Early Modern Readers Research Articles

Reading and Writing inSociable Letters; Or, How Margaret Cavendish Read Her Plutarch

AbstractMargaret Cavendish's Sociable Letters (1664), a fictionalized collection of private letters, makes reading and writing its subject in the broadest possible sense. Individual letters in the collection frequently offer commentary on books and describe the reading practices of women and men. This essay argues that Sociable Letters can be read as a case study of the conditions of women's reading practices. In Sociable Letters Cavendish demonstrates both an awareness of gendered models of reading and a strategic reclamation of the desiring female reader. Epistolarity becomes a means for some women to negotiate identities as reading subjects. More broadly, this essay suggests that Sociable Letters can contribute to a more inclusive history of early modern reading, which has often been defined in terms of a normative male reader. Cavendish's extended commentary on Plutarch's Lives offers a skeptical critique of humanist models of reading. In her responses to Plutarch's Cato and Pericles, Cavendish descri...

Joann Dellaneva, Reading Desportes through the italians: two early modern readers’ responses

Il presente studio offre un’accurata descrizione dei rapporti fra Desportes e la lirica italiana del Cinquecento, prendendo come riferimento due testi anonimi che elencano le consonanze fra Desportes e alcuni poeti italiani. Il primo e costituito da una serie di annotazioni scritte a mano a margine dell’edizione del 1593 delle Œuvres di Desportes attualmente conservate nella Bibliotheque municipale di Lione. Il secondo e un volumetto bilingue dal titolo Rencontre des Muses de France et d’Ital...

Reading Early Modern Literature Historically

AbstractRecently the interrelationship between early modern literature and history has been much considered, but the dialogue between the disciplines of English and History has not always been harmonious. Disputes have been fuelled in part by the divisive nature of some of the work that has been carried out in a literary‐historical vein. In particular, New Historicist approaches, which might be criticised on methodological and conceptual grounds, have caused alarm among scholars from both departments. However, there are reasons to think that historians and literary critics might be able to enjoy better relations. First, the criticisms that may be levelled at New Historicism do not apply to the work of a number of scholars who, from the 1980s on, have sought to locate literature in precise historical contexts. Secondly, both sides might view positively the fact that new texts and contexts are being examined: radical writing is being recovered; the use of gender as a key category of analysis has led to a reconfiguring of the texts which are routinely studied; literature is being discussed within ever widening geographical contexts (British, European, global); and debate over the early modern ‘public sphere’ has led to a broadening of the political and social contexts in which literature is situated. Finally, those literary critics who remain suspicious of historicisation actually have little to fear: the text, and close analysis of it, remains at the heart of any effective literary‐historical work.

Apocalypse (A User's Manual): Joseph Mede, the Interpretation of Prophecy and the Dream Book of Achmet

[Introduction]. In 1632, the English theologian Joseph Mede proposed a new avenue for interpreting a text whose importance, for him and others, was literally worldhistorical. The biblical Apocalypse, Mede announced, should be read with the help of a Near Eastern book of ancient dream interpretations attributed to 'an Arab' called Achmet. Once it was understood that John's prophecies were, on one level, an accurate prediction of the course of world political history, Achmet's book of symbols allowed the attentive reader to cut with confidence through the Apocalypse's morass of bloody seas, horned beasts, and astronomical prodigies to determine exactly what part of John's prophecy was past and what was yet to come. Because these were among the clearest claims in Mede's Commentarius apocalypseos ('Commentary on the Apocalypse') - a book written to aid the bewildered readers of his even more difficult Clavis apocalyptica ('Key to the Apocalypse') of 1627 - and because both of Mede's books were later published in English by order of the Long Parliament in 1643, Achmet's name gained large currency among Protestant interpreters of prophecy throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 1 Nor did those interpreters confine themselves merely to repeating Mede. As late as 1796, an anonymous British follower of Joseph Priestley discovered, with the aid of 'the Oriental oneirocritics', that John had prophesied both the French and American Revolutions.2 If Achmet is little known today outside Byzantinist circles - and was little known to early modern readers before Mede's intervention - his seventeenth-century rise to fame deserves our attention not least because it reveals the priorities and the manifold difficulties of a typical scholarly churchman.

