Renaissance Poets Research Articles

Stella P. Revard, Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700.Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700. Stella P. Revard. Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies 351. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 27. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies/Brepols, 2009. Pp. ix+359.

<i>Stella P. Revard</i>, Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700.<i>Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700</i>. Stella P. Revard. Medieval and Renaissance Texts &amp; Studies 351. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 27. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies/Brepols, 2009. Pp. ix+359.

The early Renaissance and vernacular culture

Why do the paintings and poetry of the Italian Renaissance--a celebration of classical antiquity--also depict the Florentine countryside populated with figures dressed in contemporary silk robes and fleur-de-lys crowns? Upending conventional interpretations of this well-studied period, Charles Dempsey argues that a fusion of classical form with contemporary content, once seen as the paradox of the Renaissance, can be better understood as its defining characteristic. Dempsey describes how Renaissance artists deftly incorporated secular and popular culture into their creations, just as they interwove classical and religious influences. Inspired by the love lyrics of Parisian troubadours, Simone Martini altered his fresco Maesta in 1321 to reflect a court culture that prized terrestrial beauty. As a result the Maesta scandalously revealed, for the first time in Italian painting, a glimpse of the Madonna's golden locks. Modeled on an ancient statue, Botticelli's Birth of Venus went much further, featuring fashionable beauty ideals of long flowing blonde hair, ivory skin, rosy cheeks, and perfectly arched eyebrows. In the only complete reconstruction of Feo Belcari's twelve Sybilline Octaves, Dempsey shows how this poet, patronized by the Medici family, was also indebted to contemporary dramatic modes. Popularizing biblical scenes by mixing the familiar with the exotic, players took the stage outfitted in taffeta tunics and fanciful hats, and one staging even featured a papier mache replica of Jonah's Whale. As Dempsey's thorough study illuminates, Renaissance poets and artists did not simply reproduce classical aesthetics but reimagined them in vernacular idioms.

The Recovery of the Literal: Learning from the Renaissance How to Circumnavigate the Globe

In this essay, Waters highlights a characteristic of Renaissance humanism long acknowledged but always in need of renewed appreciation: the way that some people gave new attention to the literal, the minute, and the particular. The implications of this shift were so radical they turned the world upside down, making possible, even imperative to some, the overthrow of monarchs; the circumnavigation of a globe, the roundness of which had not been until then fully grasped; closer inspection of the heavens; and the reading of the text of the Bible and other key documents, such as The Donation of Constantine. Waters claims that what was at stake was a shift from medieval holism as a frame of mind to modern atomism. He goes to the heart of the positive and the negative sides to the development of what he calls “bitsiness,” the systematic emphasis on the literal and the particular, by giving an account of what it was like for him as a person who had grown up in an orthodox Catholic family in America in the second half of the twentieth century to suddenly find himself, in reading Milton, to be living in a world where bitsiness was the rule. He had to learn to read things literally, not allegorically, to circumnavigate his world just as Renaissance scientists, poets, and explorers had. Renaissance humanism gave him tools, spiritual exercises, for learning to train his attention to the words on the page and to stop seeing them through a distorting haze.

“Fool … Look in Thy Heart and Write”: W. B. Yeats”s Return to English Renaissance Poetry in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”

