Early Modern Literature

Genova, capitale di uno stato repubblicano, consegue tra il 1580 e il 1650 una posizione di singolare rilievo nella cultura italiana. Gli intellettuali grazie a cui la letteratura genovese oltrepassa la dimensione municipale sono studiati in questo volume a partire dall'analisi delle opere che più compiutamente li rappresentano. Nasce dalla ricerca un'immagine meglio delineata degli articolati rapporti che legano l'ambiente genovese alle poetiche barocche. Il saggio introduttivo ricostruisce lo scenario socio-politico e culturale della città ligure tra Cinque e Seicento

John Skelton is a central literary figure and the leading poet during the first thirty years of Tudor rule. Nevertheless, he remains challenging and even contradictory for modern audiences.

This book aims to provide an authoritative guide to this complex poet and his works, setting him in his historical, religious, and social contexts. Beginning with an exploration of his life and career, it goes on to cover all the major aspects of his poetry, from the literary traditions in which he wrote and the form of his compositions to the manuscript contexts and later reception. Contributors: Tom Betteridge, Julia Boffey, John Burrow, David Carlson, Helen Cooper, Elisabeth Dutton, A.S.G. Edwards, Jane Griffiths, Nadine Kuipers, Carol Meale, John Scattergood, Sebastian Sobecki, Greg Waite

Scopo dichiarato dell’ordine dei cavalieri di Santo Stefano, fondato nel 1561 da Cosimo I de’ Medici anche per motivi di legittimazione dinastica, fu la difesa della cristianità dalla minaccia ottomana. La politica aggressiva nei confronti dei Turchi, praticata attraverso la guerra di corsa e gli attacchi per mare alle piazzeforti ottomane in vari punti del Mediterraneo, praticata in modo ancora moderato da Cosimo e Francesco de’ Medici, venne ripresa con forza da Ferdinando I, che ne fece un fiore all’occhiello del Granducato nel confronto con le analoghe attività delle altre potenze europee, e poi soprattutto da suo figlio Cosimo II e suo nipote Ferdinando II. In coincidenza con i tre granduchi l’uso di strumenti di comunicazione e propaganda relativi alle imprese navali dei cavalieri, relativamente poco presente fino alla fine del Cinquecento, divenne un progetto sistematico che vide nella prima metà del Seicento la pubblicazione di numerose relazioni, la loro ristampa in altre città italiane, e la loro traduzione, ristampa, o ripresa anche in altre nazioni europee (soprattutto in Spagna), con il coinvolgimento nella veicolazione complessiva dei contenuti anche di intellettuali come il poeta Gabriello Chiabrera. Il saggio mette in rilievo il carattere sistematico della produzione di relazioni sulle imprese dei cavalieri di Santo Stefano contro i Turchi nel corso del Seicento, illuminandone gli aspetti produttivi e il successo editoriale, ed evidenziandone anche i rapporti con la produzione di tipo più letterario.

This dissertation will argue that the early modern theatre and the early modern church were both concerned with keeping the attention of their audiences, and that one of the ways that dramatic interest in Christopher Marlowe's and William Shakespeare's plays was generated was by staging acts that can be read as ambiguous, interrupted, failed or parodic confessions, prayers, and sermons. In particular, I will argue that when the characters in Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s tragedies fail to find solace in acts that model reformed devotional practices, they eventually suffer the strange but dramatically engaging consequences of their tragic passions like despair, hatred, jealousy, fear, and rage. This dissertation, then, will bridge the turn to religion and affect studies as a means of arguing that early modern tragedy was consumed with attracting, and sustaining, the dramatic attention of the audience. While it is not possible to say, with any finality, why tragedies hook an audience's attention, it is possible to suggest how Marlowe's and Shakespeare's tragedies used the passions generated by the failure of model devotional acts as a means of capturing and sustaining the attention of the audience.

Satires offer themselves to the audience in all kinds of forms: from novels to pamphlets, from cartoons to ritual performances, from learned wit to slanderous attacks. This was as much the case in early modern Europe as it is in contemporary (Western) society. Still, in all their variety, satirical utterances seem to share at least one characteristic, namely their double bind to both seriousness and laughter. In this paper, I analyse this double bind with the help of two Dutch cases of satire from the late eighteenth century.

