Renaissance Institute Summer Symposium, 2010

DAVID K. ANDERSON is an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma English Department, specializing in Renaissance drama and poetry. His particular interest is the relationship between the religious and literary cultures of Tudor-Stuart England. He is currently working on a book about how the early modern crisis surrounding religious violence (in particular martyrdom) is reflected in the tragedy of Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights. Beyond that, he is undertaking research on the intersection of politics and theology in a number of early modern writers, including John Milton. A Canadian, Anderson has been awarded doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He received his PhD from McGill University in 2009, an MA from Dalhousie University in 2003, and a BA from Queen’s University in 2001.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

The Theatre of the Damned: Religion and the Audience in the Tragedy of Christopher Marlowe

The religious conflict I want to examine in my essay for the symposium is an internal one, running through the society of late Tudor England and, in particular, running through the audience of Christopher Marlowe.  I want to posit a new understanding of Marlowe’s relationship to his society’s religious culture.  It leaves aside the question of his personal religious convictions, whether sceptical or sincere, claiming that, whatever they were, Marlowe was adept at manipulating the religious turmoil within his audience.  The paper will focus on the issue of damnation, and the way that Marlowe’s villain-heroes in three plays (The Jew of Malta, The Massacre at Paris and Doctor Faustus) present that audience with a clearly damned protagonist who is, at times, the object of disconcerting pity—a volatile and, a times, transgressive emotion in Renaissance England.  Thought these tragic protagonists Marlowe complicates the sympathies of the spectators, and probes the uneasy conscience of the Elizabethan religious settlement.

TODD BUTLER is an Associate Professor and Buchanan Scholar at Washington State University, where he also serves as the department’s vice-chair. He works within the nexus between law, literature, and political theory in the early modern period, with a particular interest in the relationship of crime, print, and manuscript, as well as the way in which elements of individual and corporate thought provide an index by which we might understand the workings of political power in the seventeenth century. He began exploring these interests first in Imagination and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Ashgate 2008), a study of how understanding the human mind offered the early moderns a language to describe political process. He has published in such journals as SEL, The Journal of the History of Ideas, The Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, and has received grants from the NEH, the Mellon Foundation, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. He is also the past president of the MLA Discussion Group on Law and Literature.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Signs and Souls: Equivocation, Self, and Stories in Early Modern England

In offering a tactic by which an individual might answer judicial interrogatories while simultaneously disguising the full substance and meaning of one’s answer, the Catholic doctrine of equivocation responded to the precarious position of Catholics in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras. This project demonstrates, however, that the impact of the controversy over equivocation was not limited to its most public appearance during the trials of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators. In articulating a potentially viable theorization of the impenetrability of the human mind, equivocation instead demonstrates the centrality of human cognition to definitions of citizenship and subjecthood circulating throughout the religious and political conflicts of the seventeenth century. In their own debates over Biblical stories and the role of language and intentionality in both speech and writing, both Protestant and Catholic polemicists debate developed more than just theological treatises. Rather they pursued working theories of the contextualization and design of narratives, transforming their texts into investigations of the process of reading and writing. Equivocation thereby becomes a key to understanding how issues of law, textual interpretation, and cognitive access helped shape seventeenth-century religious literature and conflicts.

JOSEPH CAMPANA is a poet and scholar with essays on Spenser, Shakespeare, Nashe, Middleton, early modern poetics, the history of sexuality, and other topics in PMLA, Modern Philology, Shakespeare, Prose Studies, and elsewhere. Current scholarly projects include Disarming Mars: Edmund Spenser and the Poetics of Vulnerability, which treats notions of vulnerability in heroic poetry written the wake of the Reformation, and The Child’s Two Bodies, a study of sovereignty and sexuality in the child figures of the Shakespearean stage and page. He is the author of a collection of poems, The Book of Faces (Graywolf, 2005) and his poems appear in Slate, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the Isabel MacCaffrey Essay Prize from the International Spenser Society, the Crompton-Noll Essay Award from the GL-Q Caucus of the MLA, and artist’s grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Houston Arts Alliance.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Spenser’s Dark Materials: Representation in the Shadow of Christ

