Early Modern Texts Research Articles

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.

‘Christian notes sound sweetest suffering’: birds, books and textual circulation in Sir John Gibson’s commonplace book (BL Add 37719)

ABSTRACT A growing body of scholarship has worked to recover the vocal dimensions of early modern reading and the effects of aural reading cultures on literary composition. Where these studies have focused on the relationship between the human voice and early modern texts, this article examines how the seventeenth-century royalist prisoner Sir John Gibson deploys early modern ideas about birds and birdsong as he seeks consolation through the material and textual processes of literary composition, manuscript compilation, and epistolary exchange. These efforts are evident in his physical and imaginative construction of his miscellany (BL Add 37719) as possessing bird-like capacities for movement and communication. While Gibson’s miscellany does draw on familiar seventeenth-century ideas about music and the human voice, I argue that his invocations of birds and birdsong produce intriguing and powerful claims for the ways written texts can extend the capabilities of the human voice and body.

Voicing Emotion at School: Quintilian, Donatus, and Nicholas Udall

Abstract: This essay argues that late antique and early modern texts could teach pronunciation through careful attention to emotional language, even when the topic was not explicitly addressed. Rhetoricians have long been aware that certain compositions require sensitive, modulated delivery. In the Institutio Oratoria , Quintilian showed that an orator needed an understanding of language and control over his voice to transmit the emotions of a client to his audience. The performance of emotional speeches was also modeled in two pedagogical works based on the plays of Terence: Aelius Donatus’s Commentum Terentii , which was read in the early modern period, and Nicholas Udall’s Floures for Latine Spekynge (1534), a collection of lines from Terence accompanied by translations into English. Donatus and Udall interpreted the plays’ emotional lines and, in doing so, guided readers to speak them well. Pronunciation was a central part of early modern education, teaching pupils to present themselves to the world with appropriateness, coherence, and composure.

R2P, the Imperial Critique, and Self-Determination: Recovering the Narrative of the Tlaxcaltecas

Abstract Scholars look to early modern canonical texts to understand the philosophical underpinnings of R2P. Meanwhile, critiques argue these origins couch Western imperial intentions. This article complicates the story by returning to a pivotal historical moment – the Spanish encounter with the Aztecs – to explore protective war from an overlooked angle: that of Spain’s indigenous allies, the Tlaxcaltecas. Despite being oppressed by the imperialistic Aztecs, canonical Western texts related to R2P and post-colonial critiques both elide the Tlaxcaltecas’ precarious agency – the rights and duties moulded by endemic structures of violence before, during, and after protective intervention – by problematically embracing simple binaries of European oppressor and indigenous oppressed. Restoring the Tlaxcaltecas to the story complicates tropes about imperial projections of force and the pervasive assumption in R2P discussions of the ‘innocent oppressed’. Our conclusions provide new perspective from which to view future Pillar 3 dilemmas by recognising that the protected sometimes have a bellicose role to play.

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.

Thinking with two heads: The poetics of asat in early-modern India

In early modern India, and particularly South India—from roughly the sixteenth century until the eighteenth—a new literary vogue emerged in all major literary traditions (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Sanskrit, Persian). With remarkable salience, we find verses built around absurdity of various kinds and modes. Sometimes it is a matter of pushing the existing literary conventions and figures to an impossible extreme. In other cases, we find a fascination with asymmetry, disjunction, skewed causality, and irrealis or counter-factual linguistic forms. Although such experiments with absurdity have precedents in classical kāvya, the evident consistency and intertextual relations among outlandish poems in this period are very striking, as is the fact that the theoreticians of poetics found it necessary to posit a grammar for them (including for poems based on asat, that is, non-existence or sheer impossibility). This essay explores the forms and logical underpinnings that this fashion for the bizarre assumed; we also offer a tentative explanation for the new trend. The prabandha-based poems of absurdity need to be distinguished from the coded texts known in Kannada as beḍagina vacana and in early Hindi as ulaṭbaṃsi, in which an upside-down or inside-out world is created, the goal being to arrest intellection altogether. We also show the distinction between the poetry of the absurd in the early modern texts and the European Dada movement, which aims at unravelling language and enshrines a principle of pure randomality in the choice of words.

How ancient wisdom shaped the development of modern science

How ancient wisdom shaped the development of modern science VERITRACE will enhance our understanding of the role of ancient wisdom writings in the development of early modern natural philosophy by employing state-of-the-art digital techniques on a large corpus of early modern texts. The project charts the spread of this discourse from Renaissance Italy to early modern Europe and identifies watershed moments in the reception of these ancient wisdom writings.

