of ethics is embodied by female characters in a variety of works—poetry, drama, visual arts, and prose narrative—from the late medieval period to the Renaissance. The book emphasizes the pragmatic, everyday discourses and practices that engage what Crocker terms “material virtue”: the inherent powers of a body (not necessarily a human body) interacting with other bodies in the world. Paying attention to such virtues as they emerge in literary texts offers not just a recuperation of feminine virtue—a quality so often derided as weak or inauthentic—but “a rival idea of what it means to be human” (p. 6).It is helpful to disentangle these literary arguments from the philosophical or theological partly because some of the brief discussions of the history of philosophy can be misleading, as when the destabilized relationship between habit and virtue in the fourteenth century is redescribed as a severing of the connection between volition and action, with the impression that medieval scholastic philosophy was consumed with the problem that a vicious person might merely perform good acts (p. 10). It was not, although Crocker convincingly demonstrates that literary and instructional texts were in fact so consumed. More importantly, the role of Aristotle's moral philosophy, treated throughout the book, is somewhat unsettled. Crocker often aligns female virtue with Aristotelian virtue theory. Katherine, in John Capgrave's Life of St. Katherine, “exemplifies the Aristotelian idea that virtue develops as a result of constant guidance and deliberate practice . . . [she] is fostered by an ethical habitus that promotes her innate goodness” (p. 117). Katherina in Taming of the Shrew inhabits virtue along Aristotelian lines and thus “achieves material virtue” (p. 234). This understanding of Aristotelian virtue as involving both body and mind, unifying action and intention, is linked to Crocker's recuperation of feminine ethics as involving inherent power, distinct from a rules-based ethics that might merely be performed. Yet elsewhere Aristotelian ethics is highlighted for its masculinist assumptions and rootedness in a heroic culture that celebrates the independent rational agent. Thus the book also describes “traditional virtue ethics” as standing for individualism and masculine norms rather than the vulnerability that is marked feminine in the works treated here. This bifurcation can be confusing, as the reader sometimes gathers the impression that the recovery of a premodern virtue ethics in the process of being superseded is key to the recognition of an alternative feminine virtue. But that is not, in fact, the story the book has to tell.Instead, taking the readings and arguments on their own terms—and thus taking the book's gestures to classical, premodern, and contemporary philosophy as contingently relevant rather than forming a linear historical argument—allows the lineaments of feminine material virtue to emerge more clearly. The book describes a cultural environment in which women's conduct was increasingly subject to overt and specific direction (e.g., in conduct books) and yet constantly under suspicion for its propensity to cover viciousness with virtuous appearances. In the works under study, female characters find unexpected power in the capacity to defy misogynist expectations and either to shape their environments or to indict their social contexts when that shaping fails.The first chapter asks the intriguing question of why Criseyde is absent from the “famous women” catalogue tradition that includes Boccaccio and Christine de Pizan. Crocker turns to Lydgate's Troy Book for an account of Criseyde's excellence, and she persuasively reads Lydgate to understand Chaucer, rather than the more (understandably) usual tack of reading the earlier author's influence on the later. Lydgate's depictions of both Criseyde and Helen reveal that social standards for women's virtue are more to blame for their infidelity than some internal flaw. One of the pleasures of the chapter is in Crocker's uncovering of the ironies in Lydgate's narrative address to Helen, as though she were an errant housewife who should have guarded her honesty more carefully—why did she not stay at home, why go out “strangeris for to se”? In both Lydgate and Chaucer, the ethical tension for Criseyde in being bound to external prescription at the same time that she strives to maintain an internal virtue leads to her loss of dignity. Yet the object of critique in these works is not feminine virtue, or its mutability and failure, but a heroic culture that cannot accommodate feminine ethical action.The second chapter takes up Criseyde's legacy in Henryson and Shakespeare. It expands the familiar story of “what Henryson did to Chaucer” (p. 79) by taking up Henryson's influence on sixteenth-century verse. Henryson's destroyed, leprous Criseyde emerges as more powerful, dignified, and sympathetic in the Testament itself, only for her character to emerge in later verse as a whip to discipline women and a figure of terror and repulsion for men who should learn to fear feminine deception. Ironically, as Crocker demonstrates, such cynicism about feminine virtue evacuates the didactic function of prescriptive writings. They inevitably present themselves as merely descriptive, with virtue and vice as inherent qualities that cannot be transformed. In Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Criseyde is retrieved as a heroine who might once again exhibit corrupted virtue not as an indictment of women, but as a critique of a masculine social system.Chapter three turns to Chaucer's Custance and the tradition of virgin martyr legends. In these stories, virtue comes from a source outside the self: from God. Such grace does not diminish the power of feminine virtue, but instead it contributes to the development of an idea of virtue that circulates (“Custance's virtue is catching” [p. 125]), takes place in a network of relations, and involves dependency on others. The chapter suggests an intriguing analogy between the networks of feminine bodies and the production and circulation of books and images for women. Indeed, even more than working by analogy, each network authorizes the other. The chapter contains a reading of the frescoes in Eton College Chapel that include a version of the “Empress of Rome” narrative depicting a wrongly accused queen. These kinds of narratives accumulate a sense that ethical action can be reactive: constancy in the face of suffering, and even constancy in response to grace, offers a positive model of virtue at odds with individual action.The fourth chapter returns to the question of an interiority divided from bodily practice. Thomas Lodge's A Margarite of America is read as indicting cultural prescriptions that disallow “women's capacities for moral discretion” (p. 155). Spenser's Faerie Queene, in turn, positively constructs a model of material virtue—enacted, bodily virtue—joined to intelligence. It is not only literary texts that create the possibilities for acknowledgment of feminine virtue, but the cultural significance of Elizabeth I, who is read here not only as a threat to male power, but as a feminine object of ethical admiration. Crocker provides an intriguing rereading of Spenser's Florimell, the constantly fleeing beauty. She observes that Florimell is often judged in terms of the “regard or disregard of those who behold her beauty” (p. 167), when in fact beauty, in Platonic and other terms, has an ethical intelligence of its own.The final chapter takes in the unexpected parallel pairing of Griselda and the shrew, under the name of “Shrewish Virtue.” Crocker shows that Griselda stories actually demonstrate this figure's industriousness and integrity, not so much her passivity. Yet the chapter argues further that the binary of active and passive is better understood as undone by Griselda. She is a model for agency as endurance rather than action. In a reading of John Phillip's Plaie of Pacient Grissell, both the shrew figure (the Nurse) and Grissell are seen to articulate the same critiques of male household tyranny, placing the shrew and the patient wife on a continuum rather than in opposition. Masculine dominance is shown to depend upon this dichotomy of shrew and virtue. The most famous shrew, Shakespeare's Katherina, is read as destabilizing these categories further; via her “radical obedience” (p. 234) she usurps Petruchio's role and rather than disciplined shrew turned patient wife she is a self-created embodiment of only seemingly passive virtue that still has the capacity to unsettle and embarrass.The book concludes with Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, a work that has long troubled scholars for its unsatisfyingly limited portrayals of feminine virtue and its occasional silencing of female voices. Among other arguments, Crocker observes persuasively that in “suspending feminine complaint” Chaucer “departs from the tradition that makes women's pain a site of poetic production” (p. 260). This claim might be considered productively alongside Marjorie Curry Woods’ scholarship on the role of classical women's speeches in the medieval classroom, especially her recent book Weeping for Dido. Giving voice to women cannot be assumed in this context to be a sustainable gesture of cross-gender solidarity.The Matter of Virtue offers much of interest for feminist literary scholars and scholars invested in ongoing critiques of humanism. Its culminating portrait of feminine virtue rooted in shared vulnerability, dispossession, and endurance offers a provocation for rethinking our understanding not only of premodern literature and culture, but also our contemporary ethical models.