SINCE ITS PUBLICATION in January 1939, the dominant critical interpretation ofW. B. Yeats's Circus Animals' Desertion has been tendentiously autobiographical. The story goes that this poem chronicles Yeats's struggle with his anguished perception of advancing poetic decrepitude. Witness the poem's very title and celebrated conclusion, in which the wretched speaker-Yeats-must he down where all the ladders start/In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.1 Denis Donoghue's statement can stand as synecdoche for the sad consensus: the poem is not a willing commitment to life, but moral accountancy, balancing profit and loss.2 The circus animals have deserted Yeats; that is, he is bereft of poetic inspiration.But this and similar biographical readings overlook the extreme irony contained in Yeats's choice of vehicle for his statement about the Muses' purported desertion-a skilled and beautiful poem, that is, performative refutation of that very poem's ghastly confession. To heighten the irony, the scholarly biographers have overlooked singular biographical fact about the poet, his intellectual heritage from the English Renaissance. Circus Animals' Desertion is profound reworking, both as to form and substantive content, of Sir Philip Sidney's first sonnet in Astrophil and Stella. The abiding cleverness ofthat sonnet resides in its permitting Sidney to rid himself of the encumbrance of earlier poetic tradition, even as he skillfully exploits it. Just so, I will argue, Yeats, too, looks in his heart and writes. But, significant as the Sidney link is, it hardly exhausts Yeats's ramified connections with Renaissance poetry, and Renaissance poetics. Y eats does not only use Sidney to explore his theme; he also gains secondary support from other English Renaissance writers such as Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir John Davies; and, more significantly, from the Renaissance acceptance of the Delphic injunction, know thyself. Far from bewailing senescent impotence, Yeats is savoring the richness of tradition that has roots not only in his own poetic life, but also in revered poetic repository, one of formidable power. In exquisitely accomplished imitation of his Renaissance predecessors, in returning to his heart, Yeats demonstrates his poetic virtuosity even as he laments his lack, or loss, of poetic talent. This is the feint of magisterial involution.That Yeats had more than passing acquaintance with the material in question is hardly contentious. In Yeats and the English Renaissance, Wayne K. Chapman established the case for Yeats's abiding interest in and formative influence by English Renaissance poetry. Yeats was an expert on Shakespeare, to lesser extent on Spenser and the Elizabethans at very young age (emphasis added)/' In A General Introduction for My Work, Yeats ecstatically confessed that he owed his very soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Blake . . . and to the English language (Chapman 7). His advice to the young Thomas MacDonagh is telling: read the great old masters of English, Spenser, Ben Jonson, Sir Thomas Brown[e], perhaps Chaucer,-until you have gotten our feeble modern English out of your head.4 Yeats was, needless to say, not naive poet; he anticipated our awareness of the frighteningly charged and endlessly recessive dialectic between actual and ideal Irelands and Englands. Still and all, Yeats could unblushingly harbor ambitions for Irish Renaissance that in no way diminished his English affiliations.Renaissance influences are temporally Janus-faced, for Yeats: thus there is modernist component. Though he sometimes ostentatiously professed to esteem the poetry of Pound, Eliot, and Sitwell above his own, Yeats consistently claimed never to fully consider himself member of their assemblage. Nevertheless, in revealing rejection of the modern, Yeats claimed that he was unable to write free verse in the manner of Turner, Lawrence, and Pound because of uneasiness about losing himself in anything but (sometimes altered) traditional stanza. …

“Paradox lust”: the fortunate fall according to Joyce in finnegans wake

A half century ago Atherton started cataloguing the plethora of books in the Wake, and fifteen years ago Hogan concentrated on Milton’s work among those furnishing more potent, complex, and extended allusions. Not since Rabelais’s, Cervantes’s, Sterne’s, and Goethe’s fictions, which demonstrated how to journey through vast realms of culture and paradigmatic literature, has any author acted with such sovereign freedom as Joyce to align a convergence of all books and language over the ages with his own search for wisdom. The fact that Joyce achieved a very personal synthesis out of the referential immensity adduced in the Wake should not deter us from recognizing certain deep patterns which qualify Joyce as a renewer of important tradition. The patterns of concern here as encountered in Joyce finally carry us over into experiencing a kind of “modern mysticism” that is not exclusively apophatic but also simultaneously directly affirmative, although not explainable in any routine discursive fashion. Joyce’s idea of a divine creative principle that appears to “fall” in the course of bringing forth its own purpose in a “creation” has an honorable place in theological, cosmogonic, and mystical thought in the European tradition. A number of Renaissance savants and poets believed that various paradigms embodied in ancient myth, including the biblical story of Adam and Eve, reflected this proposition. Several streams feeding from the Renaissance over Romanticism into Modernism and interesting to Joyce (e.g., early anthropological myth analysis, cabala, theosophy, etc.) kept alive the poetic vocabulary by which to express an encounter with the baffling puzzle of Being as a drama played out by the human race, an evolutionary drama with both historical and psychological dimensions. Joyce’s contemporary, Thomas Mann, while quite different in many respects, shares Joyce’s perception that a parallelism exists between the “fall” of Being or Spirit, the “agon” of human development, and the problem of a seemingly absurd mind/body division. Although keen interest in poets like Blake, the heroic power of the imagination, and the Luciferic theme is prominent in Ulysses, a movement occurs in the Wake away from the Bildungsroman structure toward a more encompassing visionary sense of rebirth. In the Wake Joyce “revises” the Miltonic version of the fall (as well as the Dantesque and others) in a way consonant with Goethe’s revision of the meaning of the recorded three millennia of human striving in Faust II; the Goethean coda anticipates Joyce in “fulfilling” the inner tendency which surfaces from the biblical account of the family romance onward and appears instantiated repeatedly in the world theater/history. Joyce’s version abandons the apocalyptic model of a once-only creation and privileges the alternate model of an eternal or permanent universe, but according to Joyce the repeatable story of the “fortunate fall” eventuates in a requisite salvational insight suited to the Viconian “eternal return”: in the words of the mother, “first we feel, then we fall”. Joyce reinvents the basic sacraments poetically to reflect the ultimate union of creator and creation, and the Wake’s famous coda confirms the sacred mission and destiny of love’s “body” (which is also by analogy the text’s body or embodiment).