Benjamin of Tudela, Spanish explorer

The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, written in the late twelfth century, has long been recognized as a unique source for both Jewish and Mediterranean history. This paper attempts to shift the focus to the text and its history, and examine the process of its translation and reception in early modern Europe. I focus on the first Latin translation (Antwerp, 1575), prepared by the Spanish biblical scholar Benito Arias Montano. In his dedication and preface, Montano presents Benjamin as an eminent member of the illustrious Spanish tradition of explorers and geographers. Moreover, he sees in the Itinerary a document that may be significant for the understanding of Scripture. Montano's conceptualization allows us to understand the complexities of translation as a cultural process – the attempts to bridge linguistic, religious, and chronological barriers that separated Benjamin from his early modern readers.

The epigrams of Sir John Harington

Contents: Preface Part I The Pleasant Learned Poet: The Courtier in the Margins Models and Sources Patterns and Sequences The Texts and Early Modern Readers. Part II The Epigrams: Critical Apparatus First-line Index and Table of Contents Appendix Tables Bibliography Index.

Alexander and the Geographer’s Eye: Allegories of Knowledge in Martín Fernández de Enciso’s Suma de geographía (1519)

Martín Fernández de Enciso’s Suma de geographía (1519) is one of the cornerstones of Spanish cartographic and navigational literature in the first half of the sixteenth century. Although the book is known today mainly for containing the first printed description of America in Spanish, the Suma was in fact a synthesis of the geographic knowledge of all the known world. At the center of the book, Fernández de Enciso records the medieval story of Alexander the Great’s journey to the Earthly Paradise. This essay argues that Enciso’s reworking of this story within the context of the new cartographic developments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries encapsulates the new observational and representational techniques derived from the early modern reading of Ptolomy, while at the same time situating the production of geographic knowledge at the center of the Spanish Imperial program.

Reading Early Modern Women's Writing (review)

Reviewed by: Reading Early Modern Women's Writing Marea Mitchell Salzman, Paul, Reading Early Modern Women's Writing, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006; hardback; pp. 256; 1 b/w illustration; R.R.P. £71.00; ISBN 9780199261048. Inspired by 'the recent interest in the history of reading' (p. 219), Paul Salzman's book uses a case study approach to re-examine the field of Early Modern women's writing, taking both well-known and less familiar examples. Its seven chapters, plus introduction and conclusion explore 'early modern women's writing as a body of knowledge' (p. 1), arguing that the energy and excitement that has surrounded the discovery of manuscripts and writing by women has had as a corollary a lack of reflection about the nature of that work as it is being used by modern scholars. The category of gender, which has allowed and enabled the study of women's writing, has also entailed a homogenization of that writing where differences are overlooked, and sameness is instantiated in the process of identifying, preserving and disseminating the work of a group of people that has been undervalued historically. Salzman's project is to rethink the way that women's writing is studied and the contexts in which it might be used. This is a thoughtful reflection from a scholar whose own endeavours in the field of bringing women's writing to light has been pioneering. [End Page 246] Salzman builds on the work of feminist historians and critics like Margaret Ezell and Danielle Clark in inclusive and generous ways, acknowledging the work and debates that have preceded his own discussion. While he canvasses material that is now becoming quite familiar, even canonical, to scholars in the field, such as that of Mary Wroth, Mary Sidney and Anne Clifford, he brings to readers the work of other writers such as Eleanor Davies, Margaret Fell and Anna Trapnel. The endeavours of women outside what might be thought of as a literary field, unprotected by a more privileged background, need to be understood, and to become part of a history of Early Modern writing more generally. Now that we have such an extensive corpus of material, as academics and scholars we can make new connections between writings and new distinctions within the category of women's writing. We can move away from the need to reify that writing, and let it stand in its own contexts. A large part of the point of the book is that seeing women as part of a group unified by gender has entailed a '[f]lattening out … [of] political context' (p. 116), so the question that begins the book, taken from Denise Riley's work, is 'Am I that name?' In other words, is women's writing containable in the category that describes it? This is a timely approach, and one that has been broached before, perhaps in less sympathetic ways, in other fields. Allen J. Frantzen's article 'When women aren't enough' in Speculum 1993, discussing the field of medieval women's writing, comes to mind. The discussion of the history of the work on women's writing is also insightful, assessing, for example, Virginia Woolf's readings of Anne Clifford, and Vita Sackville West's treatment of Aphra Behn. Woolf's desire in A Room of One's Own for women to read back through is part of the story here. As Salzman points out in the concluding pages of the book, critics tend to find in the objects of their study what suits the critical mood of the moment. If poststructuralism has taught us that this is inevitable, and even preferable when weighed against the notion of a timeless and objective criticism, it nevertheless does not hurt to be aware of these critical moods. If the trend in Behn criticism is moving away from sexuality to politics, this acknowledges that in terms of temporary mores the kinds of critics interested in women's writing tend to value radicalism over conventionalism and there is more to be said in one area than another – in Salzman's formulation, there is a preference for sinners over saints (p. 218). While this book does present serious and...