The first case consists of a political periodical from the 1780’s, that makes use of the ‘magic-lantern formula’, which means that it imitates the live performance of a magic-lantern show or raree show (peepshow), a regular feature at eighteenth-century fairs. This Lanterne magique of toverlantaern applies the ‘magic-lantern formula’ to perform slanderous ridicule. The second case is an almanac-like series of booklets, published between 1792 and 1801 by the eccentric physician Pieter van Woensel, under the title De Lantaarn (‘The Lantern’). In these illustrated booklets, Van Woensel offers his ironic critique on contemporary politics and society.

The two cases differ in many ways. The Lanterne magique is highly partisan and uses a harsh kind of humour that is solely aimed at scapegoating political enemies. Van Woensel’s Lantaarn is ideologically ambivalent and uses the weapon of irony to lay bare the ludicrousness of the day. Nevertheless the two are related through their taking together of seriousness and playfulness/jest, their shared intention to make the audience laugh but at the same time to convey to it a more serious (political or moral) message.

Perhaps it is especially this double face of satire that makes its meaning oftentimes so difficult to grasp, not only for the audience, but also for scholars and literary critics. Looking at satire through the lens of its simultaneously serious and playful intentions might thus lead to a better understanding of the working of satire in general.

This paper examines the character of Bergetto from John Ford’s play, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and suggests that the foolish figure is an evolution of the humanum genus stock-character. As such, Bergetto encapsulates moral and ethical paradigms, most notably the parable of the prodigal son and Aristotle’s golden mean. In the morality tradition the representative of humanity is aided and hindered by opposing forces of Virtue and Vice, led into sin by the latter before being persuaded to repent by the former, and thus finding the path to salvation. Aristotle’s ethical vision of virtue as a moderate point between vices of excess and defect was frequently overlaid upon this psychomachian concept; fallen humanity becoming the vice of defect and the forces of evil that seek to corrupt him or her the vices of excess. In Ford’s debased Parma there are no virtuous figures (with the possible exception of Bergetto’s would-be wife Philotis) and Bergetto offers the sole representative of frail humanity. Surrounded in a city that has been overrun by vice and excess, he is ultimately murdered moments before his marriage, an event that often signified redemption in the Stuart period. Ford uses Bergetto to exploit and pervert traditional morality themes in order to portray a society so corrupt that innocence and virtue cannot survive. Bergetto therefore plays a vital and underestimated role in conveying the depth of this dark vision.

Real, Julian. 2017. ‘Bergetto - The Prodigal Son Abroad in “The Iron Age”.’ Early Modern Literary Studies 0 (0). https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/journal/index.php/emls/article/view/377.

Il saggio intende dimostrare che, subito dopo la pubblicazione, da parte di Alberico Gentili, dei De iuris interpretibus Dialogi sex (1582) e delle Lectiones et Epistolae (1583-1584) i rapporti fra Jean Hotman e il giurista di San Ginesio divennero molto difficili e burrascosi. Lo dimostrano alcune epistole scritte da Hotman ad autorevoli giuristi (ad es. Bodin), e ad alcuni umanisti (Bergmann, Payne, Cuffe, Th. Savile) contenenti critiche molto dure e severe ai Dialogi gentiliani. Malgrado ciò, e malgrado le opposizioni dei puritani, Gentili riuscirà ad ottenere la cattedra di Civil Law a Oxford.Il saggio contiene anche notizie circa il tentativo compiuto, dal Gentili, di ottenere un insegnamento a Tubinga nel 1580.

"We currently find ourselves at a peak moment in the importance and visibility of Spanish baroque drama within the eminently Shakespearean community of Anglophone early modern literary studies. Capitalizing on this momentum , Norton's timely publication of its new anthology The Golden Age of Spanish Drama both testifies to this academic trend and pushes the ball forward with its new and accessible translations into English of some of the period's most important plays written by Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and their contemporaries . Curated by Barbara Fuchs, who has proven to be one of the most accomplished scholars to bridge the gap between the study of early modern English and Spanish literature, this anthology includes five of the most iconic dramatic works written in the Spanish-speaking world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries..."

