COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES最新文献

{"title":"Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England by Urvashi Chakravarty (review)","authors":"Sarah Bischoff","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912684","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912684","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England by Urvashi Chakravarty Sarah Bischoff Urvashi Chakravarty, Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), ix + 295 pp. Fictions of Consent examines the contradiction between early modern England’s reliance on compulsory service and the claims that English air was “too pure for slaves to breath [sic] in” (John Lilburne’s Star Chamber Case of 1638, cited in Chakravarty, Fictions of Consent, 1). Urvashi Chakravarty highlights that this is [End Page 215] a matter of belief—not just of legislation. This belief made slavery in England (supposedly) an impossibility, despite the immense amount of historical and literary material that attests to compulsory labor and service on the island during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chakravarty examines this fissure, showing that the philosophical, legal difference between bound service and slavery is, per the title, supposed consent. Chakravarty thus argues that the primary operative fiction is that all persons on English soil willingly serve their betters all the way up to the monarch, who in turn willingly serves god. Such a structure legitimized the paradigm of the supposed impossibility of slavery on English soil—which legally and philosophically rendered enslaved people invisible—but still managed to enforce servitude through many avenues. One example she cites is the often brutal vagrancy and begging laws of the sixteenth century that punished and put to work the “masterless,” or those living outside socially acceptable systems of labor (often the houseless and/or beggars) (4). This coercion, however, is coincidental to the fiction and the mythos of English freedom, even as it is the fundamental contradiction that makes up the very matter of willing servitude. The ideological dependence upon this hairsplitting is that the idea of consent honed the fictions that underwrote and authorized compulsory servitude, even as it made slavery ostensibly impossible. This consent is a fiction in multiple senses of the word, Chakravarty argues: it is, as mentioned, an imagined reality that makes up the legal structures that forbid slavery on English soil, despite there being documented presences and an evident economic reliance on enslaved people; it is a rhetoric that turns compulsory labor into willing devotion and service; it becomes integral to the emergences of what will define the family, genealogy, and race. Of particular importance, also, is that these fictions reshape social reality as time continues, even as their artificiality stands out. These fictions can (and do) defend both the naturalization of racialized slavery and the naturalization of somatically marked race itself. These traced emergences make Chakravarty’s text a useful one for following questions of service and slavery across multiple centuries, from Engl","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Lanthorn in the Crypt: White Erotics in Romeo and Juliet","authors":"Sarah Bischoff","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912674","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912674","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Optimistic Shakespeareans have taken to going “a-queering” with his work, reading his poetry and plays for subversion of erotic expectations. This article looks at the racializing consequences of such reading, focusing particularly on the ways Romeo and Juliet has been read queerly not for the homoeroticism that inundates the play, but for the titular lovers’ death-fixated deviation from the genealogical imperative of heteronormative time. This article does not dispute this reading; it instead looks at the ways that such a reading dovetails with racializing fixtures of how the bodies of the lovers, labeled white, become idealized, and are mourned by both the story’s families and the audience. The eroticism laid out in Romeo and Juliet forms what Sharon Patricia Holland calls a “project of belonging”: the process of making personal and community identity through an assumed erotic connection, even if that eroticism takes on unexpected forms.","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture by Louise D’Arcens (review)","authors":"Hillary Cheramie","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912686","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912686","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture by Louise D’Arcens Hillary Cheramie Louise D’Arcens, World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 201 pp. Louise D’Arcens’s thorough investigation of medievalism beyond European chronology provides a timely model for reframing how scholars can attentively engage the “Middle Ages.” Drawing from a rich and diverse archive, D’Arcens masterfully unpacks the capacity of the Middle Ages to conjure contradictions. By carefully illuminating these contradictions and holding them aloft, she creates a framework to analyze how medievalism can at once bolster and displace the legacies of nationalism, racism, and colonialism. World Medievalism is poised to query the many developments of the global turn in medieval studies over the last twenty years and forge a path toward ethically making a world capacious enough for spatial and temporal localizations that resist Euro-Anglo hierarchies. The world, D’Arcens argues, can transcend the globe’s teleology because it can encompass the “transhistorical experiential state” of medievalism (22). This phenomenological aspect can be constructed sensorily, as it is at a heritage tourism site, or imaginatively, as