In "Spenser's Dark Materials: Representation in the Shadow of Christ," I argue that Spenser's concern for the idolatrous nature of poetic representation conceals a deeper fascination with its materiality.  As representations of the body of Christ wane in post-Reformation England so too does the mediating power of Christ's body.  Spenser's "satire" of Catholicism reveals an attempt to find in idolatry a productive discourse for imagining mediation; that is for construing the relationship between words and things.  This desire for mediation in the wake of an absent Eucharistic or incarnational poetics appears in a shadow world of materiality in the Legend of Holiness: dark forests, monstrous bodies, women's bodies, dreams, Hesiodic cosmogonies, and harrowing underworlds.  Spenser's interest in the "evil" materiality of a shadow world of idolatry reveals an attempt to forge in the world of organic matter a new contract to mediate emerging disjunctions between words and things, matter and form, flesh and spirit. 

KIMBERLY ANNE COLES is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland. Her recent book, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2008) examines the influence of women writers on religious identity and its cultural expression in the sixteenth century. She has published articles in ELR, Modern Philology, and The Review of English Studies on the topics of women’s writing, gender, and religious ideology. Her current research investigates how the soul could be understood to have profound agency in the arrangement of the human organism in the early modern period—and the implications of this thinking for both religious and racial identification.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

"[H]umorous is my contrition": body and soul in John Donne’s Holy Sonnets

John Donne’s apostasy and eventual installment as the Dean of St. Paul’s Church provided him with a rare perspective: few people in England were so positioned to hold a nuanced view of religious ideology. It is surprising, then, that when Donne considers his apostasy—which he does in little and in large in Holy Sonnet 19—he casts conversion in somatic terms. In Donne’s Holy Sonnets, the soul’s condition posits bodily consequences: spiritual crisis is rendered in terms of humoral subjectivity (“As humorous is my contrition…and as soon forgot: / As riddlingly distempered, cold and hot”). If the discourses against religious others are framed within physical technologies as they are understood, as I claim they are, Donne’s humoral constitution of faith in the Holy Sonnets anatomizes the agency of the soul in the organization of the human subject. Of course, English Catholics are not regarded in precisely the terms of somatic difference that I have been attributing to religious others in foreign lands. But the distinction lies, I would argue, in the potential for the reformation of Catholics on English soil. As one such planted former Catholic, Donne supplies evidence of spiritual growth apprehended as bodily transformation.

BROOKE CONTI is an assistant professor of English at the State University of New York at Brockport, where she works on Milton and seventeenth-century prose. She was educated at Yale University. Her published or forthcoming work includes articles on Donne, Milton, Thomas Browne, and Lancelot Andrewes. Her first book project, “Confessions of Faith: Autobiography and Religion in Early Modern England,” explores the curious tendency of controversial prose to shade into autobiography. She is also co-editing, with Reid Barbour, a new edition of Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici for Oxford University Press. Her work has been supported by fellowships at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Princeton Rare Books Collection, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Confessions of Faith in Early Modern English Literature

Although scholars over the past several decades have given increasing attention to Early Modern life-writing, there is still surprisingly little criticism on both the variety of forms that autobiographical writing took in the Renaissance and the role of religious identity and religious conflict in shaping those forms. This essay argues that the unexpected moments of autobiography that emerge in and around the edges of works of nonfictional religious prose deserve further study as a class of autobiography all their own: they are confessions of faith, occasioned by the political and generic pressures of writing in a context of religious controversy. With illustrations drawn from the prose works of James I, Donne, Milton, Browne, Bunyan, and James II, this essay suggests that while such autobiographies typically perform their author’s confidence in his religious identity, they reveal, upon closer inspection, a deep sense of uncertainty—about their author’s orthodoxy, salvation, or fulfillment of the divine plan. That these confessions of faith seem motivated by an anxiety they attempt to erase tells us something about early autobiography, but even more about the difficulty of negotiating a private religious identity in a century and a genre that preferred stark binaries.

