Early Modern English Research Articles

On the history of ephemeral conditional subordinators: Evidence from the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English

This article discusses the history of a selection of ephemeral adverbial subordinators (Kortmann 1997, 301), i.e., those that mainly originated in the Early Modern English period (16th -17th centuries) but whose subordinating function, however, either became obsolete rather quickly or was subject to further restrictions beyond this period. This phenomenon was particularly frequent in the CCC relations, these are: causality, conditionality and concessivity. The present article analyses a selected number ephemeral conditional subordinators and compares them with the prototypical conditional subordinator if. The methodology is corpus-based, and I examine the data in the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English. The examples discussed reveal that ephemeral conditional subordinators are scarce and serve as a clear illustration of the concept of ephemerality in the realm of adverbial subordinators.

Musicians, Chariot Bearers, and Ghost Characters: The Spectrality of Black Slavery in Early Modern Mediterranean Drama

The article discusses early modern English plays from the 1590s to the 1610s, set in or referring to the Mediterranean, which feature Black African characters in marginal roles. These characters are ‘spectral’ in that they have no speaking part but appear briefly as attendants, servants, musicians, or indeed slaves. The article argues that their spectrality evokes the presence of Black African slaves in the Mediterranean, which has often been ignored in Early Modern Studies. However, through these characters Black slavery is turned into a mere spectacle, performed for the gaze of the theatre audience in early modern London.

Punctuation in Early Modern Texts: The English Translation of Rembert Dodoens’ Herbal in Handwriting and Printing

The present paper analyses the punctuation of a handwritten and a printed version of a distinguished herbal from the Early Modern period—that is—the English translation of Rembert Dodoens’ A Niewe Herball or Historie of Plants. The paper aims to contribute to the dissemination of knowledge on the use and distribution of punctuation in Early Modern English texts of a diverse typology, as well as to provide fresh observations as regards the historical linguistic comparison between scribes and printers’ writing practices. All this considered, it pursues the following objectives: to undertake (i) a quantitative survey of the various punctuation marks occurring in the texts; (ii) a qualitative examination of these at macro- and micro-textual levels; and (iii) an evaluation of the similarities and differences between the manuscript and the printed versions.

Prescriptivist attempts at a spelling reform in Early Modern English: sociolinguistic and stylistic routes and rates of adoption

ABSTRACT Some late Renaissance scholars, like Smith (1568); Hart (1569; 1570); Bullokar (1580); Mulcaster (1582), attempted to reform English spelling to reflect the pronunciation changes resulting from the Great Vowel Shift. Their goal was to align letters and phonology by devising a more stable and predictable new system. This study explores the impact and diffusion of these spelling proposals. It examines texts from 1300 to 1700, written by authors from different socio-demographic and biological backgrounds, and across various genres, registers and text-types. The sources used as linguistic materials are the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose, an archival data source of prose pieces representing different genres from 1150 to 1500 and the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, a collection of 4,970 authored documents written from 1410 to 1681 by informants from different social ranks. This study may allow us to trace the sociolinguistic and stylistic route and rate of adoption (if any) followed by these attempts at reforming the English spelling system within processes of diffusion of linguistic innovations at the level of orthography, as well as to reconstruct the sociolinguistic contexts of language variation and change in past communities.

From Anatomical Theatres to the Stage: Ferdinand and Dissection in the Duchess of Malfi

Unlike our 21st-century approaches to the disciplines, science and art were inextricably intertwined during the Early Modern Period. Innovations in scientific knowledge were both propagated and critiqued through various literary forms. Operating within the intersection of science and literature, this essay examines John Webster’s 17th-century play, The Duchess of Malfi, as a vehicle for critiquing contemporary anatomical dissections. Building upon Daisy Murray’s Twins in Early Modern English Drama and Shakespeare, and Albert H. Tricomi’s “The Severed Hand in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi,” this essay highlights the ways in which Webster engages with the anatomical dissections of his time. “From Anatomical Theatres to the Stage” begins with an overview of the history of European anatomical theatres and moves into an analysis of twinship as a dissection at birth and its implications for the early modern reader. Then, it considers Ferdinand’s association to witchcraft and his embodiment of the early modern surgeon as a means to showcase the immoral nature of the performance of human dissection. Beyond its demonstration of Webster’s engagement with his contemporary science, this essay ultimately illustrates the inseparability of art and science.

