Early Modern Prose Research Articles

Under Cover in Babylon: Rossini's Cyrus the Great for the Lenten Season

Rossini's Ciro in Babilonia, ossia, La caduta di Baldassare (Cyrus in Babylon, or, The Fall of Belshazzar) was performed during Lent in 1812 at Ferrara's Teatro Comunale. This study examines how the opera's librettist Francesco Aventi synthesized disparate sources that included the Greek historian Herodotus and the Biblical prophets, ancient and early modern prose treatises on the Persian king Cyrus the Great, and baroque operatic representations of imperial power; and how Rossini responded to those sources musically for the particular historical moment in March of 1812. The piece is of interest as the first serious opera for the librettist and the composer both. It displays innovative approaches to classicizing material familiar from the eighteenth-century, as exemplified in Metastasio's Ciro riconosciuto and Sarti's Giulio Sabino, and it presents the secular hero Cyrus as a Christological figure that suffers and then triumphs with divine help. Musically it anticipates developments in Rossini's own Mosè in Egitto and Semiramide. The title “Under cover in Babylon” refers first to Aventi's and Rossini's use of the standard operatic plot device of the disguised lover to motivate Cyrus's entry into the enemy city of Babylon. Second, by calling the piece an “oratorio” and including Biblical material, they disguised an opera as an entertainment appropriate for Lent. Finally, the piece carries possible but subtly expressed messages connected with Napoleonic Italy and the Ferrarese Jewish community.

Foreword

Foreword Andrew Hiscock Welcome to the 2022 volume of the Yearbook of English Studies published by the Modern Humanities Research Association. The first collection in this series was published in 1971 and the editor was Professor T. J. B. Spencer, who was at that time Director of the Shakespeare Institute and also Head of the Department of English Literature at the Institute. The 'Assistant Editor' was R. L. Smallwood. The introduction to the volume specified that this was to be a 'new annual publication […] devoted to the language and literature of the English-speaking world'. As the editors underlined, the Yearbook had been 'established because of the continuing rise in the amount of good work in English studies offered for publication in the Modern Language Review, and the similar increase in the number of books on the language and literature of the English-speaking countries sent for review.' In 1976 the Yearbook moved a short distance to the University of Warwick with the editorial duties now taken on by G. K. Hunter and C. J. Rawson. R. L. Smallwood remained as the Assistant Editor, but was replaced in the following year by Jenny Mezciems. At this point a new policy for the Yearbook was implemented. While it might operate as 'an additional outlet' for MLR submissions, 'a substantial portion of each Yearbook will from now on consist of specially commissioned articles on a broad topic […] in order to give each volume a greater centrality of interest and a wider readership.' And so with this new policy in place, the 1978 Yearbook (vol. 8) became an 'American Literature Special Number'. By 1984, Claude Rawson was sole editor with Jenny Mezciems continuing as Assistant Editor. In addition, by this time, the Yearbook had acquired an 'advisory panel' which included John Beer, Malcolm Bradbury, Philip Edwards, G. K. Hunter, Derek Pearsall, Pat Rogers, R. L. Smallwood, J. B. Trapp and Larzer Ziff. 1989 (vol. 19) saw the introduction of the first 'guest editor' for a Yearbook, J. R. (Dick) Watson of Durham University, who later became the Chairman of the MHRA. In 1990 Professor Andrew Gurr, Reading University, assumed the editorship of the Yearbook with Phillipa Hardman as the Assistant Editor, and in 2000 (vol. 30) he re-introduced the practice of inviting guest editors to the series. In the years which followed, Nicola Bradbury, also of Reading University, edited and commissioned a number of volumes of the Yearbook. During these years, Professor John Batchelor, Newcastle University, became English Editor for MLR, and took on the role of Series Editor for the Yearbook in the period 2006–11. He experimented with new patterns of publication for the Yearbook (two annual volumes), introduced new cover designs, and edited two Yearbook volumes himself in this period: one devoted to Victorian literature, and another entitled From Decadent to Modernist: and Other Essays. [End Page v] Apart from being a regular reader of the Yearbook in the course of my career, my first participation in its scholarly activities began when I was invited to become guest editor for the 2008 Yearbook devoted to Tudor Literature. After such a stimulating editorial project, it was an enormous pleasure to be appointed to succeed John Batchelor as series editor for the Yearbook of English Studies and as English editor for MLR in 2011. I remain enormously indebted to John for sharing his extensive knowledge of the very distinguished scholarly history of the MHRA's Yearbook of English Studies. In addition, I would like to take this opportunity to extend my sincere thanks to him, to Richard Correll (the Yearbook's editorial assistant) and to Gerard Lowe (the MHRA's Production Manager). In each case, their input and support has been invaluable. In recent years the Yearbook series has ranged in its research enquiries from early English drama to early modern prose fiction, Victorian world literatures, and to literature in the 1950s and 1960s. The present 2022 issue (vol. 52) returns attention to some of the earliest surviving literary documents in English Literature and to a culture negotiating urgent challenges of invasion, radically changing social priorities and the rigours of religious devotion. This collection, guest-edited by Clare Lees and Joshua...

