{"title":"Dreaming of Death and the Dead in the Stuart Political World Imaginary: The Case of William Laud","authors":"Carole Levin","doi":"10.1163/23526963-04702003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526963-04702003","url":null,"abstract":"<p>William Laud played a critical role in the politics and religion in the reign of James <span style=\"font-variant: small-caps;\">I</span> and especially that of his son, Charles <span style=\"font-variant: small-caps;\">I</span>. There was great antagonism toward him by Puritans, and Laud’s close friendship with George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, made Laud even more controversial, as did his fight with the king’s jester, Archy Armstrong. Dreams were seen as having great significance at time of Laud, and Laud recorded his dreams in his journal. Dreams also played a role in the early Stuart political world. This essay examines how Laud’s enemies used his own dreams against him in the work of William Prynne, once Laud was arrested during the English Civil war. It also looks at how Laud was compared to also despised Thomas, Cardinal Wolsey in a number of political pamphlets that used dreams, such as Archy’s Dream and Canterburie’s Dream. Laud also appeared as a character in a dream of Charles <span style=\"font-variant: small-caps;\">I</span>’s attendant Thomas Herbert the night before the king’s execution, where Laud came to comfort Charles.</p>","PeriodicalId":55910,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Renaissance Culture","volume":"304 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138506385","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":"Breaking Bread with the Bedchamber: Feasting at the Court of James I of England, 1603–1625","authors":"Jennifer S. Ng","doi":"10.1163/23526963-04702005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526963-04702005","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines the institution of the Bedchamber of James <span style=\"font-variant: small-caps;\">I</span> of England (1603–1625) through the practice of feasting. Originally comprising James <span style=\"font-variant: small-caps;\">VI</span>’s Scottish entourage, the Bedchamber was a novel introduction to the English royal household in the Jacobean period: as such, this group of attendants came to represent both a body with unparalleled royal access, and a Scottish barrier between James <span style=\"font-variant: small-caps;\">I</span> and his English court. By approaching the Bedchamber through its social and cultural obligations, the institution emerges as a mediating, rather than restrictive, body, serving to enact reconciliation between the king, the Court, and foreign states. Moreover, the Bedchamber’s feasting calendar indicates a broad basis of reward, circulating around several Bedchamber Gentlemen rather than a single favorite. Patterns of Bedchamber feasting ultimately reflected a Court that was largely accessible, not significantly structured by ethnic divisions, and conducive to the proliferation of culture and favor.</p>","PeriodicalId":55910,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Renaissance Culture","volume":"34 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138537290","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":"Dematerializing Sovereignties in The Character of Holland and The Loyal Scot","authors":"William Fitzhenry","doi":"10.1163/23526963-04702001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526963-04702001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper argues that in The Character of Holland and The Loyal Scot, Marvell consistently meditates on the nature of political sovereignty, especially regarding its perils and shortcomings. By ventriloquizing republican propaganda and monarchical ideology in these poems, Marvell creates a space where he can stage and then dematerialize these absolutist forms of power. Marvell demonstrates how the debate regarding union and division in each poem is really an argument about the nature and potential excesses of sovereign power. He does this by constructing a poetics in which his delineations of the political, as well as his own provisional status as an author, call into question the various formations of national identity put forward in these early and late satires. By entangling the political and the aesthetic, Marvell is able to imagine deeper, more abiding kinds of human attachment that transcend national boundaries and limit the exercise of sovereign power.","PeriodicalId":55910,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Renaissance Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43649797","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":"(De)Constructing the Madonna’s Cloth of Honor","authors":"Lilian H. Zirpolo","doi":"10.1163/23526963-04702002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526963-04702002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The present study centers on pieced textiles included in Marian paintings of the Proto-Renaissance era rendered in Tuscany. The complex geometric patterns of these cloths mimic those found in the Islamic textiles that were then being imported into Europe, consumed by the aristocracy, and later imitated by Italian cloth makers. On a basic level, their colors and patterning reference the virtues of the Virgin, her mission to bring about the Incarnation of Christ, her selflessness, virtuous character, and majesty. They also contribute to her humanization since these are material objects that belonged in the aristocratic domestic setting and which were familiar to the patrons who paid for the works. On a deeper level, they provide complex layers of meaning, some of which derive from Moorish iconography. They reference the perfection of God’s creation and the promise of an affable afterlife. They also evoke the remote lands where the lives of the Virgin and Christ unfolded. By inserting pieced cloths into Marian iconography, artists were following a long established tradition of utilizing the piecing technique in Early Medieval sacred practice, an issue that until now has not been recognized.","PeriodicalId":55910,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Renaissance Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45092677","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":"Wetnurse Politics in Spenser’s View and Jones’ Arte and Science","authors":"Katarzyna Lecky","doi":"10.1163/23526963-47010005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526963-47010005","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This essay places Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland (1596) into conversation with John Jones’ 1579 nursing manual Arte and Science in order to contextualize Spenser’s medical solution to Irish rebellion. For both, the Irish wetnurse, who controlled the political system of fosterage undermining England’s agenda in Ireland, is central to the corporate identity of a conjoined Anglo-Irish kingdom. A View’s relationship to Jones’ text reveals the vexed ontological landscape of England’s early