STEPHEN B. DOBRANSKI conducts his primary research on John Milton and seventeenth-century print culture. A Professor in the Department of English at Georgia State University, he recently edited Milton in Context (Cambridge 2010) and authored A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton: “Samson Agonistes” (Duquesne 2009). His other books include Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge 2005), winner of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association’s English Studies Award, and Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade (Cambridge 1999). He also co-edited Milton and Heresy (Cambridge 1998), winner of the Irene Samuel Memorial Award. His articles on early modern literature have appeared in various multi-authored collections as well as ELR, Milton Quarterly, Milton Studies, PMLA, RES, The Seventeenth Century, and SEL. (Email: sbdobranski@gsu.edu)

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

"Of Parting and of Fight": Free Will and Divine Intervention in "Paradise Lost"

When Satan confronts Gabriel and his angelic squadron in Paradise Lost, God intercedes: he “Hung forth in heaven his golden scales,” and “in these he put two weights / The sequel each of parting and of fight” (IV.997, 1002-03). As critics have long objected, Milton’s use here of a deus ex machina seems to encroach on Satan’s and the angels’ free will. If we accept the Arminian premise at the core of the theodicy, that God created not only human beings but also “all the ethereal powers / And spirits” as “authors to themselves in all” (III.100, 122), we would not expect the Creator to prevent angelic conflict by providing a timely and telling preview of where Satan’s choices might lead. This paper will examine God’s golden scales in the context of epic precedent, seventeenth-century disputes over predestination, and, perhaps surprisingly, early modern uses of weights and measures. By also comparing the divine intervention that ends the stalemate in the war in heaven, I wish to analyze God’s balancing act both for what it implies about Milton’s concept of military valor and for what it reveals about the relation between divine foreknowledge and angelic freedom.

KASEY EVANS received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkely in 2005. Her recently-completed first book, Colonial Virtue: The Mobility of Temperance in Early Modern England, argues that the virtue of temperance underwent a semantic sea-change during the English Renaissance, evolving from a paradigm of self-discipline and moderation into a value of time-management, efficiency, and colonial aggression. In the past year, she has presented work to the Shakespeare Association of America, the Renaissance Society of America, the International Spenser Society, and the Chicago Renaissance Seminar, and published articles in Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 and Renaissance Drama. Other areas of interest include Italian medieval and Renaissance poetry (Dante, Ariosto, Tasso); race, gender, and sexuality; and literary and critical theory, from medieval exegetes through postmodern philosophers.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Temperate Revenge: Religion, Profit, and Retaliation in 1622 Jamestown

In readings of two polemical texts written during a time of crisis in Jamestown, Virginia, this article examines the rhetoric of temperance as a linchpin of seventeenth-century English colonial ideology. John Donne’s sermon "To the Honorable, the Virginian Company" and Christopher Brooke’s "Poem on the Late Massacre in Virginia"—both responses to a 1622 Powhatan attack that killed over three hundred English settlers—bear witness, I argue, to the decline of religious idealism and the ascendancy of commodity-based avarice as the foundation of England’s colonial ambitions in the New World.

The texts distinguish moderation from temperance: the former consistent with classical temperance-qua-affective restraint; the latter an ethos entangled in the mandates of time management, mercantile efficiency, and commodity culture. Donne, I argue, embraces moderation but eschews temperance, in an attempt to advocate evangelism rather than primitive accumulation to Virginia Company investors. Brooke, on the other hand, recommends preemptive and excessive violence, a response he calls temperate precisely because it facilitates material gain. As a critical and interpretive lens, temperance, thus redefined, offers new vantage into the history of secularization, colonial ambition, and proto-capitalistic ideology in early modern transatlantic culture.

