Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture – serie

'This is revelatory work that pries open challenging literary texts to reveal human vulnerability as a central thematic and political element. Kuzner will change our thinking about the early modern subject.'Barbara Correll, Cornell University'Sensitive to ambient changes in social life, Kuzner's heroes of vulnerability, adrift in an unguarded existence where immune defenses have been turned off, hatch scripts for "worlds elsewhere," alternative modernities founded on pleasure, enjoyment, and the forms of openness they incite and sustain.'Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and LifeStudies of the republican legacy have proliferated in recent years, always to argue for a polity that cultivates the virtues, protections and entitlements which foster the self's ability to simulate an invulnerable existence. James Kuzner's original new study of writing by Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell and Milton is the first to present a genealogy for the modern self in which its republican origins can be understood far more radically. In doing so, this study is also the first to draw radical and republican thought into sustained conversation, and to locate a republic for which vulnerability is, unexpectedly, as much what community has to offer as it is what community guards against. At a time when the drive to safeguard citizens has gathered enough momentum to justify almost any state action, Open Subjects questions whether vulnerability is the evil we so often believe it to be.

A new reading of madness in Don Quixote based on archival accounts of insanity.From the records of the Spanish Inquisition, Dale Shuger presents a social corpus of early modern madness that differs radically from the 'literary' madness previously studied. Drawing on over 100 accounts of insanity defences, many of which contain statements from a wide social spectrum - housekeepers, nieces, doctors, and barbers - as well as the testimonies of the alleged madmen and women themselves, Shuger argues that Cervantes' exploration of madness as experience is intimately linked to the questions about ethics, reason, will and selfhood that unreason presented for early modern Spaniards.In adapting, challenging and transforming these discourses, Don Quixote investigates spaces of interiority, confronts the limitations of knowledge - of the self and the world - and reflects on the social strategies for diagnosing and dealing with those we cannot understand. Shuger discovers an intimate connection between Cervantes's integration of this discourse of madness and his part in forging the new genre of the European novel.Key Features• Challenges the Foucauldian narrative of repression and the Bakhtinian narrative of liberation• Uses a historicist approach to show how Don Quixote engages, transforms and transcends the historical• Proposes a new reading of the development of the novel that comes from the unreasonable Baroque subject as opposed to the rational Enlightenment subject

A new reading of madness in Don Quixote based on archival accounts of insanity.From the records of the Spanish Inquisition, Dale Shuger presents a social corpus of early modern madness that differs radically from the ''literary'' madness previously studied. Drawing on over 100 accounts of insanity defences, many of which contain statements from a wide social spectrum - housekeepers, nieces, doctors, and barbers - as well as the testimonies of the alleged madmen and women themselves, Shuger argues that Cervantes'' exploration of madness as experience is intimately linked to the questions about ethics, reason, will and selfhood that unreason presented for early modern Spaniards.In adapting, challenging and transforming these discourses, Don Quixote investigates spaces of interiority, confronts the limitations of knowledge - of the self and the world - and reflects on the social strategies for diagnosing and dealing with those we cannot understand. Shuger discovers an intimate connection between Cervantes''s integration of this discourse of madness and his part in forging the new genre of the European novel.Key Features• Challenges the Foucauldian narrative of repression and the Bakhtinian narrative of liberation• Uses a historicist approach to show how Don Quixote engages, transforms and transcends the historical• Proposes a new reading of the development of the novel that comes from the unreasonable Baroque subject as opposed to the rational Enlightenment subject