Female Protagonism on the Early Modern European Stage One of the major differences between the commercial theatre cultures of early modern England and continental Europe was that, whereas in England the female roles were performed by young cross-dressed boys, elsewhere female performers were prominent figures in their industry. Indeed, actresses in countries such as Italy and Spain played an active role in the creative process of theatre-making, and could rise to lead their own acting companies and even write their own plays. With this distinctive factor in mind, this paper comparatively explores from a quantitative standpoint how playwrights across early modern Europe depicted female characters in their plays, with particular focus on Shakespearean England and Golden Age Spain. The number of lines pronounced by female characters as opposed to male ones in the works of dramatists from one or the other country indicates a significant disparity between the two, which in turn might suggest that the presence and absence of actresses in one and another theatrical culture directly affected the amount of speech, protagonism and agency allocated to female characters in their plays.

Speaking to You analyses how modes of addresses encountered in modernist writing continue to inform uses of the second person in the late twentieth-century. The book explores the re-emergence of classical, medieval and early modern poetic buttonholings of you – from Propertius to Milton; Dante to Ben Jonson – in negotiations of political and personal identities in the present. I focus on the work of four poets –W.S. Graham, Geoffrey Hill, Don Paterson and C.H. Sisson – whose redeployment of ancient and modern voices closely tunes in to (and answers back to) the lyric articulations of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Yeats, Joyce. In such work, the invocations of past writers rubs up against contemporary political and personal interjections, and addresses to readerships, newspaper critics, editors, friends and forebears.

Drawing into conversation a range of figures across temporalities, this book situates late twentieth-century lyric address as part of a much longer literary and philosophical history, arguing that such poetry is persuasive public interlocution that rethinks transhistorical allegiances.

Ghosting twentieth-century poetry is an insistence that artworks participate in a theatre of public words continually borrowed, tested out and altered in different civil contexts. 'Speaking to You' navigates the numerous ways in which address is a key into the political, national and personal work performed by, and through, poetic texts. It provides a literary-philosophical history of late modernist address, arguing that such writing tunes into, and is repeatedly interrupted by the diverse and often mutually antagonistic strands that comprise its alterable envisionings of the literary present.

En l’imaginari col·lectiu català hi ha alguns episodis bèl·lics
que han marcat profundament la cultura i, en conseqüència, la
literatura, per les seves pregones repercussions històriques: a
l’edat moderna les guerres dels Segadors i de Successió són
guerres de sang i de papers, en què la poesia, com altres gèneres
literaris, serveix com a vehicle per transmetre idees i explicar
fets. Amb el tricentenari, la guerra de Successió i les manifestacions
culturals i literàries que va generar s’han pogut fer
visibles per a un públic més ampli, però la literatura de la guerra
dels Segadors segueix sent, per norma general, força desconeguda
per a la majoria dels lectors, i és de justícia que no
segueixi dormint als calaixos de quatre estudiosos.

Computational flattening algorithms have been successfully applied to X-ray microtomography scans of damaged historical documents, but have so far been limited to scrolls, books, and documents with one or two folds. The challenge tackled here is to reconstruct the intricate folds, tucks, and slits of unopened letters secured shut with “letterlocking,” a practice—systematized in this paper—which underpinned global communications security for centuries before modern envelopes. We present a fully automatic computational approach for reconstructing and virtually unfolding volumetric scans of a locked letter with complex internal folding, producing legible images of the letter’s contents and crease pattern while preserving letterlocking evidence. We demonstrate our method on four letterpackets from Renaissance Europe, reading the contents of one unopened letter for the first time. Using the results of virtual unfolding, we situate our findings within a novel letterlocking categorization ...