it is in the world of a novel. In each of her four case studies, D’Arcens analyzes the contradictions and tensions of the transhistorical experience of medievalism. The first half of the book examines the use of the Middle Ages in the Northern Hemisphere to in one instance attempt to maintain Eurocentric legacies, and in the other instance displace Eurocentric legacies with interculturalism. The book’s second half is concerned with medievalisms that have emerged from the Global South, specifically the Asia-Pacific region. These medievalisms illuminate the possibilities and pitfalls of the transtemporal straddling of premodernity. The first chapter focuses on how right-wing French nationalism uses medievalism in reaction to identity crises spurred on by threatening globalization. D’Arcens’s selection of novels is astute in that each demonstrates the different contradictions arising from French nationalist medievalism. The thread that binds them together is déclinisme, a sense that in a teleological societal progression France is worsening, which manifests on the Right as melancholy for lost imperialism. Jérôme Ferrari’s Sermon on the Fall of Rome (Le Sermon sur la chute de Rome, 2012) aligns post-Roman France and post-colonial Corsica and, D’Arcens argues, imagines that a neomedieval future will develop from this power vacuum. Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (Soumission, 2015) satirizes [End Page 221] concerns of a neomedieval future in his depiction of France on the eve of becoming an Islamic polity. D’Arcens shows how medievalism is invoked to “disorient” clichéd antagonism between Europe and Islam and ridicule the contradiction inherent to the Islamophobic Right’s traditionalism. Th","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712624","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Women’s Lives: Self-Representation, Reception and Appropriation in the Middle Ages ed. by Daniel Armenti and Nahir I. Otaño Gracia (review)","authors":"Catherine Powell-Warren","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912680","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912680","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Women’s Lives: Self-Representation, Reception and Appropriation in the Middle Ages ed. by Daniel Armenti and Nahir I. Otaño Gracia Catherine Powell-Warren Daniel Armenti and Nahir I. Otaño Gracia, eds., Women’s Lives: Self-Representation, Reception and Appropriation in the Middle Ages (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2022), 325 pp. Mysticism, in the abstract, conveys notions of self-improvement, of fore-knowledge, of healing, and of peace, notions that are as appealing today as they likely ever were—evidenced, for example, by the popularity of shops selling healing and energy crystals that dot most high streets. This mysticism, however, is altogether different from the deeply religious form of mysticism that animated the likes of Hildegard of Bingen and St. Catherine of Siena. To these women and their medieval contemporaries, mysticism was above all a state of being, a mechanism of transmission through which they became conduits for God. Importantly, as Elizabeth Petroff revealed in her extensive studies and writing, being recognized as a female mystic had critical implications for these women’s ability to exercise agency, autonomy, leadership, and authority—qualities otherwise impossible due to their gender. The essays collected in Women’s Lives: Self-Representation, Reception and Appropriation in the Middle Ages are appropriately dedicated to her. In her seminal work Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (Oxford University Press, 1994), Petroff revisited and expanded upon her already considerable body of work on medieval female mystics. She examined what she termed the “rhetoric of transgression” that animated much of the writings of the female mystics and the circumstances of their daily existences. Petroff concluded that medieval women’s mysticism was significantly tied to freedom: the freedom to live lives outside of marriage and motherhood, the freedom to lead religious communities, and the freedom to write and engage with a number of public spheres, none of which would have been possible outside of the path between conformity and transgression that the mystics navigated carefully. The editors of this volume write in the introduction that Petroff, in an echo (or perhaps an homage) to the mystics who attempted to (re)negotiate the boundaries of gender, displayed a “passion to help women and minority individuals to study medieval literature and culture.” Given the lack of inclusivity and diversity that continues to pervade not only medieval studies (together with many of the humanities), this is indeed a legacy worth acknowledging and celebrating. The volume consists of an introduction, a helpful reproduction of the first and eighth essays from Petroff’s Body and Soul (“Women and Mysticism in the Medieval World” and “Male Confessors and Female Penitents: Possibilities for Dialogue”), and ten essays divided into three thematic groupings: “Self-Representation,” “Reception,” and “Appropriation.” True to Petroff’s","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135710988","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Portrait Cultures of the Early Modern Cardinal ed. by Piers Baker-Bates and Irene Brooke (review)","authors":"Livia Stoenescu","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912681","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912681","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Portrait Cultures of the Early Modern Cardinal ed. by Piers Baker-Bates and Irene Brooke Livia Stoenescu Piers Baker-Bates and Irene Brooke, eds., Portrait Cultures of the Early Modern Cardinal (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 381 pp., 59 ills. + 12 color plates. This thought-provoking volume