Review: Pythagoras and Renaissance Europe: Finding Heaven by Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier

Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier . Pythagoras and Renaissance Europe: Finding Heaven . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 319 pp., 72 b/w illus. $90 (cloth), ISBN 9780521517959 This is the second of the author's two volumes on the critical fortune of Pythagoras and the ideas attributed to him from antiquity to the early seventeenth century. Volume one, Measuring Heaven: Pythagoras and His Influence on Thought and Art in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, which appeared in 2006,1 covered the period beginning with Pythagoras's lifetime, in the sixth century BC, and ending in the fourteenth century. The volume reviewed here centers on fifteenth- and earlier sixteenth-century Italy and includes some material from northern Europe and up to the seventeenth century. This chronological and geographical emphasis is not surprising, since the project began with the author's investigation of the iconography of Raphael's School of Athens , ( Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura: Meaning and Invention ,2 where Pythagoras is prominently represented. While some of this Pythagorean material has been available in classic studies like S. K. Heninger's Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics ,3 George Hersey's Pythagorean Palaces: Magic and Architecture in the Italian Renaissance ,4 and Paul Rose, The Italian Renaissance of Mathematics ,5 this is the first attempt to consider Pythagoras himself as the main subject of a book and to present, systematically arranged, a corpus of primary source materials. Pythagoras himself wrote nothing, and the corpus of Pythagorean material is small, consisting of works erroneously attributed to him, traditions about him recorded especially in antique and late antique authors, and most particularly by Plato's incorporation …

From Many Gods to One: Divine Action in Renaissance Epic. Tobias Gregory . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. xii+247.

<i>From Many Gods to One: Divine Action in Renaissance Epic</i>. Tobias Gregory . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. xii+247.

THE MOCK HEROIC, AN INTRUDER IN ARCADIA: GIROLAMO GIGLI, ANTONIO CALDARA AND L'ANAGILDA (ROME, 1711)

ABSTRACTIn 1711 the opera L'Anagilda was performed in the private theatre of Francesco Maria Ruspoli, an important Roman patron of the Arcadian Academy. L'Anagilda's librettist (Girolamo Gigli) and composer (Antonio Caldara) were both associated with this society, but the opera contrasts with the basic goal of Arcadian aesthetics – namely, to reform literature and opera by imitating the structure of ancient Greek tragedy and the stylistic purity of Italian renaissance poets. Rather, Gigli and Caldara created an opera infused with comedy, interspersed with fantastic intermezzos and formulated according to a genre not endorsed by Arcadian literary critics, the mock heroic. This article explores topics related to one central question: why would Gigli and Caldara openly flout the literary precepts of Arcadia? Gigli was a career satirist whose works eventually caused him to be exiled from his native Siena, all of Tuscany and the Papal States, and to be expelled from three major literary academies, the Intronati, the Cruscanti and the Arcadians. Since he continually criticized the organizations to which he belonged for their narrow-mindedness, prejudice and hypocrisy, I contend that L'Anagilda represents a critique of Arcadia. Yet in the process, Gigli also shows the Arcadians that there is more than one path to verisimilitude and the imitation of classical models. Despite the mock-heroic characteristics of the libretto, Gigli adheres to some Arcadian structural requirements, and Caldara's score heightens the characterizations and the overall verisimilitude of the opera.

