Renaissance Practice Research Articles

Music before the mind's eyes: The sublime practice of musica reservata and seconda prattica in the light of the transformative ludus performing and listening experience

The paper starts from a critical confrontation of the modern, deforming and the ancient, original meaning and use of the term ekphrasis with regard to the concepts of pictura and logos as their contrasting basis. The ancient rhetorical meaning of ekphrasis was revived on a continuous cultural line from the mannerist musica reservata to the baroque seconda prattica at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries as the poetic foundation of the vocal practice of madrigals and motets, whose new expressive and representational compositional manners of defamiliarization (madrigalisms) rooted in the logos concept were deviations from the Renaissance practice of musica osservata and prima prattica. The two distinctive lines of vocal practices are illuminated through their ludic functions in culture.

Review

Review

"Some subtleties o'th' isle": Shakespeare's Tempest and Montaigne's Apologie of Raymond Sebond

A remarkable fact about William Shakespeare's The Tempest is that characters do not always see or hear the same thing. But while this estrangement of knowledge thins out the boundaries between character and environment to recognizably great dramatic effect, the aporetic energies underlying that estrangement are not yet fully understood. This article explores their significance by examining the connections between The Tempest and Michel de Montaigne's An Apologie of Raymond Sebond (long suspected to be related). It proposes a new verbal parallel between the play and the essay but does not confine its argument to such a criterion. Rather, it is a case study in the Renaissance practice of imitation that works from a number of aspects—shared matrices of thought and feeling, similar metaphors, networks of texts—to reconstruct the presence of a locus classicus of Renaissance skepticism in Shakespeare's late play. Along the way, it triangulates these works with a discussion of King Lear and examines the presence of Vergil and the possible presence of Seneca. It argues that Shakespeare used Montaigne's essay to make his island epistemologically strange and that this sensitive use of a philosophical source is notable for being so deeply dramatically embedded.

The Potential Impact of COVID‐19 on Student Learning and How Schools Can Respond

There is no denying the impact that the coronravirus disease (COVID‐19) outbreak has had on many aspects of our lives. This article looks at the potential impact of COVID‐19 on student learning as schools abruptly morphed into virtual learning environments using data from several instructional, practice, and assessment solutions offered by Renaissance. First, three hypothetical learning scenarios are considered using normative data from Star assessments to explore the potential impact on reading and math test performace. Next, data on Focus Skills are used to highlight which grades may have missed the most foundational math and reading content if instruction was stopped or reduced. Last, data from two of Renaissance's practice tools are used to evaluate whether students were practicing key skills following school closures. The article concludes that academic decline will likely occur but may be tempered by the increased use of practice tools; effects may look different for math and reading; and may impact grades and schools differently. As such, schools may need to leverage decision‐making frameworks, such as the Multi‐tiered Systems of Support/Response‐to‐Intervention (MTSS/RTI) framework, more than ever to identify needs and target instruction where it matters most when school begins in fall 2020.

Pleasurable Reading: Donne’s “Valediction Forbidding Mourning”

The best-known of Donne’s poems of “Valediction” is a lyric whose analogies of gold and a compass have long been considered touchstones for the so-called metaphysical style. Reading the poem, I have realigned these analogies with the Renaissance practice of making the invisible visible through analogy. In particular, the compass results from a poetic process that is simultaneously intellectual, material, and affective. Its polyphony is amazingly attuned to the multiple pressures and possibilities of Donne’s culture.

A Presentist, Palestinian, Pedagogical Reading of Language and Gender Politics in Middleton’s Women Beware Women

ABSTRACTIn addition to the methodology of new historicism, this article deploys feminism, performance studies and presentism to discuss the effects of the masculine practice of enforced marriage and turning a deaf ear to the female voice in Thomas Middleton’sWomen Beware Women and contemporary Palestine. I explain that Middleton’s Women Beware Women criminalises the absolute right of the monarch to command through a critique of Renaissance practice of enforced marriage and of male figures’ deafness to the female voice. I argue that Middleton’s tragedy questions and interrogates the dominant patriarchal discourse by locating subversion within the dominant discourse. While Middleton shows that women are complicit with male figures’ voices, male figures show no recognition of the inadequacy of their voices. The eclectic range of critics I am using in this article opens up gender-based readings in the teaching context of An-Najah University where I teach Renaissance Drama. This article seeks to modify the feminist view that tragedy merely suggests that female characters face verbal and physical circumscription. Rather, tragedy ensues because male figures are deaf to female figures’ voices and such deafness breeds female figures’ subversive plots.

