Early Modern Texts Research Articles

'Paradoxing' the Alien: The Morisco in Early Modern English Texts


 This paper addresses the English early modern problematization of the Spanish Moriscos, tragic representatives of the period’s increasingly complex and contradictory preoccupation with the paradoxical identities of the ‘enemy within’, while it also attempts to establish their visibility in 16th and 17th century English culture. While the exploration of how early modern texts deal with various ‘others’ —both at home and abroad— has been sufficiently documented along the past two decades, this paper suggests that the English semiosphere (in Lotmanian terms) not only scripted and rejected these strangers but was also ‘contaminated’ with a multiplicity of others, who were simultaneously and paradoxically admired, absorbed, adapted, and misrepresented in a diversity of literary and non-literary texts: drama, dictionaries, pamphlets, and travel narratives. Among these others, the Spanish Morisco cuts across various faultlines, as a religious, cultural and political alien of uncertain identity and contradictory allegiance.

Exploring a Multilingual Digital Edition of Early Modern European Theater

The Classics of Early Modern European Theater (EMOTHE) project, based at the University of Valencia (Spain) and directed by Professor Joan Oleza, represents a significant expansion, in a European direction, of the former experience of the international research team led by Oleza on early modern Spanish theater and new research tools and strategies. The group's previous focus was the creation of ARTELOPE, http://artelope.uv.es, a powerful database on Lope de Vega's plays (including summaries of their plots) published online in 2011.The main objective of EMOTHE is the creation of a repertory of classics of early modern European theatrical texts. The project's foundations have already been established by the ARTELOPE group, which has developed a database hosted on a server at the University of Valencia, where the different researchers have personalized privileges for remote access.1Included in the database is a repertory of plays from the four basic traditions of the early modern European theater (Italian, English, French, and Spanish) and the database uses the four corresponding languages. The edition of each play must contain at least two versions, one in the original language and the other in a language of translation. However, the aim is to present each play in the original language and in all three translations; there can also be different versions of the play. The structure is conceived as a galaxy of texts, as a set of planetary systems, in which each star (play) is the orbiting center of its planets, which are other texts related to it. These other texts may be translations of an original play into other languages (this is the most frequent case), but can also be different textual versions in the original language of that play, and may also be later adaptations of the play in the same language or in other languages. The database, for example, allows room for other texts of the same play reflecting different early testimonia in their original language, like in the case of La Estrella de Sevilla, a drama that has come down to us through two very different ancient testimonia. Also it is possible to insert subsequent adaptations, including those versions in different languages: this is, for instance, the case of the Italian comedy Gl'Ingannati, by the Intronati di Siena, adapted (not translated) into Spanish by Lope de Rueda as Los enganados, and the case of La verdad sospechosa, by Juan Ruiz de Alarcon, adapted to the French by Corneille with the title of Le Menteur. Some exceptional cases showing the European circulation of an extremely popular theme will incorporate more adaptations and derivative versions than translations: that is the case of plays featuring the figures of Don Juan or Faustus, for example.The original texts consist of reliable scholarly editions. Permissions to use already existing critical texts are requested, and, if necessary, copyright is paid. The team counts on the collaboration of prestigious editors who are specialists in the different theatrical traditions. In the case of the translations, we attempt to use translations of historical value, which exemplify the circulation of texts in Europe since the sixteenth century. If they cannot be found or do not exist, we use either translations by scholars associated with the team who transfer us their rights, or translations commissioned and subcontracted to specialists. A prose translation will be used if an existing verse translation cannot be found or if a new translation into verse is not feasible.The team's work is structured according to three research lines. Line 1 structures the data that is to be inserted into the different sections of the EMOTHE database and introduces the different versions of a text, where they are marked up in XML/TEI language through a tool already designed for this purpose, and prepared for its subsequent Web and EPUB publication. …

Las piernas de la duquesa: Praxis médica y claves hermenéuticas en el Quijote de 1615

Based on early modern medical texts, a new understanding of the therapeutic use of fuentes on the duchess’s thighs brings about a shift in the hermeneutics of Don Quixote and leads us to a necessary reinterpretation of a character who, besides being one of the key figures in the second part (appearing over some 30 chapters), has not been sufficiently understood in her individuality. Analysis of the duchess has always been framed within the generic category of the ducal couple–los duques–and she thus has most often been excluded from the corpus of feminine characters (Zoraida, Marcela, Camila, Ana Félix, and even Maritornes) of special relevance in the novel who exemplify what I call the work’s “poetics of the feminine” or the will to explore through novelistic fiction the social problematic of women in that epoch.