Milton and the Victorians by Erik Gray

MLR, 105.2, 2010 537 impairing literary historical periodization' (pp. 168-69). It is a fact that literary history is habitually organized by authors' birth dates, whereas itwould look ra dically different iforganized by authors' death dates' (p. 169).To give an example: JaneAusten (1775-1817) andWalter Scott (1771-1832) would come before Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) and Fanny Burney (1752-1840). In pursuit of her purpose, after a very richly textured introduction, Looser dedi cates a chapter to Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth, and then single chapters to Catharine Macauley, to JaneAusten, to Hester Lynch Piozzi, to Anna Letitia Barbauld, and to JanePorter: all of them, except JaneAusten, lived to considerable and even advanced old age (between sixty-one and eighty-eight), which brings the reader towonder in the firstplace why a chapter should be dedicated toAusten, who lived only to be forty-two: in this case Looser definitely turns her interest to narrative characters, and precisely to old maids, whose peculiar plight, however, is contained within quite loose age-brackets, not necessarily definable as belonging to old age'. This uncertainty of a theoretical scheme does not mean that Looser does not supply interesting observations on JaneAusten's old maids, characters such as Emmas Miss Bates, 'her [Austen's] most visible old maid' (p. 77), and Persuasions Anne Elliot (both not really old at all, but simply as yet unmarried); from these Looser takes her lead to communicate to us her many findings in publications concerning old maids, such as the periodical The Old Maid (thirty-seven issues in 1755-56, written by Frances Brookes) or The Philosophical Historical and Moral Essay on Old Maids, published in 1785 byWilliam Hayley. Although Looser's assumptions may not be shared by every reader, the book is so well informed and ends with such a vast bibliography that everyone stands to learn by it. Universita degli Studi di Milano Marialuisa Bignami Milton and theVictorians. By Erik Gray. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2009. ix+183 pp. ?21.95. ISBN 978-0-8014-4680-1. This book belongs in the traditions ofAndrew Elfenbein's Byron and theVictorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Adrian Poole's Shakespeare and theVictorians (London: Arden, 2004), and in that ofHarold Bloom, The Anxi etyofInfluence: A Theory ofPoetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), which, of course, posited Milton as theRomantics' major precursor. While being tentative about themeaning of influence, Erik Gray startswith the stark difference between theVictorians and theway that the Romantics needed Milton and rewrote him: the detail about the rifling ofMilton's coffin in 1790, as told in a contemporary pamphlet by Philip Neve, A Narrative of theDisinterment of Milton s Coffin, is a fascinating reminder of a baroque appeal within Romanticism; Gray refers to the pamphlet, perhaps underplaying its significances. He uses, for theRomantics' dual Milton, Lucy Newlyn's 'Paradise Lost' and theRomantic Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993): theRomantics sawMilton doubly, as both authoritarian and a figure of negative capability (p. 8). In contrast, theVictorians used Milton, and cited him, 538 Reviews much more diffusely. Immediately the point is stated, it seems right:where Milton is cited byVictorian poets, it isoften in latent form, among many other Renaissance poets. Itdoes not seem possible to see the same degree of unmistakable influence, a point which Gray keeps returning to, in thisvery gentle and scholarly book, which gives plenty of space to readingMilton without coming to a definite conclusion why it should be so, and leaves it, therefore, as an issue to be developed further: how did modernism's reaction toVictorian poetry include a relationship toMilton? Milton in thenineteenth century gains a new lifeas a result of the discovery, and publication, in translation out of Latin, of Christian Doctrine (1825), which gener atesMacaulay's defence ofMilton in theEdinburgh Review. There are chapters on 'theVictorian Milton', and onMilton as Classic andMilton as Bible, which includes work on Christina Rossetti ('Milton I cannot warm towards', p. 45), and Hopkins, who, disliking Milton fiercelyforhis theology and views on marriage, defines him as a classic, in that it seems that everything in the poetry necessitates everything else, making a firstreading of the poem impossible, because it seems to have been heard...

The Playfulness of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Joseph J. Feeney

