Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Brepols Publication Series
http://www.brepols.net/publishers/
Performing the Middle Ages from 'Beowulf' to 'Othello'
Andrew James Johnston, 2008
(Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies 15)
Performing the Middle Ages from ‘Beowulf ’ to
‘Othello’ traces the dialogic nature of the
relationship between the Middle Ages and
modernity. Arguing that modern beliefs in the
alterity of the Middle Ages stem from the
Middle Ages’ own processes of self-representation,
Johnston explores varieties of nostalgia
through a wide selection of texts. This volume
spans an extensive chronological period with a
view to demonstrating how our notions of the
medieval have been crucially informed by the
past itself. The study is focused on works
which stage that popular literary archetype —
the nostalgic figure of the aristocratic warrior
— and argues that it is this image that provides
a structural model for so many modern perspectives
on the Middle Ages. And yet, in the
Middle Ages this model was being deconstructed
as it was also being generated. By moving
from the self-consciously archaic heroism of
Beowulf to the scathing comment on chivalric
narrative presented in Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’, Johnston’s analysis offers an intriguing insight
into the way medieval texts engage in a continual aesthetic and ideological critique of their
own cultural moment. Using Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight and the Alliterative Morte Arthure as
examples of an incisive critique of the cult of
subjectivity and of a highly self-conscious desire
for tradition, Johnston extends his analysis
to the early seventeenth century, and explores
the ways in which Shakespeare’s Othello brilliantly
deconstructs the very concept of
‘Renaissance Man’. With its interest in issues of
subjectivity, textual performance, and the ideological
self-awareness of medieval culture,
Performing the Middle Ages provides a scholarly
and compelling investigation into the Middle
Ages’ ability both to understand itself and to
shape (post)modern notions of the medieval.
Practices of Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Megan Cassidy-Welch and Peter Sherlock (eds), 2008
(Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies 11)
This collection argues that gender must be considered as both an approach to history, and as a reflection of the deep workings of the lived, historical past. The sixteen original essays explore social and cultural expressions of gender in Europe from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. They examine theories and practices of gender in domestic, religious, and political contexts, including the Reformation, the convent, the workplace, witchcraft, the household, literacy, the arts, intellectual spheres, and cultures of violence and memory. The volume exposes the myriad ways in which gender was actually experienced, together with the strategies used by individual men and women to negotiate resilient patriarchal structures. Overall, the collection opens up new synergies for thinking about gender as a category of historical analysis and as a set of experiences central to late medieval and early modern Europe.
The Theatre of the Body: Staging Death and Embodying Life in Early Modern London
Kate Cregan, 2008
(Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies 10)
This study is a threefold investigation of understandings of embodiment – as displayed in the playhouses, courthouses, and anatomy theatres of London between 1540 and 1696. These dates mark the waxing and waning of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons’ domination of the practice of dissection in London. In 1540 Henry VIII gave them his approval and encouragement but by 1696 Edward Ravenscroft’s The Anatomist: Or the Sham Doctor staged their loss of power. This loss of power, the book contends, is symptomatic of a major shift in the concept of embodiment. The book explains the changing understanding of the human body throughout this period by analysis of the interplay between the texts used in and the material practices of three specific public sites: the public playhouses, the Sessions House, and the Anatomy Theatre of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons of London. Using an approach which combines the socially textured understandings of fields of practice found in Bourdieu with the interpretations of progression across time found in Elias and Foucault, The Theatre of the Body demonstrates how the three fields of drama, law, and medicine are intimately inter-connected in that process.
In presenting this analysis, the author argues that the quality of embodiment begins to shift during this period from the mid-sixteenth century and throughout the course of the seventeenth century. In this shift one can observe how the earlier, ‘traditional’ interpretation of embodiment is intensified and resolidified into the beginnings of the medicalized ‘modern’ body.
Giulia Gonzaga and the Religious Controversies of Sixteenth-Century Italy
Camilla Russell, 2006
(Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies 8)
Giulia Gonzaga (1513–66) was renowned throughout sixteenth-century Italy as a model of pious widowhood and of female beauty. Yet over three decades she sustained a risky friendship and personal correspondence with Pietro Carnesecchi (1508–67), the one-time papal favourite who became infamous for his heretical religious beliefs and associations. Indeed, Carnesecchi was condemned to death by the Tribunal of the Roman Inquisition, implicated in part by evidence of his correspondence with donna Giulia.
This major new study traces the evolution of donna Giulia’s unorthodox religious ideas and networks. Considered alongside inquisitorial trial records and contemporary religious treatises, donna Giulia’s written dialogue with Carnesecchi and others, vividly reflects the religious tensions of mid-sixteenth-century Italy.