A compelling cultural reinterpretation of humanist discourses of boyhood The English epyllion, the highly erotic mythological verse that swept the London literary scene in the 1590s, is as much about rhetoric as about sex. So argues William Weaver in this fascinating study of Renaissance education and poetry. Rhetoric, moreover, is erotic. Far being merely formal, rhetoric is the key to deciphering the cultural meanings of an enigmatic genre. Weaver attends to one of the epyllion's defining dramas: boys in transition to adulthood. Whereas recent studies of the epyllion have posited sexuality as the primary, even exclusive, means of representing beautiful boys, Weaver discovers that Renaissance male sexuality itself is an effect of a disciplinary drama of pedagogical transition from boyhood to adolescence, grammar to rhetoric. This drama of differentiation, lucidly expounded by Weaver, is at the heart of the erotic epyllia of Shakespeare, Marlowe and their imitators.Key Features*Focuses on six poems written between 1592 and 1594, looking to the most inventive period of the English epyllion *Documents previously unknown sources of Marlowe's Hero and Leander and Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis*Makes the first cultural critique of the Renaissance progymnasmata, the popular rhetorical exercises*Shows the vital connections between English poetry and continental rhetoric*Productively complements histories of sexuality, queer theory and feminist criticism

A compelling cultural reinterpretation of humanist discourses of boyhood The English epyllion, the highly erotic mythological verse that swept the London literary scene in the 1590s, is as much about rhetoric as about sex. So argues William Weaver in this fascinating study of Renaissance education and poetry. Rhetoric, moreover, is erotic. Far being merely formal, rhetoric is the key to deciphering the cultural meanings of an enigmatic genre. Weaver attends to one of the epyllion''s defining dramas: boys in transition to adulthood. Whereas recent studies of the epyllion have posited sexuality as the primary, even exclusive, means of representing beautiful boys, Weaver discovers that Renaissance male sexuality itself is an effect of a disciplinary drama of pedagogical transition from boyhood to adolescence, grammar to rhetoric. This drama of differentiation, lucidly expounded by Weaver, is at the heart of the erotic epyllia of Shakespeare, Marlowe and their imitators.Key Features*Focuses on six poems written between 1592 and 1594, looking to the most inventive period of the English epyllion *Documents previously unknown sources of Marlowe''s Hero and Leander and Shakespeare''s Venus and Adonis*Makes the first cultural critique of the Renaissance progymnasmata, the popular rhetorical exercises*Shows the vital connections between English poetry and continental rhetoric*Productively complements histories of sexuality, queer theory and feminist criticism

How the classical and medieval conceptions of Fortune shifted to the modern notion of chance.Is chance nothing more than a projection of human desire on to the world?In this fascinating new study, John Lyons argues that the idea of chance assumed new vigour in the late Renaissance, when converging philosophical and literary currents demystified the powerful concept of Fortune, sensitizing writers to the relationship between human desire and the world’s apparent randomness.Up to now, the story of chance has been written by historians of mathematical thought and has focused on calculation, probability and gambling. Lyons, by contrast, highlights the ethical, aesthetic and even erotic aspects of chance. He offers detailed readings of the works of major French authors - Montaigne, Corneille, Lafayette, Scudéry, Pascal, Racine, Bossuet, and La Bruyère.Key Features• Renews our understanding of romance, tragedy, comedy & religious polemic in the light of the changed conceptions of the fortuitous • Shows how the emergence of suspense and subjective interest are linked to the shift from Fortune to randomness• Proposes a new view on how religious writers, faced with the sceptical challenge of late Renaissance thought, integrated chance into the post-Reformation mainstream of Catholic teachingsKeywords: Chance, Fortune, Randomness, Probability, French Early Modern Literature, post-Reformation, Genre, Romance, Prose, Montaigne, Corneille, Molière, Lafayette, Scudéry, Pascal, Racine, Bossuet, La Bruyère