:Reading Early Modern Women's Writing

:<i>Reading Early Modern Women's Writing</i>

The Woman in the Garden: (En)gendering Pleasure in Late Elizabethan Poetry

The image of the woman in the garden captured the interest of early modern readers and writers as an embodiment of a historically specific form of moral ambivalence toward aesthetic pleasure, and, by extension, toward art and poetry. The image acquired this resonance as a result of two cultural coincidences: ambivalence toward sensual pleasure was conventionally schematized in gendered form, and functional and structural parallels were perceived between poetry and the period's new pleasure gardens. For poets, these parallels made poetic gardens a singularly rich medium for exploring the merits and problems of their art in a mode that exceeded the standard moral analyses of the defenses. What the image reveals, particularly when it incorporates a female Other to mediate between the male poet figure and art's sensuous and affective pleasures, is a reluctance to accept the widening gap between body and mind in the period's new conceptions of subjectivity. The new privileging of an independent intellect threatened an older posture essential to poetry as it was conceived by Philip Sidney and others, a porousness to the world at once mental and physical, a passivity that balanced and enabled the autonomy of “self-fashioning.” Rooted in traditional Galenic psychophysiology, this older, rival ontology accepted the sub-rational aspects of human nature that poetry appealed to as forces that connected a person to the lower tiers of creation, to other people, and finally to God.

De-Centering the Narratives and Privileging Proverbs: Two Early Modern Readings of the Conde Lucanor

Scholars have tended to read the Conde Lucanor, by the fourteenth-century Castilian nobleman Don Juan Manuel, as a book of exempla in which narratives are presented through an interpretive frame. In such studies the narratives frequently take privilege over the sententious material of the frame; some studies go so far as to dismiss the sententiae entirely, insisting that the book was meant to be read as entertainment. Two little-studied early modern manuscripts, however, pointedly reject the narratives in favor of the sententious material. Rather than a sententious frame through which to read narrative, a close examination of Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional 19.426 and Santander, Menendez y Pelayo 92 shows that for some readers, the primary purpose of narrative is provide a frame through which to read sententiae. Thus, the sententiae are privileged, and the narratives become, ultimately, dispensable.

Reading Desportes through the Italians : Two Early Modern Readers’ Responses

Like most 16th-century French poets, Philippe Desportes made liberal use of the Italian lyric tradition as source material for his poems. These sources include not only Petrarch’s canzoniere but also a host of more minor petrarchist poems, many of which Desportes no doubt read in the collections of Italian lyrics that were published throughout the Renaissance, including the well-known 9-volume set popularly referred to as the Giolito Anthologies, the Italian Anthologies, or the rime diverse.T...

:The Uses of History in Early Modern England

The essays in this collection investigate the ways in which the past was exploited to meet the concerns of the present in early modern England. The understanding of the past in this period was characterized by a deepening and more fully articulated conception of time and history, with its roots in impassioned religious and political controversies. The discourses that arose from this dialogue informed and drew together a range of genres and activities: prose accounts, polemical tracts, poems, plays, romances, secret histories, novels. Although many of these genres are no longer recognized as history, early modern writers and readers treated them as such. In assessing the uses of the past, these essays consider literary and factual writings side by side, avoiding traditional chronological and disciplinary divisions and the artificial separation of secular from ecclesiastical history. Cumulatively, they supply the context and provide a vast array of evidence for the way in which the deployment of history for political, religious, moral, aesthetic, or commercial purposes shifted between the mid-sixteenth century and the late eighteenth.