538 Reviews much more diffusely. Immediately the point is stated, it seems right:where Milton is cited byVictorian poets, it isoften in latent form, among many other Renaissance poets. Itdoes not seem possible to see the same degree of unmistakable influence, a point which Gray keeps returning to, in thisvery gentle and scholarly book, which gives plenty of space to readingMilton without coming to a definite conclusion why it should be so, and leaves it, therefore, as an issue to be developed further: how did modernism's reaction toVictorian poetry include a relationship toMilton? Milton in thenineteenth century gains a new lifeas a result of the discovery, and publication, in translation out of Latin, of Christian Doctrine (1825), which gener atesMacaulay's defence ofMilton in theEdinburgh Review. There are chapters on 'theVictorian Milton', and onMilton as Classic andMilton as Bible, which includes work on Christina Rossetti ('Milton I cannot warm towards', p. 45), and Hopkins, who, disliking Milton fiercelyforhis theology and views on marriage, defines him as a classic, in that it seems that everything in the poetry necessitates everything else, making a firstreading of the poem impossible, because it seems to have been heard before (p. 58). He has chapters on Arnold, and Tennyson, comparing Lycidas and InMemoriam. The section discusses the use of the phrase genial spirits' in In Memoriam (Epilogue, 1.77), and makes nice comparisons with similar phrases in Coleridge andWordsworth, using 'Samson Agonistes', 1.594 (p. 119). Similar work, though itdoes not render this otiose, was done by George Dekker, in Coleridge and theLiterature of Sensibility (London: Vision Press, 1978). Gray discusses the biography ofMilton by David Masson (1822-1907), Professor of English Litera ture firstat University College London and then at Edinburgh: the seven volumes appeared between 1859 and 1894. Gray indicates the debt thatGeorge Eliot owed to them, in themost interesting chapter in the book, which is, significantly,not on a poet's, but a novelist's pervasive debt to Milton. Using Dayton Haskin on 'George Eliot as a "Miltonist": Marriage andMilton in MiddlemarcK (in Milton and Gender, ed. by Catherine Gimelli Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 207-22), it is argued that there is in Eliot a personal engagement with Milton in relation to divorce, which Gray compares toMiddlemarch, and specifically to Dorothea and her marriage to Casaubon. Milton is felt as a personality, and this conditions theway he ghosts Eliot and the novel. University of Manchester Jeremy Tambling The Playfulness of Gerard Manley Hopkins. By Joseph J.Feeney. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2008. xxi+206 pp. ?50. ISBN 978-0-7546-6005-7. I can think of no one more fittedto explore the subject of thisbook than JoeFeeney, long known as a cheerful presence inHopkins gatherings and enthusiastic lover of Hopkins's work. He shares Hopkins's calling as a Jesuit and therefore speaks with authority on certain aspects of the lifeand work, particularly the idea that the life ismore of a cause for joy than for agony. It is this conviction that drives the present book. As the author states candidly at the beginning of the preface, he wishes to do no less than 'to change theway MLR, 105.2, 2010 539 Hopkins is read as a poet and known as a person. As both poet and person he has long been viewed as serious and anguished, yet I have grown convinced that Gerard Hopkins was also playful, consistently playful, even compulsively playful' (p. xv). For me, Feeney is pushing at an open door in arguing thatwe must recognize Hopkins's love of fun in all sorts of things, and the book goes too far in the opposite direction, but the insistence forms an extreme counterbalance to an all too familiar ponderousness in critical pictures ofHopkins, which overemphasize his anguish. Surely no one could resist the comedy of the opening of his letter toRobert Bridges of 23March 1880, where he writes from his unhappy post in Liverpool to excuse his dilatoriness: 'The teapot of inclination has been tilted several times till the spout of intention very nearly teemed out the liquor of execution (I am speaking ofmyself now, not ofMr. Rathbone, and must point out the extraordinary merit of the...

Early English Protestantism and Renaissance Poetics: The Charge is Committing Fiction in the Matter of Rastell v. Frith

The debate between John Rastell and John Frith constitutes a previously unrecognized ancestor to Stephen Gosson's attack on poetry and Sir Philip Sidney's (problematic) defense of it. Although the nominal aim of Rastell's A Newe Boke of Purgatorye and Frith's A Disputation of Purgatory is theological disputation, in fact these texts constitute an implicit defense of and attack on fictions. Consequently, they form an important background for the Elizabethan and Jacobean "war against poetry."

Lyrics of the French Renaissance: Marot, Du Bellay, Ronsard

In this collection of rhymed, metrical translations of selected poems by three of France's and Western literature's most gifted and prolific poets, Norman R. Shapiro presents English versions of works by Clement Marot (1496-1544), considered by some to be the last of the medieval poets; Joachim Du Bellay (1525-1560); and Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585). The original French poems - more than 150 in all - and their new English translations appear on facing pages. Some of the poems are very well known, while others will be a new pleasure for many readers. In these faithful translations of the poetry of the three most highly acclaimed French Renaissance poets, Shapiro maintains the rhyme and metre of the original works. He adheres to the message of each poem yet avoids a slavishly literal translation to offer creative and spirited equivalents. For students and general readers of this volume, Hope Gildden's introduction, along with notes she and Shapiro provide on the specific poems, seek to enhance appreciation and illuminate historical and linguistic issues relating to these lyric poems.

Pretty creatures: children and fiction in the English Renaissance

Children had surprisingly central roles in many of the public performances of the English Renaissance, whether in entertainments-civic pageants, children's theaters, Shakespearean drama-or in more grim religious and legal settings, as when children were possessed by demons or testified as witnesses in witchcraft trials. Taken together, such spectacles made repeated connections between child performers as children and the mimetic powers of fiction in general. In Pretty Creatures, Michael Witmore examines the ways in which children, with their proverbial capacity for spontaneous imitation and their imaginative absorption, came to exemplify the virtues and powers of fiction during this era. As much concerned with Renaissance poetics as with children's roles in public spectacles of the period, Pretty Creatures attempts to bring the antics of children-and the rich commentary these antics provoked-into the mainstream of Renaissance studies, performance studies, and studies of reformation culture in England. As such, it represents an alternative history of the concept of mimesis in the period, one that is built from the ground up through reflections on the actual performances of what was arguably nature's greatest mimic: the child.