Echo’s Fluid (Im)materiality across Text and Performance

This article explores the use of echoes in early modern theater, particularly in the context of opera. By examining the incorporation of echoes in plays, libretti, and scores, the article argues that the Ovidian trope of Echo occupies a fluid space spanning textuality and performance. The article begins by delving into how the sonic essence of Echo was conveyed in early modern dramatic texts and conceptualized in coeval theoretical writings, forming a continual negotiation between the specific features of the performance and the endeavor to record it on the page. Subsequently, it looks at the appearance of Echo in Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, offering it as a case study for evaluation through the lens of modern performances and the interpretive questions they raise.

Teaching Early Modern Texts in the Age of #MeToo

Teaching Early Modern Texts in the Age of #MeToo

“Davydova Skolota”: a historical-philological note to the text of the Primary Chronicle of Rus

The article examines a fragment of the Rus Primary Chronicle’s entry for 1097, in which the hapax legomenon “skolota” is used in relation with the accusations of Prince Davyd Ihorovych of Volodymyr in blinding Prince Vasylko Rostyslavych of Terebovl. The article analyses the tradition of interpretation of this word in the late medieval and early modern texts, namely chronicle compilations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as well as in Vasilii Tatischev’s historical work. It has been demonstrated that the authors or scribes of these texts did not understand the word “skolota” precisely. They tried to replace it with another expression, rephrase the phrase, or simply shorten this fragment of the Primary Chronicle. The versions of the translation of the relevant place of the text in modern scholarly translations into different languages are reviewed. In most cases, scholars have interpreted the word “skolota” and the relevant passage of the chronicle based on a general understanding of the context and artistic taste. The possible origin of the word is examined. Its place in the chronicle narrative, specifically in the context of the characters’ direct speech. The authors conclude that the word “skolota” has a Slavic etymology and is one of the relics of the Kyivan Rus elite’s vernacular.

S’initier aux écrits littéraires du XVIe siècle par le site Tragiques Inventions : une pédagogie du hand reading

Designed as a paper reflecting on the editorial mediation of early modern French literary texts, this article maps the educational activities conducted on the Tragiques Inventions site since 2020. In particular, it delves into the procedures linked to documenting, generating and manipulating descriptive and analytical (meta)data. A new concept of ‘hand-reading’ is being developed – the possibility of using digital technology to prioritize human intervention in the construction of knowledge through textual editing. This concept will bring a fresh perspective on early modern literary texts.

S’initier aux écrits littéraires du XVIe siècle par le site Tragiques Inventions : une pédagogie du hand reading

Designed as a paper reflecting on the editorial mediation of early modern French literary texts, this article maps the educational activities conducted on the Tragiques Inventions site since 2020. In particular, it delves into the procedures linked to documenting, generating and manipulating descriptive and analytical (meta)data. A new concept of ‘hand-reading’ is being developed – the possibility of using digital technology to prioritize human intervention in the construction of knowledge through textual editing. This concept will bring a fresh perspective on early modern literary texts.

“[An] old battle constantly re-fought”: Why Language Matters when Editing Early Modern Women’s Letters: A Case Study Of the Holograph Letters of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots (1489–1541)

ABSTRACTThrough a case study of the holograph letters of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots (1489–1541), this article examines the centuries-old editorial debate of whether to modernise or preserve the old-spelling of early modern texts. I examine how historical biographers and editors have approached and presented the language of Margaret Tudor’s letters and consider the implications their editorial approaches have on how readers perceive the figure and epistolary voice of Margaret Tudor. I then draw upon two recent studies in the field of linguistics to show how the detailed analysis of diplomatic transcriptions of Margaret Tudor’s holograph letters can provide important new insights and a fuller understanding of Margaret’s sociolinguistic history, her dual identity as English princess and Queen of Scots, and the processes and agents involved in the production of her holograph correspondence. This article argues for the necessity of diplomatic editions and for an editorial approach that carefully attends to and contextualises the language of early modern women’s letters. The article contends that such an approach is central to developing more advanced and nuanced understandings of early modern women and their letters.

Kritische Edition, Neudruck, Digitalisat

Abstract Starting with Rolf Tarot’s article on the edition of early modern texts in the volume Texte und Varianten (Texts and Variants, 1971) and the subsequent process of reaching an understanding about the practical handling of texts from the period between 1500 and 1750, an overview of the evolution of this discussion from the 1970s to the present is given. On the one hand, the medial development from the conventional transcription to the reprint and the availability of digitized texts is retraced. On the other hand, the influence of the availability of scans on the research process is discussed, as well as the challenges this poses for current editorial projects of early modern texts. These lie less in the area of textual constitution, but rather in the commentary-based analysis and reconstruction of historical textual networks.

