Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Early Modern History 1500-1750'
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Geschwind, Rachel L. "MAGDALENE IMAGERY AND PROSTITUTION REFORM IN EARLY MODERN VENICE AND ROME, 1500-1700." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1302019358.
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Gow, Andrew Colin. "The Red Jews: Apocalypticism and antisemitism in medieval and early modern Germany." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/186270.
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The Red Jews are a legendary people; this is their history. From the late thirteenth to the late sixteenth century, vernacular German texts depicted the Red Jews, a conflation of the Biblical ten lost tribes of Israel and Gog and Magog, as a savage and unnaturally foul nation, who are enclosed in the 'Caspian Mountains', where they had been walled up by Alexander the Great. At the end of time, they will break out and serve the Antichrist, causing great destruction and suffering in the world. The hostile identification (c. 1165) of Jews with the apocalyptic destroyers of Ezekiel 38-39 and Revelation 20 expresses a new and virulent antisemitism that was integrated into the powerful apocalyptic traditions of Christianity. None of the few scholars who have noticed the Red Jews in medieval and early modern vernacular texts has sought out, collected and examined the complete body of medieval and early-modern sources that feature the Red Jews. This study provides a long-term analysis of the intimate connections between antisemitism and apocalypticism via a forgotten and submerged piece of German 'medievalia', the Red Jews. The legend gradually dissipated. Until the beginning of the seventeenth century it was a medieval lens through which Germans saw events relating to the Turkish threat in the East; after that time, the Red Jews disappeared from European texts.
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Streete, Adrian George Thomas. "Calvinism, subjectivity and early modern drama." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/12800.
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This thesis examines the connections between Calvinism and early modern subjectivity as expressed in the drama produced during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. By looking at a range of theological, medical, popular, legal and polemical writings, the thesis aims to provide a new historical and theoretical reading of Calvinist subjectivity that both develops and departs from previous scholarship in the field. Chapter one examines the critical question of 'authority' in early modern Europe. I trace the various classical and medieval antecedents that reinscribed Christ with political authority during the period, and show how the Reformers' conception of conscience arises out of this movement. In chapter two, I offer a parallel reading of Reformed semiotics in relation to the individual's response to two specific loci of power, the Church and the stage. Chapter three brings the first two chapters together by outlining the development of Calvinist doctrine in early modem England. Chapter four offers a theoretical reading of the early modern 'unconscious' in relation to the construction of England as a Protestant nation state against the threat of Catholicism. In the next four chapters, I show how the stage provided the arena for the exploration of Calvinist subjectivities through readings of four early modern plays. Chapter five deals with Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and in particular the Calvinist conception of Christ interrogated throughout the play. Chapter six looks at The Revenger's Tragedy in relation to the question of masculine lineage and the Name-of-the-(Calvinist)-Father. Finally, in chapters seven and eight, I examine two of William Shakespeare's plays, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. In the first, I demonstrate how the play's concern with witchcraft brings about a parody of providential discourse that is crucial to an understanding of Macbeth's subjectivity. And in the second, I excavate the use of the biblical book of Revelation in Antony and Cleopatra in order to show how an understanding of the text's 'religious' concerns problematises more mainstream readings of the drama.
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Phillips, Harriet. "Uses of the popular past in early modern England, 1510-c.1611." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.648360.
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Wikland, Linda. "Vårt dagliga bröd giv oss idag. Hungersnöd, krishantering och resiliens i Stockholm 1650–1750." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Historiska institutionen, 2020. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-190846.
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Famines were recurring events in the early-modern world. This thesis aims to identify and analyse institutional, social, and political parameters that improved or reduced the society’s capacity for crisis management and institutional adaptations in Stockholm in times of foodshortages during the period 1650–1750. The study consists of four case studies. The study shows that the government effectiveness improved during the investigated period, which increased the possibilities to mitigate the consequences of famine. Furthermore, the ambition to protect the social order seems to have been the most important driving force to take measures to ease and prevent famines in Stockholm. I conclude that very few institutional adaptations to prevent future famines were made during the period. Most likely because the elite lacked political incentives to act. The study provides knowledge on societal resilience in the early-modern era
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Nielson, James. "Elizabethan realisms : reading prose from the end of the century." Thesis, McGill University, 1990. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=74597.
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This thesis basically has a twofold aim: on the one hand, to make a somewhat neglected body of Renaissance prose more readable, by adding, in a punctual and miscellaneous manner, to our historical, philological and thematic understanding of it and by examining it in the light of some of our current theoretical preoccupations; and, on the other hand, to problematize the "realistic" rubric assigned to these works and to do so by cultivating a more thoroughgoing textual realism on the part of readers.These works, traditionally grouped together because of the interaction of their authors at the end of the 16th century, include Robert Greene's "cony-catching" and "confessional" pamphlets, the texts of the controversy between Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey, and Harvey's manuscript drafts, as well as more familiar works such as Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller.
The theoretical issue of "the real" as a textual effect has been divided up according to the three nominal categories of persons, places and things, but the thesis falls methodologically into two halves. The opening chapters aim at reintroducing the figures of Greene, Nashe and Harvey, and exploring the quasi-genres of confession, invective and rough draft as exemplary models of the textual construction of a realistic person. They also attempt an alternative form of reading which is an amalgam of cento, summary, close reading, theoretical aside, and running commentary. In the second half, microreadings of the Marprelate Tracts, the cony-catching pamphlets, and texts by Nashe are used to shed light on theoretical issues of textual "place" such as the rhetorical construction of "presence" and metaphorical "movement." Once the relationship between premodern and postmodern textuality has been sketched, the final chapter offers a critique of the unreflexive academic practice of doing "readings," and argues for a new literalism and the self-subversion of the figurative in an "extrarhetorical" reading of Nashe's Lenten Stuffe.
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Farley, Stuart. "Copious voices in early modern English writing." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/11904.
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This thesis takes as its object of study a certain strand of Early Modern English writing characterised by its cornucopian invention, immethodical structure, and creatively exuberant, often chaotic, means of expression. It takes as its point of departure the Erasmian theory of ‘copia' (rhetorical abundance), expanding upon it freely in order to formulate new and independent notions of copious vernacular writing as it is practised in 16th- and 17th-century contexts. Throughout I argue for the continuity and pervasiveness of the pursuit of linguistic plenitude, in contrast to a prevailing belief that the outpouring of 'words' and 'things' started to dissipate in the transition from one century (16th) to the next (17th). The writers to be discussed are Thomas Nashe, Robert Burton, John Taylor the ‘Water-Poet', and Sir Thomas Urquhart. Each of the genres in which these writers operate–prose-poetry, the essay, the pamphlet, and the universal language–emerge either toward the end of the 16th century or during the course of the 17th century, and so can be said to take copious writing in new and experimental directions not fully accounted for in the current scholarship. My contribution to the literature lies principally in its focus on the emergence of these literary forms in an Early Modern English context, with an emphasis on the role played by copiousness of expression in their stylistic development and how they in turn develop the practice of copia.
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Pearce, Michael. "Vanished comforts : locating roles of domestic furnishings in Scotland, 1500-1650." Thesis, University of Dundee, 2016. https://discovery.dundee.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/30341c43-2f2d-48d9-a893-7dd9c8b9a13b.
