{"title":"Investigating English Sanctity in the Middle English St. Erkenwald","authors":"Dominique Battles","doi":"10.1353/sip.2023.a910768","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2023.a910768","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay extends the analysis of an earlier article, published in the previous issue of Studies in Philology , which argues for an Anglo-Saxon cultural identity for the nameless man in the tomb in the Middle English St. Erkenwald . The present essay examines the fictional scenario of the poem, involving the exhumation and investigation of an early English saintly body during renovations at St. Paul's Cathedral in London, within the context of the historical investigations of Anglo-Saxon saints' cults in the decades following the Conquest of 1066, proceedings that track the nationwide cathedral-building program inaugurated by the Normans. The poem's emotional staging of a skeptical high-ranking prelate questioning the body, flanked by an anxious community, and the conspicuous absence of written documentation concerning the body capture the spirit and methodology of the historical investigations conducted by Norman prelates on early English saints pending reinterment in new ecclesiastic buildings. The poem emulates features of post-Conquest hagiography of early English saints in its long historical proem, while challenging the vision of history it proclaims. The source text of the Trajan legend and its importance to pre-Conquest society underscore and reassert early English formulations of salvation, supplying the distinctly early English mode of baptism of tears. The poem subtly undermines the investigatory process, defending early English identity in post-Conquest society.","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135737243","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Essay concerning the Origine of Sciences and the Mode of Scriblerian Satire","authors":"Pat Rogers","doi":"10.1353/sip.2023.a910772","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2023.a910772","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: A short satire, An Essay of the Learned Martinus Scriblerus concerning the Origine of Sciences , concerns the alleged role of an anthropoid race of pygmies in the evolution of human knowledge. It was first published in the Miscellanies of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift in 1732, and has been attributed to both of these authors. The aim of this article is to provide the first full account of the Essay in its context. This draws on information relating to the literary, biographical, and bibliographical circumstances in which members of the Scriblerian group produced the work. Among issues considered are relevant controversies engaged in by fellows of the Royal Society, notably Dr. John Woodward; the debt of the Essay to a pioneering work of physical anthropology, Edward Tyson's Orang-Outang (1699), first explored by Richard Nash; and a survey of other sources, as revealed by citations and hidden allusions. The concluding argument seeks to establish the close filiation of the Essay with other Scriblerian satires and to suggest that it serves as a template for the subgenre that these came to embody. A case is made for the key role in composition taken along with Pope by Dr. John Arbuthnot, FRS, a polymath with special interests in comparative anatomy.","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135737421","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Prosodic Change in Thomas More’s Epitaphs for Henry Abyngdon (1518): From Medieval to Renaissance","authors":"D. Carlson","doi":"10.1353/sip.2023.a903802","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2023.a903802","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Analysis of a corpus of Anglo-Latin verse epitaphs published in the period 1380–1520 establishes that a shift from medieval rhymed dactylic verse, including Leonines and more complex polyrhymed varieties, to Renaissance-humanist classical-style unrhymed verse occurred in the period, irreversible by about 1460. Near the same date, Thomas More’s humanist contemporaries began to practice types of non-dactylic Greco-Roman lyric meters that More himself did not much essay; meanwhile, his two epitaphs for the practical musician Henry Abyngdon, the one humanist, the other a parody of the ornate rhymed style, depend for their meaning on this prosodic shift from medieval to Renaissance.","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43645087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Thomas Watson, Thomas Kyd, and Embedded Poetry","authors":"B. Vickers","doi":"10.1353/sip.2023.a903806","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2023.a903806","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this essay, I explore the relationship between Thomas Watson and Thomas Kyd in terms of the practice of “embedded poetry,” when a poet reuses borrowings from other poets. Both Kyd and Watson deployed such borrowings skillfully and consciously for a wide range of dramatic and poetic effects. After defining and illustrating Watson’s rhetoric of “Inventions,” I argue for Watson’s authorship of The Teares of Fancie, a 1593 sonnet sequence, and explore the many textual parallels between the poetry of Teares and Kyd’s plays. A close examination of the interplay between these two poets and of Kyd’s judicious echoes of Watson’s sonnets suggests that Kyd’s rhetorical and poetical engagement with Watson’s writing inspired and enriched Kyd’s own dramatic production.","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48490677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Who (What) Lies in the Tomb in the Middle English St. Erkenwald?","authors":"D. Battles","doi":"10.1353/sip.2023.a903801","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2023.a903801","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article makes the case for an Anglo-Saxon cultural identity for the nameless man in the tomb in the Middle English St. Erkenwald on textual, hagiographic, historical, art historical, and literary grounds. The poem’s historical proem, akin to similar prologues in Middle English lives of pre-Conquest saints, evokes the negative stereotype of the primitive Saxon heathen popular in the post-Conquest era, which the remainder of the poem dispels. The incorrupt corpse and garments, in the guise of a