{"title":"Dedicated to the Tudors: Thomas Gemini and a Shifting Book Dedication","authors":"V. Schutte","doi":"10.1163/23526963-04601007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526963-04601007","url":null,"abstract":"Thomas Gemini dedicated Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio to Henry viii in 1545, Edward vi in 1553, and then Elizabeth in 1559, with that to Elizabeth differing greatly from those to Henry and Edward. Elizabeth received a gender-appropriate dedication that focused on spirituality and virtue, while Henry and Edward were offered dedications that focused on the need for medical knowledge and training to be spread within England. The 1559 edition also has an engraved image of Elizabeth that some scholars have even considered to be an adaptation of an image of Mary, meaning that the text may have had an association with four Tudor monarchs. This essay suggests that the shifting dedications by Gemini are evidence of a man who remained loyal to the crown, when he easily could have kept the dedication to Henry in all editions or even removed the dedication altogether when printing under later monarchs.","PeriodicalId":55910,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Renaissance Culture","volume":"46 1","pages":"30-43"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/23526963-04601007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47094878","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":"Violence in Elizabeth’s England: Tudors and Turbervilles","authors":"Carole Levin, C. Kracl","doi":"10.1163/23526963-04601004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526963-04601004","url":null,"abstract":"Throughout her life Elizabeth Tudor was aware of the perennial violence that threatened her, threats that were also reflected in the England she ruled over. The experiences of the prominent Turberville family paralleled the type of violence Elizabeth faced, violence in which familial, political, and religious interests intersected. The most well-known of the Turbervilles was the writer George, whose Catholicism may have been the reason that Robert Jones attempted to murder him. Perhaps even more terrifying than religious violence was family violence. In her sister’s reign Elizabeth greatly feared that Mary would execute her. Shockingly, George’s older brother Nicholas was murdered by his brother-in-law. Elizabeth knew intimately the complex dangers of the time and so did her subjects.","PeriodicalId":55910,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Renaissance Culture","volume":"46 1","pages":"57-69"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/23526963-04601004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44415735","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":"Henry viii and the “Bewhoring” of the Petrarchan Beloved in Sixteenth-Century English Literature","authors":"Susan Dunn-Hensley","doi":"10.1163/23526963-04601003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526963-04601003","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the ways in which changes in Marian theology and the defaming and execution of two of Henry viii’s queens affected early modern literary representations of female power. It argues that, through the translations of Thomas Wyatt, Petrarchan poetry entered into a world of state-sponsored iconoclasm, a world where images of the sacred feminine, once revered, could be destroyed, and queens, once exalted as beloveds, could quickly be reduced to “whores” and executed. The first part of the article considers Wyatt’s “Whoso list to hunt,” a translation of Petrarch’s “Rime 190,” as a lens for examining the female body as both object of desire and site of violent destruction. The second part of the article considers English Petrarchism late in the reign of Elizabeth i, examining how John Donne’s “Love’s Progress” and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (Book ii) construct violent fantasies of male control over the powerful female.","PeriodicalId":55910,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Renaissance Culture","volume":"46 1","pages":"2-16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/23526963-04601003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45975954","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":"Sovereignty at Bridewell Palace: Gender in the Architectural Designs of Hans Holbein the Younger","authors":"A. Meyer","doi":"10.1163/23526963-04601005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526963-04601005","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines the representation of gender and sovereignty in a little examined design for a royal fireplace created by Hans Holbein the Younger during the reign of Henry viii. When Henry sought to divorce Catherine and to establish the Church of England, the Bridewell precinct became a site for political upheaval. As Holinshed’s Chronicle details and William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s 1613 All Is True or Henry viii\u0000 would later dramatize, Bridewell and the neighboring Blackfriars staged the divorce trial and removal of Catherine’s sovereignty as Queen. By examining Holbein’s design that Bridewell palace became a palimpsest upon which the crown continually cultivated its dynastic desires –desires that Holbein’s design prove to be imbricated with questions of gender and sovereignty. Gender, sex, and reproduction are central to Holbein’s representation of the Tudor dynasty. Yet, alongside this gendered discourse is a legal one. Holbein depicts the law and justice as mechanisms which can redefine a sovereign woman’s subjectivity and curb her agency in submission to her King and husband. Thus, from Holbein’s fireplace emerges an ideology of familial dynasty and imperial aspirations built atop the legal subjection of women.","PeriodicalId":55910,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Renaissance Culture","volume":"46 1","pages":"17-29"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/23526963-04601005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49643758","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":"Between the Stage and the Street: Art and Artifice in Giordano Bruno’s Candelaio","authors":"Nicholas Albanese","doi":"10.1163/23526963-04502004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526963-04502004","url":null,"abstract":"The Italian Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno’s only literary work, the comedy titled Candelaio published in 1582, has been interpreted through a comparative analysis with either his philosophical writings or with other plays from the tradition of the commedia erudita. In this article, I focus on the Candelaio’s textual strategies by drawing on the analytical categories of dissonance and deflection in order to demonstrate how Bruno’s theatrical piece can be viewed as a polemical statement on aesthetics. The introductory peritexts of the work set