Jacopo Aconcio (ca.1500-ca.1567) was an Italian philosopher who acquired some fame in Europe for his views on religious toleration. After embracing the Reformed faith, he sought refuge in England. He soon started working in the service of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leices-ter, who also acted as patron to Thomas Blundeville (ca.1522-ca.1606), a prolific translator of Italian moral and philosophical works. The close intellectual relationship between Acon-cio and Blundeville stimulated Blundeville's translation of some of the philosopher's works, including the historiographical treatise Delle osservationi et avvertimenti che haver si debbono nel leg-gere delle historie. Despite scanty scholarly attention, this text is notable as being one of the few treatises on the subject of historiography in early modern England and the first to offer advice on how to read and interpret history. In this paper I argue that the typical sixteenth-century principle of freedom in the re-elaboration of the source was widely employed by Blundeville in order to provide Leicester with a text purged of Aconcio's rhetorics and where his principles of 'method', 'purpose', and 'public utility' might find their full application .

L’informatique a profondément transformé les études littéraires, qu’il s’agisse des méthodes d’investigation, des questions posées ou des corpus abordés. Pour nombre de chercheurs toutefois, les «humanités numériques» demeurent un domaine étrange et étranger, source de fantasmes et de frustrations.
Cet ouvrage aborde le sujet sous un angle résolument concret, celui des interfaces. En douze chapitres concis destinés aussi bien aux curieux qu’aux porteurs de projets, il présente les bénéfices et les enjeux du numérique pour les études littéraires, des usages d’un catalogue de bibliothèque aux analyses de big data, en passant par les nouveaux modes de lectures qu’inspirent les éditions en ligne et le brassage des corpus opéré par les bases de données. Exemples à l’appui, la réflexion démontre le rôle fondamental des interfaces: parce qu’elles transforment notre rapport aux textes, aux livres et à leurs auteurs, elles constituent l’apport décisif des humanités numériques à la littérature.

https://www.alphil.com/index.php/editions-livreo-alphil/interfaces.html?___store=de_chf&___from_store=de_chf

Der Band präsentiert die Ergebnisse einer interdisziplinären Tagung, die im Oktober 2008 an der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt stattfand und sich exemplarisch dem Literaturbetrieb der Reichsstadt in der Zeit des Umbruchs zwischen Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit widmete. Im Mittelpunkt stehen die Institutionen des lokalen Kultur- und Literaturbetriebs sowie die Strategien literarischer Kommunikation des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts. Vor dem Hintergrund ereignis- und epochengeschichtlicher Wandlungen, religiöser Auseinandersetzungen, bildungspolitischer Reformen und nicht zuletzt buch- und mediengeschichtlicher Entwicklungen wird die Rolle der Literatur im Kraftfeld städtischer Repräsentationsaufgaben und partikularer Gruppeninteressen untersucht.

Bibliotheks- und überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien ermöglichen es, das literarische Profil Frankfurts zu bestimmen. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit findet die einflussreiche Spieltradition, indem die Rezeptionsstrategien und der ambivalente Status des Frankfurter Passionsspiels zwischen Liturgie und Theater analysiert werden. Einen weiteren thematischen Schwerpunkt des Bandes bildet die Bedeutung Frankfurts als Verlags- und Messestadt, wobei auch die jüdische Literatur angemessene Beachtung erfährt. In den Blick genommen wird zudem die literarische Darstellung der Reichsstadt und ihrer Bürger, wie sie in Chronik, Städtelob und Schmähgedicht mit Hilfe rhetorischer, narrativer und im weitesten Sinne fiktionaler Elemente inszeniert wird.

Se presenta y describe el funcionamiento la base de datos PCEM (Cens de Poesia Catalana de l’Edat Moderna, https://pcem.iec.cat/). Para la consecución de este work in progress, sus autores, Joan Mahiques y Helena Rovira, han contado con el apoyo institucional y económico del Institut d’Estudis Catalans, que entre otras cosas ha proporcionado un soporte digital creado a medida y supervisado por Santi Muxach. Aparte de exponer qué criterios metodológicos que limitan este corpus de textos en lo referente a la cronología, soporte material, etc., se describen las posibilidades de su motor de búsqueda y los materiales han sido vertidos hasta el momento.