king, signal two abiding markers of Anglo-Saxon sanctity that distinguish it from post-Conquest hagiography, while the body’s social role as a judge announces a primary arena of continuing authority of early English culture. The material culture of the tomb and robes bespeaks Anglo-Saxon design and the social and economic networks that facilitated these artforms. When revived, the body expresses an Anglo-Saxon worldview in terms of time, historical orientation, poetic sensibility, codes of reciprocity, spirituality, and life after death. The poem portrays a golden age of early English society and proposes its acceptance in the contemporary world of the poem.","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41785285","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sir Thomas More and the Tragedy of Citizenship","authors":"To-Ken Lee","doi":"10.1353/sip.2023.a903804","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2023.a903804","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay explores the historical and generic basis for a tragic reading of The Book of Sir Thomas More. The early modern period’s dominant forms of tragedy (such as revenge tragedy and historical tragedy) typically focus on the dynastic-imperial struggles of aristocratic powers against the backdrop of centralization and state-building. Sir Thomas More inverts this representational hierarchy by leaving the monarch un-represented, relegating to the background the well-known factional conflicts that undergirded the Henrician Reformation. Instead, the play dramatizes the history of Tudor consolidation from the perspective of London’s citizenry, who are made to grapple with the meaning of their own freedom in an age of mass migration. The result, I suggest, is a charter myth not of the nation-state but of London and its civic institutions: a tragic meditation on the place of the city and its citizens in the world.","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46734109","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Translating the Law in the Inns of Court Play Gismond of Salerne (1566–68)","authors":"Alice Equestri","doi":"10.1353/sip.2023.a903803","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2023.a903803","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Gismond of Salerne (1566–68) was a dramatic adaptation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Tancredi and Ghismunda novella produced at the Inner Temple. Positing that the legal background of the authors was reflected in their reception of Boccaccio, this essay investigates the representation and use of various significations of the law in the play. It argues that the Inns authors were receptive to the presence of the Natural Law concept in the background of Boccaccio’s novella and that they intensified its role in the play, emphasizing its conflict with man-made law. The latter is also investigated in its own right, showing its impact on a thematic, rhetorical, and dramaturgical level. Further, the Inns writers’ political interests as members of a community revolving around common law explain why the play idealizes and justifies specific legal notions and practices.","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45704016","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Richard Linche: The Fountain of Elizabethan Fiction","authors":"Katie Reid","doi":"10.1353/sip.2023.a903805","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2023.a903805","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay represents the first scholarly assessment of the complete works of the Elizabethan poet and translator Richard Linche (fl. 1596–1601). Linche was interested in classical mythology, sonnet writing, and prose translation. He was also concerned with the burning literary questions of the 1590s and early seventeenth century. This article analyzes Linche’s sonnet sequence Diella (1596) and his love poem The Love of Dom Diego and Gynevra (1596), highlighting Linche’s use of ancient mythology as an ideal vehicle for exploring personal passion in contemporary poetry. It then turns to Linche’s English translation of the Italian mythographer Vincenzo Cartari, The Fountaine of Ancient Fiction (1599), to illustrate how Linche deals with mythology as an inspiration for literature. Linche identifies myth as an appealing source for contemporary writing while displaying discomfort with some of its sexual content. Finally, this article discusses Linche’s An Historical Treatise of the Travels of Noah into Europe (1601), placing the work in the larger picture of his literary career and suggesting that it was a euhemeristic response to his earlier explorations of myth. In contrast to Linche’s earlier works, The Travels offers a de-personalized and desexualized approach to myth. By providing the first detailed critical assessment of Richard Linche’s oeuvre, this essay reveals an Elizabethan writer who was interested in what inspires fiction, particularly in the complicated moral issues surrounding the sensuality of classical mythology and the role of eroticism in contemporary poetry.","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48001386","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"John Donne and the Legacy of Early Modern Testamentary Verse","authors":"Douglas Clark","doi":"10.1353/sip.2023.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2023.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores John Donne's contribution to the relatively overlooked genre of early modern testamentary verse. I use Donne's work to show that poetic wills and testaments do not simply constitute poems that are structured as lengthy inventories of complaints and bequests. My study instead demonstrates that the formal features of his testamentary poems relate to and deviate from the egocentrically commemorative impulses of elegiac, epitaphic, and lyric verse. I argue that testamentary poems provide a unique textual site for self-display and self-commemoration because they function to communicate and fulfill the will of the (soon-to-be) dead. In sum, this article aims to advance our knowledge of the wider role that the composition of poetic legacies played in early modern English literary culture.","PeriodicalId":45500,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN PHILOLOGY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43387865","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}