Treading the Digital Turn: Mediated Form and Historical Meaning

Treading the Digital Turn:Mediated Form and Historical Meaning Jen Boyle (bio) This essay offers a framework for thinking about the active mutability of form in an early modern context. My purpose is to illuminate a potential point of intervention in emerging relationships between the digital humanities and historical scholarship. As Henry Turner has recently pointed out, many of our current understandings about the materiality of form are drawn from contemporary assumptions about the limits of disciplinary practice. Turner identifies rich influences from both contemporary historians of science and early modern poetics that work to inflect a "notion of form [that] is not a static architecture or an immanent, closed idea," but which flourishes as a "renewing, relational network" (5). I am particularly interested in following this idea as a way back into our prevailing sense of what historical work can offer to the "digital turn" (including the new institutional hegemony of the digital humanities) and, conversely, what the digital turn can offer to historical work. My principal contention is that we are yet to see a thoroughgoing consideration of the deeper impacts of historical methodologies on digital practices and theories. I close with a brief demonstration of how attention to "renewing, relational" networks of form, using the works of Margaret Cavendish as an example, have the potential to transform our investigations into the practical and theoretical implications of the digital. As a scholar, teacher, and practitioner of both new media-digital studies and early modern studies, I am particularly attuned to the trajectory of historical studies as the digital humanities gains prominence across disciplines. Apart from a few exceptional examples, the majority of early modern digital projects [End Page 79] are still very much concerned with digital access to and distribution of early modern texts.1 This observation is in no way meant to imply that there is something deficient about such a priority; the digitization of early editions and archives has had a tremendous impact on the range and reach of early modern scholarship and pedagogy.2 That said, both the digital humanities and historical scholarship stand to benefit dramatically from a more nuanced discussion about their constitutive influences upon one another. Such an exchange seems particularly relevant at a moment when traditional humanities programs are increasingly defunded, while, as an emerging field, the digital humanities continues to gain prominence and add new funding sources. Scholarly historical approaches have gained much from the digital humanities as a source for the development of augmented media that distribute and deliver early texts and archives. However, there is perhaps a deeper and more critical relationship to be forged in thinking about how our digital methodologies might be inflected by earlier models of material and procedural form. I draw here on some pertinent specifics to Turner's discussion of how we might re-define and re-animate approaches to form, transhistorically and across contemporary disciplines. Turner emphasizes that literary study has integrated into its various methodologies an increasing repertoire of ideas and concepts of form: stylistic form (semiotics, syntax, and semantics); structural form (the component descriptions of "meaningful systems," and interrelationships among parts and whole); material form (textual and paratextual elements of format); and social form (models and modes of relationship that extend beyond the textual).3 He further points out that even with the last category of social form taken into account (inclusive of work from Claude Levi-Strauss to Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu) that one significant problem facing literary critics is the need to extend formal models beyond language and text. Interestingly, this becomes not just a question of adding more categories to or expanding the epistemological foundation of form, but of rethinking form as an kind of ontology, as a moving, "shaping principle" (584) that is temporally in-process as opposed to a static model that defines and delimits. Turner highlights some perspectives and influences from both literary studies and the history of science that contribute to an understanding of form as a mutable in-process event.4 Yet early modernists—poets, rhetoricians, and natural philosophers—provide him with some of the most provocative and insightful examples of form as mediating action. Such principles, for example, can be...

A Political Necrology of God

For early modern Christian subjects, Christ’s crucifixion and death fixes at the heart of things a momentary submission to decreation and destruction, replenished by the Resurrection and the promise of the Second Coming, but present all the same as a kind of absolute eclipse in ontotheology. With reference to the reworked “Nicene Creed” that closes Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, this essay asks: what happens to political ecologies of vibrant matter when they confront the corpse of God? How might Renaissance political ecologies speak to contemporary political dynamics, and what stands to occupy the vacant place of suicide, then and now, within this communal nexus? This essay pursues answers to these questions by placing an early modern text on suicide, John Donne’s Biathanatos, into conversation with a contemporary theorization of community—Roberto Esposito’s Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community. Donne’s scandalous, even blasphemous, presentation of Christ as a “self-killer” in Biathanatos raises the possibility that Christian community is founded in the shadow of an originary yet occulted moment of self-destructive will, at once inferred yet unrepresentable. The socially binding consequences of this sacrificial dynamic are further explored in relation to contemporary politics, with reference to the focalizing effect of the suicide of Mohammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose self-immolation catalyzed the “Arab Spring” of widespread popular revolt.