stands out as a commemorative gesture to Piers Brooke and to the scholarship of the late Professor Clare Robertson, whose pioneering work on the cardinalate complements her seminal work on artists and ecclesiastical patrons of Rome and the Counter-Reformation. Within the burgeoning field of early modern studies from the last decades, the driving forces behind portraiture research have been the material origins and imaginative properties of portraits. Notably, cardinalate portraiture remains a topic ripe for critical attention, even though the experts have reached a consensus about the early modern portrait as a genre predicated upon verisimilitude rather than likeness. To be sure, this volume does more than fill a lacuna as it sheds new light on the historical, aesthetic, religious, and humanistic underpinnings of ecclesiastical portraiture within which emerged the cardinal portrait as a discrete category. The editors convincingly argue that “as material objects, cardinal portraits were clearly embedded with meanings specific to the class of individuals represented” (23). Comprising an introduction, four thematic sections, and a conclusion, the volume encompasses aspects of the intricacies of individual likeness and collective identity in “Individuality and Identity: Florence and Rome,” the effect of political allegiances in “Divided Loyalties: Venice and Rome,” the role of wealth, art collections, and ritualistic display in “Collecting and Display: Portraits and Worldly Goods,” and the impact the religious climate of the Council of Trent (1545–63) had on the depiction of cardinals in “Post-Tridentine Piety: The Devout Cardinal.” In “Introduction: Cardinals and Their Images,” Piers-Baker Bates and Irene Brooke lay out the visual legacy of early modern cardinals in the media of painting, engraving, medals, and sculpture. As the editors acknowledge, the tradition of painted portraits established by Raphael’s Julius II formed the fundamental basis for a typology of cardinal portraits, quickening the originality of Sebastiano del Piombo and Scipione Pulzone’s painted portraits and, likewise, of Bernini’s sculpted busts depicting living cardinals such as Scipione Borghese. Evolving parallel to the powerful presence of portraitists, alternative formats for memory and preservation in the ancient format of medallic portraits would become integral to the post-Tridentine practice of worshipping the cardinals’ portraits as miracle-performing objects. The introduction includes a second essay, Miles Pattenden’s “The Early Modern Cardinal: An Historical Appraisal,” which [End Page 208] discusses the cardinal as partaker of the papal acumen in bo","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712267","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"White People in Shakespeare: Essays on Race, Culture, and the Elite ed. by Arthur L. Little Jr (review)","authors":"Christina Moe Simmons","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912699","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912699","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: White People in Shakespeare: Essays on Race, Culture, and the Elite ed. by Arthur L. Little Jr Christina Moe Simmons Arthur L. Little Jr., ed., White People in Shakespeare: Essays on Race, Culture, and the Elite (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2023), 322 pp., 4 ills. Arthur L. Little Jr.’s edited volume, White People in Shakespeare, contains a collection of essays from acclaimed early modern critical race scholars that will undoubtedly radically shift how early modernists engage with Shakespeare and his legacies. From the introduction, Little carefully yet clearly establishes what conversation in early modern studies the volume rests in, addressing the noticeable voids in the historical framework used to critically engage with Shakespeare that prevent early modern scholarship from asking the question of race. The introduction provides a necessary rundown of the key differences between “whiteness” and “white people,” the significant transformation of whiteness as a valuable property through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and why Little has entitled this collection of essays White People in Shakespeare, rather than “Whiteness” in Shakespeare. Little argues that “Shakespeare remains key to any study of the further emergence of a ‘white people’ in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century,” establishing this collection as a critical analysis of the property of whiteness—and those who own it—through the early modern period (7). The volume is split into two separate parts. Part 1, “Shakespeare’s White People,” consists of essays focusing mainly on the characters from Shakespeare’s plays that have received critical attention. The analyses provided by the contributors to the volume all have one significant aspect in common: they all thoughtfully address the missing question of race in the litany of critical works available around these characters. Ian Smith’s “Antonio’s White Penis: Category Trading in The Merchant of Venice,” for instance, reengages “the question of Antonio’s sexuality in relation to race” (77) to argue that “whiteness is an expression of a sexuality—whiteness is a sexuality—and any departure from its idealization marks a venture into its literal opposite: blackness and corresponding notions of deviance that are assiduously avoided and denigrated as un-Venetian” (79). In “Disrupting White Genealogies in Cymbeline,” Joyce Macdonald draws a connection between “the questions of succession, descent and lineage that drive Cymbeline” with “its racial anxiety over the fortunes of British whiteness” (136). The accumulated essays not only contend with the critical gap left in early modern studies regarding race but also point out the problematic proclivity for critical white studies to apprehend “race as a post-Enlightenment