The Role of Le Balet Comique in Forging the Stuart Masque: Part 2 Continuation

Following the discussion in Part 1 (Dance Research 32.2 2014, 185–207) of the use made by the Jacobean court of Le Balet Comique ( McGowan 1982 ) to frame innovation in the masque, this article will explore two further examples of the continuing use of the text. The overt adoption of features of Le Balet Comique for Tempe Restored (1632, Aurelian Townshend and Inigo Jones) brought French practice into play once more for the Caroline masque. Following in his father's footsteps, Charles 1 was able to bring to the masque his personal skill as a dancer and the participation of his young and beautiful French queen Henrietta Maria. From the re-launch of the court masque in 1631, until the break-up of the Whitehall court in 1640, both retrospective and innovative practices were pursued. Although this was a new reign, a strong element of continuity prevailed in the court personnel serving the masque. Acting as artistic director, Inigo Jones was now firmly in control of masque concepts, pursuing a design process of imaginative imitation based on Renaissance practice. In collaboration with individuals among the music and dance artists, Jones had been intimately involved in adapting features of the ballet in devising The Masque of Queens of 1609. 1 That Le Balet Comique formed the basis for Tempe Restored is made very plain in the published text. The influence of the 1581 ballet on A Masque presented at Ludlow Castle 1634 (known as Comus) by John Milton can only be discerned by analysing the performance conditions of a work that is now published as a poem. Once again the Circe persona takes the stage, this time in masculine form as Comus. I argue here that the link between the two is the personnel of Tempe Restored. An analysis of the original performance of Comus draws on understanding of elite dance practice of the day leading to new insights into this innovative masque.

Imitation, Emulation, Influence, and Pound's Poetic Renewal

Imitation, Emulation, Influence, and Pound's Poetic Renewal

Essaying Hatred: Montaigne's Poetics of Ethical Allusiveness

Essaying Hatred:Montaigne's Poetics of Ethical Allusiveness François Rigolot Are not certain things to be covered up in a speech, either because they ought not to be disclosed or because they cannot be expressed adequately? Quintilian1 Montaigne is usually presented as an unconditional apostle of tolerance, moving defender of conciliation, and a staunch enemy of hatred. As recent criticism has shown, the essayist rejects the Cannibals' "ideology of vengeance" to embrace clemency and exalt a profoundly human "quality of mercy."2 He resolutely moves from a preoccupation with the Stoic care of the self to a more Christian-inspired care of the other.3 Yet the vocabulary of hatred is not absent from the Essais. There are 47 entries for the noun "haine(s)" [hatred], and 73 for the verb "haïr" [to hate], in its different forms.4 When the essayist uses the first-person "je hay" [I hate], it is usually to express his strong dislike for "passions vitieuses" [vicious passions], like cruelty (II, 11, 429a), flattery (I, 40, 253b), hypocrisy (II, 17, 646a), pedantry (I, 25, 133b; III, 8, 927b), snobbery (I, 25, 139b), and all types of excessive sophistication, which the "sage" must avoid.5 Indeed hatred is what he hates above everything. It is useless to pray to God, he tells us, unless we have our soul clean and rid of vicious passions; instead of redressing our fault, we redouble it if our feelings are still full of hatred: "Il faut avoir l'ame nette […] et deschargée de passions vitieuses. […] Au lieu de rabiller nostre faute, nous la redoublons, presentans à celuy qui nous avons à demander pardon, une affection pleine d'irreverence et de haine" (I, 56, 319a). Moreover, Montaigne claims that he is incapable of hating people ("Aussi ne hay je personne"), simply because he is so squeamish about hurting anybody ("et suis si lache à offencer que, pour le service de la raison mesme, je ne le puis faire"). He agrees with Aristotle, who said that he hated wickedness, but could never bring himself to hate a wicked person (III, 12, 1063b). At the same time, the essayist realizes that he himself lives in a world dominated by antipathy, animosity, and detestation. Although Christianity is supposed to foster love for one's neighbor, around him Catholics loathe Protestants, and vice versa. He does not hesitate to use strong language to [End Page 32] attack religious fanaticism, the principal source of hatred in his time as in our time: "Il n'est point d'hostilité excellente comme la chrestienne. Notre zele faict merveilles, quand il va secondant notre pente vers la haine, la cruauté, l'ambition, l'avarice, la detraction, la rebellion" (II, 12, 444c). On the contrary, nobody seems to care any more about goodness, civility and moderation; unless by miracle some rare nature appears on the horizon, these essential virtues are hardly ever put into practice. This paper examines one test case of unprecedented hatred in French history, the infamous Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. One should talk about "massacres" in the plural, since the hysterical rage, begun in Paris on August 24, 1572, spread to several other cities in France. The killing and looting continued for two months. Although no one knows the exact number of victims, estimates range from 20,000 to 100,000.6 It is one of the darkest pages of French history, and it occurred at the time when Montaigne started writing his Essais. Yet he apparently never mentions it, and generations of diligent readers have wondered why. In the following pages, I would like to suggest that Montaigne's so-called silence was not as total as it might seem. In a rhetorical twist much attuned to the Renaissance practice of præteritio, I will try to show how Montaigne addressed the Massacre issue in an indirect, yet remarkably clear way, giving the alert reader specific clues to read his discourse on American Indians allegorically as a sustained metaphor of the hateful things which happened in France on Saint Bartholomew's Day.7 The essayist who is often portrayed as the unconditional defender of American Indians and the sharp censor of European colonization—a...