Between Surrey and Marot: Nicolas Bourbon and the Artful Translation of the Epigram

In many accounts of the early Tudor period, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and Sir Thomas Wyatt are paired as exponents of those Renaissance poetics which mature in the later sixteenth century. Wyatt’s reputation has waned and waxed depending heavily on interpretation of his metres; more recently the value of his work has been located in the poised reticence and artful equivocation sustained by his subtly developed poetic personae which articulate the experience of writing under the tyrannical conditions of the Henrician court during religiopolitical crisis. Surrey palpably differs from Wyatt in his experimentation in unrhymed hexameter, in the signal achievement of his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid II and IV in unrhymed iambics, and more generally in the smoother rhythms and mannered diction of his lyric poetry. Surrey’s engagement with classical sources constitutes an attempt to domesticate in the vernacular some of the poetic forms and qualities prized by humanist taste. This essay begins with identification of the source of Surrey’s ‘Yf he that erst the fourme so livelye drewe’ before discussing the implications for our understanding of the transmission of humanist poetry from continental Europe. It is an assumption too easily made that Henrician vernacular poets of humanistic bent like Wyatt and Surrey relied completely upon Continental vernacular counterparts, relishing, as Puttenham has it, ‘the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian’ (and sometimes French) poetry.1 Although humanism has its origins in neo-Latin writing, in poetry there was no straightforward subordination of the vernacular to the learned languages. Yet for English poetry of the early Tudor period, the habitual search for anterior texts has been undertaken among Italian and French poets whose assimilation of humanistic influences into the vernacular was already well under way. In Surrey’s

:Elizabethan Literature and the Law of Fraudulent Conveyance: Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare

This book investigates the origins, impact, and outcome of the Elizabethan obsession with fraudulent conveyancing, the part of debtor-creditor law that determines when a court can void a transfer of assets. Focusing on the years between the passage of a key statute in 1571 and the court case that clarified the statute in 1601, Charles Ross convincingly argues that what might seem a minor matter in the law was in fact part of a wide-spread cultural practice. The legal and literary responses to fraudulent conveyancing expose ethical, practical, and jurisprudential contradictions in sixteenth-century English, as well as modern, society. At least in English Common Law, debt was more pervasive than sex. Ross brings to this discussion a dazzling knowledge of early modern legal practice that takes the conversation out of the universities and Inns of Court and brings it into the early modern courtroom, the site where it had most relevance to Renaissance poets and playwrights. Ross here examines how during the thirty years in which the law developed, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare wrote works that reflect the moral ambiguity of fraudulent conveyancing, which was practiced by unscrupulous debtors but also by those unfairly oppressed by power. The book starts by showing that the language and plot of Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor continually refers to this cultural practice that English society came to grips with during the period 1571-1601. The second chapter looks at the social, political, and economic climate in which Parliament in 1571 passed 13 Eliz. 5, and argues that the law, which may have been used to oppress Catholics, was probably passed to promote business. The Sidney chapter shows that Henry Sidney, as governor of Ireland (a site of religious oppression), and his son Philip were, surprisingly, on the side of the fraudulent conveyors, both in practice and imaginatively (Sidney's Arcadia is the first of several works to associate fraudulent conveyancing with the abduction of women). The fourth chapter shows that Edmund Spenser, who as an official in Ireland rails against fraudulent conveyors, nonetheless includes a balanced assessment of several forms of the practice in The Faerie Queene. Chapter five shows how Sir Edward Coke's use of narrative in Twyne's Case (1601) helped settle the issue of intentionality left open by the parliamentary statute. The final chapter reveals how the penalty clause of the Elizabethan law accounts for the punishment Portia imposes on Shylock at the end of The Merchant of Venice. The real strength of the book lies in Ross's provocative readings of individual cases, which will be of great use to literary critics wrestling with the applications of legal theory to the interpretation of individual texts. This study connects a major development in the law to the literature of the period, one that makes a contribution not only to the law but also to literary studies and political and social history.

Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England

Contents: Introduction, Douglas A. Brooks. Part I Reproductive Rhetorics: Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg, and Descartes, Margreta de Grazia Meaning, 'seeing', printing, Ann Thompson and John O. Thompson. Part II Ink and Kin: A womb of his own: male Renaissance poets in the female body, Katharine Eisaman Maus Ben Jonson's branded thumb and the imprint of textual paternity, Lynne Dickson Bruckner All father: Ben Jonson and the psychodynamics of authorship, David Lee Miller. Part III Issues of the Book Trade: The bastard art: woodcut illustration in 16th-century England, James A. Knapp Promiscuous textualities: the Nashe-Harvey controversy and the unnatural productions of print, Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast The birth of advertising, Michael Baird Saenger Printing bastards: monstrous birth broadsides in early modern England, Aaron W. Kitch 'Red Incke': reading the bleeding on the early modern page, Bianca F.C. Calabresi. Part IV Parental Authorities: Marginal maternity: reading Lady Anne Clifford's A Mirror for Magistrates, Stephen Orgel Checking the father: anxious paternity and Jacobean press censorship, Cyndia Susan Clegg Pater patriae: James I and the imprint of prerogative, Howard Marchitello. Part V Textual Legacies: How many children had Alice Walker?, Laurie E. Maguire Mothers and authors: Johnson v. Calvert and the new children of our imagination, Mark Rose In locus parentis, Judith Roof. Afterword, Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth Bibliography Index.

Christine Clark-Evans, The brain and nervous system in two French Renaissance «scientific» poets: Pernette Du Guillet and Guillaume Du Bartas

“French Renaissance poets were consumed with their ambitions to know the world and to know human life as the central subject of this world. To this end certain poets educated themselves about theoretical medicine and medical philosophy, particularly Galen, as a part of their curriculum for a proposed new culture”, p. 289. La studiosa tenta di delineare i tratti di una fisiologia del cervello e del sistema nervoso secondo la concezione di due poeti del XVI sec., Pernette Du Guillet e Guillaume...

Julius Caesar Scaliger's Poetics

Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem. Sieben Bücher über die Dichtkunst, Unter Mitwirkung von Manfred Fuhrmann, gen. ed., ed. and tr. Luc Deitz and Gregor Vogt-Spira. 5 vols. Vol. I: Books 1-2, xciv + 633pp.; Vol. II: Book 3.1-94, 575pp.; Vol. III: Book 3.95-126 and Book 4, 653pp.; Vol. IV: Book 5, 733pp.; Vol. V: Books 6-7, 647pp. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1994-2003. Individual volumes, €214; entire set €890. ISBN 3 7728 1501 4. Years ago, as an undergraduate struggling with a senior thesis on Edmund Spenser's Shepheards Calendar, I was looking for a work that would summarize what a learned poet might know in the 1580s about the ancient tradition of pastoral poetry. After reviewing a number of Renaissance treatises on poetics I found a work that seemed perfect: the compendious summa of classical poetry offered by Julius Caesar Scaliger's Poetices libri septem. Despite my inexperience I had located a text that explained in the richest detail practically everything that sixteenth-century scholars knew about pastoral poetry or for that matter about practically any other aspect of classical literature. Scaliger discusses pastoral poetry in two chapters titled "Pastoralia" (1.4 and 3.98) as well as in his comparison between passages in Virgil's eclogues and their models in Theocritus (5.5). Indeed, I was reassured that Scaliger's erudite compendium constituted a "definitive" summary of Renaissance poetics precisely because it had been surpassed and displaced in the next generation by the rigorous early-modern philology of his younger son Joseph Justus. (In fact Julius Caesar dedicated his poetics to his eldest son Sylvius.) In retrospect Scaliger's ars poetica, eclipsed by the emerging ars critica, seemed to prefigure Bach's Art of Fugue, an impressive recapitulation of a cultural system that was fast becoming obsolete. After J. S. Bach the fugue was often regarded as a sterile academic exercise, and the future belonged to the popular Italianate style of his sons. After Scaliger senior had so painstakingly delineated the rules for writing Latin eclogues, georgics, and epics, European poets like Milton tended to view such compositions as mere gradus ad Parnassum preliminary to their [End Page 667] achievements in the vernacular. It would appear that Latin poetry, as Charles Rosen has written about the classical sonata, "could not be defined until it was dead."1 Or were obituaries premature? The Poetics exercised considerable if sporadic influence over neo-classical literary theory until 1700. Once literary criticism declared its autonomy from textual philology surely Scaliger had something to offer the modern reader. Restored and resuscitated for the new millennium, is there life in the old dinosaur yet? The Poetices libri septem of Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558) was first published posthumously in 1561, was reprinted in 1586 and 1594, and then appeared in a revised edition (1607, 16172 ), which may have been edited by Scaliger's son Joseph Justus. In the past twenty years the German publishing house Frommann-Holzboog has undertaken the disinterment and perhaps the resurrection of this massive encyclopedia of classical poetics. In 1964 they published a facsimile of the 1561 edition with an introduction by August Buck.2 Now, after nearly a decade of editorial gestation, they have produced a five-volume edition with German translation and notes. (A final volume of indexes is promised.) Given the vast proportions of Scaliger's work—it has taken the editors nearly a decade to exhume the text—and in light of its role in the emergence of modern literary criticism, some post mortem reflections on the recent boom in Scaliger scholarship appear indispensable. This monumental new edition represents a Herculean labor—or, rather, a Dioscurean feat—divided between the two editor-translators. Books 1-4 and 7 were edited and translated by Luc Deitz, and Books 5 and 6 by Gregor Vogt-Spira. Each editor introduces the single...