the key parameters for reading his text as a conscious play on conventionality and thus provide the interpretive framework for disentangling the complex meanings embedded in the dramatic action of the five acts that follow. Ultimately, the comedy aims to question representational practices through an engagement with the debate over the nature and function of art and artifice that invested all of the arts during the Cinquecento.","PeriodicalId":55910,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Renaissance Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/23526963-04502004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47320646","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":"To Sleep or Not to Sleep—Is it a Question?","authors":"J. Faust","doi":"10.1163/23526963-04502002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526963-04502002","url":null,"abstract":"Amidst the many trials Donne experienced during his 1623 illness recounted in his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions are bouts of insomnia introduced in Devotion 15 and implied in Devotions 16–18 with the unceasing tolls of bells in the nearby church commemorating the dying and dead. Donne’s agonized longing for the comfort of sleep as he lay day after day and night after night for fourteen days to the disease’s crisis, then over three months of slow recuperation, hits readers where they live: in all probability, all of us have tossed and turned on long sleepless nights. But is Donne preoccupation with sleep an anomaly among seventeenth-century writers, peculiar to his 1623 illness, and another example of Donne’s excessive focus on his own body, or did other Early Modern writers and theorists demonstrate an obsession with sleep? And more importantly, was insomnia a hindrance to his creativity before, during, and after his illness? A look at Donne’s Devotions in light of Early Modern theories of sleep and “not to sleep” indicates that Donne’s work not only documents his own personal sufferings and anxiety about liminal states but also illustrates Early Modern beliefs about insomnia, its causes, and even its benefits. Insomnia was not a temporary and isolated stage of Donne’s 1623 illness but a burden throughout his life, possibly serving as a source of his creativity and linking him to other sleepless writers of his time and beyond.","PeriodicalId":55910,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Renaissance Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/23526963-04502002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46052001","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 2019 William B. Hunter Lecture of the scrc: Paleness versus Eloquence: The Ideologies of Style in the English Renaissance","authors":"R. Strier","doi":"10.1163/23526963-04502001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526963-04502001","url":null,"abstract":"This essay considers the contrast between plainness and eloquence in some canonical English (secular) lyrics and plays from Wyatt through Shakespeare. Its claim is that in the relevant body of work, and in the culture as a whole, each of the styles bore a specifiable ideological charge. It shows that English secular poetry and drama in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century was profoundly aware of the ideologies associated with the two levels or kinds of style, and profoundly divided in its commitments. In lyric poetry, this is true in Wyatt at the beginning of the sixteenth century and of Sidney at the end. In drama, Shakespeare is profoundly aware both of the styles and of the ideologies with which they are associated. He uses and also critiques both of these in the poems and the plays. Othello is the culmination of both the use and the critique.","PeriodicalId":55910,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Renaissance Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/23526963-04502001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48595123","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":"“Quitting Nature’s Part”: The Reproductive Quest in Dryden’s Virgil","authors":"Kenneth Connally","doi":"10.1163/23526963-04502005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526963-04502005","url":null,"abstract":"John Dryden’s translations of Virgil’s Aeneid and Georgics engage with an early modern discourse of reproduction that encouraged maximizing production while warning against disorderly generativity. While Virgil and Dryden both had political reasons to be invested in patrilineage, their shared interest in Epicureanism, with its denial of life after death, may have driven these poets to search for an alternative form of immortality in reproduction. Dryden’s choices as a translator reveal cultural anxieties around women’s role in procreation and suggest a preference for adoption as a model for reproductive success because it allows women to be cut out of the process. Ultimately, Aeneas’ decision to identify with his deceased, adopted son rather than his living biological son in the poem’s final lines suggests a turning away from futurity and acceptance of death.","PeriodicalId":55910,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Renaissance Culture","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/23526963-04502005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41924563","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":"Picturing Miracles: Biblical Healings in the Paintings by Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beuckelaer","authors":"B. Kaminska","doi":"10.1163/23526963-04502003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/23526963-04502003","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay, I analyze three sixteenth-century Netherlandish paintings of New Testament miraculous healings in the context of the contemporary understanding of miracles and approaches to disability. I argue that, in contrast to the negative perception of the infirm in the early modern literature, the images promote care for the sick as a Christian duty. Given the complicated theological status of miracles ca. 1600, scriptural healings begin to function primarily as exempla of mercy rather than as promises of supernatural intervention. In the discussed compositions, biblical stories become a model for sixteenth-century viewers through the rhetorical use of architectural backdrops, which replicate a strategy employed in the vernacular theatre and urban festivals. Finally, I show that this connection between miraculous healings and mercy is also established in the iconography of visiting the sick, in which broadly defined medical care is introduced as a manifestation of charity.","PeriodicalId":55910,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Renaissance Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/23526963-04502003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44491872","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}