This paper investigates literary discourse surrounding the early modern stag hunt to explore somatic grounds for empathetic communication between humans and animals. The stag hunt—more than any other form of hunting during the early modern period—is frequently construed in allegorical terms, which sustain human-animal divisions and reinforce notions of human superiority. However, I argue that elements of the stag hunt blur these boundaries, posing a challenge to essentialist conceptions of the human, and opening up more fluid mediums of corporeal communication. I contend that the literary representation of hunting in the early modern period can serve as a model for an embodied understanding of cross-species communication and interaction.
Beginning with George Gascoigne’s treatise The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting (1575), I consider how, within the context of hunting, the hunter’s body is initially understood as unified and stable, while the stag’s body is perceived as malleable; it is something which can be made and unmade at the hunter’s discretion. Using the performative element of Gilles Deleuze’s conception of “meat,” and work by contemporary thinkers like Vinciane Despret and Rane Willerslev, I contest these assumptions to explore human-animal “meating places.” I then turn to Jaques’ encounter with the stag in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1599) to consider the potential for trans-species communication of material “passions.” My approach resonates with current work like that of Ralph Acampora, which attempts to shift the grounds of humans’ ethical consideration for animals from the psyche to the soma.

*Impressive Shakespeare* reassesses Shakespeare’s relationship with "print culture" in light of his plays' engagement with the language and material culture of three interrelated "impressing technologies": wax sealing, coining, and typographic printing. It analyses the material and rhetorical forms through which drama was thought to "imprint" early modern audiences and readers with ideas, morals and memories, and—looking to our own cultural moment—shows how Shakespeare has been historically constructed as an "impressive" dramatist. Through material readings of four plays—Coriolanus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale—Harry Newman argues that Shakespeare deploys the imprint as a self-reflexive trope in order to advertise the value of his plays to audiences and readers, and that in turn the language of impression has shaped, and continues to shape, Shakespeare’s critical afterlife. The book pushes the boundaries of what we understand by "print culture", and challenges assumptions about the emergence of concepts now central to Shakespeare’s perceived canonical value, such as penetrating characterisation, poetic transformation, and literary fatherhood.

This essay delves into the inescapably close interpersonal relationships that exist among the male characters in William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Coriolanus. Through this close examination, we will find the relationships to be less homoerotic than they are often described in criticism concerning this play, but instead they are based on an unconventional marriage to war itself. This polyamorous marriage links all of the characters in a web of war, blood, and lust.

The early modern commercial book market was the cradle of authorial branding. Authors and publishers increasingly explored the construction of authorial brands: a set of recurring and recognizable characteristics associated with authorial images. This chapter looks at branding in the context of the media landscape of the early modern Dutch Republic. Authorial branding developed over time in conjunction with new conceptions of the individual, technological innovations, and the changing role of-amongst others-patrons and publishers. Analyses of the branding of Jan Jansz. Starter (1593-1626) and Sara Maria van der Wilp (1716-1803) illustrate how the non-formalized, dynamic constellation of the literary eld inspired various agents to create a range of (multifaceted) author brands on the spectrum 'economic-symbolic'.

En La española inglesa de Cervantes se han identificado una variedad de subtextos y componentes genéricos: desde tropos provenientes de novelas bizantinas e historias de cautivos, a elementos específicos de una novela italiana de Bandello. Menos obvia, pero no menos presente, es la alusión en esta 'novela ejemplar' de Cervantes a textos religiosos como la historia bíblica del patriarca José y la traducción española de la Historia eclesiástica del cisma de Inglaterra de Pedro de Ribadeneira. Ejemplo por excelencia de la paciencia exílica en las tradiciones judía, musulmana y cristiana, la historia de José apoya la lección explícita que la providencia recompensa la virtud, en concordancia con la creencia de cristianos viejos y nuevos. Por su parte, la historia de Ribadeneira, ampliamente difundida por la península ibérica, parecería ser la fuente principal de la perspectiva española sobre la reforma inglesa. ¿Qué propósito podrían cumplir estos intertextos mediterráneos religiosos en la novela ejemplar de Cervantes?  Esta presentación sugerirá razones estéticas, sociales y religiosas.