Ovid in the Age of Cervantes ed. by Frederick de Armas (review)

Reviewed by: Ovid in the Age of Cervantes ed. by Frederick de Armas Ignacio López Alemany Ovid in the Age of Cervantes. Ed. Frederick de Armas. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. 291 pp. This book is the first comprehensive study of Ovid's influence during early modern Spain since Rudolph Schevill's Ovid and the Renascence in Spain (1913). This time, fifteen specialists have contributed to a volume with a great variety of perspectives and surprising cohesiveness. The opening pages of the book are used by the editor to explain the unusual label employed to designate the span of time these studies cover. De Armas suggests that the early modern, or Spanish Golden Age, could be referred to as "the age of Cervantes" because this writer "has become a symbol of change, experimentation, and breaking with the past" (xi). Although this is a very problematic argument to be broadly accepted, it serves as the point of departure for this book: the consideration of Ovid and Cervantes as literary banners of their times and the celebration of the latter as legitimate heir of the former. The volume is divided into four parts. The first section, entitled "Alternatives, diagnoses, and translations" begins with an essay about the medical and satirical writings of the Middle Ages in which Ovid's Remedia amoris is considered a reliable diagnostic source for curing the lovesick. The following chapters of this section study early modern approaches to Metamorphosis and its canonical status as an opportunity for self-fashioning through the examination the Classical heritage, taking into account the new role of science and current social issues. Finally, a lesser known text, Fasti, is studied for its productivity in didactic and humanistic writing of the time. Part two of this collection, "Ovid and Cervantes," comprises three chapters that separately explore not so evident echoes reminiscent of Ovid's Metamorphosis in the episode of the fulling hammers (batanes), the interpolated tale of "El curioso impertinente," as well as in some of the characters' transformations throughout the novel. Although the chapters constitute a well tightened triad, the reader will miss a study of other Cervantine works with rich presence of Ovidian themes such as La Galatea or Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda. Part three, "Poetic Fables," is an interesting read, but there is a feeling of disconnect between some of Ovid's Metamorphosis tales that are referenced [End Page 97] and the chapters' interpretations of texts by Garcilaso de la Vega, Lope de Vega, and Cristóbal de Castillejo. The final essay is a close reading of early modern texts that reflect the cultural tensions in scientific and moral discourse resulting from interpretations of Ovid's tale of "Hermaphroditus," and the issue of the "third sex." The final part, "Ovidian Fame," deals with reelaboration of myths for the purpose of self-fashioning and constructing poetic fame. This section studies the case of poets, Garcilaso de la Vega (Third Ecglogue) and Jorge de Montemayor (La Diana), who present themselves as orphic voices. Lope de Vega (El amor enamorado) and Calderón de la Barca (El laurel de Apolo) also use the Ovidian tale of Apollo and Dafne to praise themselves and to give cautionary advice to the king in their respective court plays. Another chapter discusses the argument that Gabriel Téllez, known to the stage as Tirso de Molina, composed his miscellaneous work, Deleitar aprovechando, as a public repudiation of Ovidian traditions that he had previously followed. The last chapter of this book is a fascinating study on Juan de Miramontes Zuázola's Armas antárticas (1608-9). Here, a former African slave claims Apollo and Andromeda as ancestors of his nation, which serves to whiten his past by linking it to Classical Antiquity. In this way, Miramontes makes the Ethiopian community a worthy opponent for the Spaniards by elevating their victory through a connection to the Ancient world, which also gives the story a classical heritage and noble literary genealogy. In summary, the reader should know that this book is a stimulating collection of studies about the presence of Ovidian themes in "the age of Cervantes," and although it does not provide a comprehensive study...

Comment from the Field

The Autumn 2012 meeting of Northern Renaissance Seminar was held at Leeds Trinity University College on 8 September 2012, with theme of Disability and Renaissance. The theme was intended to address a perceived lack of engagement thus far with critical theory by scholars of Renaissance literature and culture.The conference organizer, Dr Susan Anderson of Leeds Trinity, welcomed delegates and introduced keynote speaker, Dr Allison Hobgood from Willamette University, Oregon. Hobgood's talk, Modern Disability Studies: Beholding Milton, started with a discussion of ethical beholding as a way of avoiding excluding people from critical discourse, and as a way of combating normative encouragement to ignore difference. Hobgood argued that disabled was an operational identity category in English Renaissance and that representations of in period are not always merely metaphorical, but can also tell us something of lived experience of people. Indeed, she asserted that material conditions of illness, injury, and childbirth would have made impairment more rather than less visible than it is now.The second part of keynote speech was a round-up of state of field in USA, detailing current research on aspects of as diverse as dwarf aesthetics in The Faerie Queene, and autism and theory of mind in connection with Book of Common Prayer. Hobgood's vision for future of studies in early modern period necessitates resisting charges of anachronism in order to enable socially responsible dialogue anti-ableist politics and advocacy in scholarship and teaching.The final part of keynote speech was a Miltonic case study, critiquing traditional scholarly discourses surrounding Milton's blindness and instead positioning Paradise Lost as part of a disability aesthetic. In this paradigm Milton's God is the ultimate normate and his angels are ableist superhumans, while Satan stands against their definitions of what it means to be fit.Following keynote speech, first panel, chaired by Dr Liz Oakley-Brown (Lancaster University) was on Sexuality. Dr Amritesh Singh, from University of York, spoke on Masculinities in Mary Sidney's The Tragedie of Antonie, looking at links between compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory (marital) heterosexuality. The paper examined crisis that occurs when a body becomes by age or injury and how this impacts on gender. The other paper in this panel was my bisexual approach to examining liminality of gender and psyche in Spenser and Shakespeare, an argument that these texts offer ways to present positive, festive outcomes for madness. This reading was welcomed as being particularly important to a presentist approach to early modern texts, taking into account impact of exclusionary readings for present-day queer and spectators and readers.The next panel was devoted to and was chaired by keynote speaker Allison Hobgood. Dr Liam Haydon, from Manchester University, spoke on Milton and Universal Blindness, arguing that Paradise Lost is not an account of an individual's blindness but rather taps into an early modern metaphorical understanding of blindness as denoting a loss of virtue. Haydon compared quotations from Paradise Lost with King James and Geneva Bible verses from Psalms, describing being compassed about by enemies and calling for help. Haydon argued that doubly reconfigures his own and challenges his audience to see right. Then Adleen Crapo from Toronto presented her paper Staging Disabled Authorship in Early Modern Literature: The Cases of Paul Scarron and John Milton, focusing on two writers with acquired disabilities. Crapo outlined how their enemies and detractors used Milton's blindness and Scarron's physical deformities (probably caused by rheumatic fever) to call their morality into question, and how both men used rhetoric and self-publicity to counter these accusations. …