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Household inventories record objects that can be compared with surviving artefacts contributing to the study of material culture and social history. However, this thesis shows how heterogeneous inventories found in early modern Scottish sources resist quantification and aggregation. Instead, qualitative use of inventory evidence is advocated. Inventories can contribute information on the locations of activities in the home. These activities may be preferred to the object as evidence of historical change and as units of international comparison. Furnishing a house was cultural activity, and a construction of culture. In this study, objects are regarded as participants in cultural activities, strategies, and the construction of values. Sixteenth-century inventories are often impersonal and tend to show similarities in content, encouraging mechanistic interpretations of domestic life. The seventeenth century saw a proliferation of household equipment and furnishing for elites throughout Europe due to changes in production and consumerism. Some of this new furnishing was bought in London, some in France. While national difference was apparently maintained in architecture, new furnishings may have effaced distinctions within elite rooms. Scottish and English culture was merged by aristocratic intermarriage. This new culture is seen in the inventories of Mary, dowager Countess of Home. She maintained houses in England and Scotland. Some of her furnishings represented the style of an inner circle at court. Her inventories are also significant because they detailed equipment for a range of activities. She personally prepared medicines and sweetmeats, and had a number of scientific instruments. Pursuits reconstructed from the detail of later inventories can illuminate other domestic situations where clues are more subtle or absent. The level of autonomy Lady Home and her daughters exercised over their homes is a reminder of the agency exercised by women over furnishings, gardens, architecture, and estate policy.
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Bider, Noreen Jane. "Tudor metrical psalmody and the English Reformations." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape11/PQDD_0026/NQ50115.pdf.
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Hammerton, Rachel Joan. "English impressions of Venice up to the early seventeenth century : a documentary study." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/2792.
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The first Englishmen to write about the city-state of Venice were the pilgrims passing through on their way to the Holy Land. Their impressions are recorded in the travel diaries and collections of advice for prospective fellow pilgrims between the early fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the most substantial being those of William Wey, Sir Richard Guylforde and Sir Richard Torkington, who visited Venice in 1458 and '62, 1506, and 1517 respectively. In the 1540s arrived the men who saw Venice as part of the new Europe--Andrew Borde and William Thomas. Thomas's study of the Venetian state emphasized the efficiency of its administration, seeing it as an example of constructive government, where effective organisation for the common good led directly to national stability and prosperity. The mid-sixteenth century saw the beginnings of Venice as a tourist centre; the visitors who came between 1550 and the end of the century described the sights and the people, the traditions and way of life. Fynes Moryson's extensive account details what could be seen and learned in the city by an observant and enquiring visitor. In addition to information available in first-hand accounts of Venice, much could be learned from the work of the late sixteenth-century English translators. Linguistic, cultural, geographical, historical and literary translations yielded further knowledge and, more importantly, new perspectives, Venice being seen through the eyes of Italians and, through Lewkenor's comprehensive work, The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, of Venetians themselves. Finally, to assess the general impressions of Venice and the Venetians, we consider the literature of the turn of the sixteenth-seventeenth century; what, and how much, of the three-hundred year accumulation of knowledge of the city and people of Venice had most caught the attention and imagination of the English mind, and how close was the relationship between the popular impression and the documentary information from which it had largely developed.
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Wong, Alexander Tsiong. "Aspects of the kiss-poem 1450-1700 : the neo-Latin basium genre and its influence on early modern British verse." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708782.
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Botchkareva, Anastassiia Alexandra. "Representational Realism in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Changing Visual Cultures in Mughal India and Safavid Iran, 1580-1750." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:13070051.
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The concept of realism in visual representation has been defined and deployed largely within the domain of the Western artistic canon. In the field of art history, the term is often used in ways that depend on implicit, culturally coded assumptions about its connection with the formal markers of optical-naturalism. The Persianate tradition of pictorial representation by contrast, has been traditionally characterized in modern scholarship as stylized and decorative, with little acknowledgment of an interest in realism in its own visual language. Furthermore, normative Euro-centric attitudes have perpetuated the assumption that an engagement with realism entered Persianate artistic practices with the advent of Europeanizing modes of depiction in Safavid and Mughal spheres of production around the late sixteenth-century. This dissertation explores the topic of realism from the perspective of Persianate visual culture. In so doing, it proposes to refine our understanding of the concept in terms that accommodate the varied artistic production of cultures that laid claims to cultivating representational realism in their own primary sources.
The first chapter draws on multi-disciplinary discussions to challenge art historical treatments of pictorial realism as a style, in favor of a functional definition of the concept as an emergent quality rooted in formal strategies that activate particular patterns of mirror-response in their audiences.
The second and third chapters reject the principle of evaluating the realism of Persianate representations according to their degree of proximity to European models. The second chapter discusses the structural conditions of change in visual habitus in cases of inter-cultural encounter between foreign modes of representation and the resulting works of aesthetic hybridity. The third chapter presents material evidence of early modern Safavid and Mughal albums as discourses of aesthetic heterogeneity.
The fourth chapter explores the local Persianate roots of realism, including the changes these realism strategies underwent in the early modern period. The fifth and final chapter develops case studies of two seventeenth-century Mughal and Safavid drawings, which cultivate representational enlivenment in depicting harrowing moments of death. The discussion delves in greater detail into the particular patterns of realism developed in the seventeenth-century Persianate visual culture.History of Art and Architecture
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Hanan, Rachel Ann 1978. "Words in the world: The place of literature in Early Modern England." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/11156.
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ix, 268 p. : ill. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number."Words in the World" details the ways that the place of rhetoric and literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries changes in response to the transition from natural philosophy to Cartesian mechanism. In so doing, it also offers a constructive challenge to today's environmental literary criticism, challenging environmental literary critics' preoccupation with themes of nature and, by extension, with representational language. Reading authors from Thomas More to Philip Sidney and Ben Jonson through changes in physics, cartography, botany, and zoology, "Words in the World" argues that literature occupies an increasingly separate place from the real world. "Place" in this context refers to spatiotemporal dimensions, taxonomic affiliations, and the relationships between literature and the physical world. George Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie (1589), for instance, limits the way that rhetoric is part of the world to the ways that it can be numbered (meter, rhyme scheme, and so forth); metaphor and other tropes, however, are duplicitous. In contrast, for an earlier era of natural philosophers, tropes were the grammar of the universe. "Words in the World" culminates with Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621/1651), in which the product of literature's split from the physical world is literary melancholy. Turning to today's environmental literary criticism, the dissertation thus historicizes ecocriticism's nostalgic melancholy for the extratextual physical world. Indeed, Early Modern authors' inquiries into the place of literature and the relationships between that place and the physical world in terms of literary forms and structures, suggests the importance of ecoformalism to Early Modern scholarship. In particular, this dissertation argues that Early Modern authors treat literary structures as types of performative language. This dissertation revises the standard histories of Early Modern developments in rhetoric and of the literary text, and it provides new insight into the materiality of literary form.
Committee in charge: Lisa Freinkel, Chairperson, English; William Rossi, Member, English; George Rowe, Member, English; Ted Toadvine, Outside Member, Philosophy
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Glover, Victoria E. C. ""To Conceive With Child is the Earnest Desire if Not of All, Yet of Most Women": The Advancement of Prenatal Care and Childbirth in Early Modern England: 1500-1770." VCU Scholars Compass, 2018. https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/5694.
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This thesis analyzes medical manuals published in England between 1500 and 1770 to trace developing medical understandings and prescriptive approaches to conception, pregnancy, and childbirth. While there have been plenty of books written regarding social and religious changes in the reproductive process during the early modern era, there is a dearth of scholarly work focusing on the medical changes which took place in obstetrics over this period. Early modern England was a time of great change in the field of obstetrics as physicians incorporated newly-discovered knowledge about the male and female body, new fields and tools, and new or revived methods into published obstetrical manuals. As men became more prominent in the birthing chamber, instructions in the manuals began to address these men as well. Overall these changes were brought about by changes in the medical field along with changes in culture and religion and the emergence of print culture and rising literacy rates.
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Chow, Po-fun Wendy, and 周寶芬. "Carnivalization and subversion of order in comic plays, with referenceto Shakespeare's Twelfth night and Herry IV." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1987. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31948996.
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McKeogh, Katie. "Sir Thomas Tresham (1543-1605) and early modern Catholic culture and identity, 1580-1610." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c6d9ffcd-570e-4334-acd4-735c656c0a1f.
