Mythologizing the Middle Class: 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and the Urban Bourgeoisie

Contributor(s): Valerie L. Jephson, Bruce Thomas Boehrer

This paper examines the strategies through which John Ford's play validates an image of the rising urban middle class as constitutionally confused and therefore destructive to the social fabric of seventeenth-century London. The portrayal of the middle class as struggling to inhabit signifiers of...

Hamlet et la Préface de Marie de Gournay

Contributor(s): Richard Hillman

Vers 1600, Shakespeare devait se mettre à remanier une pièce démodée sur le sujet de Hamlet, en puisant, d'après un grand nombre de spécialistes, dans les Essais de Montaigne. Pourtant la Préface de Marie de Gournay à l'édition de 1595 des Essais n'a jamais été mise en rapport avec l'oeuvre...

The Tridentine Ruling on the Vulgate and Ecclesiastical Censorship in the 1580s

Contributor(s): William McCuaig

Four works by the historian Carlo Sigonio (1523-1584) were made the target of censures by ecclesiastical authorities in the early 1580s. His works were never put on the index of prohibited books, but the censures reveal the mentality and concerns of the censors more clearly than any other...

Colliding Discourses: John Donne's "Obsequies to the Lord Harington" and the New Historicism

Contributor(s): Ann Hurley

This essay seeks to develop new critical procedures to better serve works like John Donne's "Obsequies to the Lord Harington." It argues that Donne's "Obsequies" is more profitably approached by readings which de-emphasize the valorization of personality and presence which have so dominated Donne...

Editorial

Contributor(s): Mark Vessey, Nancy Frelick

Writing the Tragic Self: Richard II's Sad Stories

Contributor(s): Paul Budra

When Shakespeare has Richard II call for the telling of "sad stories" he is not merely alluding to a tradition of medieval de casibus tragedy, but rather engaging with a well-known vision of historical teleology, popularized in Shakespeare's time by narrative historical tragedies. Shakespeare's...

Hamlet hears Marlowe; Shakespeare reads Virgil

Contributor(s): James Black

The excerpt from Aeneas' tale to Dido which Hamlet elicits from the Player is based in part on Marlowe's Dido Queen of Carthage. As a melodramatic description of the culmination of the Trojan war with the slaughter of Priam, the Player's speech appears to be specified by Hamlet because it recalls...

Montaigne's Vanity: Reading Digressions on Travel

Contributor(s): Virginia M. Green

The theme of travel, prominent in the essay "De la Vanité" (III, 9), and the subject of many of its "digressions," serves, in a sense, to disguise the more central and unifying theme of vanity. The question of vanity lies behind all of Montaigne's so-called "digressions" on travel, which are not...

Making Religion of Wonder: The Divine Attribution in Renaissance Ethnography and Romance

Contributor(s): William M. Hamlin

Drawing on the concept of "autoethnography" as defined by Mary Louise Pratt, this paper argues that representations of cross-cultural encounter in Renaissance travel narratives often bear striking resemblances to moments of encounter and reunion in Spenserean and Shakespearean romance. Focusing...

Distributed Donne: A Response to the Problem of His Titles

Contributor(s): Janis Lull

Most of the titles traditionally associated with Donne's poems probably did not originate with the biographical Donne. When modern editors use these titles, they expand Donne's authorial "self" to include the literary judgments of the poet's first readers as well as their own literary judgments....

The Sexual Identities of Moll Cutpurse in Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl and in London

Contributor(s): Susan E. Krantz

Moll Cutpurse dramatically demonstrates the insufficiency of gender categories both in The Roaring Girl and in her life. The fictional Moll’s sex/gender ambiguity is explored through three distinct sexual identities (prostitute, hermaphrodite, bisexual ideal) and is further complicated through...

Du “conseil des muetz” au “taire parlier”: Le langage du geste chez Rabelais et Montaigne

Contributor(s): Guylaine Fontaine

Cet article traite de la réflexion renaissante sur le langage gestuel telle que cette réflexion s'articule dans les textes de Rabelais et Montaigne. Ces oeuvres apparaissent en effet comme de précieuses balises de la période 1540-1580 où se serait manifesté, selon des études récentes, un tournant...

Celebrations held in Siena during the Government of the Nine

Contributor(s): Gordon Moran, Michael Mallory

In fourteenth-century Siena the government of the Nine functioned very much within alliances with the leading Guelf powers. This article studies celebrations of Guelf victories in Siena, as depicted in the famous castle cycle of the Palazzo Pubblico and described in the writings of Benvoglienti.

Figuring Justice: Imperial Ideology and the Discourse of Colonialism in Book V of The Faerie Queene and A View of the Present State of Ireland

Contributor(s): Walter S. H. Lim

Edmund Spenser is a vocal spokesman for the colonization of Ireland. In A View of the Present State of Ireland, he provides one of the most sustained imperialist articulations in Elizabethan England. And in Book V of The Faerie Queene, he promulgates a vision of justice that is necessary for...

Announcements / Annonces

Contributor(s): Author Not Applicable

Calvinist Miracles and the Concept of the Miraculous in Sixteenth-Century Huguenot Thought

Contributor(s): Moshe Sluhovsky

This paper is a study of French Calvinism as a language. It was a language which employed the signifiers and the signs of the traditional Christian culture. There was persistent usages of key Catholic words in the theology of early Huguenot believers, regardless of their level of education or...

The Development of Hispanitas in Spanish Sixteenth-Century Versions of the Fall of Numancia

Contributor(s): Rachel Schmidt

The story of the Celtiberian town of Numancia and its fall in 133 B.C., as seen in the writings of Livy, Plutarch and others, was a well established topos in sixteenth-century Spain. The accounts of the bravery of the Numantians in defending their besieged city formed the basis for hispanitas,...

Silvestro da Prierio and the Pomponazzi Affair

Contributor(s): Michael Tavuzzi

The Italian Dominican friar Silvestro Mazzolini da Prierio (1456-1527), known as Prierias, served as Master of the Sacred Palace during the pontificates of Leo X, Adrian VI and Clement VII. He is chiefly remembered for his involvement in the cases of Luther and Reuchlin and an epistolary exchange...

“To Warn Proud Cities”: a Topical Reference in Milton’s “Airy Knights” Simile (Paradise Lost II.531-8)

Contributor(s): John Leonard

In Paradise Lost II.531-8 modern editors often see an allusion to Josephus’ account of armies appearing in the sky shortly before the fall of Jerusalem. In fact, reports of spectral soldiers and aerial battles were quite common in seventeenth-century English pamphlets, such as Mirabilis Annus and...

Announcements / Annonces

Contributor(s): Author Not Applicable