phenomenon” by [End Page 253] delineating both the historical context and textual evidence that unequivocally demonstrate race operating in Shakespeare’s plays (1). Each essay in part 1 provides","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712594","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reason in Madness: Ariosto’s Ambiguous Irony between Truth and Morality","authors":"Elena Casanova","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912673","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912673","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Irony has always been a central focus of Ariosto scholarship: in particular, the interrelation between the endless flux of words and adventures that fill the Furioso , and the binary oppositions at the base of the poem has been considered a key ironic feature. Ariosto’s demiurgical distance is however not a sign of indifference: I argue that, while Ariosto’s irony transmits an estrangement from the traditional chivalric values, the author’s trust in the affirmative power of language and in its didactic function lies at the root of the Furioso ’s moral irony. Irony is, in fact, a vehicle for Ariosto’s ethical stance, but also a warning against the hypocrisy of courtly norms. First, I analyze the moral function of the Furioso ’s ironic narrator and Ariosto’s intimate relation to his audience, which thrives on complexity, difference, and multiplicity. I then look at the role that contradictions and (mis)quotations play within the poem’s ironic structure. Finally, I investigate how the Satire might represent the outer threshold of Ariosto’s irony. In fact, if in the Furioso Ariosto’s escapism could take shape thanks to the fantastic element, the Satire ’s ironic movement is revealed under a new, “barer” guise that walks a thin line between irony and moral satire.","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature ed. by Carol Mejia LaPerle (review)","authors":"Christina Kolias","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912698","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912698","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature ed. by Carol Mejia LaPerle Christina Kolias Carol Mejia LaPerle, ed., Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature (Tempe: ACMRS Press, 2022), vii + 221 pp., 4 ills. Carol Mejia LaPerle’s Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature is a welcome and noteworthy contribution to the Premodern Critical Race Studies (PCRS) field, as it is the first collection to discuss race’s direct relationship to affect theory in early modernity. In recent years, there has been an increase in interest and resistance to the rich history of PCRS scholarship, which seeks to question the supposed universality of early modern canonical literature. La-Perle’s collection embodies a similar task, where the past contributes to present understandings of racial formation and race-making. What sets this collection apart is each scholar’s personal connection and racial investment in exposing white supremacy and its affective relations in early modern texts and culture. Each contributor, through their means of rhetorical resistance and reckoning, proves that affect is a powerful lens to investigate race. Considering “affect is persistent proof of a body’s never less than ongoing immersion in and among the world’s obstinacies and rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations” (Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010], 1), every chapter in this collection highlights not just the stark anti-Blackness of the period and its preservation of racist ideologies and categorizations but race’s many passionate affects that inform (un)belonging. Tracking the nuances of affect displays its variability as a verb and noun, where affect is expressive through thoughts (internal) and actions (external). Even LaPerle’s introductory reference to critical works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Fred Moten, and Calvin L. Warren draws attention to the collection’s focus on one retrospective question—how does race feel? The importance of feelings and passions in affect studies highlights the imbrication of externalized disgust and difference internalized by racialized subjects. Even though the collection analyzes early modernity’s attempts at dominance and disempowerment, the authors in this collection, as LaPerle notes, capture the spirit [End Page 250] of bell hooks’s “oppositional gaze.” Each contributor’s use of hooks’s gesture as methodology not only lays a foundation for the change they desire in the field but also, most importantly, illustrates the interplay between criticism and activism. The collection contains three equally balanced sections, each applying intersectional and/or cross-disciplinary lenses committed to uncovering racializing regimes and the importance of feeling race as evidenced in early modern literature and culture. The editor skillfully assembles a first-class group of con","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135711011","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Chastity Plot by Lisabeth During (review)","authors":"Robyn McAuliffe","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912687","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912687","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Chastity Plot by Lisabeth During Robyn McAuliffe Lisabeth During, The Chastity Plot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 391 pp. The title of this book draws attention to a device or, as During reveals, a preoccupation of the media we consume. The “chastity plot” forms central narratives in contemporary books, films, and television shows (for example, Jane the Virgin and the American Pie franchise). The sociologist Laura Carpenter has written extensively on the stigmatization of virginity and virginity-loss within