Image de force, perception de faiblesse: La clémence d'Henri IV

Contributor(s): Michel De Waele

Parmi les nombreux éléments qui composent la légende d'Henri IV, la clémence qu'il manifesta envers ses ennemis occupe une place de choix. Sans elle, affirment de nombreuses personnes, le premier Bourbon n'aurait jamais pu s'asseoir sur le trône de France. Tous ne partageaient pas cependant cet...

Early English Protestantism and Renaissance Poetics: The Charge is Committing Fiction in the Matter of Rastell v. Frith

Contributor(s): Peter C. Herman

The debate between John Rastell and John Frith constitutes a previously unrecognized ancestor to Stephen Gosson's attack on poetry and Sir Philip Sidney's (problematic) defense of it. Although the nominal aim of Rastell's A Newe Boke of Purgatorye and Frith's A Disputation of Purgatory is...

Re-Reading Folly: Rabelais’s Praise of Triboullet

Contributor(s): Camilla J. Nilles

Rabelais's praise of Triboullet differs from earlier works on folly by using the fool's differing perspective to conduct its search for authentic meaning. The descriptions of the sage mondain and the divine fool initiate the process, establishing folly and wisdom as relative terms, whose meaning...

The Autobiography of Grace, Lady Mildmay

Contributor(s): Randall Martin

The following is an annotated transcription of Lady Grace Mildmay's autobiographical papers, written between 1617 and 1620. These "Memoirs" reveal the preoccupations and moral teachings of an English woman brought up in the reformed faith. They also contain a wealth of information on monetary...

Ad dotandum puellas virgines, pauperes et honestas: Social Needs and Confraternal Charity in Rome in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

Contributor(s): Anna Esposito

In the late fifteenth century, Roman confraternities, especially that of SS. Annunziata, provided dowries for poor but "honest" girls. This charitable work was in response to the growing needs of a relatively defenceless segment of a society that was undergoing rapid transformation. This study of...

The Reception of Erasmus’ Adages in Sixteenth-Century England

Contributor(s): Erika Rummel

The Adages of Erasmus, a collection of more than 4,000 classical proverbs, was a bestseller in its time. The book was valued both for its usefulness in Latin composition and its witty asides on contemporary society. The dissemination of the Adages in England is of special significance because the...

Didactisme et parcours discursife dans les Epistres d’Hélisenne de Crenne

Contributor(s): Jean-Philippe Beaulieu

Cet article traite d'un ouvrage moins connu d'Hélisenne de Crenne: les Epistres familieres et invectives publiées en 1539. Il est possible de suivre dans ce recueil épistolaire le cheminement d'Hélisenne de Crenne, de la conformité aux grands codes moraux et didactiques provenant de la tradition...

Religion and the Law in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair

Contributor(s): Jeanette Ferreira-Ross

In Bartholomew Fair, Jonson, speaking for the Establishment, debunks the presumptuous "singularity" of extreme Puritans, demonstrating the folly of "authority" which is rooted not in traditional structures of church and state but in excentricity and private fancies. Jonson's satirical method...

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...