:Games and War in Early Modern English Literature: From Shakespeare to Swift

:<i>Games and War in Early Modern English Literature: From Shakespeare to Swift</i>

Notes on Contributors

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreDouglas Clark is a postdoctoral research assistant at the Université de Neuchâtel. His first book project, Performing the Will in English Renaissance Drama, determines the extent to which playwrights were preoccupied with exploring the destructive potential of the will (as both a faculty of the soul and a legal document). He is the author of forthcoming articles on John Donne’s testamentary verse for Studies in Philology, and transgressive acts of willing in Renaissance drama for Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England.Marjorie Garber is William R. Kenan Jr. Research Professor of English and of visual and environmental studies at Harvard University. She is the author of several books on Shakespeare, including Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers, Shakespeare After All, and Shakespeare in Modern Culture, and of books on cultural topics ranging from dogs and real estate to cross-dressing, bisexuality, the use and abuse of literature, and the place of the arts in academic life. Her most recent book is Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2020).Toria Johnson is a lecturer in early modern English Literature at the University of Birmingham (UK), and the author of Pity and Identity in the Age of Shakespeare (D. S. Brewer, 2021). Her recent publications attend to the intersection of law and emotion in early modern Europe, cultures of fear in Macbeth and Othello, and the impact of the Reformation on English understandings of compassion.Kent Lehnhof is a professor of English at Chapman University. He has published some two dozen articles on early modern literature and culture in such journals as Shakespeare Quarterly, Modern Philology, SEL, ELH, and ELR. He is also coeditor (along with Moshe Gold and Sandor Goodhart) of the essay collection Of Levinas and Shakespeare: “To See Another Thus” (Purdue University Press, 2018). He is currently working on a book-length study of vocality and ethics in Shakespeare’s late plays.Martin Moraw is an assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the American University in Cairo. He is currently completing his first book, Drama of Forms: Genre and Politics in the Time of Shakespeare, which argues that revenge tragedy, the history play, comedy, and romance give dramatic shape to the contradictions that animate the English political conjuncture of the early seventeenth century. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 50, Number 1Spring 2022 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/720378 © 2022 Northwestern University. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Cleland, Katharine. Irregular Unions: Clandestine Marriage in Early Modern English Literature.

Cleland, Katharine. Irregular Unions: Clandestine Marriage in Early Modern English Literature.