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What did it mean to be a Catholic elite in Protestant England? The relationship between the Protestant crown and its Catholic subjects may be examined fruitfully through a study of an individual and his world. This thesis examines this relationship through the example of Sir Thomas Tresham, who has often been seen as the archetypal Catholic loyalist. It is argued that the notion of Catholic loyalism must be reconfigured to account for the complexities inherent in the relationship between Catholics and the government. The duty to honour the monarch's authority was bound up with social and national sentiment, but it often accompanied criticisms of the practice of that authority, and the ways in which it encroached on personal experience. Intractable tensions lay behind expressions of loyalty, and this thesis travels in these undercurrents of cultural, social, religious, and political conflict to investigate the nuanced relationship between English Catholics and English society. Political resistance as classically understood - actions which directly opposed and undermined government policy - risks the exclusion of culture and identity, through which resistance was redefined. It is argued that Tresham's participation in elite activities became vehicles for resistance in the Catholic context. Book-collecting, reading, and the donation of books to an institutional library are framed as forms of resistance which countered the spirit of government legislation, and provided for the continuation of a robust tradition of Catholic scholarship on English soil. Through artistic and architectural projects, Tresham found ways to participate in elite culture which were not closed off to him, and in which Catholicism and gentility could sit side by side. These activities were also avenues for resistance, whereby the erection of stone testaments to Tresham's faith defied the government's attempts to redefine Englishness and gentility in Protestant terms, to the devastation of Catholicism. These artistic works combined piety, gentility, and resistance, and, together with Tresham's two Catholic libraries, they were to be his legacy.
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Hirsch, Brett Daniel. "Werewolves and women with whiskers : figures of estrangement in early modern English drama and culture." University of Western Australia. English and Cultural Studies Discipline Group, 2009. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2009.0175.
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Each chapter of Werewolves and Women with Whiskers: Figures of Estrangement in Early Modern English Drama and Culture explores a particular figure of fascination and fear in the early modern English imagination: in one it is owls, in another bearded women, in a third werewolves, and in yet another Jews. Drawing on instances from drama and other cultural forms, this thesis seeks to examine each of these phenomena in terms of their estrangement. There is a symbolic appositeness in each of these figures, whether in estranged and estranging minority groups, such as Catholics, Jesuits, Jews, Puritans, Italians, the Irish, and the Scots; or in transgressive behaviours, such as cross-dressing and gender trouble, infidelity and apostasy, intemperate passion and unnatural desire. Essentially unfixed and unstable, these emblematic figures are indicative of cultural uncertainty and therefore are easily adapted to suit changing political, religious, and social climates. However, adaptability and fluidity come at a price, since figures of difference have an uncomfortable way of transforming themselves into figures of resemblance. Thus, this thesis argues, each of these figuresowls, bearded women, werewolves, Jewsoccupies an undefined and undefinable space on the precarious boundary between the usual and the unusual, between the strange and the strangely familiar, and, most strangely and paradoxically of all, between us and them.
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Jennings, Emily. "Prophetic rhetoric in the early Stuart period." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:13643178-0544-4b2b-9ca3-55d6c73a5d26.
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This is a study of the political prophecy in England in a period delimited by the accession of King James I (1603) and the end of the Interregnum (1660). It combines the analysis of hitherto obscure manuscript texts with that of printed works to provide a nuanced account of the uses and reception of prophecies in this period. Chapter One (which focuses on the first decade of James's reign) and Chapter Two (which covers the period 1613-19) approach the analysis of dramatic treatments of political prophecy through the study of prophecy both as a rhetorical buttress to the Jacobean state and as a protest genre. Attentive to the elite bias of the legal documents wherein allegedly oppositionist uses of prophecy are recorded, these chapters heed the counsel of historians who have found literary scholars insufficiently suspicious of the rhetoric of these materials. A focus on dramatic texts, neglected by the historians, reveals that Jacobean playgoers were encouraged to regard both official prophetic rhetoric and official rhetoric about prophecy with scepticism. Chapter Three considers how native and continental prophetic traditions were expanded and repurposed in England around the beginning of the Thirty Years' War, when belief in the purportedly inspired status of prophecies was rare but recognition of their utility as a vehicle for political discussion was nonetheless widespread. Chapter Four explores the adaptation and tendentious exposition of medieval, sixteenth-century, and Jacobean manuscript prophecies in printed propaganda for both the royalist and parliamentarian causes in the mid-seventeenth century. This study of literary and archival sources finds that previous scholarship has overestimated the extent of popular faith in the authenticity of allegedly ancient and inspired prophecies in the early Stuart period. The longevity of purported prophecies, it concludes, was ensured through the recognition, appreciation, and exploitation of their rhetorical affordances.
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Pihl, Christopher. "Arbete : Skillnadsskapande och försörjning i 1500-talets Sverige." Doctoral thesis, Uppsala universitet, Historiska institutionen, 2012. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-182392.
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The aim of this thesis is to explore work as an idea and a practice for the construction and maintenance of differences and power relations, and to examine what the consequences were for the individual and society in early modern Sweden. The period saw an expansion of the state apparatus which created numerous new opportunities for employment. There also exists a body of literature from this period, in the form of instructions relating to work and households. The thesis draws both on these instructions and descriptions and on sources produced by the crown. The thesis shows that gender was a crucial factor for the organisation of work. Operating The service of the crown was characterised by two principal organisational forms: the household, and a precursor of a bureaucratic system. The household had its basis in the couple, and had a clear gendered division of power, the couple together constituted the management of the household, at the same time there was an element of male superordination. The other form was exclusively male and based on delegation of power within the organisation and on an attempt to formalise relations by written instructions. The majority of the jobs created were held by men. In crafts and administration, men took over a number of female areas of competence. In this process was occupational positions created for these men. Women’s opportunities to work were heavily affected by an idea of a female area of expertise, ‘womenfolk’s work’ which never become specialiced, but the investigation also shows that work created in the crowns households in positions of leadership created livelihoods for married adult women. Among employees that were young and unmarried the similarities between the genders were often more striking than the differences. Greater differences emerge from a comparison of the entire workforce of the crown, which shows women’s annual wages to be 75 per cent of those of men. Overall women had few opportunities to make careers and get well paid employments.
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Tidman, Gemma. "Ce qui s'enseigne : the Querelle des collèges and the emergence of littérature, 1750-1789." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f2be0fba-5a34-4f83-bbed-65f9c5f70d4e.
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This study examines an important eighteenth-century French querelle about literary education which has so far gone unacknowledged by scholars as a querelle and which, I argue, helped redefine contemporary notions of littérature. This querelle is the series of disputes about how to reform literary education in the collèges, which gathered momentum in the early 1760s, following the expulsion of the Jesuits and the publication of Rousseau's Émile (1762). I propose that we call this querelle the Querelle des collèges. Using a combination of close reading, sociological methodologies, and scholarly approaches to the study of early modern querelles, I examine how a diverse corpus of texts debated how to reform collège literary teaching practices. By resituating Émile in this context, I show that it was one among many interventions in the Querelle des collèges. My study of this Querelle demonstrates that querelleurs increasingly reached a consensus that practices associated with the disciplines of rhétorique and belles-lettres should be replaced by new practices of littérature, which were intended to turn boys into French 'grands hommes'. This Querelle was not only constituted by texts, but also by pedagogical practices, as evidenced by the results of my original archival research into the literary teaching practices of the École royale militaire, founded in 1751. Finally, my analysis situates the Querelle des collèges in the context of broader eighteenth-century debates about education, which I argue should be understood as the Querelle de l'éducation, and I provide the first corpus of this Querelle. This thesis challenges scholarly claims that littérature is a nineteenth-century invention. It argues, instead, that modern notions of littérature as 'an aesthetically pleasing, valued text', and 'a national canon', which began to appear in the late seventeenth century, were stabilised and legitimised by being written into the school discipline of littérature, which emerged between 1750 and the Revolution, in the context of the Querelle des collèges.