Irish Mantles, English Nationalism: Apparel and National Identity in Early Modern English and Irish Texts

The Irish mantle—a type of long, heavy woolen cloak—came under regular attack by writers and lawmakers in Tudor and Stuart England. This article examines how a range of early modern English texts used the Irish mantle to establish and regulate the boundaries of national identity. The Irish were problematically similar to the English; most significantly, they lacked the clear physical differences that distinguished other colonial subjects. For writers such as Barnabe Rich, Edmund Spenser, John Davies, and Ben Jonson, the mantle takes on the function of signifying an essential “Irishness” and differentiating it from “Englishness.” Relying on an easily changed garment to signal natural difference, however, rendered less stable the very distinctions in national identity that English writers attempted to create and maintain. Irish texts from the same period, including several of the Annala [Annals] and poems by Tadhg Dall O hUiginn and Dhaibhidh Ui Bhruadair, offer competing images of Irish dress and often demonstrate a greater comfort with hybrid identities and less concern with the idea of an Irish nation. English discourse on the mantle could help to create and police an English identity only by simultaneously creating an Irish nation against which to define itself.

Beyond Adaptation: Emblematics as an Intersemiotic Translation

The essay analyses Renaissance emblematics as a form of intersemiotic translation. To this end, the adoption of a semiotic approach is proposed in order to go beyond the traditional analysis of iconographic, literary or philosophical models and highlight the richness and implications of a syncretic semiotic system whose translational elements have not been fully appreciated so far.Starting from concrete examples, the essay tries to demonstrate that emblematics is not an ancillary practice to circulate didactic texts deliberately seasoned with a little hieroglyphic flavour. On the contrary, it negotiates with source texts relying on its own semiotic tools to multiply their meaning potential while keeping their internal coherence, so that it goes even beyond adaptation to become a fully fledged transposition.The essay, therefore, aims at opening up new theoretical perspectives and a new practical approach to a kind of textuality that may have a major hermeneutic impact on translation studies and, at a more general level, on the analysis of figurality in early modern texts.

Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern EnglandMemory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England. Jennifer Summit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. x+343.

<i>Jennifer Summit</i>, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England<i>Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England</i>. Jennifer Summit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. x+343.

Árvaság és mártírium

I argue that widowhood (often called “orphanage” in early modern texts) was an important metaphor of the contemporary Hungarian Calvinist Church. Several prayers, prayer books, congregational songs, jeremiads and sermons represented the martyrdom of the Church (and of the Hungarian nation as well) as a “helpless widow”, and lamented in her name. This cultural and rhetoric pattern was created and prescribed for the communities by several early modern texts, and were based on scriptural quotations from the Old Testament. (For instance: “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!” Lamentations 1, 1) I examine this metaphor not only in late seventeenth century texts, but also in the eighteenth century, when authors could not write openly about the Calvinist Church because of the new and increased censorship of the Habsburgs and the Catholic settlers in Transylvania. The representational patterns of Calvinist women in the eighteenth century is explored in this study thorough the example of countess Kata Bethlen.