Playing the Pirate, Playing the Jew: Refiguring the Other(s) on the Early Modern English Stage

Playing the Pirate, Playing the Jew: Refiguring the Other(s) on the Early Modern English Stage

‘A trouble to the whole house’: the Frankford's plague‐time home in Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness

AbstractCriticism in early modern English drama continues to expose the socio‐spatial anxieties generated by plague that shaped both plays and the playhouse space. What has not yet been considered in any detail, however, are the numerous public health measures born out of these anxieties that altered the lived experience of space during outbreaks. This article begins to address this lacuna by reading Thomas Heywood's domestic tragedy A Woman Killed with Kindness through the lens of contemporary plague prevention. Plague policy repurposed the home into a space that might not only contain the infected but, with competent governance, might also provide the first line of defence against infection. Woman Killed, a play that likely premiered in the wake of an outbreak, is vigorously alert to the dynamics of plague‐time domestic space and the onus placed on householders to cleanse and manage the home and its peripheries. This article examines how Heywood draws on plague prevention practices to introduce and remove ‘infectious’ sources to and from the Frankford home. Heywood utilizes the cultural immediacy of plague measures to expose and explore the dangers of female adultery that, like plague, threatened the integrity and autonomy of domestic space.

Opportunities And Threats Of Historical Evidence And Data Via Corpus-Based Software: A Case Study On Gerard Malynes

The aim of this paper is to exploit the informative nature of datasets that can be created from corpus-based software to explore specific phenomena in early modern specialized discourse, and to corroborate the adoption of the same software for historical analysis. Particular relevance will be devoted to the special nature of historical evidence, which has caused critical issues in the reliability of the data collected for the purpose of historical investigation of English. Spelling variation, in this sense, is one of the most crucial problems of Early Modern English, and this has often affected the reliability of data to be collected via software, especially when statistical findings are involved. The normalisation of historical texts has contributed enormously to make texts better readable for historical corpus analysis; and, consequently, to improve the accuracy and manipulation of data. Moreover, several tools used in corpus linguistics have benefited from the normalisation of spelling variants in the same terms, e.g. part-of-speech taggers for historical variety. This case study will attempt to explore the data retrievable from corpus-based software like VARD, #LancsBox and CQPweb, and to use them to corroborate a preliminary analysis of early modern economics discourse in two treatises written by Gerard Malynes in 1601 and 1623.

Faithful men and false women: Love‐suicide in early modern English popular print

Faithful men and false women: Love‐suicide in early modern English popular print

Speech, Media, and Early Modern English Writing

Speech, Media, and Early Modern English Writing

Sherman, Anita Gilman. Skepticism in Early Modern English Literature: The Problems and Pleasures of Doubt

Sherman, Anita Gilman. Skepticism in Early Modern English Literature: The Problems and Pleasures of Doubt

Kimura, Asuka. Performing Widowhood on the Early Modern English Stage

Kimura, Asuka. Performing Widowhood on the Early Modern English Stage

In Pursuit of Equanimity: Managing Change and Adversity in Early Modern English Households, c.1570–c.1670

Abstract This article establishes equanimity as an important emotional ideal in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In showing how equanimity served to strengthen positive emotions and temper disruptive states, it promotes a more positive view of the era’s emotional landscape. The article employs the pursuit of equanimity as an intimate analytical device for uncovering the agency of ordinary people, and thus offers historians a new perspective on momentous change and adversity in the early modern period. It charts personal experiences of adversity—from physical and spiritual threats to familial disputes, uncertain patriarchal power and economic precarity—alongside individual management of religious, social and political change following the English Reformations and during the Civil War. Where other scholars have examined how different social groups reactively negotiated new realities, this microhistorical study of one gentry family in the North West of England urges historians to refocus their attention on the proactive courses that people took. Through a detailed examination of 541 manuscript letters, domestic decorative schemes, and archaeological evidence of ritual practices of protection, the article uncovers how the Moretons of Little Moreton Hall in Cheshire managed change and mitigated disaster. It discusses instances where equanimity played a persistent role in motivating the family’s actions and behaviours in daily life, and argues that practices designed to promote emotional harmony were crucial for preserving kinship networks and managing personal well-being, as well as gender relations within households, in early modern England.

Illuminating the problem of blue verditer synthesis in the early modern English period: chemical characterisation and mechanistic understanding

We present a study into early modern English production of blue verditer, an early synthetic copper-based blue pigment chemically analogous to azurite. Verditers have been identified in numerous wall and easel paintings. While initial documentation occurs in the mid 1500s and production recipes were documented by the 17th c., the synthesis was known to be unreliable. This study replicates historical and recent scientific work on blue verditer and represents a significant advance in our understanding of verditer production and its challenges. Procedures for verditer synthesis are drawn from both 17th c. documentation and 20th c. replication work. The effects of temperature, copper and carbonate sources, solution stirring, copper ion concentration, and atmospheric composition are studied in order to elucidate the mechanism of synthesis and explain its unreliability in early modern refineries. Products are characterised by polarised light microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and powder X-Ray diffraction. Rouaite, a green basic copper nitrate, is for the first time confirmed as a product of the refiners’ synthesis and a precursor to blue verditer in laboratory syntheses. This result problematises the blanket identification of green verditer as basic copper carbonate and provides important clues to the mechanism for blue verditer synthesis. Solution chemistry and ion equilibria allow us to explain the route by which rouaite is first formed and then converted to blue verditer. Conditions favouring blue verditer production are also clarified further. Although it is commonly stated that low temperatures are required for blue verditer production, blue verditer is produced here at a range of ambient temperatures. The reaction is found instead to be controlled by solution equilibria and heavily favoured by high partial pressures of carbon dioxide. Alongside archival materials about refining and verditer production, these results are contextualised and explanations for the unreliability of historical synthesis are proposed.