Drawing forth immaterial architecture

An immaterial architecture of fleeting perception is proposed, descendent of the Renaissance practice of drawn idea and eighteenth-century architecture of picturesque perception. © 2006, Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

The Foundation Horoscope(s) for St. Peter's Basilica, Rome, 1506: Choosing a Time, Changing the Storia

St. Peter's Basilica is a familiar cultural landmark, begun under the patronage of Pope Julius II by the architect Donate Bramante and substantially completed by Michelangelo. Following a common Renaissance practice, a horoscope was produced for the foundation ceremony of the great structure. It suggests several features of Renaissance astrological practice in coordinating the heavens with the earth. This essay argues that the horoscope published in 1552 is not the original horoscope but, rather, a "rectified" chart made after the church construction had been stalled for nearly forty years; that the date had been chosen according to religious and political dictates, and so the astrologer(s) had to work with the planetary positions that pertained on 18 April 1506; that the astrologer(s) chose the time of day-a time correctly noted not in the published horoscope but in the diary of Julius's personal secretary-because it coordinated the founding of the basilica with the important horoscopes of its patron and its region; that the primary patron of the basilica was not Julius but, rather, Christ, whose geniture was discussed in astrological texts of this era; that the coordination of the basilica's horoscope with that of Christ simultaneously coordinated the great structure with the thema mundi, the horoscope for the birth of the world; and that several putative horoscopes for Julius II seem related to those of the basilica and of Christ.

The Origins of Modern Notation in Early Keyboard Music

The Origins of Modern Notation in Early Keyboard Music. Modern notation, which is based on absolute note values and organized in time units of equal duration (measures) separated by vertical lines (bar lines), can only partially be traced back to earlier mensural notation. Whereas the mensural system is associated with the structure of vocal polyphony as a hierarchy of relative note values, the earliest examples of keyboard notation from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries represent an entirely different approach to writing music. This contains the basic ingredients of the modern notational concept, which, accordingly, is not primarily a product of the leading medieval and renaissance practice, but rather of a notational sidetrack which later moved into the center and opened up new possibilities of composition.

The Fountain of Narcissus: The Invention of Subjectivity and the Pauline Ontology of Art in Caravaggio and Rembrandt

QNE OF THE TRICKIER problems facing students of early modern culture is the ambiguity surrounding the key term imitation. The word arises in a variety of contexts-from aesthetics to education and the philosophy of language to the theology of Christ. But while, as a verbal form, the term itself remains constant, encouraging us to imagine that it refers to a single activity, it has in fact two distinguishable meanings. On one hand, we find what we might call the naive or primitive notion of imitatio naturae, the mirrorlike replication of the external world canonically associated with pictorial art. On the other hand, there is the more theoretically sophisticated notion of imitation as the representation less of external nature than of existing works of art: a notion bound, via ekphrasis, to the Renaissance practice of poetic aemulatio, the simultaneously reverent and competitive reproduction of authoritative classical example.' Both senses are abundantly attested by period sources.' Renaissance theorists of painting and poetry alike insist both that the spring of art

Philosophical fictions and the French Renaissance (review)