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Johnson, Toria Anne. "'Piteous overthrows' : pity and identity in early modern English literature." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/4197.
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This thesis traces the use of pity in early modern English literature, highlighting in particular the ways in which the emotion prompted personal anxieties and threatened Burckhardtian notions of the self-contained, autonomous individual, even as it acted as a central, crucial component of personal identity. The first chapter considers pity in medieval drama, and ultimately argues that the institutional changes that took place during the Reformation ushered in a new era, in which people felt themselves to be subjected to interpersonal emotions – pity especially – in new, overwhelming, and difficult ways. The remaining three chapters examine how pity complicates questions of personal identity in Renaissance literature. Chapter Two discusses the masculine bid for pity in courtly lyric poetry, including Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and Barnabe Barnes's Parthenophil and Parthenophe, and considers the undercurrents of vulnerability and violation that emerge in the wake of unanswered emotional appeals. This chapter also examines these themes in Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Sidney's Arcadia. Chapter Three also picks up the element of violation, extending it to the pitiable presentation of sexual aggression in Lucrece narratives. Chapter Four explores the recognition of suffering and vulnerability across species boundaries, highlighting the use of pity to define humanity against the rest of the animal kingdom, and focusing in particular on how these questions are handled by Shakespeare in The Tempest and Ben Jonson, in Bartholomew Fair. This work represents the first extended study of pity in early modern English literature, and suggests that the emotion had a constitutive role in personal subjectivity, in addition to structuring various forms of social relation. Ultimately, the thesis contends that the early modern English interest in pity indicates a central worry about vulnerability, but also, crucially, a belief in the necessity of recognising shared, human weakness.
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Doyle, Anne-Marie. "Shakespeare and the genre of comedy." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/177.
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Traditionally in the field of aesthetics the genres of tragedy and comedy have been depicted in antithetical opposition to one another. Setting out from the hypothesis that antitheses are aspects of a deeper unity where one informs the construction of the other’s image this thesis questions the hierarchy of genre through a form of ludic postmodernism that interrogates aesthetics in the same way as comedy interrogates ethics and the law of genre. Tracing the chain of signification as laid out by Derrida between theatre as pharmakon and the thaumaturgical influence of the pharmakeus or dramatist, early modern comedy can be identified as re-enacting Renaissance versions of the rite of the pharmakos, where a scapegoat for the ills attendant upon society is chosen and exorcised. Recognisable pharmakoi are scapegoat figures such as Shakespeare’s Shylock, Malvolio, Falstaff and Parolles but the city comedies of this period also depict prostitutes and the unmarried as necessary comic sacrifices for the reordering of society. Throughout this thesis an attempt has been made to position Shakespeare’s comic drama in the specific historical location of early modern London by not only placing his plays in the company of his contemporaries but by forging a strong theoretical engagement with questions of law in relation to issues of genre. The connection Shakespearean comedy makes with the laws of early modern England is highly visible in The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure and The Taming of the Shrew and the laws which they scrutinise are peculiar to the regulation of gendered interaction, namely marital union and the power and authority imposed upon both men and women in patriarchal society. Thus, a pivotal section on marriage is required to pinion the argument that the libidinized economy of the early modern stage perpetuates the principle of an excluded middle, comic u-topia, or Derridean ‘non-place’, where implicit contradictions are made explicit. The conclusion that comic denouements are disappointing in their resolution of seemingly insurmountable dilemmas can therefore be reappraised as the outcome of a dialectical movement, where the possibility of alternatives is presented and assessed. Advancing Hegel’s theory that the whole of history is dialectic comedy can therefore be identified as the way in which a society sees itself, dramatically representing the hopes and fears of an entire community.
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Gardner, Corinna. "The just figure shape, harmony and proportion in a selection of Andrew Marvell's lyrics." Thesis, Rhodes University, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002273.
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The phrase "the just Figure" - a quotation from Upon Appleton House - is the central theme of this thesis as it aptly describes Marvell's repeated use of shape, harmony and proportion to suggest morality and virtue. The poet's concern with geometrical imagery is conveyed by the word "figure", which also is another term for a metaphor or conceit. The word "just" suggests not only moral appropriateness, but also mathematical exactness or fit. The thesis consists of five chapters, each dealing with an aspect of the imagery of shape and form which pervades so many of Marvell's lyrics. The first chapter, "Moral Geometry", deals with the way in which Marvell uses the imagery of lines, angles and curves. In some poems the lines are curved, as in Upon the Hill and Grove at Bill-borrow, where the graceful downward curved line of the hill conveys Fairfacian humility. Symmetry and circularity are discussed in the second chapter. The poet uses the perfect shape of the circle to depict objects which convey a moral significance. Similarly, several of the lyrics are themselves quasi-circular with their closing lines echoing their openings. Chapter Three deals with liquid spheres. Marvell explores the nature, shape and texture of tears in poems such as Eyes and Tears and Mourning; and in On a Drop of Dew uses the shape of the dew drop to suggest the perfection of the heavenly realm from which it has been parted. In several of the lyrics, Marvell places a frame around his poems to create an enclosed world in which his poetic creations exist. These enclosed, or framed, worlds are discussed in Chapter Four. The final chapter, "Beyond The Frame", describes how some of the lyrics suggest a move from the world within to the world beyond the frame of the poem.This can either be a movement from confinement to release, or from the seen world to worlds unseen. Shape, harmony and proportion are the qualities which Marvell uses to convey morality and humility and a vision of the world based on what is, in the various senses of the word, "just".
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Mukherjee, Manisha. "The representation of transgressive love and marriage in English Renaissance drama /." Thesis, McGill University, 1996. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=42103.
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This study explores the presentation of transgressive, effective and erotic relationships in a selected group of early modern plays as those relationships relate to the English Renaissance ideal of marriage and sexuality expressed in religious and secular tracts. The depictions of illicit love and sexuality in these plays reveal problematic social and moral issues inherent in the construction of the English Renaissance ideal of love and marriage. Not only do the dramatists reveal the tension between transgressive and normative love and sexuality, but they do so through the use of aesthetic forms that transgress conventional dramatic structure. This dissertation contends that the unconventional dramatic representation of transgression functions as a cognitive mode for the audience in their understanding of the practical social reality associated with the abstract ideality of love and marriage. Focussing on a selected plays of English Renaissance dramatists William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, Thomas Heywood, John Ford, and two anonymous playwrights, I suggest that the dramatists refuse to condemn or condone the transgression. Rather, they endow it with meaning, and while not rescinding the ideal love and sexuality, offer possible ways of accommodating it.
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Jeffrey, Anthony Cole. "The Aesthetics of Sin: Beauty and Depravity in Early Modern English Literature." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2017. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1062818/.
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This dissertation argues that early modern writers such as William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, George Herbert, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell played a critical role in the transition from the Neoplatonic philosophy of beauty to Enlightenment aesthetics. I demonstrate how the Protestant Reformation, with its special emphasis on the depravity of human nature, prompted writers to critique models of aesthetic judgment and experience that depended on high faith in human goodness and rationality. These writers in turn used their literary works to popularize skepticism about the human mind's ability to perceive and appreciate beauty accurately. In doing so, early modern writers helped create an intellectual culture in which aesthetics would emerge as a distinct branch of philosophy.
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Bellis, Joanna Ruth. "Language, literature, and the Hundred Years War, 1337-1600." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.609852.
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May, Simon. "Marlowe and monarchy." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:84716f56-e527-4a6b-820c-d2204c87cfe2.