Penelope Anderson's original study changes our understanding both of the masculine Renaissance friendship tradition and of the private forms of women's friendship of the eighteenth century and after. It uncovers the latent threat of betrayal lurking within politicized classical and humanist friendship, showing its surprising resilience as a model for political obligation undone and remade. Incorporating authors from Cicero to Abraham Cowley and Margaret Cavendish to Mary Astell, the book focuses on two extraordinary women writers, the royalist Katherine Philips and the republican Lucy Hutchinson. And it explores the ways in which they appropriate the friendship tradition in order to address problems of conflicting allegiances in the English Civil Wars and Restoration. As Penelope Anderson suggests, their writings on friendship provide a new account of women's relation to public life, organized through textual exchange rather than bodily reproduction.Key Features:Studies early modern women's friendship in depth for the first time Offers an account of the classical and humanist discourse of friendship by revealing the centrality of betrayal to the Aristotelian, Ciceronian, and Epicurean traditionsIntervenes within recent feminist and queer theory by showing textual friendship to be an alternative account of women's relation to public lifeArticulates the links between women's literary writing and political theories such as contract theory, natural sociability, and patriarchalismContributes to the growing interest in early modern women's writing, drawing on extensive archival materials and texts

The first full-length study of how the concept of the "girl" was constructed in sixteenth and seventeenth century literature and drama.The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters argues for a paradigm shift in our current conceptions of the early modern sex-gender system, challenging the widespread assumption that the category of the "girl" played little or no role in the construction of gender in early modern English culture. Girl characters appeared in a variety of texts, from female infants in Shakespeare’s late romances to little children in Tudor interludes to adult "roaring girls" in city comedies. Drawing from a variety of print and manuscript sources, including early modern drama, dictionaries, midwifery manuals, and women’s autobiographies, this book argues that girlhood in Shakespeare’s England was both a time of life and a form of gender transgression.Key Features:* Charts the emergence of the word "girl" into early modern English and its evolution from a gender-neutral term applied to both male and female children to one used only for female individuals* Challenges the misconception that girls were largely absent from English Renaissance literature* Offers a literary history of female child characters in Renaissance drama* Features an examination of how women writers described their own girlhoods

'This is revelatory work that pries open challenging literary texts to reveal human vulnerability as a central thematic and political element. Kuzner will change our thinking about the early modern subject.'Barbara Correll, Cornell University'Sensitive to ambient changes in social life, Kuzner's heroes of vulnerability, adrift in an unguarded existence where immune defenses have been turned off, hatch scripts for "worlds elsewhere," alternative modernities founded on pleasure, enjoyment, and the forms of openness they incite and sustain.'Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and LifeStudies of the republican legacy have proliferated in recent years, always to argue for a polity that cultivates the virtues, protections and entitlements which foster the self's ability to simulate an invulnerable existence. James Kuzner's original new study of writing by Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell and Milton is the first to present a genealogy for the modern self in which its republican origins can be understood far more radically. In doing so, this study is also the first to draw radical and republican thought into sustained conversation, and to locate a republic for which vulnerability is, unexpectedly, as much what community has to offer as it is what community guards against. At a time when the drive to safeguard citizens has gathered enough momentum to justify almost any state action, Open Subjects questions whether vulnerability is the evil we so often believe it to be.

Examines the painted body of the actor on the early modern stageInventions of the Skin illuminates a history of the stage technology of paint that extends backward to the 1460s York cycle and forward to the 1630s. Organized as a series of studies, the four chapters of this book examine goldface and divinity in York's Corpus Christi play, with special attention to the pageant representing The Transfiguration of Christ; bloodiness in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, specifically blood's unexpected role as a device for disguise in plays such as Look About You (anon.) and Shakespeare's Coriolanus; racial masquerade within seventeenth-century court performances and popular plays, from Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness to William Berkeley's The Lost Lady; and finally whiteface, death, and "stoniness" in Thomas Middleton's The Second Maiden’s Tragedy and Shakespeare's The Winter’s Tale. Recovering a crucial grammar of theatrical representation, this book argues that the onstage embodiment of characters—not just the words written for them to speak—forms an important and overlooked aspect of stage representation.

