Field Of Early Modern Studies Research Articles

Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell. Edited by Christopher D’Addario and Matthew C. Augustine. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv+255.

<i>Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell</i>. Edited by Christopher D’Addario and Matthew C. Augustine. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv+255.

Why Front?

This essay considers the importance of nonstandard English to fostering a more inclusive and incisive Shakespeare classroom. Grady focuses on his experience as the instructor of a Shakespeare course that occasionally employed African American Vernacular English in its analysis of texts. His reflection considers how taking such language seriously encourages more genuine participation from a wide range of students. While this pedagogical approach offers one manner in which the field of early modern studies might expand points of access and foster cross-cultural dialogue, it also stands to deepen the analytic possibilities of the Shakespeare classroom. Grady uses the example of African American Vernacular English to demonstrate that nonstandard English can offer particularly nuanced means through which to investigate and discuss Shakespeare's works.

Of Memory and Literary Form: Making the Early Modern Nation. Kyle Pivetti. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2015. Pp. x+187.

<i>Of Memory and Literary Form: Making the Early Modern Nation</i>. Kyle Pivetti. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2015. Pp. x+187.

Ernst Kantorowicz, Shakespeare, and the Humanities’ Two Bodies

This commentary reflects on two very different revivals of Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology in the field of early modern studies, the first during the heyday of New Historicism and the second in the current post-New Historicist moment that is still defining itself. The first revival focused on the literal meaning of king’s two bodies, the second on its figurative and fictional nature. The first trained its lens on the doctrine’s absolutist potential, the second on its constitutionalist strain. To account for these political and literary shifts I turn to a larger trend in literary and humanistic studies, the desire to move away from ideology critique and to reframe the humanities in terms of its capacity to articulate “a new vision for human community,” to borrow Victoria Kahn’s phrase. I argue that the peculiarly ironic status of the king’s two bodies offers a way to intervene in this debate, which I term “the humanities’ two bodies.” The commentary concludes by offering Laertes’ popular rebellion in Hamlet as a brief test case of the limits and promise of this most recent turn in the career of Kantorowicz’s protean text.

URLy Nouveau: A User’s Guide to Transfashioning the Early Modern

When we think about the early modern period (or pre-modern in some regions) we tend to attribute to it historical shifts, arcs, and narratives of development and influence within a particular span of history, such as, for scholars of English literary-cultural history, 1500-1640. But we typically do not see the period as having a speed, momentum, or intensity of its own, even as we identify the many ways and examples of how it anticipates and reflects modernity. Some of us, for instance, recognize in Hamlet proto-modernist reflexive-consciousness, in Iago a proto-modern performative individual, in Bartholomew Fair proto-meta-theatrics, in Tamburlaine a proto-post-dramatic style, in Rosalind and Moll Cutpurse proto-feminists, or in Robert Greene a proto-post-structuralist or modern celebrity author. Early modern studies, perhaps more than any other academic field focusing on a historical era, teems with claims for transformational phenomena of epic proportions: the anti- quating of feudalism, the origin and rise of a nascent modern-heading mode of capitalism, the demise of absolutism, a democratic type of self-fashioning, co- lonialism, a resurgence of interest in the arts, new-world expansion, and so on. How, then, do we formulate toward an inclusive and expansive term to repre- sent the multiplicity that is and continues to become the early modern?The main critical enterprise for the past few decades, for scholars, it seems, has to do as much with discovering the in the early modern period as clearly distinguishing an unequivocally methodology as well as one that is best suited to its early modern subject matter. To give some prominent exam- ples, which includes various overlapping and sub-setting, consider the succes- sion from historicism to historicism or other post-Marxisms, or cultural materialism to historicism, or historicism to materialist feminism, or the emergence of materialism, then presentism (cultural materialism sans history), then mobility studies, then (new) materialism (the different wave of materialism in philosophy, performance studies, and communications, etc., that also comes back around to early modern studies), then to post- humanism, and, very recently, idealism (and its battle with reductionist or eliminative materialism), or transversal poetics (that comingles and cross- pollinates with all the approaches mentioned). So what exactly is this drive for the new that characterizes the field of early modern studies, the period, and the corresponding methodologies? Why is it that scholars in the field have a compulsion for the new? Does this indicate some cultural anxiety among the early modern studies community over not being sufficiently original or fresh- of individual scholars inadvertently affirming their own lack in a long lineage of brilliance? Does this reveal a conspicuous absence within the field of a com- mitment to an accepted methodology or purpose, or rather the conspicuous presence of the field's proven knowledge of appropriation or proper-naming? To move in a different direction, is it because the term early modern is itself inherently complicated, especially hermeneutically, by the fact that it is being applied to a moving target or targets; in other words, there is no static history to which it refers because history is mobile and mobilizing? If we compare the early modern period to the tortoise in Zeno's paradox, then scholars are like Achilles, never catching up with their subject matter because they relate to it on their own terms. Perhaps it is some combination, the desire for the on the one hand and the eclectic and processual nature of the subject matter on the other hand, that makes the super-sized field of early modern studies-yet not necessarily or even primarily the individual scholars operating within it- resonate with popular concepts of the postmodern, that is, its inconsistent, mutating, truth-changing, mystery-making, self-deconstructing, self-recon- structing, and generally positive ethos. …