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Focusing on the works of Christopher Marlowe (1564-93), this thesis explores the complex engagement of popular drama with the political and religious writing of the Elizabethan fin de siècle. It focuses on the five plays by Marlowe that feature royal protagonists: 1-2 Tamburlaine (1587), Dido, Queen of Carthage (1588), Edward II (1592), and The Massacre at Paris (1593). By interpreting each play in its immediate political context, it shows that Marlowe did not deal with monarchy in the abstract but responded to current affairs - from the incursions of the Ottoman Empire to the threat of the Spanish Armada, from the conspiracy claims of Catholic polemic to the debate surrounding England's involvement in continental warfare. The introduction situates the thesis in the critical and historiographical context relating to Marlowe and to the relationship between literature and politics in the early modern period; it provides the justification for reading Marlowe's plays as topical statements. Chapter One looks at 1-2 Tamburlaine in the light of contemporary attitudes to the Ottoman-Safavid War. Chapter Two shows that Dido, Queen of Carthage adapted the stories and tropes of polemic to reflect fears of Catholic conspiracy and Spanish invasion. Chapter Three reads Edward II as a creative response to the print war of 1591-2, which centred on the moral character of the queen's closest counsellors. Chapter Four proposes that Marlowe's final play, The Massacre at Paris, employed arguments drawn from Reason of State to influence decisions at the 1593 Parliament. The thesis concludes by suggesting that despite Marlowe's reputation as a radical overreacher, his drama displays considerable sympathy for the monarchs who must rule precariously and without the option of private happiness.
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Paulin, Lotta. "Den didaktiska fiktionen : Konstruktion av förebilder ur ett barn- och ungdomslitterärt perspektiv 1400–1750." Doctoral thesis, Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för litteraturvetenskap och idéhistoria, 2012. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-74273.
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This thesis investigates the construction of role models, more specifically literary didactics and constructions of subject positions, in literary works with exemplary stories in Swedish 1400–1750, from the perspective of literature for children and young adults. Childhood concepts, didactic concepts and subject positions presented to the reader are analyzed from the point of view of dominance and dissonance between different characters and messages. A number of themes have been chosen for a comparative study, for example: ideas about identification, the construction of subject positions and ideals for girls, the responsibility of adults, subversive tendencies, obedience or autonomy, the immoral role model as exemplary, conflicts between different childhood concepts, adults and children as role models. A central conclusion is that there is variation when it comes to the subject positions that are constructed for children and young adults, mainly through role models. There are examples of authoritative teachings that demands the subordination and obedience of the reader/recipient, as well as encouragement of questioning and even contra conventional subject positions. One conclusion is that premodern literature for the young does not just have an authoritative tone towards the reader, but the texts also negotiates with the reader. The messages are not just about obedience and religious fidelity, but also about learning, questioning and personal, moral responsibility. A critical perspective on adults is encouraged through critizism of adults and exemplary role models. Subject positions for girls also vary in the texts. Some texts convey conventional, passive gender roles while others present active subject positions, where chastity, wisdom and manliness are presented as ideal virtues for girls.
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Ponce, Timothy Matthew. "The Hybrid Hero in Early Modern English Literature: A Synthesis of Classical and Contemplative Heroism." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2017. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1062882/.
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In his Book of the Courtier, Castiglione appeals to the Renaissance notion of self-fashioning, the idea that individuals could shape their identity rather than relying solely on the influence of external factors such as birth, social class, or fate. While other early modern authors explore the practice of self-fashioning—Niccolò Machiavelli, for example, surveys numerous princes identifying ways they have molded themselves—Castiglione emphasizes the necessity of modeling one's-self after a variety of sources, "[taking] various qualities now from one man and now from another." In this way, Castiglione advocates for a self-fashioning grounded in a discriminating kind of synthesis, the generation of a new ideal form through the selective combination of various source materials. While Castiglione focuses on the moves necessary for an individual to fashion himself through this act of discriminatory mimesis, his views can explain the ways authors of the period use source material in the process of textual production. As poets and playwrights fashioned their texts, they did so by consciously combining various source materials in order to create not individuals, as Castiglione suggests, but characters to represent new cultural ideals and values. Early moderns viewed the process of textual, as well as cultural production, as a kind of synthesis. Creation through textual fusion is particularly common in early modern accounts of the heroic, in which authors synthesize classical conceptions of the hero, which privilege the completion of martial feats, and Christian notions of the heroic, based on the contemplative nature of Christ. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how Thomas Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy (1585), Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene (1590), William Shakespeare in Titus Andronicus (1594), and John Milton in A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (1632) syncretized classical and Christian notions of the heroic ideal in order to comment upon and shape political, social, and literary discourses. By recognizing this fusion of classical heroism with contemplative heroism, we gain a more nuanced understanding of the reception of classical ideas within an increasingly secular society.
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Montanari, Anna Maria. "'A heart in Egypt' : Cleopatra on the Renaissance stage in Italy and England." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.709112.
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Leskinen, Saara. "Reliable knowledge of exotic marvels of nature in sixteenth-century French and English texts." Thesis, Warburg Institute, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.564418.
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Kershaw, Alison. "The poetic of the Cosmic Christ in Thomas Traherne's 'The Kingdom of God'." University of Western Australia. School of Social and Cultural Studies, 2006. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2006.0085.
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[Truncated abstract] In this thesis I examine the poetics of Thomas Traherne’s often over-looked Christology through a reading of The Kingdom of God. This work, probably written in the early 1670s, was not discovered until 1997, and not published until 2005. To date, no extended studies of the work have been published. It is my argument that Traherne develops an expansive and energetic poetic expressive of the theme of the ‘Cosmic Christ’ in which Christ is understood to be the source, the sustaining life, cohesive bond, and redemptive goal, of the universe, and his body to encompass all things. While the term ‘Cosmic Christ’ is largely of 20th century origin, its application to Traherne is defended on the grounds that it describes not so much a modern theology, as an ancient theology rediscovered in the context of an expanding cosmology. Cosmic Christology lies, according to Joseph Sittler,“tightly enfolded in the Church’s innermost heart and memory,” and its unfolding in Traherne’s Kingdom of God is accomplished through the knitting together of an essentially Patristic and Pauline Christology with the discoveries and speculations of seventeenth century science: from the infinity of the universe to the workings of atoms. … The thesis concludes with a distillation of Traherne’s Christic poetic The Word Incarnate. The terms put forward by Cosmic Christology are used to explicate Traherne’s intrepid poetic. In his most remarkable passages, Traherne employs language not only as a rhetorical tool at the service of theological reasoning, but to directly body forth his sense of Christ at the centre of world and self. He promises to “rend the Vail” and to reveal “the secrets of the most holy place.” Scorning more “Timorous Spirits,” he undertakes to communicate and “consider it all.”
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Auger, Peter. "British responses to Du Bartas' Semaines, 1584-1641." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:be0f89c2-c2e4-482d-ac8f-e867985ff72e.
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The reception of the Huguenot poet Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas' Semaines (1578, 1584 et seq.) is an important episode in early modern literary history for understanding relations between Scottish, English and French literature, interactions between contemporary reading and writing practices, and developments in divine poetry. This thesis surveys translations (Part I), allusions and quotations in prose (Part II) and verse imitations (Part III) from the period when English translations of the Semaines were being printed in order to identify historical trends in how readers absorbed and adapted the poems. Early translations show that the Semaines quickly acquired political and diplomatic affiliations, particularly at the Jacobean Scottish Court, which persisted in subsequent decades (Chapter 1). William Scott's treatise The Model of Poesy (c. 1599) and translations indicate how attractive the Semaines' combination of humanist learning and sacred rhetoric was, but the poems' potential appeal was only realized once Josuah Sylvester's Devine Weeks (1605 et seq.) finally made the complete work available in English (Chapter 2). Different communities of readers developed in early modern England and Scotland once this edition became available (Chapter 3), and we can observe how individuals marked, copied out, quoted and appropriated passages from their copies of the poems in ways dependent on textual and authorial circumstances (Chapter 4). The Semaines, both in French and in Sylvester's translation, were used as a stylistic model in late-Elizabethan playtexts and Zachary Boyd's Zions Flowers (Chapter 5), and inspired Jacobean poems that help us to assess Du Bartas' influence on early modern poetry (Chapter 6). The great variety of responses to the Semaines demonstrates new ways that intertextuality was a constituent feature of vernacular religious literature that was being read and written in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain.