Examines the impact of the royal politics of amnesia on tragedy and national historiography in France, 1560-1630This study argues that the political and legislative process of forgetting internal differences, undertaken in France after the civil wars of the sixteenth century, leads to subtle yet fundamental shifts in the broader conception of the relationship between readers or spectators on the one hand, and the matter of history, on the other. These shifts, occasioned by the desire for communal reconciliation and generally associated with an increasingly modern sensibility, will nonetheless prove useful to the ideologies of cultural and political absolutism.By juxtaposing representations of the French civil war past as they appear (and frequently overlap) in historiography and tragedy from 1550-1630, Andrea Frisch tracks changes in the ways in which history and tragedy sought to 'move' readers throughout the period of the wars and in their wake. The book shows that a shift from a politically (and martially) active reading of the past to a primarily affective one follows the imperative, so clear and urgent at the turn of the seventeenth century, to put an end to violent conflict. The emotions that neoclassical tragedy and absolutist historiography sought to elicit were intended above all to be shared, and thus a medium via which political and religious differences could be downplayed or forgotten. The book aims to illuminate some of the ways in which the experience of the wars of religion, as registered in tragedy and historiography, contributed to a restructuring of the ever-vital relationship between emotion and politics, and thereby to historicize the very concept of 'esmouvoir'.Key FeaturesConfronts historiography and tragedy in the era of the French Wars of ReligionAddresses the themes of amnesty, pardon, memory, and forgetting in the context of civil warProvides both close readings and a broad argument about the impact of the monarchical politics of reconciliation on conceptions of how history and tragedy should 'move' their audiencesTreats multiple French authors including André de Nesmond; Henri-Lancelot Voisin de la Popelinière; Pierre Matthieu; Jean de la Taille; Robert GarnierAndrea Frisch is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland. KeywordsFrench Wars of Religion; Saint Bartholomew's Day massacres; Edict of Nantes; tragedy; historiography; emotion; reconciliation; Henri IV (Henri de Navarre); Robert Garnier; Pierre MatthieuSubject: Literature

Early modern dramatists entertained audiences by staging experiential and experimental knowledge, especially consequential forms of coming to or arriving at knowledge. The contributors to this collection explore the ways in which the culture’s fascination with forms of knowledge creation – scientific, experiential, religious – shaped early modern drama. Experiential and Experimental Knowledge on the Early Modern English Stage addresses these issues from phenomenological, political and ethical perspectives and in terms of histories of science, cognitive and affective studies, and discourses of the body. Across the volume, the contributors articulate how the early modern stage served as a site where knowledge was not merely performed but produced and interrogated, imagined and transformed.

This volume posits that clothing in the early modern period was conceived of as the prime interface between the human body and its multiple environments. Both a second skin and a human-made artefact, dress can indeed be considered as the most immediate site for the elaboration of any sort of ecology, in its etymological sense of a ‘discourse’ of the oikos, or of the place we inhabit. This collection shows how early modern English literature, and drama in particular, interrogates the crucial relationship between humans and the world that surrounds them in its staging of dress. It also argues that the theatrical productions of the time derived much of their creative energy from this process, by which climates and their effects were translated and embodied through dress on the mediating stage. Its various chapters study early modern clothes in their ecosystems and challenge the inside/outside, natural/artificial and body/environment binaries.

This volume posits that clothing in the early modern period was conceived of as the prime interface between the human body and its multiple environments. Both a second skin and a human-made artefact, dress can indeed be considered as the most immediate site for the elaboration of any sort of ecology, in its etymological sense of a 'discourse' of the oikos, or of the place we inhabit. This collection shows how early modern English literature, and drama in particular, interrogates the crucial relationship between humans and the world that surrounds them in its staging of dress. It also argues that the theatrical productions of the time derived much of their creative energy from this process, by which climates and their effects were translated and embodied through dress on the mediating stage. Its various chapters study early modern clothes in their ecosystems and challenge the inside/outside, natural/artificial and body/environment binaries.