Public Sphere/Contact Zone: Habermas, Early Print, and Verse Translation

Can we identify an early modern public sphere, a "space for critique freed from the constraints of church and court"?1 If so, what forms it, what is its character, and what is its relation to literary practice? First, I would propose that the arrival of printing presses in England initiates not only an information revolution, and not only the "marketplace of print" explored by Alexandra Halasz, but also a certain kind of literary public sphere. According to Halasz, "print permanently altered the discursive field not by bringing books to the marketplace (medieval scriptoria did that) but by enabling the marketplace to develop as a means of producing, disseminating, and mediating discourse independent of the sites and practices associated with and sanctioned by university, Church, and Crown."2 If this is so, then the process also created a sphere for poetry independent of those institutional sites and practices, a sphere more public than was previously possible. I am calling this new space for English poetry the "public sphere of early print." However, there are real problems with this application of Habermas's concept. We know that the concept of the "public sphere" is elastic: in recent discussions of the Internet and the digital information revolution, it has succeeded well beyond the historical arc it was originally designed to describe in 1962, in Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit.3 But is the concept elastic enough to apply retrospectively to a previous information revolution, that of print technology, and to its associated poetry? The public sphere of early print that opens for poetry in the half century after 1476 is temporary, limited, and so peculiar and particular that it may stretch Habermas's notion beyond a reasonable shape. It is a dynamic, socio-techno-literary sphere, created largely of foreign elements. In fact, the foundational foreignness of the public sphere of early print may complicate the scholarship following Richard Helgerson's Forms of Nationhood. This site of nation formation, this public sphere of early print, is richly, [End Page 207] constitutively foreign, providing a central paradox to our accounts of early modern English national and literary identity. An examination by way of Habermas promises to raise some new issues in English Renaissance poetics. The present essay begins skeptically, however, by questioning the very applicability of the term "public sphere" to the earlier Tudor world and by asking how free from constraint the public sphere of early print was and what sorts of elements composed it. Next, the essay recovers a material and literary variant of Habermas's concept: a public sphere that includes not only poems, authors, and readers but the translators and printers who brought printed poetry before expanding audiences, the materials they used, and their processes and techniques. In England, this teeming text-world begins in the secular presses operating after Caxton (1476) and before the Royal Charter of the Stationers' Company (1557); thus it occupies a time and place somewhat freer of regulatory intervention while still involving larger potential readerships than scribal publication had permitted. Then, the essay explains that the public sphere of early print is founded on alterity, on Otherness, on the non-English and even the anti-English. Like the colonial borderlands Mary Louise Pratt describes in other contexts, the public sphere of early print is "a space where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other and establish ongoing relations," in other words, a "contact zone," in this case, one that is indirectly and pervasively rather than openly or literally colonial.4 Finally, the essay considers how this foundationally foreign public sphere shaped English poetic practice and what the implications of all this might be for those of us trying to write the literary history of the early Tudor period. I. Questioning the Applicability of the Term Many scholars have objected to Habermas's "Öffentlichkeit" (and the "Strukturwandel" he posits...

:Homoerotic Space: The Poetics of Loss in Renaissance Literature

Sexual politics in the Renaissance dictated a strong opposition to any kind of homoerotic attachments, or discussion thereof, forcing Renaissance poets and playwrights to find other means of representing these connections. In this compelling and intriguing work, Stephen Guy-Bray argues that early modern authors used renditions of Theocritan and Virgilian pastoral, as well as epic poetry, for the exploration and the allusive presentation of homoerotic and homosocial themes. Drawing on the poetry and plays by such authors as Castiglione, the Earl of Surrey, Milton, Spenser, Barnfield, William Browne, Shakespeare, and Beaumont and Fletcher, Guy-Bray investigates how some authors used these classical models to represent homoeroticism, while others found the inherent homoeroticism of these poems to be problematic. Discussing both content and form of Renaissance and Classical literature, Guy-Bray's work engages in an important and frequently heated debate about the history of homoeroticism as well as questions of literary history and the interpretation of texts.