Grace and Favour: Deconstructing Hospitality in The Pilgrim’s Progress

1. IntroductionMay I now enter here? will he withinOpen to sorry me, though I have binAn undeserving Rebel?Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress1In this article I explore some of the ways in which the law of hospitality is represented in early modern English texts, including treatises, sermons and perhaps the most influential literary text of the era, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) by John Bunyan (1628-88). Fleeing the City of Destruction with his fingers in his ears, Christian is propelled forward by a desire for the 'endless Kingdom to be Inhabited', where none are 'hurtful' and where 'every one [walks] in the sight of God, and [stands] in his presence with acceptance for ever'.2 Longing for free 'acceptance' within the celestial community, Christian nevertheless journeys through a world governed by fiercely guarded property rights. He yearns for inclusion and integration, for a hospitable society in which the constraints of both property ownership and sociallydefined subjectivity are transcended, yet finds himself defined as an outsider as he fights his way through a realm structured around the laws of trespass.3 Disturbingly, however, the narrative ultimately suggests that it is not only Giant Despair and his baronial counterparts who enforce the inhospitable exclusions attendant upon territorial jurisdictions, but also the King of the Celestial City himself.Failing to depict an order of truly open 'acceptance', The Pilgrim's Progress is not simply constrained by a theology set on condemning the reprobate even as it welcomes the elect, although Calvinist theology is foundational to the narrative. Choosing to present the workings of grace through the allegory of a stranger's quest for hospitality, The Pilgrim's Progress instead reveals that the welcome championed by the law of hospitality ultimately depends for its existence on the exclusions which it appears to oppose. Part I concludes not with Christian's glorious entry into the city but with Ignorance's violent and chilling exclusion from it; Ignorance's damnation, moreover, is not so much a nightmarish alternative to Christian's welcome as it is its dark underside. Part II attempts to resolve the tensions of part I, seeking to make tangible the hospitality which compelled yet ultimately eluded Christian's lonely, alienated quest, despite his final triumph. Ironically, however, the ostensibly more hospitable sequel, with its collective group of travellers and its safer, more welcoming journey, is unable to envisage a satisfying moment of entry into the Celestial City.4 In no apparent hurry to get to the end of their journey (unlike Christian and Hopeful in part I, who are 'sick' with desire for the city),5 many of the pilgrims in part II remain on this side of the River at the conclusion of the narrative, and we only hear a distant report of those who do cross over. Once exclusions are excluded, the narrative suggests, acts of inclusion lose their significance.Displaying the paradoxes characteristic of the hospitable encounter, The Pilgrim's Progress illuminates early modern debates regarding the nature of hospitality. Seeking to celebrate the gracious welcome on offer by the divine host, the text draws attention to the apparent gap between unconditional hospitality, extolled in Christian traditions, where the host has a duty to welcome the stranger who arrives at his door, and models of hospitality emphasising the host's discretion which deny the stranger any automatic right of entry. In line with a growing trend in early modern England, and in accordance with the Calvinist theology it allegorises, hospitality in part I of the text is reduced to selective charity, leaving the stranger, terrifyingly, at the mercy of the host.6 Depicting an order of sovereign grace and favour, governed by distinctly conditional laws of passage, part I nevertheless remains overshadowed by an alternative model of hospitality, the unconditional welcome for which the pilgrim, and the narrative, yearns. …

Toward an Early Modern Theory of Trauma: Conscience in “Richard III”

Toward an Early Modern Theory of TraumaConscience in “Richard III” Zackariah C. Long (bio) The title of this essay presents a paradox, the implications of which have yet to be explored in early modern literary studies. The use of the term trauma (from Greek “wound”) to describe a mental rather than physical injury is a relatively recent phenomenon.1 Early modern medical and philosophical texts do not speak of trauma in explaining the perturbations of the mind.2 In a literal sense, then, there is no such thing as an “early modern theory of trauma.” On the other hand, increasing numbers of critics have turned to contemporary trauma theory to interpret early modern works afresh.3 While few would question the validity of applying contemporary theory to early modern texts, usually such efforts are accompanied by an attempt to historicize the terms and concepts in question. Thus Alan Bray, in using “homosexuality” to describe male same-sex relations in Renaissance England, is careful to distinguish his use of the term from modern notions of sexuality, and Barbara Freedman, in adopting postmodern film theory to analyze “the gaze” in Shakespearean comedy, begins by considering the views of Renaissance polymath Leon Battista Alberti on perspective.4 However, no critic has yet considered how early moderns explained, or even if they recognized the symptoms that we now classify as “traumatic.”5 What follows is an attempt to explore some of the prehistory of contemporary trauma theory from the ruins of what we might anachronistically call “early modern psychology.” Specifically, I examine early modern [End Page 49] casuistical literature—religious writings about conscience—to show that much of what is now discussed in psychiatric and scientific circles concerning trauma once belonged to different lexical territory, literature about the soul.6 Indeed, in exploring a particular species of trauma—“perpetration-induced traumatic stress,” or trauma experienced by those who have inflicted suffering on others—one discovers that early modern casuistical literature offers surprisingly evocative accounts of the damage done to the soul by harming others.7 Our guide to this literature is the most influential of the English casuists, William Perkins, whose works inaugurated an explosion of casuistical texts in the seventeenth century.8 I aim to show that Perkins’s reflections on conscience can illuminate representations of trauma in early modern literature, as demonstrated through an analysis of Shakespeare’s Richard of Gloucester in Richard III. The Wounded Conscience In early modern psychology, humans were believed to be the conjunction of an immortal soul a mortal body.9 To the body belonged those things humans had in common with beasts, such as sensation; to the soul belonged those things humans held in common with God, such as understanding. Conscience was a faculty of the soul and part of understanding.10 Perkins defines conscience as “a thing placed by God in the midst between him and man as an arbitrator to give sentence and to pronounce either with man or against man unto God.” In this sense, conscience is “a little god sitting in the middle of men’s hearts” or “another person within.”11 This notion of an internalized other is nicely captured by the term itself, which combines con (with) and science (knowledge). Literally speaking, conscience is “knowledge-with”: the being with whom conscience shares knowledge is God, and the knowledge shared between them is the moral law as expressed in the biblical injunction to love God and neighbor. For Perkins, this is true even for those who have never been exposed to Scripture. Following the Pauline dictum that even the Gentiles have “the law written in their hearts” (Romans 2:15), Perkins insists that “conscience is in all reasonable creatures” lest anyone “imagine that some men by nature have conscience in them, some none at all.”12 Conscience performs its role as “arbitrator” in two main ways. First, it records the soul’s thoughts and deeds; and second, it judges them in accordance [End Page 50] with God’s law. “In this respect,” says Perkins, conscience “may fitly be compared to a notary or a register that hath always the pen in his hand, to note and record whatsoever is said...