Giulia Gonzaga and the Religious Controversies of Sixteenth-Century Italy details donna Giulia’s important contribution to the exchange and currency of reformist ideas amongst an intellectual elite of women and men, clergy and laity that extended through the Italian peninsula and beyond.
The Ghost of Boccaccio: Writings on Famous Women in Renaissance Italy
Stephen Kolsky, 2005
(Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies 7)
This major study looks at the heritage and literary transformation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris in late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth-century Italy. The monograph is the first full-length study of the new elaborations of women’s role and potential that were being developed in the north Italian courts in this period. The Ghost of Boccaccio presents a sustained textual analysis of a selection of male-authored texts. It treats these texts as highly specific events in the development of the querelle des femmes, or ‘the woman question’, providing an important and often neglected Italian context for this question. By analysing these texts together in one volume, this study places them firmly on the scholarly map. They represent an extraordinary variety of voices seeking to be heard about the status of women in Renaissance Italy, ranging from the most conservative to the truly radical. They provide vital perspectives on constructions of women in the Renaissance. A number of these texts also represent a crucial moment in the development of intellectual strategies to challenge the dominant gender ideologies of Renaissance and early modern Europe. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of Renaissance history and culture, Italian studies, neo-Latin studies, and gender studies.
Rituals, Images, and Words: Varieties of Cultural Expression in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Edited by F. W. Kent and Charles Zika, 2005
(Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies 3)
Contents
Nicholas Eckstein, The Religious Confraternities of High Renaissance Florence: Crisis or Continuity?
Nicholas Scott Baker, The Death of a Heretic, Florence 1389
Sarah Ferber, Cultivating Charisma: Elisabeth de Ranfaing and the Médailliste Cult in Seventeenth-Century Lorraine
Robert W. Gaston, Affective Devotion and the Early Dominicans: The Case of Fra Angelico
Cynthia Troup, Art History and the Resistant Presence of a Saint: The chiesa vecchia Frescoes at Rome's Tor de' Specchi
Patricia Simons, Separating the Men from the Boys: Masculinities in Early Quattrocento Florence and Donatello's Saint George
Peter Sherlock, Henry VII's 'miraculum orbis': Royal Commemoration at Westminster Abbey 1500-1700
Jaynie Anderson, Gardens of Love in Venetian Painting of the Quattrocento
Charles Zika, The Witch of Endor: Transformations of a Biblical Necromancer in Early Modern Europe
Lorenzo Polizzotto, Iustus ut palma florebit: Pier Soderini and Florentine Justice
Dale Kent, Personal Literary Anthologies in Renaissance Florence: Re-Presenting Current Events to Conform to Christian, Classical and Civic Ideals
Peter Howard, The Fear of Schism
Stephen Kolsky, The Literary Career of Lucrezia Marinella (1571-1653): The Constraints of Gender and the Writing Woman
W. G. Craven, Style and Substance in the Early Writings of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
Carolyn James, An Insatiable Appetite for News: Isabella d'Este and a Bolognese Correspondent
F. W. Kent, Unheard Voices from the Medici Family Archive in the Time of Lorenzo de' Medici
Louis Green, The Younger Castracani
Series Editors
Fred Kiefer, University of Arizona
Ian Moulton, Arizona State University
Stephanie Trigg, University of Melbourne
Charles Zika, University of Melbourne
Jointly directed by scholars from the University of Melbourne, the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and published by Brepols, this series covers the historical period in Western and Central Europe from ca. 1300 to ca. 1650. It concentrates on topics of broad cultural, religious, intellectual and literary history. The editors are particularly interested in studies that are distinguished by
* their broad chronological range;
* their spanning of time periods such as late medieval, Renaissance,
Reformation, early modern;
* their straddling of national borders and historiographies;
* their cross-disciplinary approach.
Queries about possible submissions may be sent to any of the series editors:
Ian Moulton: Ian.Moulton@asu.edu
Fred Kiefer: fkiefer@u.arizona.edu
Charles Zika: c.zika@unimelb.edu.au
Stephanie Trigg: sjtrigg@unimelb.edu.au
Editorial Board
Jaynie Anderson, University of Melbourne
John Cashmere, La Trobe University
Megan Cassidy-Welch, University of Melbourne
Albrecht Classen, University of Arizona
Bob Gaston, La Trobe University
John Griffiths, University of Melbourne
Anthony Gully, Arizona State University
Bill Kent, Monash University
Anne Scott, Northern Arizona University
Juliann Vitullo, Arizona State University
Emil Volek, Arizona State University
Retha Warnicke, Arizona State University