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

The English Enchiridion Militis Christiani in the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries

Contributor(s): Douglas H. Parker

Following earlier articles in Renaissance and Reformation and Erasmus in English, this paper examines the fate of Erasmus's Enchiridion Militis Christiani in three late editions published in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Again in 1686, 1752, and 1816, Erasmus's work was...

Observations on Milton’s Accents

Contributor(s): John K. Hale

Milton’s diacritics in six languages, though mostly typical of his time, allow some inferences about his language attainments and scholarship. For Latin verse, he uses accents to disambiguate rhythm or meaning. For Greek scholarship, he is punctilious. Italian authors are culture to him, French...

Le dialogue de l'auteur et du lecteur dans La Sepmaine de Du Bartas

Contributor(s): François Roudaut

Dans cet article, il s’agit avant tout d’attirer l’attention sur les mécanismes dialogiques qui animent tout le projet de Du Bartas dans La Sepmaine. Le narrateur de ce récit de la Création est mu par un profond désir de convaincre, de faire connaître, d’amener le lecteur à une expérience...

“The Obedience due to Princes”: Absolutism in Pseudo-Martyr

Contributor(s): Phebe Jensen

This paper attempts to tease out the contemporary political resonances found in John Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr. While it is true that Pseudo-Martyr aligns itself with absolutism, it does so in a very complex and ambivalent manner, rejecting political patriarchalism and adopting a moderate sense of...