'And in the midst of those words shot him': Satire and the Virtue of Romance in 'Assaulted and Pursued Chastity'

As its title suggests, Margaret Cavendish's 'Assaulted and Pursued Chastity' interrogates female virtue and the ways in which prose romance's generic structures depend on it. While silence and obedience were often subordinate to chastity, early modern conduct manuals ask women to uphold these and other virtues simultaneously. Early modern prose romances, however, demonstrate the difficulty of doing so. In taking up the romance genre, Cavendish satirizes the importance of chastity for the virtue of real and imagined women alike in order to renegotiate conventionally female roles in romance, and, by extension, their allegorical representations of active moral and political agents.

Translation, Medical Humanism and Early Modern Prose Fiction: Science and Literature in Francisco López de Villalobos

Francisco Lopez de Villalobos (1473–1549) shared an interest in translation with fellow humanist physicians like Andres Laguna or Francois Rabelais. His Spanish rendering of Plautus’s Amphitryon was first published in 1517 (Alcala: Brocar) and then printed again as part of Los problemas de Villalobos (Zamora: Musetti, 1543). Alongside Plautus’s comedy, the reader could find in this new volume moral and political treatises, essays on natural philosophy, dialogues peppered with comic stories, autobiographical sketches, and passages that verged on the picaresque. Its tragicomic satura of serious and humorous matter, its combination of poetry, dialogue, narrative episodes and essayistic prose turns Los problemas into a fascinating text that defies categorization. This article aims to explore how this singular admixture responded to a growing demand from an increasing readership that sought to be both enlightened and amused, and how it also pointed to the development of prose fiction as a protean genre.

“To return into Vabrillax”: fragments of a new early modern prose romance [with text

AbstractThis essay presents an edited text of a previously unknown and apparently unpublished early modern prose romance, surviving in three fragments in manuscript in the papers of the Jervoise fa...

Seeking Truth and Exposing Falsehood in Early Modern Prose Collections, or Seeing Faces in Pansies?

This article analyzes the early modern Western essay form alongside various genres of short non- fiction prose that flourished concurrently in China: xiaopin, biji, and riji. Although the works examined here were written in isolation from one another, this essay reveals these genres' common preoccupation with questions of truth, authenticity, and falsification, as well as their shared tendency to present ideas in a disorderly manner. The article argues that in both China and Europe, authors relied on these potpourri- like prose genres to respond to locally specific conditions of early modernity. Motivating this study is the question of what constitutes a viable context of interpretation and whether, in defining literary genres, scholars may responsibly invoke factors that go beyond those that historical authors themselves and their contemporaries would have recognized.

Artes populares: Serial Amusement between the Effects of Genre and Medium in early Modernity (Artes Populares: Serielles Vergnügen in der Frühen Neuzeit zwischen Gattungs- und Medieneffekten).

This article examines the status of ‘Unterhaltung’ in early modern prose (novels, short novellas etc.) while focussing on the intersections of an evolving literary market and the production of new medial artefacts in 16th and 17th centuries. Following the traces of the emerging poetological discourse in the poetics as well as in the prefaces it offers a perspective on popular ‘arts’ in the literal sense of artes populares (Bodmer and Breitinger) which is to be characterized by an emphasis on seriality in terms of novelty and reiteration, a distinctive autoreflexive gesture and the promotion of an effective idea of fiction.

Tangents (of Desire)

Does current scholarship shun or embrace what seems aleatory or “beside the point” in early modern prose, especially those elements that could be said to convey affect, tone, emotion, desire? What does it do with lyric’s indeterminate rhetoricity? Through the figure of touch and the contingencies of the tangent, this paper explores textual instances in early modern Continental literature where reading poses problems of interpretation that cannot be resolved into determinate meaning and that raise the question of how to “read” what moderns call “desire,” especially queer desire, in early modern poetry and prose. François Rabelais’s inscription of woman as writing, the tortuous fashioning of the lyric “I” as it travels between Petrarch and Louise Labé, and the sparing narrative of Marguerite de Navarre bear fragmentary traces of what moderns might call a queer feminist archive, and yet none yield positive (or empirical) “knowledge” about gendered and sexual practices and subjectivities. Rather, they inscribe modalities of desire that challenge scholars of sexuality to attend to the excess and indeterminacy that eludes efforts to capture and “represent” objects of knowledge, whether “early” or “modern.”

