Capstone and Cornerstone: Creating a Virtual Research Centre in Honours and Graduate Courses in Renaissance Literature

Contributor(s): Elizabeth Popham

For the past three years, I have experimented with courses for senior undergraduate and first year graduate students that incorporate features of directed reading projects, making use of a Managed Learning System (MLS) site as a “virtual research centre” for collaborative investigation of...

Augmented Criticism, Extensible Archives, and the Progress of Renaissance Studies

Contributor(s): Michael Ullyot

In the three decades since the rise of New Historicism, Renaissance studies has progressed through extensions of scholars’ archival reach to new objects for new interpretations. The future will bring expansions on a larger scale, like those we now witness in English print archives....

Digital Humanities and Renaissance Studies in Canada: A Graduate Student’s Perspective

Contributor(s): Sarah M. Loose

This article focuses on digital humanities and Renaissance studies in Canada, highlighting established projects such as Iter and newer efforts such as Serai, and addressing recent interest in historical GIS. This survey of projects demonstrates how the work of Renaissance studies faculty and...

Word-entries and Big Data in Lexicons of Early Modern English

Contributor(s): Ian Lancashire

This brief thirty-year history of Lexicons of Early Modern English, an online database of glossaries and dictionaries of the period, begins in a fourteenth-floor Robarts Library lab of the Centre for Computing and the Humanities at the University of Toronto in 1986. It was first published freely...

Records of Early English Drama: A Retrospective

Contributor(s): Sally-Beth MacLean

The Records of Early English Drama, founded in 1976, remains a productive humanities research project, with thirty-three volumes in print and two open access research and educational websites to date. This retrospective essay reflects on the individuals who contributed to its founding and...

Barthélemy Aneau’s Alector ou le coq and the Paradox of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism

Contributor(s): Jenny Meyer

Barthélemy Aneau’s histoire fabuleuse, Alector ou le coq (1560) epitomizes a burgeoning sixteenth-century awareness of the globe and its scope. New possibilities for envisioning global space went hand in hand with the development of cosmopolitan sympathies among Renaissance humanists; namely,...

Building Opposition at the Early Tudor Tower of London: Thomas More’s Dialogue of Comfort

Contributor(s): Kristen Deiter

Medieval and early modern English monarchs constructed the Tower of London’s iconography to symbolize royal power, creating a self-promoting royal ideology of the Tower. However, the Tower’s cultural significance turned sharply when Thomas More wrote A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation...

Authority and Attribution in the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter

Contributor(s): Rebecca M. Rush

This essay addresses the vexed question of the genre of the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter by considering the framing of the psalms in the early editions printed in England and on the continent. It is undeniable that all of the producers of the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter were committed to the...

Eucharistic Love in The Merchant of Venice

Contributor(s): Ian McAdam

The article considers the ambiguous characterizations of The Merchant of Venice in light of Protestant and Catholic interpretations of the Eucharist, and raises implications for masculine gender construction in the opposition between Jewish and Christian cultural and theological perspectives. The...

Hamlet, Pirates, and Purgatory

Contributor(s): Tom Rutter

Hamlet’s abduction by pirates during his voyage to England is an episode that does not appear in the main narrative source of Shakespeare’s play, Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques. This essay surveys the various sources that have been proposed, including the Ur-Hamlet, Plutarch’s “Life of Julius...

Nicholas of Cusa’s Dialogue with Augustine: The Measure of the Soul’s Greatness in De Ludo Globi

Contributor(s): Sarah Powrie

Nicholas of Cusa’s De Ludo Globi (1463) explores the tensions between the soul’s terrestrial and transcendent aspirations; between its desire to engage materiality through creative self-expression and to remove itself from its historically-bound identity in mystical contemplation. Many of Cusa’s...

Symbiotic Anthropology and Politics in a Postmodern Age: Rethinking the Political Philosophy of Johannes Althusius (1557–1638)

Contributor(s): Nico Vorster

Postmodern societies are increasingly characterized by a hyperpluralism that coincides with an interdependence between social spheres and structures. Actions in one sphere of life often impinge on other spheres of life. This leads to a consistent and endemic conflict between the social dynamics...

What the Monk’s Habit Hides: Excavating the Silent Truths in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron 31

Contributor(s): Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

In Heptaméron 31, Marguerite de Navarre portrays a lascivious “Cordelier” or Franciscan who takes over a matron’s household during her husband’s absence, kills her servants, and disguises the woman as a monk before abducting her. Despite its surface resemblance to Rutebeuf’s “Frère Denise,”...

Broken Lutes and Passionate Bodies in A Woman Killed with Kindness

Contributor(s): Deanna Smid

Thomas Heywood’s 1607 play, A Woman Killed with Kindness, ends with the protagonist, Frankford, discovering the lute of Anne, the wife he has just banished for adultery. Grieved by the sight of the instrument that he conflates with his marriage and with Anne herself, Frankford exiles the lute...

“Nature’s Bastards”: Grafted Generation in Early Modern England

Contributor(s): Claire Duncan

This paper examines the shared rhetoric between human and horticultural generation in early modern England, particularly focusing on grafting. Early modern English gardening manuals imagine grafting as a method of controlling generation in the natural world, and early modern English obstetrical...

Introduction

Contributor(s): Colette H. Winn

La passion au miroir: les dizains spéculaires de Délie

Contributor(s): Nancy Frelick

Cet article se donne pour but d’examiner l’expression et la représentation des passions dans les dizains spéculaires de Délie, object de plus haulte vertu de Maurice Scève à la lumière de plusieurs traditions (ovidienne, platonicienne, pétrarquiste, ficinienne, etc.). Il s’agira donc...

Gabrielle de Coignard’s Sonnets spirituels: Writing Passion within and against the Petrarchan Tradition

Contributor(s): Deborah Lesko Baker

This article will focus on the ways in which Gabrielle de Coignard’s Sonnets spirituels, cultivated in purposefully sought domestic isolation, reveals conflictual aspirations nourished by the pursuit of an untainted devotional path that nevertheless cannot escape the assimilation of the earthly...

“C’est un amour ou Cupidon nouveau”: Spiritual Passion and the Profane Persona in Anne de Marquets’s Les Divines Poesies de Marc Antoine Flaminius (1568–1569)

Contributor(s): Annick Macaskill

While best known for her 480 Sonets spirituels, published seventeen years after her death in 1605, the Dominican nun Anne de Marquets also contributed a remarkable collection of personal spiritual poetry during her lifetime in Les Divines Poesies de Marc Antoine Flaminius (Paris, chez N....

Éros médical. Le périple anatomique de René Bretonnayau (1583)

Contributor(s): Dominique Brancher

À la Renaissance, seule l’utilité biologique reconnue aux jeux de Vénus paraît conférer le droit de les pratiquer et d’en parler dans les traités médicaux en langue vulgaire. Mais le plaisir du texte, à l’instar du plaisir sexuel, peut se délier de l’utilité et conduire à savourer ces...