ACHSAH GUIBBORY, Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel in Seventeenth-Century England.

ACCORDING to the standard narrative of literary criticism, Christianity and Judaism represent one of the greatest examples of binary dualism in early modern England. Yet such an approach collapses the range of English attitudes towards Jews. More recent criticism resists an over-simplified grand narrative in which Jews and Israel were respectively treated as outsiders—the ‘Other’—and without influence in Christian identity. In the past twenty years, then, a number of valuable historical philo-semitic studies have built upon the early work of scholars—including David S. Katz and Kitty Cohen—in order to demonstrate nuanced and complex relationships between Christianity and Judaism. Representing a scholarly shift in this perception is the writing of Jason Rosenblatt, Jeffrey Shoulson, Christopher Hill, and Sharon Achinstein. Achsah Guibbory's Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel in Seventeenth-Century England continues an expanding historiography that is concerned with Christian encounters with Jews. Her book explores the various ways that early modern Christians put to use perceptions of Jews, Judaism, and biblical Israel in an effort to legitimize the nation-state and its institutions. As such, Guibbory's concern is with English engagement with the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament), rather than with rabbinic material, the Semitic languages or the Jewish race. Concepts of Jewishness and Israel became especially resonant following the Reformation: Guibbory argues that, post- Reformation, the Hebrew Bible was ‘foundational to English Protestant Christianity,’ a tool of ‘both the powerful and the powerless—helping to imagine a nation’ and inspire ‘ideals of justice and equality’ (295). This argument may begin to explain why so many early modern sermons, political pamphlets, and texts such as Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan refer, often extensively, to Jewish sources.

Introduction to “Cognitive Cervantes”: Integrating Mind and Cervantes’s Texts

En este articulo introductorio se justifica la importancia de incorporar los estudios cognitivos a la critica cervantina, y se presentan los articulos que conforman esta coleccion especial. ********** THE SENSES, FEELINGS, INTERPLAY of minds, development of characters, and their well-defined voices and subjectivities constitute some of threads of narrative fabric woven by Cervantes. This fabric, which seems to never fray or fade with passage of time, leaves modern reader still standing in awe of and behavioral dynamics between master and squire, well as humanity infusing representation of characters in Don Quixote. This special cluster presents a collection of essays that incorporate approaches to study of Cervantes's texts. Cervantes represents first effort to bring together work of scholars examining Hispanic literature, and more specifically Cervantes's writings, in relation to human cognition. (1) With its focus on and its processes, approach facilitates examination of dimension of literary texts, which is particularly salient in Don Quixote and other Cervantine texts. Salvador de Madariaga's Guia del lector del QUIJOTE published in 1926 is perhaps first foray into this dimension of Cervantes's texts. Subsequent studies of Don Quixote have largely been carried out by medical doctors or from a psychoanalytic standpoint and have often centered on its protagonist and his alleged madness, particularly those coming from medical field. (2) essays in this issue, however, focus for most part on Sancho (Jaen, Reed, Wagschal, Wehrs, and Connor) and less central figures; female characters like Marcela and Dorotea (Wehrs); or outsiders (to borrow Amy Williamsen's term) like Zoraida (Wehrs), Ricote (Wehrs, Connor), Maritornes (Wagschal), and even Rocinante (Wagschal). They also consider aspects of novel that have not been sufficiently explored, such as embodiment and intentionality, two main themes that pervade nascent field of Spanish literary studies. Finally, it is important to note that a approach to Don Quixote is especially innovative and relevant to Cervantine studies, not only because it allows us to take a step further in our investigation of novel, but also because of its dialogue with both early modern and present-day knowledge about mind. Such dialogue is made possible by interdisciplinary nature of field. (3) Following a brief discussion of this interdisciplinary nature, I will briefly introduce above-mentioned areas of study (embodiment and theory of mind) and will review, in second half of this introduction, individual essays, highlighting promise each holds for study of Cervantine and early modern texts. Cognitive literary studies is an interdisciplinary endeavor with des to realm (the sciences) as well as to a variety of literary traditions, chiefly English tradition, but also Spanish, French, German, etc. The sciences are not a monolithic enterprise. In fact, they represent a variety of disciplines and areas of study whose focus is understanding of mind/brain. (4) As Howard Mancing reminds us in his overview essay, there are two levels of inquiry and discussion when talking about human cognition: mind and brain, brain being physical organ and its activity. To borrow his description, the is what brain does. In essays, discussion may be taking place on one or both of these levels, and readers should be cognizant of this fact. Therefore, a cognitive scientific or (cognitive) psychological approach will mainly refer to mind or study of mental processes and will make no claim as to neurology of brain. …