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Bulman, Helen Lois. "Concepts of folly in English Renaissance literature : with particular reference to Shakespeare and Jonson." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/3475.
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Chapter 1 considers Barclay's 'Ship of Fools' in relation to other folly literature in English, particularly Lydgate's 'Order of Fools', Skelton's 'Bowge of Courte', and 'Cocke Lorrel's Bote'. Motifs, allegories and the woodcuts of the text are discussed and some are included in an Illustrations section. Chapter 2 discusses Erasmian folly looking back to the Neoplatonic writings of Nicholas of Cusa, and to the debt Erasmian exegeses owe to Origen. Erasmus' own philosophical and theological views are examined, particularly as they are found in his 'Enchiridion', and in the influence of Thomas à Kempis' 'Imitation of Christ'. A close textual analysis of the 'Moriae Encomium' is undertaken in this light. Chapter 3 defines the lateral boundaries of folly, where it blends into madness. In the context of Renaissance psychology sixteenth century medical works are analysed, including Boorde's 'Breviary of Healthe', Barrough's 'Method of Physicke' and Elyot's 'Castel of Helth'. Blurring between madness and sin, the negative judgments on the mad as demon-possessed, and the biblical models from which such judgments largely arose give alternative perspectives on madness and its relation to folly. Chapters 4-6 look at three Shakespearean comedies showing the development of a primarily Erasmian view of folly. This moves from overt references in 'Love's Labour's Lost' to natural folly, the folly of love and theological folly, through carnivalesque aspects of folly and madness in 'Twelfth Night', to an embedded notion of folly which influences and affects the darker comedy of 'Measure for Measure'. Chapter 7 considers satires of Hall, Marston and Guilpin, and looks at Jonson's Humour plays in this context. 'Volpone' and 'Epicoene', and 'The Alchemist' and 'Bartholomew Fair' are discussed in pairs, showing the softening of Jonson's attitude to folly, and his increasing representation of Erasmian folly reaching its full expression in 'Bartholomew Fair'.
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Tanner, Jane Hinkle. "Sharing the Light: Feminine Power in Tudor and Stuart Comedy." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1994. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278551/.
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Studies of the English Renaissance reveal a patriarchal structure that informed its politics and its literature; and the drama especially demonstrates a patriarchal response to what society perceived to be the problem of women's efforts to grow beyond the traditional medieval view of "good" women as chaste, silent, and obedient. Thirteen comedies, whose creation spans roughly the same time frame as the pamphlet wars of the so-called "woman controversy," from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, feature women who have no public power, but who find opportunities for varying degrees of power in the private or domestic setting.
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Higgins, Benjamin David Robert. "We have a constant will to publish : the publishers of Shakespeare's First Folio." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ab876515-5984-46a5-8bf0-8346165fb583.
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This thesis is a cultural history of the publishing businesses that financed Shakespeare's First Folio. The thesis argues that by 1623 each of the four businesses that formed the Folio syndicate had developed an influential reputation in the book trade, and that these reputations were crucial to the cultural positioning of the Folio on publication. Taking its lead from a dynamic new field of study that has been called 'cultural bibliography', the thesis investigates the histories and publishing strategies of the business owned by the stationers William and Isaac Jaggard, who are usually thought of as the leading members of the Folio project, as well as those owned by William Aspley, John Smethwick, and Edward Blount. Through detailed analysis of the publishing strategies of each stationer, the thesis puts forward new theories about how these men influenced the reception of the Folio by transferring onto it their brands, and the expectations of their readerships. The business of each Folio stationer was like a stage with an audience assembled around it, waiting for the next production to emerge. This thesis identifies the publishing activities that attracted the audiences of the Jaggards, Blount, Smethwick, and Aspley, and ultimately suggests the Folio was granted significant legitimacy through the collaboration of these men. After an introductory chapter that locates the thesis in its scholarly field, the first chapter tells the history of syndicated book publishing in England, and reviews what we know of the pre-production process of the First Folio, taking a particular interest in how the publishing syndicate formed. The following chapters then form a series of case studies of the four publishing businesses, reviewing the apprenticeships and careers of each stationer before suggesting how those careers created a context of meaning for the Folio. These case studies focus on the authoritative reference publishing of the Jaggards, the religious publishing of William Aspley, the geographical location of John Smethwick's publishing business beside the Inns of Court, and the cultural achievements of Edward Blount. In conclusion the thesis explores the idea that it was the unique partnership of these businesses that consecrated the Folio as an emblem of literary taste.
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Feldman, Linda Ellen. "The good Hausvater : patriarchal elements and the depiction of women in three works by Grimmelshausen." Thesis, McGill University, 1986. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=73974.
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Rumbold, Kate Louise. "All the men and women merely players : quoting Shakespeare in the mid-eighteenth-century novel." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.670136.
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Philo, John-Mark. "An ocean untouched and untried : translating Livy in the sixteenth century." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:72584fcd-42d6-42b6-9186-18b01b95af85.
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This is a study of the translation and reception of the Roman historian Livy in the sixteenth century in the British Isles. The thesis examines five major translations of Livy's history of Rome, the Ab Urbe Condita, into the English and Scottish vernaculars. The texts considered here span from the earliest extant translation of around 1533 to the first, full-scale translation published in 1600. By taking a broad view across the century, the thesis uncovers the multiple and versatile uses to which Livy was being put and maps out the major trends surrounding his reception. The first chapter examines Livy's initial reception into print in Europe, outlining the attempts of his earliest editors to impose a critical order onto his enormous work. The subsequent chapters consider the respective translations undertaken by John Bellenden, Anthony Cope, William Thomas, William Painter, and Philemon Holland. Each translation is treated as a case study and compared in detail with the Latin original, thereby revealing the changes Livy's history experienced through the process of translation. By locating these translations in the cultural and political contexts from which they emerged, this study reveals how Livy was exploited in some of the most pressing debates of the period, from arguments over women's apparel to questions of faith. The thesis also considers how these translations responded to the most recent developments in European scholarship on the Ab Urbe Condita and on classical history more generally. Livy's contribution to the development of Scottish historiography is also considered, both as a stylistic model and as a rich source of narrative material. Ultimately this thesis demonstrates that Livy played a fundamental though hitherto underexplored role in the development of vernacular literature and historiography in the British Isles.
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Koenig, Gregory R. (Gregory Robert). "The Relationship of Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe, 1588-1590: An Episode in the Development of English Prose Fiction." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1988. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500802/.
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Robert Greene began collaborating with Thomas Nashe as English prose was turning away from the style and subject matter of Lyly's Euphues (1578) and Sidney's Arcadia (1590). When Greene and Nashe came together in London, the two writers appear to have set the tone for the pamphleteers who would establish the realistic tradition that contributed to the development of the novel. Greene's Menaphon (1589) may be a satire representing his abandonment of courtly fiction. The influence of the Marprelate controversy is reflected in Greene's appeals to the pragmatic character of the emerging literate middle class. Greene's Vision (1592) appears to be Greene's affirmation of his critical philosophy at a point of stress in the authors' relationship.
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Hacksley, Timothy Christopher. "A critical edition of the poems of Henry Vaux (c. 1559-1587) in MS. Folger Bd with STC 22957." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2008. http://eprints.ru.ac.za/1704/.
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Tissot, Allan. "Une abbaye de renom à l'époque moderne : l'Abbaye aux Dames de Saintes (fin du XVe siècle - début XIXe siècle)." Phd thesis, Université Michel de Montaigne - Bordeaux III, 2012. http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00909678.