imperial self-fashioning, which linked the re-engineering of the genetic nature of colonial bodies to the management of women’s reproductive labor.","PeriodicalId":55910,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Renaissance Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46827776","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":"Prosaic Diction: Finding Patterns in the Words of Spenser’s View","authors":"C. A. Berry","doi":"10.1163/23526963-47010003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526963-47010003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Scholars have long noted the eccentric vocabulary of Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland, primarily with an eye toward glossing words unfamiliar outside of a contemporary Irish context. This essay steps back from consideration of individual words to ponder what can be learned from word frequencies, primarily focusing on what the tools of corpus linguistics can tell us about the View and especially the View in relation to Spenser’s poetry. What words are most common in the View? What words in the View are most likely (or least likely) to occur in Spenser’s poetry? Is the vocabulary of Eudoxus similar to or notably different from the vocabulary of Irenius? What parts of Spenser’s poetic corpus have the greatest (or least) affinity, vocabulary-wise, with the View? This essay answers those questions and argues that linguistic analysis must go hand-in-hand with traditional close reading in order to draw conclusions from those answers.","PeriodicalId":55910,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Renaissance Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49555371","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":"Spenser’s View and the Production of Political Knowledge in Elizabethan England","authors":"N. Popper","doi":"10.1163/23526963-47010006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526963-47010006","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article analyzes the View as an example of knowledge production, rather than plumbing it for representation or ideology as scholars have traditionally done. Tracing the process of construction, sources, and generic conventions that Spenser wielded not only illuminates some of the more curious elements of the View, but also reveals his practices and motivations for it. As this article suggests, such an approach reinforces the idea that Spenser designed the View as an appeal for the patronage and support of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, by modeling specific forms of expertise and counsel characteristic of the Essex circle.","PeriodicalId":55910,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Renaissance Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42651631","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":"Edmund Spenser’s View of Christendom: New Legal and Theological Contexts for A View of the Present State of Ireland","authors":"Brian C. Lockey","doi":"10.1163/23526963-47010004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526963-47010004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This paper considers how Spenser’s conception of conscience and universal law and justice in A View of the Present State of Ireland can be understood within the context of jurist Christopher St. German’s early sixteenth-century tract on equity and the common law and his subsequent tracts on the reformation of Church corruption. The paper attempts to re-situate Spenser’s engagement with legal and political theory within the context of English legal education as it had developed throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Ultimately, it shows that Spenser’s engagement with law, theology and politics reflected a commitment to a new Protestant conception of transnational Christendom as well as a re-conception of England as a Protestant nation within that transnational entity.","PeriodicalId":55910,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Renaissance Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46950471","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":"Dressed in Sheep’s Clothing: Pastoral and Reform in Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland","authors":"Denna Iammarino","doi":"10.1163/23526963-47010007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526963-47010007","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This study investigates the presence of pastoral themes in Spenser’s prose dialogue, A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596). Tracing the traditional pastoral themes of generational conflict, degeneration, and regeneration in Spenser’s late pastorals, this study considers how Spenser’s inclusion of these pastoral themes shape paradigms of reform in the View. It argues that generational conflict is exacerbated in the colonial space where degeneration is pervasive threatening both the self and the social structure of the English colonial project in Ireland. These connections to pastoral themes suggest that Spenser and his colonial peers, such as Lodowick Bryskett, conceive of their lives in pastoral terms intersected with imperial politics.","PeriodicalId":55910,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Renaissance Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47408696","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":"Plantation, Contagion, and Containment in Spenser and Bryskett","authors":"A. Zurcher","doi":"10.1163/23526963-47010008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526963-47010008","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Early modern Ireland was notoriously, or reputedly, a place of disease: the plague, the ague, the country fever, the looseness, the bloody flux, and an assortment of coughs, chills, sweats, and other illnesses—Ireland’s endemii morbi or “reigning diseases”—regularly figure in surviving letters and historical accounts from the period. This essay explores not only the reports of disease issuing from Ireland at this time, but the way in which the experience and rhetoric of contagion help to shape ideas about space, security, and civility in the colonial theory of the period. In Spenser’s View of the present state of Ireland (c. 1596) and Bryskett’s A Discourse of Ciuill Life (1606), illness and its metaphors seem to correlate with, and perhaps to occasion, complex responses to the alleged disorder and promiscuity of the Irish—energies evident, too, in the military and political strategies of deputies Sir Henry Sidney, Arthur Lord Grey, and Sir Arthur Chichester. This essay sees Spenser’s View and Bryskett’s Discourse as polemical attempts – at key moments before the planting of Munster and Ulster – to push New English colonial policy away from the morbid failures of Pale government and violent military suppression toward the corpus sanum of plantation.","PeriodicalId":55910,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Renaissance Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48611133","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}