&lt;i&gt;Rhetoric, Science, and Magic in Seventeenth-Century England&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Rhetoric, Science, and Magic in Seventeenth-Century England Alison Searle Ryan J. Stark. Rhetoric, Science, and Magic in Seventeenth-Century England. Washington: Catholic University of America, 2009. Pp. vii + 234. $69.95. Mr. Stark’s primary thesis postulates that learning and science “used the idea of plainness in order to distinguish between their non-magical understandings of language and esoteric beliefs held by wizards, witches, theurgists, and other practitioners of mysterious arts. . . . ‘Plainness’ was a philosophical idea, not a syntactical one.” The goal of Bacon, Casaubon, Dryden, and their ilk was “the most significant linguistic happening in seventeenth-century England.” More controversial, Mr. Stark’s second thesis concerns “Enlightenment rhetorical castoffs” that “fell by the wayside.” Against “modernity’s materialization of language . . . trapping the human voice in the bric-a-bric of the material world,” he argues for “the return of enchanted rhetoric.” It is a spiritually weighted agenda that connects language “to the Word at the beginning of the world” and refuses the separation of “Spirit . . . from daily life and language.” Conversely, “nefarious eloquence” is an evil that “infects individuals—and congregations of individuals.” “Nonchalant about the world of the preternatural and the supernatural,” scholars lack the sophistication and sensitivity of their early modern counterparts. These two theses are conflated in his methodology, which is a type of worldview analysis: “we are challenged to perceive in every aspect of style a broader Weltanschauung. . . . By setting aside typical concerns over tropes and syntactical configurations, we can apprehend the real target of the plain language advocates, and this is the enchanted Renaissance cosmos in all of its rhetorical mystery and charm.” The first thesis has much merit. Proceeding through an analysis of Bacon, [End Page 102] Daniel Sennert, and Joseph Glanvill, Mr. Stark demonstrates that these “new philosophers” opposed “charmed tropes” in order to advance “a non-magical philosophy of rhetoric commensurable with the ethos of modern experimentalism.” This trajectory, in Mr. Stark’s argument, culminates in the plain language reforms of the Royal Society—a politically motivated opposition to “bewitching idioms, which most intellectuals of the period saw as the primary linguistic cause of England’s religious and social strife.” In his narrative of transformation from “numinous sensibilities” to a “proto-Enlightenment style,” Sprat and Locke are central. However, this conflation of the political, linguistic, and religious, by way of weltanschauung analysis and a chronological division circa 1665 is also reductive. Any judgment of the “aura” of a person’s writings that can lead to an easy correlation between Donne and Cromwell is highly problematic; more nuanced distinctions need to be made when assessing the interrelationships between politics, religion, and style, especially in the first sixty years of the seventeenth century. The argument is stronger in his chapter on natural magic, where Mr. Stark differentiates between Rosicrucians and experimentalists based on their philosophy of rhetoric: “Rhetoric is a cosmological architectonic in occult philosophy. For new scientists and writers influenced by them, however, tropes had only figurative significance, not ontological.” This is a theological and philosophical claim, not a political one. By demonstrating the shift from ontological significance to figurative correspondence in the theories of language that separated members of the Royal Society from magicians (though even this differentiation is slippery), Mr. Stark rightly “calls into serious question the recurrent thesis that Renaissance magic somehow evolved into the new experimentalism.” A philosophy of style that treats language as a neutral “tool” is incommensurable with a philosophy that sees it as “an occult device capable of transmogrifying reality.” However, his composite chapter on demonic eloquence again overplays the usefulness of weltanschauung analysis by arguing that in order to perceive the significance of demonic rhetoric, “spiritual sensitivity” is essential in “addition to a tropological sensitivity” if the “aura” of a discourse is to be discerned accurately. Here Mr. Stark’s important recognition of the link between a particular author’s style and philosophy becomes a kind of ontological determinism that irons out important shades of nuance, conflict, and the juxtaposition of voices within early modern texts. In his argument against the reduction of philosophies of rhetoric to syntactical styles, Mr. Stark is in danger of reducing style or tropes to signifiers...