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Entre la fin du Moyen Âge et la Révolution, l'histoire de l'abbaye de Saintes, deuxième communauté féminine de France par ses revenus, grand seigneur de sa province, s'avère incontournable tant pour la connaissance des communautés religieuses que celle de la Saintonge. Avoir recours aux actes notariaux et à toutes les sources externes disponibles permet de pallier la destruction des archives du monastère à la Révolution pour en établir une histoire globale.Le pouvoir royal ne parvient à y imposer la nomination des abbesses qu'en 1544, laissant se mettre en place une longue dynastie de supérieures de lignages du Sud-ouest. Après l'échec, en 1511 et 1530, de deux réformes de la communauté imposées par les autorités civiles, suite à une longue préparation dès le XVIe siècle, Françoise II de Foix, réussit durablement à mettre fin à des abus remontant au Moyen Âge. Rapportés par un journal janséniste, les épisodes mystiques extrêmes vécus par les moniales (1777-1787) défraient la chronique. Révélant l'isolement spirituel d'une communauté contemplative à l'époque des Lumières, ils sont riches de sens pour la connaissance de l'existence de pratiques surannées et de l'évolution des mentalités. C'est l'occasion pour l'évêque et la noblesse locale d'un projet de remplacement de l'abbaye par un chapitre de chanoinesses. Si des filles de parlementaires puis de négociants entrèrent à l'abbaye respectivement aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, la vieille noblesse du Centre-ouest domina constamment l'effectif. La prise d'habit doit être située dans le cadre de stratégies familiales et servait à marquer une ascension sociale lignagère. Toute-puissance des abbesses, moniales vivant dans un relatif confort, la lecture tenant une grande place. Faisant preuve de ferveur, l'abbaye reçoit les courants spirituels successifs. A la Renaissance, elle protège des humanistes. Au XVIIe siècle, elle adhère de manière passionnée au jansénisme puis suit la voie du rigorisme avant de choisir une direction jésuite. Le monastère conserve son patrimoine à l'issue de nombreux procès. Il mène une politique de charité limitée eu égard à ses revenus mais s'avérant efficace. S'appuyant sur des receveurs ou des fermiers bien renseignées et ambitieux, il met en valeur efficacement ses biens, développant les brûleries à Oléron et faisant précocement assécher des marais en Poitou au prix de conflits. Les fermiers, souvent des proches des abbesses, connaissent une ascension qui les amènera à occuper les principales fonctions politiques après la Révolution, établissant ainsi une continuité inattendue entre Ancien et Nouveau Régime.
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Faull, Lionel Peter. "Robert Herrick's self-presentation in Hesperides and his Noble numbers." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002250.
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Literature has tended to be cut from the moorings of its authorial origins under the influential literary criticism of the past forty years. This thesis is an attempt to re-moor a work of literature to its authorial origins; particularly a work of literature in which the author-poet‘s self-referential markers are so overtly and persistently present as is the case in Hesperides and His Noble Numbers. Although there is a significant overlap between the real-life Herrick and the Hesperidean Herrick, the two figures cannot be regarded as identical. Instead, Herrick‘s deployment of specific genres and not of others, his chosen conventions for ordering a collection of miscellaneous poems, and his adoption of certain conventional poetic stances provide him with a semi-fictionalised way of declaring who he understands himself to be and how he wants himself to be understood. At the same time, the rich classical mythological associations of Herrick‘s title, Hesperides, declare his status as an inheritor of the classical literary tradition, whose hallmark during the Renaissance was the melding of classical, Christian and secular associations into new and complexly polyvalent literary works. For example, Herrick‘s appropriation of the classical mythological figure of Hercules provides him with both a narrative way and an allegorical way of reconciling the so-called secular, or profane poetry of Hesperides with the so-called religious, or divine poetry of Noble Numbers. In Noble Numbers, Herrick reveals new facets of his self-presentation to the reader, whilst also making explicit the theological congruencies between the two works. Herrick‘s religious self-presentation demonstrates his expansive scholarly interests, as well his instinct to include, rather than to exclude, the religious beliefs of others within his syncretistic sense-of-self. Finally, the placement of Noble Numbers after Hesperides is not a signal that Herrick privileged the former, or took his religion less seriously than he did his love for classical poetry, but rather that in Herrick‘s understanding of his world, man‘s fleeting glimpses of God in the secular sphere give way to a fuller comprehension of Him in the divine sphere.
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Collins, Margo. "Wayward Women, Virtuous Violence: Feminine Violence in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature by Women." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2000. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2474/.
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This dissertation examines the role of "acceptable" feminine violence in Restoration and eighteenth-century drama and fiction. Scenes such as Lady Davers's physical assault on Pamela in Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) have understandably troubled recent scholars of gender and literature. But critics, for the most part, have been more inclined to discuss women as victims of violence than as agents of violence. I argue that women in the Restoration and eighteenth century often used violence in order to maintain social boundaries, particularly sexual and economic ones, and that writers of the period drew upon this tradition of acceptable feminine violence in order to create the figure of the violent woman as a necessary agent of social control. One such figure is Violenta, the heroine of Delarivier Manley's novella The Wife's Resentment (1720), who murders and dismembers her bigamous husband. At her trial, Violenta is condemned to death "notwithstanding the Pity of the People" and "the Intercession of the Ladies," who believe that although the "unexampled Cruelty [Violenta] committed afterwards on the dead Body" was excessive, the murder itself is not inexcusable given her husband's bigamy. My research draws upon diverse archival materials, such as conduct manuals, criminal biographies, and legal records, in order to provide a contextual grounding for the interpretation of literary works by women. Moving between contemporary accounts of feminine violence and discussions of pertinent literary works by Eliza Haywood, Susanna Centlivre, Delarivier Manley, Aphra Behn, Mary Pix, and Jane Wiseman, the dissertation examines issues of interpersonal violence and communal violence committed by women.
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Johanson, Kristine. "A rhetoric of nostalgia on the English stage, 1587-1605." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/1001.
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In locating the idea of nostalgia in early modern English drama, ‘A Rhetoric of Nostalgia on the English Stage, 1587-1605’ recovers an influential and under-examined political discourse in Elizabethan drama. Recognizing how deeply Renaissance culture was invested in conceptualizing the past as past and in privileging the cultural practices and processes of memory, this thesis asserts nostalgia’s embeddedness within that culture and its consequently powerful rhetorical role on the English Renaissance stage. The introduction situates Elizabethan nostalgia alongside nostalgia’s postmodern conceptualizations. It identifies how my definition of early modern nostalgia both depends on and diverges from contemporary arguments about nostalgia, as it questions nostalgia’s perceived conservatism and asserts its radicalizing potential. I define a rhetoric of nostalgia with regard to classical and Renaissance ideas of rhetoric and locate it within a body of sixteenth-century political discourses. In the ensuing chapters, my analyses of Shakespeare’s drama formulate case studies reached, in each instance, through an exploration of the plays’ socio-political context. Chapter Two’s analysis of The First Part of the Contention contextualizes Shakespeare’s development of a rhetoric of nostalgia and investigates connections between rhetorical form and nostalgia. I demonstrate the cultural currency of the play’s nostalgic proverbial discourse through a discussion of Protestant writers interested in mocking the idea of a preferable Catholic past. Chapter Three argues that Richard II’s nostalgic discourse of lost hospitality functions as a political rhetoric evocative of the socio-economic problems of the mid-1590s and of the changing landscape of English tradition instigated by the Reformation. In Chapter Four, Julius Caesar and Ben Jonson’s Sejanus constitute a final analysis of the relationship between a rhetoric of nostalgia and politics by examining the rise of Tacitism. The plays’ nostalgic language stimulates an awareness to the myriad ways in which rhetoric questions politics in both dramas.
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Jayawickrama, Sarojini. "Carnival, carnivalisation and the subversion of order, with reference to Shakespeare's Henry IV and Henry VI." Thesis, [Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong], 1991. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B13115601.