Edmund Spenser, George Turberville, and Isabella Whitney Read Ovid's Heroides

IN the Heroides, perhaps the ancient world's most prominent ex ample of literary transvestism, Ovid adopts the personae of legend ary women who lament the amatory crimes of the men they love. It may have been some of the first poetry in Latin that Spenser encoun tered, as it was for many schoolboys from the twelfth century onward, in accordance with its traditional pedagogical status, admirably docu mented by Ralph Hexter.1 Since it was part of Eton's Erasmian curricu lum as early as 1528, its familiarity and centrality to Spenser, whom Richard Mulcaster inculcated with a similar humanism at the Merchant Taylors' School, should not surprise.2 It served as a primary text for beginning Latin students in England through the nineteenth century. For early modern readers, it also served as a celebrated exemplum of the potential for inventive excellence by an ancient author in his juve nile endeavors, another reason why the burgeoning New Poet would probably have read it. To Spenser and his innumerable poetical prede cessors who sought to work meaningful improvisations on the tradi tions they wished to embody in their work, Ovid's cadre of mythical heroines (Lat. herois, -ides) exemplified doubly literate women-those

Paul Salzman. Reading Early Modern Women's Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. 247. $90.00 (cloth).

Paul Salzman. Reading Early Modern Women's Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. 247. $90.00 (cloth).

Naufrágio, cativeiro, e relações ibéricas: a História trágico-marítima num contexto comparativo

Esse artigo compara as narrativas portuguesas de naufrágios dos séculos dezesseis e dezessete, muitas das quais foram publicadas no livro História trágico-marítima, de Bernardo Gomes de Brito (1735-1736), com os relatos coevos de naufrágio e cativeiro hispânicos. Ao examinar não só as estratégias e as estruturas das narrativas de naufrágio e cativeiro, mas também suas conexões intertextuais, pretende-se iluminar o contexto ideológico e literário compartilhado pelos impérios ibéricos na modernidade. A comparação permite desnudar ainda a capacidade destas narrativas de divertir os autores e os leitores modernos como também o seu caráter didático e dessa forma questionar as interpretações contemporâneas que ou priorizam a perspectiva nacionalista ou focam-se exclusivamente no aspecto contra-hegemônico contidos nesses textos.

Gabriel Harvey, James VI, and the Politics of Reading Early Modern Poetry

In this essay, Jennifer Richards suggests that a study of Gabriel Harvey's neglected poetry and prose qualifies his current reputation as a purely pragmatic Renaissance humanist. In his literary writings, Harvey explores the different ways in which social bonds are formed and sustained; this interest is also manifested in his marginalia. Richards considers the continuity between Harvey's work as both a writer and a reader in relation to his annotations of James VI's Essayes of a Prentise, in the Divine Art of Poesie (Edinburgh, 1584). This example also suggests that the broader political implications of marginalia should be reappraised.

Reading Early Modern Women's Writing (review)

Reading Early Modern Women's Writing (review)

Zayde: A Spanish Romance (review)