the United States in particular. Lisabeth During’s The Chastity Plot, however, is a much-needed and important new addition to the conversation surrounding chastity, covering a multitude of literary and cross-cultural traditions to identify and explicate the cultural preoccupation with chastity and virginity that has endured since antiquity. Drawing on examples from many literary genres, During uses each chapter to chart the glorification and downfall of the chastity ideal. She begins first with a brief introduction to the concept of chastity, its prevalence within contemporary evangelical and conservative Christian teachings, and its links with morality, before moving in chapter 1 to an elucidation of the differences between “the eunuch’s plot” favored by Church writings, specifically within saints’ lives, and “[c]hastity plots,” which “stage a struggle against the social insistence on marriage and reproduction” (30). From her analysis of the female saint Thecla, [End Page 223] known for her chastity and allegiance to the teachings of St. Paul, and the eighteenth-century advocate of chastity, Pamela, from Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, During moves on to an analysis in chapter 2 of the tragic hero Hippolytus, whose devout allegiance to the chaste state in Euripides’s classical Greek tragedy Hippolytus ends in turmoil. This is a particularly effective chapter for its exploration of male chastity, its links with misogyny within the play, and the dangers of an unchecked and uncontrolled male chastity. Chapter 3 focuses on the “antimarriage plot” and the issue of reconciling chastity with marriage (87). During’s analysis focuses predominantly on female characters who resent prescriptive marriage and seek a life of asexual independence; specifically, she looks to those in Aeschylus’s The Suppliants, the myth of the misandrist Chinese princess Turandot in various literary forms, including Gozzi’s Turandot, before turning to the twentieth-century antimarriage narrative of The Philadelphia Story. Chapters 4 and 5 take a more religious turn, focusing on the “radical sexual renunciation” of Christianity and the difficulty of aligning chastity with conjugality (132). Both chapters focus on the ascetic’s desire to return to a prelapsarian condition of sexual innocence, a sentiment that flavors many ecclesiastical diatribes advocating the spiritual benefits of virginity. Chapters 6 and 7 explore both the early mo","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135711997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Milton’s Poetical Thought by Maggie Kilgour (review)","authors":"Brandon Taylor","doi":"10.1353/cjm.2023.a912695","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912695","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Milton’s Poetical Thought by Maggie Kilgour Brandon Taylor Maggie Kilgour, Milton’s Poetical Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 129 pp. Maggie Kilgour’s Milton’s Poetical Thought is part of a larger series of texts that belong to Oxford’s The Literary Agenda, which, according to series editor Philip Davis, seeks to address “the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world” from the position that the literary is increasingly “dismissed or is unrecognized as a way of thinking or an arena for thought” (xi). The series aims to foster a “renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading for the sake of the future” (xi). Kilgour’s slim and insightful text takes up this pedagogical mission through the capacious and contentious vessel of John Milton and his poetic work, which she chronologically traces from his early poetry to his later masterpieces, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. The book is aimed at students and first introduces Milton as a student himself, young and ambitious and conflicted with his desire to satisfy his family’s, and especially his father’s, aspirations for his gifted son while also pursuing his interest in poetry. Kilgour’s foregrounding of Milton-the-student has the effect of humanizing Milton for students and also, importantly, signals the ways in which The Literary Agenda’s pedagogical program are best served by highlighting the human within the humanities. Having taught Shakespeare, Milton, Herbert, and other early modern authors and poets to undergraduate students in introductory courses, I can understand why students feel like professors are hefting an ancient leather-bound tome upon the lectern, blowing centuries-old dust off of its cover, and intoning about the wisdom of long-dead white men whose world and worldview are so alien from our own that their opinions could never have foretold of memes, TikTok dances, or the vicissitudes of ChatGPT-generated response papers. Kilgour’s work is therefore a welcome early modern intervention in the discourse on the importance of the literary and helps point toward a way of encouraging student familiarity with the literary by understanding the people—poets, artists, and authors—who create the works of literature and art that we have come to so enjoy reading and discussing. Kilgour argues that what makes poetry unique is that it is not simply a rigid system intended to deliver data; it is instead capacious and ultimately “excessive, beyond the author’s full control,” and that this latitude is liberating for readers, since Milton “allows us to have free will” (8) as active participants in his work. We are not bound by strict borders but are instead encouraged to explore and find joy in those complexities that the author, himself, may not have intended. The early portrait that Kilgour paints of Milton in the introduction is that of a lively human being inviting us to a poetic hearth, one where rea","PeriodicalId":53903,"journal":{"name":"COMITATUS-A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135712277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}