In this original study, Niall Oddy explores representations of Europe in sixteenth and early-seventeenth century French writing to argue that Europe as an idea evolved in productive dialogue with emerging national consciousness, not as an alternative to the nation state. Analysing literary texts alongside works of travel, geography, history and politics, this book demonstrates how ideas of Europe were shaped by real and imagined journeys across the globe and adapted across a range of discursive contexts for varied purposes. Using the notion of 'imagined geography' to present a conceptual map of what Europe looked like from different points across the globe, each chapter examines representations of the continent through the lens of one location (Brazil, Constantinople, Malta, Geneva). In a period of great intellectual transformation, as new interactions with cultures overseas reshaped how the wider world was understood, this focus on nationhood uncovers how, as the idea of 'Europe' developed, it emerged as a contested notion and an issue of debate.

In this original study, Niall Oddy explores representations of Europe in sixteenth and early-seventeenth century French writing to argue that Europe as an idea evolved in productive dialogue with emerging national consciousness, not as an alternative to the nation state. Analysing literary texts alongside works of travel, geography, history and politics, this book demonstrates how ideas of Europe were shaped by real and imagined journeys across the globe and adapted across a range of discursive contexts for varied purposes. Using the notion of 'imagined geography' to present a conceptual map of what Europe looked like from different points across the globe, each chapter examines representations of the continent through the lens of one location (Brazil, Constantinople, Malta, Geneva). In a period of great intellectual transformation, as new interactions with cultures overseas reshaped how the wider world was understood, this focus on nationhood uncovers how, as the idea of 'Europe' developed, it emerged as a contested notion and an issue of debate.

Doubtful Writing offers a major reassessment of philosophical uncertainty in one of the early modern period's foremost doubters. It argues that Montaigne's engagement, his endless 'commerce' with two dogmatists, Seneca and Plutarch, produced a radical new mode of doubtful writing; one with which Montaigne could conduct and communicate a double, unresolved, and contradictory mode of thinking.Seneca and Plutarch have long been recognised as Montaigne's preferred authors: he himself, on numerous occasions, holds them up as authors of the books he could not be without and their influence on his informal, fragmentary style is widely acknowledged. But these authors have, until now, escaped significant attention from the perspective of philosophical uncertainty. Doubtful Writing argues that it was with these authors dogmatists who nevertheless practised a 'doubtful and unresolved way of writing' that Montaigne developed his own maniere de dire ('way of saying'). Reading Montaigne through this lens offers a valuable new perspective on doubt in the Essais and in the early modern period more broadly, understanding doubt not only as a philosophical system or set of arguments but as a practice of thinking in and with writing.

Doubtful Writing offers a major reassessment of philosophical uncertainty in one of the early modern period's foremost doubters. It argues that Montaigne's engagement, his endless 'commerce' with two dogmatists, Seneca and Plutarch, produced a radical new mode of doubtful writing; one with which Montaigne could conduct and communicate a double, unresolved, and contradictory mode of thinking.Seneca and Plutarch have long been recognised as Montaigne's preferred authors: he himself, on numerous occasions, holds them up as authors of the books he could not be without and their influence on his informal, fragmentary style is widely acknowledged. But these authors have, until now, escaped significant attention from the perspective of philosophical uncertainty. Doubtful Writing argues that it was with these authors dogmatists who nevertheless practised a 'doubtful and unresolved way of writing' that Montaigne developed his own maniere de dire ('way of saying'). Reading Montaigne through this lens offers a valuable new perspective on doubt in the Essais and in the early modern period more broadly, understanding doubt not only as a philosophical system or set of arguments but as a practice of thinking in and with writing.

The period following the Reformation saw a rapid increase in the production of funeral monuments in England. Women, Texts and Tombs after the Reformation argues that gender was a leading factor in this flourishing reformed culture of death. In a religious climate that placed increasing value on the laity, women quickly took on the role of exemplary Christians in popular texts including sermons and conduct books. This space awarded to godly womanhood in Protestant religious practice provided a rich foundation for women’s engagement with reform. By considering how women wrote and built tombs, this work explores one way that gender informed the development of doctrine beyond political and theological tracts in commemorative volumes and drama, local communities and the parish church. Taking gender as a primary lens to view early modern mortuary culture reveals the untapped potential of commemorative building in the study of religious change.