What a difference a digraph made: phonetic spelling and the assimilation of the word “armada” in Early Modern English

What a difference a digraph made: phonetic spelling and the assimilation of the word “armada” in Early Modern English

Subject‐Object Asymmetries and the Development of Relative Clauses between Late Middle English and Early Modern English

AbstractThis paper presents the results of a corpus study on the Wycliffe Bible and the King James Bible, examining the distribution of the pronouns who(m)/which and the complementiser that in relative clauses with a personal referent. The data indicate that the decisive factor in both periods was the function of the gap (subject vs. non‐subject): wh‐pronouns are preferred in object relative clauses, while that is preferred in subject relative clauses. In addition, the paper argues that the subject/non‐subject distinction was decisive not only regarding the major wh/that distribution but also regarding the who(m)/which distinction. While in the case of the wh/that distinction, a syntactic difference (relative pronoun versus relative complementiser) underlies the attested asymmetry, the pronouns who(m) and which do not differ in their core syntactic properties. The data clearly indicate that both the wh‐strategy in general and the pronoun who(m) in particular started to spread from the lower functions of the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy, whereby the spread of who(m) was one step behind the general spread of the wh‐strategy. The findings thus suggest that asymmetries along the lines of the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy are not necessarily paired up with syntactic asymmetries.

Contextualizing Canonical Inclusion: The Case of Early Modern English Female-Authored Non-Canonical Verse

The Early Modern English female-authored text is recently (to be specific since 2000s) introduced to the English literary canons as supplementary material to anthologized literary lists such as the Norton Anthology of English Literature. This recent shift in their inclusion is argued as insufficient to the abundantly abandoned English female-authored publications printed between 1450s until the early 1700s. The process of their inclusion in the literary anthologies of the English Renaissance is seen as integral towards building an equitable representation of this age. Offering an equitable inclusion of women’s literature in this era is the aim of this study. This paper will first offer an in-depth contextualization to the canonization of female-authored texts with focus mainly on their exclusion from literary canons. Then, the study offers methodized canonized inclusions of Early Modern female-authored texts. In conclusion, the paper provides a detailed sample of a course plan that aims at the inclusion of female-authors during this era in a general mandatory course (for undergraduate students at the School of Foreign Languages at the University of Jordan) titled “English Literature from the Beginning until 1660s.” This course plan has been prepared and revised by the researchers from the years 2019-2023 to ensure sampling the inclusion of female-authored texts in this survey course.

The Printer as Author in Early Modern English Book History: John Day and the Fabrication of a Protestant Memory Art by William E. Engel (review)

The Printer as Author in Early Modern English Book History: John Day and the Fabrication of a Protestant Memory Art by William E. Engel (review)

Down-sampling from hierarchically structured corpus data

Abstract Resource constraints often force researchers to downsize the list of tokens returned by a corpus query. This paper sketches a methodology for down-sampling and offers a survey of current practices. We build on earlier work and extend the evaluation of down-sampling designs to settings where tokens are clustered by text file and lexeme. Our case study deals with third-person present-tense verb inflection in Early Modern English and focuses on five predictors: year, gender, genre, frequency, and phonological context. We evaluate two strategies for selecting 2,000 (out of 11,645) tokens: simple down-sampling, where each hit has the same selection probability; and structured down-sampling, where this probability is inversely proportional to the author- and verb-specific token count. We form 500 subsamples using each scheme and compare regression results to a reference model fit to the full set of cases. We observe that structured down-sampling shows better performance on several evaluation criteria.

Luther in Early Modern English

Abstract: This article surveys and examines the translations into English of Luther's works during the early modern period. Certain themes emerge, with anti-Catholicism, devotion, and consolation particularly noted as safe and unobjectionable Lutheran topics for English audiences. English reformers chose to integrate certain divines from the European mainland at certain points, with Luther playing key roles. The reign of Elizabeth (1558–1603) was a highpoint for English translations of Luther, and these coincided with other efforts by some in England as well as Germany to emphasize unity among Protestants while downplaying divisions. A flexible and contingent deployment of Luther in English continued into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when developments such as the Civil Wars, the Restoration, and German immigration provided moments of relevance for Luther. The article draws on and points to the considerable scholarship that has reshaped English Reformation studies over the past few decades, and it offers reflections on how the particularity of early modern England can be seen in relation to the heterogeneity of Reformation Europe.