From Paratext to Epitext: Mapping the Authorial Apparatus in Early Modern Women's Writing

Our focus on Early Modern Women's Writing and the Apparatus of Authorship in this special issue of Parergon responds to emerging trends in early modern women's studies that emphasize the importance of the material text to the literary, historical, and political analysis of women's works in the long early modern period. Attention to the material contexts of women's works is not new; it has, for instance, been a staple of the invaluable critical introductions to early modern women's texts that have been produced in the past thirty years. However, it is also the case that, until relatively recently, such scholarship has remained something of a specialist concern, standing in paratexual relationship to the text proper, as an introduction to the work that follows. This relationship has been reinforced in criticism that considers the literary interpretation of early modern women's writing before, or outside of, its material and textual specificity. If there has been something of a time lag in the material turn in early modern women's studies, this might be attributed, as Sarah C. E. Ross suggests in her introduction, to the field's initial focus on the recovery of the historical woman writer and the assumption that gender provides the most pertinent interpretive crux to her text.3 While the past thirty years of scholarship has complicated this focus by incorporating analyses of rank, race, learning, sexuality, geographical location, and political and religious affiliation into the picture, the historical conditions that make a critical focus on gender valid and generative have by no means disappeared. The essays collected here share a continued focus on gender as a crucial feature of early modern women's writing, but they explore this focus in ways that attempt to unhinge it from immutable or essential associations with the body of the woman writer and insist instead on gender's shifting, contingent, productive, and performative relationships to the corpus of women's writing as we inherit it.

Natural language processing and early-modern dirty data: applying IBM Languageware to the 1641 depositions

This article provides an account of the steps involved in adapting IBM's Languageware natural language processing software to a large corpus of highly non-standard 17th century documents. It examines the challenges encountered as part of this process, and outlines the approach adopted to provide a robust and reusable tool for the linguistic analysis of early modern source texts.

Nationalizing Volpone in French Cinema and Television: Mediating Jonson through Molière, Shakespeare and Popular Screen Comedy

This article considers the challenges Jonson's Volpone presents to contemporary performance, where its apparent resistance to comprehension and apprehension frequently results in adaptation. In spite of this, Volpone has captivated the French imagination, resulting in a prominent national tradition of adapting and performing Jonson's work, evidenced by four screen versions: Maurice Tourneur's 1941 cinematic adaptation and Frédéric Auburtin's television film (2003), as well as two filmed theatre productions, directed by Jean Mayer (1978) and Francis Perrin (2001). The adaptations are the result of a re-mediation process which has taken the Jacobean play to French stages and screens in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, turning Jonson's work into a specifically 'French' item through more familiar cultural codes such as Molière, Shakespeare, and screen comedy. Through a focus on each film's insistence on the layers of rewriting that separate them from Jonson's text, the article considers how each screen adaptation both figures and disfigures its early modern source while acknowledging its debt to the Jacobean playwright, and their aesthetic and ideological consequences to specific moments of French culture. Such layers of rewriting reveal both the play's flexibility and malleability while also indicating its paradoxical resistance to adaptation, particularly in the play's ending, which is significantly altered in each of the four adaptations. These alternative endings, the article suggests, destabilise the original's categorisation of comedy mixed with dark satire and are suggestive of the early modern source text having lost significance in the eyes of French film and theatre practitioners and their audiences.

Compulsion: A View from the Director's Chair

This article illuminates the perspective of Sarah Harding, the director of Compulsion , an adaptation by Joshua St Johnston of Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling for Ray Winstone's production company, Size Nine, screened on ITV in May 2009. It considers the position, originated by Gary Taylor, of Thomas Middleton as 'our contemporary' to validate Harding's lifelong fascination with the complexity and ambiguity of morality and desire in The Changeling and explores the ways in which this might be mapped onto a contemporary prime-time television drama. The film's re-telling of the plot through the eyes of Anjika ( Compulsion's British-Asian rending of Beatrice-Joanna) and the navigation of her sexual relationship with De Flores (recast in the film as Anjika's family's English chauffeur, Don Flowers) are presented in relation to contemporary concerns surrounding the complexity of women's newfound autonomy and their sexual relations with men: concerns which resonate with the early modern source text. The article addresses the difficulties faced in adapting an early modern tragedy for a television audience which was likely to be largely unfamiliar with it, and highlights the creative care taken over the presentation of the play's troubling sexual politics in particular. Also under consideration is the film's complex interweaving of references to Shakespeare and the counter-cultural tradition of 'Jacobean' screen performance personified by Derek Jarman, which hope to continue a thread of conversation with dead Jacobean authors while addressing a twenty-first-century audience.