Transcultural Experiences in the Late Middle Ages: The German Literary Discourse on the Mediterranean World—Mirrors, Reflections, and Responses

As recent scholarship has demonstrated, the world of the Mediterranean exerted a tremendous influence not only on the societies and cultures bordering the Mediterranean Sea during the late Middle Ages, but had a huge influence on the mentality and culture of the world north of the Alps as well because it was here where East and West met, exchanged ideas and products, and struggled to find, despite many military conflicts, some kind of transcultural. The highly complex conditions in the Mediterranean realm represented significant challenges and promises at the same time, and no traveler from Germany or England, for instance, whether a merchant or a pilgrim, a diplomat or an artist, could resist responding to the allure of the Mediterranean cultures. The corpus of travelogues and pilgrimage accounts is legion, as scholars have noted already for quite some time. But we can also observe literary reflections on the Mediterranean especially during the fifteenth century. The emergence of the late medieval and early modern prose novel is often predicated on transcultural experiences, whether they entailed military conflicts or peaceful encounters between Christians and Muslims. These literary texts did not necessarily respond to the historical events, such as the fall of Constantinople in 1453, but they document an intriguing opening up of German, English, French, and Flemish, etc., society to the Mediterranean world. The prose novels discussed in this paper demonstrate that Germany, in particular, was a significant hinterland of the Mediterranean; somewhat farther apart, but still closely connected. The literary evidence will allow us to identify how those transcultural encounters were recognized and then dealt with.

Interior Description and Perspective in Deloney and Bunyan

I. Described Interiors and Perspectival RepresentationThe essays in this special issue investigate question of how interior spaces were rendered before widespread use of narrative techniques such as free indirect discourse, which permit internal focalization on a fictional world and its contents (among other effects). The strong metaphorical relation between inside of a room (and its contents) and inside of a mind (and its thoughts and perceptions) has been reinforced in literary criticism both by terminology of insides and inwardness and by literary history. Indeed, sense of that indicates beginning of a modern subjectivity has been associated with Renaissance lyric poetry of Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, and John Donne (Ferry) and with soliloquys of Elizabethan stage.1 This project began with a search through early modern prose fiction for descriptions of interiors so that they might in turn be examined for traces of perspectivism.A cognitivist approach would suggest that an association of interiors of physical spaces and perceptions is a nearly inevitable consequence of human embodied consciousness and natural language.2 George Lakoff writes, the CONTAINER schema is inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily (Lakoff 273). Building on work of Mark Johnson, Lakoff explains that body-based experience of our human selves as containers that exist inside containers such as buildings (272) predisposes us to treat boundaries of our visual field as walls of a container (e.g., of sight, out of mind) and to extrapolate spatial metaphors for consciousness such as knowing is seeing and mind is a body moving in space (Lakoff and Turner 158). The metaphorical relation can also be directed inward, as when an individual's mind, like a room, is represented as open, closed, cluttered, or even furnished with books.A culturally and historically sensitive cognitivism should be open to different expressions of container schemas in earlier literary periods, and literary history does indeed note their presence, with variations. A Cartesian image of body as container for soul-lodged in flesh like pilot of a ship-locates perceptive soul looking outwards and steering self {the mind moves body in space)? Other early modern images employ container schema to pry into its metaphorical contents. A locus classicus for representation of a mind as a container for books occurs in Book 2 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590). Spenser represents memory as a library filled with books and decaying scrolls inside skull of House of Alma, which itself takes form of a body containing Alma, soul.4 In part because of religious allegories that associate consciousness, memory, visuality, and soul, as in this Spenserian example, inwardness has been tethered to a Protestant poetics of emblems, meditations, and progresses of soul.5 Inwardness is an Anglo-Saxon word of ancient vintage, while according to OED first usage of to indicate inner character or nature dates to 1701, beginning of century of novel. English literary history associates closeted self-examination of Protestant conscience with development of early novel's themes of containment and emergent consciousness, as in Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), where Pamela retreats to a private room to pour out her heart in letters.In historical period between Renaissance meditative lyric of inward eye and interiority of early eighteenth-century novel falls period of emergent early novel, represented here by fiction of Thomas Deloney (c. 1543-1600) and John Bunyan (1628-1688). Writing about sixteenth-century romances, Elizabeth Hart asks when writers' techniques developed intermental and intramental subframes discussed by Alan Palmer (2004). …

A Lotmanian Approach to the Ideological Function of Honour in Early Modern English Texts

This essay aims at presenting a semiotic study of the ideological function of the concept of honour in early modern prose writing in England. By means of both a critical study of the major axiological and epistemological dimensions of sixteenth and seventeenth century honour, and a cultural semiotic approach to this notion (Lotman’s typology of cultures), it is my belief that it will be possible to clarify the social and ideological meaning and function of early modern honour, and to account for the transformations that the concept underwent during this period of transition, especially as can be observed in non-literary works (moral treatises and conduct books, mainly). Additionally, this is also intended to contribute to further study of the form and function of the code and concept of honour in the English literature (drama and poetry) of this period.