216 Reviews Kenny, Neil, ed., Philosophicalfictionsand the French Renaissance (Warburg Institute surveys and texts, No. 19), London, Warburg Institute, 1991, paper, pp. 137; 8 plates; R.R.P. £10. The ten essays which compromise this collection deal with aspects of the relationship between philosophy andfictionin writings in the French vernacular in the sixteenth century. Philosophy in this context is taken to embrace all investigations into human and natural phenomena, allowing that attention is restricted to inquiries infictionalform in contrast to the systematic investigation of phenomena characteristic of Aristotelian phdosophy, which was in any case normally pursued in Latin. While the broad sweep of philosophy as fiction in this period runs across most areas of philosophy, there is a particular emphasis on neoplatonist themes, and especially on alchemy and other forms of hermetic inquiry as ways to hidden truth and secret wisdom. The association of phdosophy andfictionwas not, of course an invention of the Renaissance, being as old as philosophy itself and as fully developed in some of Plato's dialogues as human genius is ever likely to achieve. More directly, Renaissance practice grew out of the medieval love of allegory and the conviction that myth and fable could be proper vehicles of philosophical truth. Ann Moss brings out this connection very clearly in her essay 'Fabulous narrations in the Concorde des deux languages of Jean Lemaire des Beiges'. This is an essay of considerable interest since Lemaire presents a mythological story of a journey to the Temples of Venus and Minerva precisely as a vehicle for considering the reception of the Italian Renaissance in France and exploring the possibility of harmony between different cultures and moral visions. Lemaire was attracted by both the platonist and neoplatonist theme of the unity of all forms of beauty and troubled by the idea of inevitable conflict between its 'higher' and 'lower' forms. Neoplatonist and platonist ideas also figure in Philip Ford's paper 'Neoplatonicfictionsin the Hymnes of Ronsard', on this occasion in the domain of cosmology. Ronsard, it is generally considered, subscribedtoa fundamentally Aristotelian view of the universe. Ford examines Les TV Saisons de Van (1563) and argues, without a great deal of conviction, that there are traces of neoplatonism in Ronsard's images which suggest that he was drawn to a more mystical conception of the cosmos than was provided by Aristotle. For discussion of a writer who was unambiguously anti-Aristotelian, one should turn to Michel Jeanneret's essay on Giordano Bruno's La cena de la ceneri (The Ash Wednesday supper, 1584): 'La Tete et l'estomac: Giordano Bruno, les banquets et le detournement de la philosophic'. Bruno's concern, in this wild suppersymposium dialogue composed during his London sojourn, was to defend his version of Copernican theory, which was essentially hermetic and non- Reviews 217 mathematical, against the Aristotelian pedants of Oxford. Jeanneret provides a lively guide to the literary and philosophical character of the dialogue, but his reading, which wdl appeal to post-modernists, exaggerates Bruno's success in elaborating a new epistemology or changing the course of philosophy. In an informative essay 'The philosophical phoenix', Richard Cooper explores the extensive imagery associated with 'the bird of wonder' in the Renaissance period with particular reference to French and Itatian poetry. The discussion ranges across the image of the phoenix in love poetry, its role as symbol of virtue in the moral order, of continuity in the social and political order, of rebirth, eternity, Christ the soul and martyrdom in the religious domain, and finally its association with science and medicine, and specifically with alchemy and the idea of its embodiment of everything longed for in the quest for the philosophers' stone. Cosmography had a special place in the Renaissance, with its burgeoning desire for a new understanding of the cosmos. In the concluding essay of the collection, entided 'Fictions cosmographiques a la Renaissance', Frank Lestringant examines two cosmographies in the sphere of mid-sixteenth century religious controversy. One is the 'Geographie infernale' (1552), developed by an early Calvinist theologian Piene Viret which can be set against the picture of underworld favoured by Dante and medieval Catholicism. The second example, also Calvinist and even more combative in character, is...