While the baroque remains a foundational concept for other European literary and aesthetic traditions, scholars have largely elided the word from British literary history. Instead of baroque, these critics prefer to use terms like metaphysical, Stuart, and Laudian terms that emphasise England's primacy rather than its relations with the world. In response to these Anglocentric approaches, The English Baroque in Early Modern Literature shows how the baroque offers a better way to appreciate the importance of transnational and multilingual relations to the development of English letters.

While the baroque remains a foundational concept for other European literary and aesthetic traditions, scholars have largely elided the word from British literary history. Instead of baroque, these critics prefer to use terms like metaphysical, Stuart, and Laudian—terms that emphasise England’s primacy rather than its relations with the world. In response to these Anglocentric approaches, The English Baroque in Early Modern Literature shows how the baroque offers a better way to appreciate the importance of transnational and multilingual relations to the development of English letters.

Despite the plethora of early modern life-writing (diaries, (auto)biographies, memoirs), it remains difficult to reconstruct a picture of everyday female experience - as women chose to tell it - from this extant corpus. The vast majority of examples are penned by men; only a handful of texts by early modern women are immediately recognisable as autobiographies and diaries, such as Anne Clifford's Diaries (1616-19) and Anne Halkett's 'True accountt' (c. 1677/8). Moreover, the few examples we do have are not representative of women's life stories in general, as there are no known diaries or autobiographies by women below the level of the middle ranks. Early Modern Women's Life-Writing and English Law shows how legal records form an alternative type of life-writing, especially for women, and that thousands of lives are yet to be uncovered from the legal archives.

Despite the plethora of early modern life-writing (diaries, (auto)biographies, memoirs), it remains difficult to reconstruct a picture of everyday female experience - as women chose to tell it - from this extant corpus. The vast majority of examples are penned by men; only a handful of texts by early modern women are immediately recognisable as autobiographies and diaries, such as Anne Clifford’s Diaries (1616-19) and Anne Halkett’s ‘True accountt’ (c. 1677/8). Moreover, the few examples we do have are not representative of women’s life stories in general, as there are no known diaries or autobiographies by women below the level of the middle ranks. Early Modern Women’s Life-Writing and English Law shows how legal records form an alternative type of life-writing, especially for women, and that thousands of lives are yet to be uncovered from the legal archives.

The sea for Shakespeare is both a location and a metaphor; and either way it affords him an extraordinary freedom of invention, releasing whatever in the plays is vast, fluid and unceasing. It is also a defining element of his historical context: he lived and worked a few yards from one of the great maritime rivers of the world, and for much of his career England was engaged in a naval war with Spain. So the Shakespearean sea invites two distinct perspectives poetics and history, the conventional literary symbol and the contingent economic struggle. This book embraces both of them together, tracing the intricate connections between them, and showing how they meet, above all, on the stage. It was in the Elizabethan playhouse that commercial enterprise, physical confinement and boundless rhetoric interacted to generate an imaginative energy whose waves can still be fel.

The sea for Shakespeare is both a location and a metaphor; and either way it affords him an extraordinary freedom of invention, releasing whatever in the plays is vast, fluid and unceasing. It is also a defining element of his historical context: he lived and worked a few yards from one of the great maritime rivers of the world, and for much of his career England was engaged in a naval war with Spain. So the Shakespearean sea invites two distinct perspectives – poetics and history, the conventional literary symbol and the contingent economic struggle. This book embraces both of them together, tracing the intricate connections between them, and showing how they meet, above all, on the stage. It was in the Elizabethan playhouse that commercial enterprise, physical confinement and boundless rhetoric interacted to generate an imaginative energy whose waves can still be fel.