{"title":"Local Waters and Notions of Home in Early Modern Recipe Manuscripts","authors":"Hillary M. Nunn","doi":"10.1353/jem.2020.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.2020.0002","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:English domestic recipe manuscripts make clear that early modern households required a great deal of water, and these texts offer surprising glimpses into the significance placed on the sources of that water. Recipe manuscripts allow us not only to see how households used water, but also how—and why—compilers envisioned it as a key ingredient. The qualities of different waters mattered, and references to specific types of water help us determine not just where a recipe originates, but the varying environments a compiler inhabited at different points in her life. These manuscripts underscore the changes that movement from one household to another brought for early modern women, as well as the influence that natural and commercial spaces surrounding a compiler's home exercised over the medical recipes in her collection. This sensitivity to physical mobility is felt in recipe compilations even as they reflect traces of the Hippocratic notion that an individual's place of birth determines where he or she can experience optimal health. Using the College of Physicians of Philadelphia manuscript 10a214 as a case study, this essay shows how water in recipe manuscripts reveals the function of both physical location and social network in early modern domestic practice.","PeriodicalId":42614,"journal":{"name":"Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"59 - 82"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/jem.2020.0002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48515483","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The English Renaissance and the Far East: Cross-Cultural Encounters by Adele Lee (review)","authors":"M. Lau","doi":"10.1353/jem.2020.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.2020.0005","url":null,"abstract":"“body natural” with her “body politic,” she orders the Conde’s execution, only to learn—too late—of his innocence. Thus, both Coello and Diamante expose their fictional queens to “human passions and, at the same time having them resign themselves to their political responsibilities . . . both Isabels bear their bodies politic as a heavy burden that has been imposed upon them” (358). Taken as a whole, this volume will be welcomed by literature scholars and historians already familiar with Elizabethan studies and/or AngloSpanish relations in the early modern era, and many of the chapters will be cited in their own right by specialists. Nevertheless, its real legacy will probably be the further research and scholastic collaboration that it hopes to inspire, since virtually all its contributors conclude that the image of Elizabeth I in early modern Spain still proves, for now, somewhat difficult to make out.","PeriodicalId":42614,"journal":{"name":"Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"119 - 122"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/jem.2020.0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43705185","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Ojos que no ven\": Gendered Blindness in María de Zayas's Desengaños amorosos","authors":"Kelsey J. Ihinger","doi":"10.1353/jem.2020.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.2020.0001","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Early modern medical discourse regarding gender and reproduction defined women as naturally inferior to men. Those who accepted Aristotle's theorization of male and female differentiation regarded the female body as an imperfect or monstrous copy of its male counterpart. This essay examines two novellas from María de Zayas's Desengaños amorosos (1647), in which Zayas confronts such patriarchal ideologies. Zayas's work has commonly been understood to challenge patriarchal norms that reinforced male dominance. This essay, however, offers a new interpretation of Zayas's resistance to misogyny by exploring her fifth and ninth desengaños through the critical discourse of disability studies. It argues that the literal blindness of Zayas's female protagonists in these stories combines with the metaphorical blindness of the men who determine women's roles within society in order to dismantle the logic upon which the social constraints placed on women were based. In these novellas, Zayas redefines the category of \"monstrous\" women as she rejects the idea of natural female impairment.","PeriodicalId":42614,"journal":{"name":"Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"29 - 58"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/jem.2020.0001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45724228","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Racing Gender to the Edge of the World: Decoding the Transmasculine Amazon Cannibal in Early Modern Travel Writing","authors":"S. Wagner","doi":"10.1353/jem.2019.0041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.2019.0041","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The pervasive figure of the Amazon cannibal woman in early modern travel writing is depicted as animalistic, hyper-sexualized, and predominately a racialized \"other.\" Using early modern travel literature like Sir Walter Raleigh's The Discoverie of Guiana and the illustrations of Theodor De Bry, this essay argues that the Amazonian cannibal woman is a transmasculine figure, serving as a platform for white European thinkers to reshape their ideologies around race and gender. Through trans and critical race theory, this essay reimagines early modern representations of indigenous women as part of the work of recovering transhistoricity. By taking up intersectional feminist calls to attend to gender as an inherently racialized project, this essay considers travel writings and visual materials as a space in which white European ideals of gender and sexuality can be constructed through the vilification of (and desire for) people of color's bodies and behaviors.","PeriodicalId":42614,"journal":{"name":"Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies","volume":"19 1","pages":"137 - 155"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/jem.2019.0041","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48225945","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Transgender Shakespeare Performance: A Holistic Dramaturgy","authors":"Sawyer K. Kemp","doi":"10.1353/jem.2019.0047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.2019.0047","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Shakespeare's plays have long been viewed as a space where the boundaries of binary gendered sex, sexuality, and desire become murky. However, the contemporary social justice call for trans/gender-inclusivity has been ambivalently integrated into standing conventions of the Shakespeare theater. This essay close reads reviews and advertising materials to argue that contemporary Shakespeare performance is space in which a public makes meaning of gender nonconformism; as such, it is vital for performance institutions to become self-aware of their role in potential education or misrecognition. Recent productions at the African-American Shakespeare Company, the Pittsburgh Public Theater, and the California Shakespeare Theater offer examples of complex and holistic strategies for engaging transgender themes through staging, casting, and outreach programming.","PeriodicalId":42614,"journal":{"name":"Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies","volume":"19 1","pages":"265 - 283"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/jem.2019.0047","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43066847","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Toward a Trans Philology","authors":"Joseph Gamble","doi":"10.1353/jem.2019.0036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.2019.0036","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay charts the circuitous trajectory of the words \"transfeminate\" and \"transexion\" as they travel from their textual origin, Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), through various lexicons, both early modern and modern. Thomas Blount's Glossographia (1656) defines \"transfeminate\" as \"to turn from woman to man, or from one sex to another,\" a definition that subsequent lexicographers repeat until 1883, when Charles Annandale's revision of John Ogilvie's The Imperial Dictionary of the English Language inverts Blount's definition and defines the word as \"to change from a male to a female.