Phantoms of the Studio

No matter how much theory is disguised or repressed, there is no practice without theory. The theory that practice has nothing to do with theory is a theory, a disingenuous and naive one, but none the less a theory. Reading works of art is dependent-at some quickly reached level of observation-upon reading in general. This may seem obvious in a wider intellectual context, but it is noted here in respect of the resistance to such ideas in the art school ambience. But even in a wider context reading is taken so much for granted that its operations and effects are often presumed to be natural. Reading, however, presupposes a critical and complex theoretical discourse, even if it is a buried one. It is a discourse about language and meaning, about the relationship between language and the world, about meaning and people, their social organisation and relations in the world. It is tran,parent that language is not transparent, and since reading art works is so languagedependent, then this business of reading is not transparent either. Once again, to constituencies other than those of the art schools and general art milieu this may seem an obvious point to make, but the notion of an unmediated 'visual language' is still a widely canvassed one in the art world. There more than anywhere the shift to the world of the instincts which has gathered momentum from the time of Romanticism has become dogmatically entrenched. The notion of a distinctive 'visual language' is founded upon the realm of the instincts. This is a 'language', it is alleged, of unmediated instinctual access, which in turn assumes language itself to be transparent in the sense of it being merely a medium in which individuals transmit messages to each other about an independently constituted world of things. The notion of a 'visual language' is a kind of common sense still central to the dominant discourse in art schools. By a common sense discourse I mean any discourse which demands to be easily read and is therefore compelled to reproduce its most familiar assumptions and values. To challenge familiar assumptions and values by staying within them is impossible. The conception of the artist is at the centre of the Western humanist-empiricist-idealist interpretation of the world. Humanism proposes that 'man' is the origin and source of meaning, action and history. This is a weak position because it locates meaning in a single place. The notion of an unmediated 'visual language' is a typical piece of this common sense meaning fixing. Linked strongly to and interdependent with this notion of a 'visual language' is the notion of the artist as an ideologically unyoked, centred subject. The yearning for this state of freedom from ideology is itself a symptom of ideological alignment. The centred subject, like language itself, is also taken to be natural not linguistic, its ideological construction being thoroughly suppressed. In art school discourse, the notion of the centred subject is also a typical example of meaning fixing. But any attempt to fix meanings comes up against the act of reading itself. In the process of reading, meanings are not only fixed but are also released. Amongst the more general points being discussed here is the largely unrecognised coercion of meaning fixing in and behind teaching in art schools. This coercion is, ideologically, to be expected. It holds to a theory of much wider impact than its application in the domain of art teaching which is widely subscribed to in Europe and America in what in old academic terms is called the Humanities. This is the theory of expressive realism. Essentially, the theory is an amalgam of two concepts, one old, one new. The older one is the Aristotelian concept of art as mimesis which was one of the important engines of Renaissance art theory and practice. The newer one is the Romantic concept that the source from which art springs is 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings', and thus that art expresses the ethos, feelings and perceptions of a person 'possessed of more than usual organic sensibility'.1 This amalgam remains the staple ideology of art school discourse and teaching. The practice of reading, as conceived in the context of the theory of expressive realism, despite the inherent instability of its more sophisticated versions, is still dominated by the propositions which constitute the concept of the centred subject. These are:

An Essay to Amplify "Ornament": Some Renaissance Theory and Practice

An Essay to Amplify "Ornament": Some Renaissance Theory and Practice

Henry Reynolds' Mythomystes and the Continuity of Ancient Modes of Allegoresis in Seventeenth-Century England

Henry Reynolds' Mythomystes revives the ancient Greek notion that myth is the allegorical expression of natural philosophy. While Reynolds acknowledges the common Renaissance practice of moral and psychological al-legoresis, he insists that the truth-seeking exegete must read the ancient myths as “meere matter of Nature.” Most of the examples of allegoresis in Mythomystes reflect the interpretations of the pre-Socratic philosophers, while the divine sense of the Narcissus commentary recalls the eschatology implied in some of Plato's myths. In method Reynolds' allegoreses are syncretic, like those of Philo and Origen, and etymological, like those of the Stoics. Involved in the syncretism is a sort of Euhemerism that ascribes Hebraic mortality to otherwise pagan gods. A spatial, rather than a temporal, typology is also part of Reynolds' method. The etymologies in Mythomystes resemble those in Cicero's De Natura Deorum. Though Reynolds' theory, practice, and method of allegoresis are ancient, his concern with knowledge of the secrets of nature, like Bacon's, is modern. However, Reynolds' instrument, mythological allegoresis, seeks to recover: Bacon's, induction, to discover.

The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice

The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice

The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice

The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice

Architectural Practice in the Italian Renaissance

IN THIS PAPER I have chosen to concentrate on the High, or as I prefer to call it, the Roman Renaissance of the first half of the sixteenth century only because I am more familiar with the sources of this period than of those that precede and follow. But I think that a proper study of Italian Renaissance practice ought to divide the field into at least three parts: first, the generation of Brunelleschi and Alberti which is documented by archival material, theoretical writing on architecture, and biography. Here one might trace the emergence of practice from the medieval guild system into the sphere of Humanism. Second, the period I shall discuss, which is not strong in theory, but which compensates by providing richer biographies, more letters and archival records, and above all, large collections of drawings-sources which are almost nonexistent for the first period. This is an age of rugged individualism in architectural practice. Finally, something should be said about the later sixteenth century when, along with the foundations of the first academies, architects begin to write about practice, while they tend to stabilize theory into law. Here architecture begins to take shape as a distinct profession, perhaps for the first time since antiquity. Leaving this more ambitious scheme to future students, my present intention is to draw from the sources at hand certain generalizations concerning the apprenticeship and training of the architect, the practice of the profession, and the process of design during the period bounded by Bramante's arrival in Rome in about 1500 and Antonio da