Introduction: The Spanish Connection: Literary and Historical Perspectives on Anglo-Iberian Relations

As the field of early modern studies becomes less bound by the category of the national literature, the manifold connections between early modern Spain and England become ever more apparent. Inevitably, we explore these connections from within our own disciplinary and political parameters. Yet as these become broader and more adventurous, the resultant readings acquire texture and nuance. From the perspective of a reconfigured discipline that is transnational, transatlantic, or Mediterranean in emphasis, there is nothing surprising about the close connections between these nations. And yet these relations have been noted before, in a long history of English scholarship that has generally acknowledged Spain only to marginalize it or demonize it. The most important contribution of the new body of work that we present here is that, as a group, these essays make the case for the centrality of Spain to the field of early modern English studies. Spain is not a curiosity or a marginal preoccupation, the province of comparatists (that eternally suspect bunch). Instead, both as a powerful cultural model and as an imperial rival, Spain is of crucial importance for understanding England's cultural and political self-definition.Perhaps the most important discovery of this new generation of scholarship is how sustained and widespread the connections are even at the moments of greatest conflict between the nations. In this sense, cultural studies provides a rich opportunity to challenge the historical verities of Anglo-Spanish enmity. In fact, as these essays show, England must negotiate Spain's cultural and intellectual influence even when it seems most reluctant or unlikely to do so. The tension between martial opposition and cultural fascination is tellingly displayed in a fascinating document brought to my attention by Miguel Martinez during our research seminar at the Folger Shakespeare Library, which shows how even during the war with Spain, an Englishman could revel in the pleasure of Spanish. A published English translation of a military treatise by the former ambassador to England, Bernardino de Mendoza, the Theoricke and Practise of Warre (1597) includes a fascinating dedication to the soldier and colonial administrator George Carew, in Spanish. In this improbable document, the translator, Edward Hoby, manifests his pleasure in the Spanish language, which Carew has encouraged him to learn. Hoby carries out this charge by enlisting Spanish captives from the raid on Cadiz to teach him the foreign, captured tongue (de los rehenes del cativerio espanol). Language itself thus forms part of the English booty, as Hoby turns to Spanish books, [sic for ora] de guerras, hora de plazeres, (now of war, now of pleasure).Although Spanish in turn becomes a weapon, allowing Hoby to reveal Spanish military tactics, it is actually a double-edged sword, poking holes in Protestant nationalism by championing the longer history of amity between Spain and England. Thus by the end of Hoby's dedication he imagines a shared history and purpose for the two nations that far transcends the war in his own time. He prays to God, he tells Carew, to dispose the hearts of rulers so that they wage war on the enemies of Christendom, instead of on each other:. . . que vuelvan el filo de su espada contra los infieles, dejando las puntualidades que unos contra otros tienen y que vea yo una paz entre Inglaterra y Castilla, como en el buen tiempo que mi tio Don Felipe Hoby fue embajador de la parte de Don Henrico Octavo, de pia y sancta, y felicisima memoria, padre de su SCCRM, en la Corte de Don Carlos quinto Emperador, los dos azote de la ambicion y tirania papal, como lo muestran las hazanas de Don Henrico en libertar su imperio del yugo y servidumbre pontifical, y coronicas de Don Carlos, cuando debajo de los Duques de Borbon mando sitiar y saquear Roma . . .. . . that they should turn their sword against the infidel, abandoning their petty disputes against each other so that I may see a peace between England and Castile, as in the good days when my uncle Philip Hoby was an ambassador for Henry VIII, of pious, sacred, and most happy memory, father of her Holy Caesarean Catholic Royal Highness, at the court of Emperor Charles V, the two of them scourge of ambition and papal tyranny, as demonstrated by Henry's feats to liberate his empire from the pontifical yoke and servitude, and by the chronicles of Charles, when he had Rome besieged and sacked under the command of the Dukes of Bourbon . …