Spielraum im Diesseits. (Un-)Verfügbarkeit der Zeit und des Ichs

Abstract The article questions the changes which took place in the perception of time and of the self during an epoch of historical transition. Using the example of early modern prose romances (among others Fortunatus, Hug Schapler, Der Goldfaden) it is demonstrated that the category of the linearity of (a life-) time acquires a new meaning and that simultaneously the perception of time starts to detach itself from the cyclical rhythm of nature (and from the liturgical year). In this way, the conceptions of the Verfügbarkeit of time and of life are shifted. The article shows the extent to which the prose romance thematised in different ways the relations which are fraught with tension between the Unverfügbarkeit of a lifetime and the cyclical dimensions of time; in addition it also demonstrates the role which is thus played by self-awareness.

Early Modern Prose Fiction and the Place of Poetics

This essay investigates the place of poetics in early modern English literature. Place, in this context, carries a dual meaning: it questions both the relative value of critical writing vis--vis aesthetic creation and the material space given to discussions of poetological issues. A detailed investigation of the latter shows that poetics can look back on a long textual history that is nevertheless marked by spatial transformations. It is only relatively late that poetics claims, first, a separate material space within the object of the book and then, second, matures into its own textual type. By looking at the changing physical locality of critical praxis, this essay shows that growing from the roots of textual criticism, theories of prose claimed ever larger material spaces. In the period between Sidney's Defence (1595) and Pope's Essay on Criticism (1711), poetics existed predominantly in the paratextual realm and only gradually became a stand-alone form, thereby implicitly allowing early modern literary forms to speak for themselves in the marketplace of commodity reading.

Cartografía de la Novela Digresiva en España

In recent years, digressiveness in the novel has become a trendy topic in literary studies. Research on the English novel has acknowledged the relevance of digressiveness in early Modern prose fiction. Conversely, Hispanists have presented the Spanish digressive novel as a postmodernist achievement, having only the Spanish predecessors of Miguel de Cervantes's Persiles y Sigismunda (1617) and Coloquio de los perros (1613). These Hispanists regard Sterne and non-Spanish modernists as the great pioneers of the digressive novel. This article argues that the roots of the Spanish digressive novel are to be found in sixteenth-century Spain, most notably in Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache (1599–1604) but also in the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and in Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605–15). It also vindicates the digressive nature of the works of Spanish Modernists such as Azorín (pseudonym of José Martínez Ruiz) and Miguel de Unamuno. Guzmán is here presented as the first great Spanish digressive novel, and Unamuno's Cómo se hace una novela (1927) as the Spanish digressive novel par excellence.

Resistance in process

This essay explores the changing senses of the term resistance in Philip Sidney's prose fictions the Old Acradia and the New Arcadia. It argues that early modern prose fiction maintains an ambiguous relation to the intellectual currents of its time: while pre-novelistic fiction is sometimes close to or even indistinguishable from empirical or argumentative prose, fictions such as the Arcadias have a special office for domesticating and giving complexity to emergent concepts. Resistance, the idea of rebellion against tyranny, is under discussion in Sidney's milieu, and he demonstrates in his fictions, especially the New Arcadia, how the concept can be made not only vivid but circumstantiated and urgent to his readers in Renaissance Europe.

Early Modern Prose Fiction: The Cultural Politics of Reading, ed. Naomi Conn Liebler

Early Modern Prose Fiction: The Cultural Politics of Reading, ed. Naomi Conn Liebler

'Now Farewell to the Lawe, too long have I been in thy Subjection': Early Modern Murder, Calvinism and Female Spiritual Authority

A True Discourse of the practices of Elizabeth Caldwell (1604) is a prose murder pamphlet narrating its eponymous ‘heroine's’ attempted murder of her husband and her subsequent trial and execution. Early modern Calvinist theology is used to interpret the narrative and expose interlocking patterns of subjection and authority which invest Elizabeth Caldwell's words (spoken and written) with a spiritual power conventionally denied to women in this period. That such power comes at a lethal price—the articulation of her authority is permissible only as she moves towards the silence of death—is one of the many paradoxes revealed by a close analysis of the pamphlet writer's rhetorical strategies, themselves based on the Calvinist generic narrative framework of early modern prose murder pamphlets. The printed text has, however, overcome the silence imposed by her execution, leaving its articulation of female spiritual authority poised between the imaginative and experiential realms, subject finally to the interplay between writers, readers and genre.