Reviewed by: Zayde: A Spanish Romance Claire Carlin Marie-Madeleine Lafayette . Zayde: A Spanish Romance, ed. and trans. Nicholas D. Paige. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xxix+210 pp. US$18, £11.50 (pb). ISBN 978-0-226-46852-5. Since its inception, "The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe" series from the University of Chicago Press has made available women's writings from Italy, France, Germany, and Spain, many for the first time in English. The selections are often unavailable in modern, affordable paperback editions even in their original language, a situation that fortunately is changing, perhaps under the impetus of the Chicago series. The French women writers already featured in the collection are Marie Dentière, Louise Labé, Mme de Maintenon, Madeleine de Scudéry, and Marie-Catherine Desjardins (Mme de Villedieu); two treatises by Gabrielle Suchon and a selection of fairy tales are the next French volumes projected. The choice of Zayde among the works of Mme de Lafayette is consistent with the effort to bring lesser-known works to a wide readership. While other Lafayette novels (La Princesse de Montpensier, La Comtesse de Tende, to say nothing of La Princesse de Clèves) have been published in recent, inexpensive paperback editions in France, Zayde has not appeared in print in French since 1990 (though it is available on the Gallica site of the Bibliothèque Nationale); the only English translation dates from 1678. Nicholas Paige's edition situates the novel in seventeenth-century French culture and in the history of the [End Page 252] genre so that North American undergraduates, along with an audience of educated readers outside the academy, will be able to appreciate fully the particularities of this work. The subtitle "A Spanish Romance" signals the importance of genre in this case. The unlikely plot twists, the imbricated tales, the heroic characters of the sprawling Baroque novels popular until around 1660 have been set in a new frame, compressed to fewer than 200 pages. Of all the attempts to remake romance in a condensed form in the final decades of the century, Zayde, first published in 1669, proved to be the only commercial success. Paige explains its subsequent disappearance from the canon as a key element in the history of the novel: as romance became feminized, associated primarily with women readers and writers, it was increasingly devalued, and by the nineteenth century it was eliminated from the realm of "serious" literature in favour of the realist strain, which was perceived as more than mere escapism. Paige helps the non-specialist reader to realize how Zayde questions and subverts the romance genre even as it takes full advantage of romance conventions. Rather than a parody in the manner of Sorel or Marivaux, "Zayde is the last great French romance" (13) in the sense that it links the embedded stories, using them to create "a sort of taxonomy of unhappiness in which heroes and heroines are separated not by real, external obstacles—an earthquake, a father's interdiction, an uncertain birth, a rival's challenge—but rather by different psychological bents" (18-19). The characters' inability to interpret narrative because of their own flawed vision requires the reader to recognize and interpret gaps in understanding caused by human frailty. Lafayette's genius in renewing the conventions of romance was little appreciated after the eighteenth century as "the realist prejudice has rewritten our conception of what the novel is and made it nearly impossible to appreciate the other novelistic genres to which early modern women made a particularly active contribution" (2). After having exposed the broad context in which Zayde must be situated in order to be appreciated, Paige's translation and its accompanying notes continue to bolster the reader's understanding of French culture in 1670. Helpful glosses on notions such as admiration, inclination, attachement, engagement, and galanterie, for example, explain the resonance of these words in salon culture. Notes are also provided when Paige wishes to elucidate his choices for other complex concepts, such as esprit, fortune, humeur, or patrie. The elegant translation balances the "charming archaism" (32) associated with romance (even for early modern readers) with the need to appeal to twenty-first...

:Women's Writing in English: Early Modern England

Preface Acknowledgements 1. Studying Early Modern Women Writers 2. Women in Early Modern England Chiselling the Image, Unwinding the Rhetoric Reading Early Modern Women's Writing Educating Women Praising and Blaming Women Wiving and Thriving Childbearing 3. The Genres of Early Modern Women's Writing Translation Margaret Beaufort, Margaret Roper, Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Bassett Jane Lumley, the Cooke Sisters, Anne Vaughan Lock, Margaret Tyler, Mary Sidney Herbert Theological Debate, Romantic Intrigue, and Classical Tragedy: Elizabeth Cary, Judith Man, Katherine Philips Meditations and Testimonials Prayers Letters and Diaries Poetry Elizabethan poets: Isabella Whitney, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, Anne Vaughan lock, Lady Mary Sidney Herbert, Anne Dowriche, Elizabeth Melville Esther Inglis and Elizabeth Jane Weston in the Republic of Letters Jacobean polemical Talents: Aemilia Lanyer, Bathsua Reginald, Rachel Speght, Mary Wroth Caroline, protectorate, and Restoration Poets' Complication of Early Modern Selfhood: Diana Primrose, Mary Fage, An Collins, 'Eliza', Elizabeth Major, Gertrude Thimelby, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Cavendish, Katherine Philips Drama and the Dramatic 'Closet' Drama: translations, Adaptations, Original Creations Mothers' Advice Books: Elizabeth Grymeston, Dorothy Leigh, Elizabeth Clinton, Elizabeth Joscelin, Elizabeth Richardson Prophecies and Polemics, Petitions and Missionary Accounts: Radical Women and Godly Zeal 4. Six Major Authors Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1561-1621) Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645) Elizabeth Tanfiled Cary, Viscountess of Falkland (1585-1639) Lady Mary Wroth (1587-1653) Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda (1632-1664)