Material Methodologies in Early Modern Iberian Treatises

Abstract Early modern culture was most fully expressed in events where materiality and textuality are inextricably intertwined: theatrical spectacles, royal parades, triumphal arches, processions, poetic tournaments, and jousts. At the other end of the spectrum, mainstream trends of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hispanic philology—a prism through which early modern texts have been used and read for years—are part of a genealogy of thought that privileges form over matter. As a result, the radical importance of materials is frequently overlooked in the study of early modern culture. However, if we pay attention to early modern poetic and philosophical treatises, we can clearly notice the anxiety to justify the medium in which texts themselves were produced and transmitted. This article stresses the importance of materiality in two types of treatises from early modern Iberia: three sensory treatises by Oliva Sabuco (1587), Lorenzo Ortiz (1687), and Diego Calleja (1700); and three manuals of textual production by Juan del Encina (1496), Francisco Lucas (1580), and Alonso Víctor de Paredes (1680). The article sets out an argument for a materialist practice of literary criticism, a way to read early modern texts in terms of their own material theory.

Taking the Mick: Characters Named Michael in ARDEN OF FAVERSHAM, OTHELLO, and THE KNIGHT OF THE BURNING PESTLE

When Shakespeare bestows the name Michael Cassio on a character in Othello he would doubtless have been aware of some distinguised antecedents, including his friend Michael Drayton and two other authors whom he did not know personally but was fond of reading, Michel de Montaigne and Miguel Cervantes. Less immediately, several historical persons of the name, perhaps most notably the Emperor Michael Palaeologus, are mentioned in a number of early modern texts. Michael does not seem to have been a common name in England, and it was also a name not much found in plays, or at least not in extant ones. In this essay I focus on three plays in which characters called Michael appear, Arden of Faversham, Othello, and The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and I shall argue that each draws in one way or another on one or more of the inherently paradoxical associations held by the name Michael in the early modern period, which suggested simultaneously money and sanctity, corporeality and spirituality, and past and future. All three of these Michaels, whether unwillingly or unwittingly, have the same effect of either causing or participating in the disruption of domestic relationships and the pitting of family members against each other. In their own very different ways, each of these three characters could be seen as emblematising or underlining the effect of sin in the home, and also perhaps as drawing attention to the dual nature of humans as having both a mortal (social, familial, and material) life and an immortal soul, in something of the same way as Michael’s strange status as both saint and archangel makes him eligible to be simultaneously understood both as someone who was once alive and as an entity always wholly spiritual.

On Practical Uses of Ten Sefirot: Material Readings in an Early Modern Kabbalistic Collectaneum (MS Michael 473)

AbstractBy the end of the sixteenth century, textual manifestations of kabbalah—a variety of Jewish mysticism that first emerged in medieval Provence and Catalonia—achieved the status of elite but authoritative lore in Eastern and Central Europe, even if at times they stirred religious opposition. At the same time, and especially in the seventeenth century, the so-called practical kabbalah, associated with magic and a talismanic approach to religious ritual, gained substantial popularity among Ashkenazi (i.e., Eastern and Central European) Jews. This study centers on a multiple-text and composite codex, Oxford-Bodleian MS Michael 473, and throws into relief the dynamics of circulation of various kabbalistic traditions in early modern Eastern and Central Europe. By zooming in on a single codex, this article foregrounds the hermeneutic potential of contextual reading of texts in complex manuscripts and of interpreting material choices taken by their cocreators. It does so with a methodological agenda that goes beyond tracing of authorial genealogies, and beyond the sociology of texts and their producers, toward exploring the interpretive relations of literary and material form in early modern handwritten kabbalistic texts. The article showcases a single textual unit, Qabbalat ‘Eser Sefirot, that MS Michael 473 contains, in order to focus on the position of practical kabbalistic texts and practices within the spectrum of kabbalistic traditions of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Eastern and Central Europe, ushered in by the contemporary modes of reading and transcription of texts.

Have we lost sleep? A reconsideration of segmented sleep in early modern England.

The theory that the people of the early modern period slept in well-defined segments of 'first' and 'second' sleeps has been highly influential in both scholarly literature and mainstream media over the past twenty years. Based on a combination of scientific, anthropological and textual evidence, the segmented sleep theory has been used to illuminate discussions regarding important aspects of early modern nocturnal culture; mainstream media reports, meanwhile, have proposed segmented sleep as a potentially 'natural' and healthier alternative to consolidated blocks of sleep. In this article, I re-examine the scientific, anthropological and early modern literary sources behind the segmented sleep theory and ask if the evidence might support other models of early modern sleep that are not characterised by segmentation, while acknowledging that construction of such models is by nature limited and uncertain. I propose a more diverse range of interpretations of early modern texts related to sleep, with important implications for medical and social history and literary scholarship.

:Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature

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

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.