\" The essay argues that the inversion of the definition of \"transfeminate\" is symptomatic of an epistemological shift in the sex/gender system in the late nineteenth century, one that rendered the notion of trans-femininity possible. Juxtaposing this lexical shift with the contemporaneous sexological work of Havelock Ellis, the general editor of the original Mermaid Series of non-Shakespearean early modern English drama, the essay argues that recent \"new\" and \"queer\" philologies are key tools for understanding the history of transgender. The essay thus offers some conceptual and methodological propositions for a movement toward a specifically trans philological practice—one that can, in particular, confront the intertwining of the philological history of \"trans\" with both early modern and modern genres of racism.","PeriodicalId":42614,"journal":{"name":"Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies","volume":"19 1","pages":"26 - 44"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/jem.2019.0036","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48500956","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Perhaps John Lyly was a trans woman?\": An Interview about performing Galatea's Queer, Transgender Stories","authors":"E. Frankland, Andy Kesson","doi":"10.1353/jem.2019.0048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.2019.0048","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This is a discussion between the UK theater maker Emma Frankland and early modern scholar Andy Kesson of their upcoming production of John Lyly's Galatea, which they have been exploring with a cast of queer, transgender, Deaf, and racially diverse performers from a range of performance backgrounds often excluded from classical theater. This dialogue takes the form of a reflective two-way interview as they move toward a full production of the play, and encompasses their focus on inclusivity, the play's queer potential, and the importance of getting practitioners and scholars into creative dialogue in which both sides are equal parts of the conversation. As such, this feature in the special issue is not a traditional scholarly article, but an attempt to represent in print a live conversation about a work-in-progress production.","PeriodicalId":42614,"journal":{"name":"Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies","volume":"19 1","pages":"284 - 298"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/jem.2019.0048","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43463155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Shakespeare's Transplant Poetics: Vegetable Blazons and the Seasons of Pyramus's Face","authors":"Vin Nardizzi","doi":"10.1353/jem.2019.0042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.2019.0042","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay places into conversation early modern trans studies and critical plant studies. It theorizes a transplant poetics that accompanies and expands upon the tranimal in trans studies. It identifies as vegetable blazons early modern poems that employ plant figures to depict the human form. It further explores those traditions in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and in the portraits of Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Both examples of transplant poetics cross human flesh with vegetable figure; they unsettle typical coordinates of gender presentation; and they put a halt to the cyclicality of the seasons by arranging the produce of all four seasons simultaneously. Transplant poetics thus expresses these faces of trans embodiment as still life.","PeriodicalId":42614,"journal":{"name":"Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies","volume":"19 1","pages":"156 - 177"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/jem.2019.0042","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46409745","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Trans Materiality: Crooke's Mikrokosmographia, Sexual Dimorphism, and the Embodiment of Identity","authors":"Jessica R. Pfeffer","doi":"10.1353/jem.2019.0045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.2019.0045","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article argues that Helkiah Crooke's 1615 Mikrokosmographia provides early modern trans theory, and trans theory more broadly, with a unique way of understanding the sexed nature of material bodies. While much of trans theory has returned to the material body in order to interrogate its relationship to a constructed or felt sense of self, these theories tend to see the material as subordinate to more malleable immaterial forces. They view the materials of the body as containing possibilities for a new politics, but only possibilities that emerge when bare material is used in relation to gender expression or self-conception.Crooke, on the other hand, takes bodily materiality as his primary focus and, by not centering agency, provides a more radical theorization of bodily materiality for trans studies. Ultimately, this article sees Crooke's discussions of sexual distinction, which look to the unruliness of materiality itself, as allowing trans studies to move into a place where \"trans\" itself becomes indistinguishable from \"cis,\" where male and female are revealed not to be performed identities buttressed by embodiment but instead positions untethered from any distinct political or embodied position.","PeriodicalId":42614,"journal":{"name":"Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies","volume":"19 1","pages":"227 - 241"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/jem.2019.0045","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43012479","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Abortive Hedgehogs: Prodigies and Trans Animality in The Duchess of Malfi","authors":"C. Gordon","doi":"10.1353/jem.2019.0044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.2019.0044","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article offers a new interpretation of John Webster's tragedy The Duchess of Malfi (ca. 1613). It treats The Duchess of Malfi's stable of creatures, which includes grave-robbing werewolves, hermaphroditic hyenas, and vermiculated corpses, as an early experiment in trans-animality that emerges in the text's fixation on prodigies. According to religio-medical tracts of the Renaissance, prodigies were portentous signs of divine anger that included sweating statues, speaking animals, human-animal hybrids, and monstrous births, particularly hermaphrodites. As rigid distinctions between gender roles become unmoored, the category of the human also frays, a process culminating in Ferdinand's descent into hysterical lycanthropy. With an eye to the creaturely transformations threaded through the text, this article considers how the play's hermaphroditic imagination erodes the boundaries between human and nonhuman forms of life to explore what Mel Chen calls \"the transness of animals.\"","PeriodicalId":42614,"journal":{"name":"Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies","volume":"19 1","pages":"206 - 226"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/jem.2019.0044","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41342413","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}