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Abiven, Karine. "L’Anecdote ou la fabrique du petit fait vrai. Un genre de récit miniature, de Tallemant des Réaux à Voltaire (1650-1756)." Thesis, Paris 4, 2012. http://www.theses.fr/2012PA040134.
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L’objet de cette thèse est de montrer les spécificités de l’anecdote, comme micro-récit à prétention véridique, à partir du milieu du XVIIe siècle. Ce genre de récit a alors connu un essor notable dans les discours émanant des milieux mondains et savants ; au même moment, il devient une des modalités de l’écriture de l’Histoire dans les Mémoires de cour. En constituant un corpus d’échantillons issus de Mémoires, de Vies et d’Ana (recueils de pensées et d’anecdotes), nous dégageons un prototype de cette séquence textuelle. Malgré son air de famille avec l’exemplum, la facétie ou l’apophtegme, l’anecdote s’en distingue par la rétention à la véridicité. Cette propriété s’avère décisive dans une période où l’écriture historique et biographique connaît une reconfiguration rhétorique, à la faveur d’une attention accrue à l’individu et au détail authentique. Mais d’autres traits inhérents à l’anecdote entravent ce souci du vrai. Parce que son usage vise à susciter un affect (rire, surprise), elle est attirée par les formes de l’invention (fiction, plaisanterie, satire). Elle est par ailleurs faite pour circuler, dépourvue de véritable auteur : issue d’un discours oral, elle est transmise par l’écrit, puis souvent extraite en recueils et compilée. En vue d’établir une poétique et une rhétorique de ce genre, nous examinons ses caractéristiques langagières, ses modalités de circulation, et sa manière paradoxale de construire un discours vrai sur l’individu. Nous espérons ainsi contribuer à une histoire des formes, en montrant que l’anecdote prend le relais d’anciens genres de récits brefs à la fin de la première modernitéThe purpose of this work is to define the characteristics of the anecdote, understood as a short non fictitious narrative, from the middle of the 17th century. In that period the anecdote enjoyed a wide popularity amongst scholars and high society, while it became an historiographic form in Memoirs of the court. The analysis of a series of examples taken from Memoirs, Lives and Ana (i.e. collections of thoughts and anecdotes) enables us to outline a textual pattern. In spite of the likeness it bears to the exemplum, the jest and the apothegm, the anecdote differs by its claim to truthfulness. This particularity appears to be essential in the context of a profound transformation of historical and biographical rhetoric, which evolves towards a deeper interest in the individual and the authentic detail. However this aspiration to truthfulness is limited by other characteristics of the anecdote. Insofar as it aims to provoke an emotional reaction (such as laughter or surprise), the anecdote is also linked to more inventive forms (for instance fiction, joke, satire). Besides it is designed for circulation and doesn’t belong to a single author: its oral origin is altered by the process of writing, collecting and compilating. To describe a poetic and rhetoric of this genre, we intend to analyse its linguistic characteristics, the paths of its circulation, and its paradoxical way of producing a truthful statement on the individual. Our work takes part in the history of literary forms and aims to show that the anecdote has replaced ancient forms of brief narratives in early modern French literature and historiography
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Allsopp, Niall. "Turncoat poets of the English Revolution." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:72c956c3-ec8b-4b07-ad91-a05b0e72fd39.
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Edmund Waller, William Davenant, Andrew Marvell, and Abraham Cowley were royalist poets who changed sides following the English Revolution, attracted to Cromwellian military power, and the reforming aims of the Independents. This thesis contributes to existing scholarship by showing that the poets engaged strongly with theories of allegiance, self-consciously returning to first principles - the natures of sovereignty and obligation - to develop a concept of allegiance that was contingent and transferrable. Their crucial influence was Hobbes. Hobbes collapsed partisan perspectives into a general theory of sovereignty constituted by a de facto protective and coercive power; this was grounded on a psychological analysis of humans' restless appetite for power. The poets' approach to Hobbes was crucially mediated by Machiavelli, who provided a less abstract account of the relationship between individual agency and collective institutions, and whose concept of virtù offered a model for how restless ambition could be harnessed to political order. An introductory chapter sketches out the intellectual background to this body of theory and reflects on the methods used to show how the poets dramatized it in their works. Chapter two considers the disintegration of Waller's courtly poetry under the pressure of civil war, and his resulting turn to rationalist theory. Chapters three and four focus on the immediate aftermath of the revolution, considering the synthesis of Hobbes' and Machiavelli's theories of military power ventured by Davenant, and the influence of Davenant's ideas on Marvell's Machiavellianism. Chapter five focuses on Cowley and his more religiously-inflected account of Hobbesian psychology and political obligations. Chapter six asks how the poets responded to the Restoration of Charles II, and in particular charts their influence on the younger poet John Dryden. With their emphasis on materialist psychology, the turncoat poets abandoned allegory in favour of a mode of dramatization which observed the contingent circumstances in which allegiances could be generated, dissolved, and transferred. They possessed a political conservatism, but a conceptual radicalism which presented a serious challenge to Anglican and constitutionalist discourses of Stuart monarchy.
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Hone, Joseph. "The end of the line : literature and party politics at the accession of Queen Anne." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d847a561-130a-42f0-b78f-2463e9e65535.
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This thesis provides the first full-length account of the political and cultural significance of the accession of Queen Anne. It offers a critical reassessment of the politics of the royal image across a spectrum of texts, events, and artefacts - from panegyrics, newspapers, sermons, royal progresses, and processions to medals, coins, and playing cards. Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of party politics to the literature and culture of the early eighteenth century. This thesis nuances that assumption by arguing: (1) that the principal focus of partisan texts was competing representations of monarchy; and (2) that the explosion of partisanship at the start of the eighteenth century was triggered by unrest about the royal succession. Anne was the last protestant Stuart. She had no surviving children. This thesis explores how authors such as Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, and a great many lesser known and anonymous writers and propagandists conceptualized the end of the Stuart dynasty. Anne's accession forced writers to conjecture on the future succession. There were two rival claimants to the throne after Anne's death: the protestant Electress Sophia of Hanover and Anne's Catholic half-brother, James Francis Edward. Sophia's claim was statutory, James's hereditary. Factions emerged in support of both claimants. Almost all topical writing took a stance on the issue. Many sided with the government, supporting Hanover. Yet some writers favoured the illegal but hereditary claim of James Francis Edward; they had to express support in covert ways. This succession crisis triggered not only printed polemic, but also swathes of clandestine manuscript literature circulating in the Jacobite underground. The government took a hard line on Jacobite writers and printers; this thesis documents both their persecution and the techniques they used to evade the law. The thesis concludes by suggesting that this oppositional literary culture only disintegrated after the defeat of the Jacobite rebellion, and the consequent settlement of the Hanoverian succession, in late 1716. After this point, royal succession ceased to be a major source of political discontent.
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Di, Ponio Amanda Nina. "The Elizabethan Theatre of cruelty and its double." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/836.
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This thesis is an examination of the theoretical concepts of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) and their relation to the Elizabethan theatre. I propose that the dramas of the age of Shakespeare and the environment in which they were produced should be seen as an integral part of the Theatre of Cruelty and essential to its very understanding. The development of the English Renaissance public theatre was at the mercy of periods of outbreaks and abatements of plague, a powerful force that Artaud considers to be the double of the theatre. The claim for regeneration as an outcome of the plague, a phenomenon causing intense destruction, is very specific to Artaud. The cruel and violent images associated with the plague also feature in the theatre, as do its destructive and regenerative powers. The plague and its surrounding atmosphere contain both the grotesque and sublime elements of life Artaud wished to capture in his theatre. His theory of cruelty is part of a larger investigation into the connection between spectacle, violence, and sacrifice explored by Mikhail Bakhtin, René Girard, and Georges Bataille.