DANIEL R. GIBBONS teaches at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.  He earned his MA and PhD at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and his BA at the University of Dallas in Irving, TX. His current book project examines lyric and liturgical attempts to reformulate national and spiritual communities in the midst of the Protestant Reformation in England using the rhetorical materials of confessional conflict. He is also currently working on articles on Shakespeare’s The Tempest and on John Donne’s sermons. His most recent publication (“Thomas Heywood in the House of the Wisewoman”, SEL 49.2 [Spring 2009]) explores Heywood’s surprising re-deployment of anti-theatrical rhetoric to defend the London theatres by eliding urban theatrical spaces and the protean space of a bawdy house in one of London’s northern suburbs in The Wisewoman of Hogsdon.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Conflicts of Devotion: Re-writing Religious Community in Spenser, Donne, and the 1559 "Book of Common Prayer"

Who will pray with me? Who will mourn with me? Who is my neighbor? The religious and political upheavals of the sixteenth century made it difficult for many English Christians to answer questions like these with confidence. The publication of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer marked a seminal moment in Western Christianity’s attempt to repair the spiritual and communal fractures that opened up during the Reformation era. This paper first examines the complex rhetorical textures of two liturgical ‘hot-spots’ in the English Prayerbook that were intimately connected to English spiritual and communal identity: the Holy Communion and the Order for the Burial of the Dead in order to gain a deeper understanding of how the ‘liturgical poetics’ of the Book of Common Prayer worked to refashion English concepts of spiritual community. The paper then explores the unintended rhetorical and spiritual outcomes of the Prayerbook’s liturgical rubrics in the hands of two poets who knew them well: Edmund Spenser and John Donne. The critical lens of liturgical poetics allows us to see more clearly some of the fertile contradictions that not only lay at the foundations of early modern English representations of community, but also energized the poetry of English Christians who attempted to write their way out of the liturgical and communitarian crises of the Reformation era.

JANE GROGAN is a Lecturer in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin (UCD). She received her PhD from the University of London, and has previously spent time at Pennsylvania State University as a Fulbright scholar. Her first book, Exemplary Spenser (Ashgate, 2009) was centred on The Faerie Queene, and she has recently edited a collection of essays on the Mutabilitie Cantos for The Manchester Spenser series (forthcoming April 2010). She is currently working on a book-length project on the Persian empire in the Renaissance imagination, tracing the interest and influence of both classical conceptions of Persia and more recent commercial and literary transactions and interactions in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

"A warre … commodious": Jacobean responses to Islamic schism

Religious schism leaves its mark on each and every literary text produced in the early modern period, whether in accommodations of form, scrupulous care with language, deep-seated concerns about authority of any kind, decisions of style and genre, its political imaginary, the nature of its appeals to readers and perhaps most of all, the recurring concern with its own authority as text. These hallmarks of early modern writing also become the grounds of its strengths, potentially unified objects carved out of the prevailing disunities of everyday life and belief. But the receptiveness of early modern authors and readers to foreign models of living with religious schism, the extent to which writers in the period have sought beyond Europe for exemplary models and even surrogate worlds in which to test these new, post-Reformation realities has not been fully explored. That the cultural encounters so avidly related in ethnographies, comparative histories and travel writing of the period, classical and contemporaries treatises and translations as well as Hakluytian catalogues and transactions, betray an abiding interest in non-European negotiations of religious conflict closely attuned to the needs of late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century readers is my contention. This interest finds informed expression on the Jacobean stage, both public and private. I propose first to identify the nature and sources of this interest in non-dramatic writing, before weighing the influence on a selection of Jacobean plays exerted by the tropes, paradigms and opportunities of these cross-cultural investigations of religious conflict in the lives of Mediterranean peoples at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My paper will be book-ended by readings of Marlowe’s densely-packed Tamburlaine plays and the plays and pamphlets surrounding the careers of the notorious Sherley brothers nearly twenty-five years later.

KENNETH HODGES investigates how romance and chivalric literature help shape and express conceptions of political community, including developing ideas of nation, in late medieval and early modern England. His publications include Forging Chivalric Communities in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Palgrave, 2005) and articles published or forthcoming in Modern Philology, Fifteenth-Century Studies, JEGP, Arthuriana, and PMLA. He received his B.A. from Williams College, an M.A. in mathematics from U.C. Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Michigan. Currently, he is an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Reformed Dragons: Spenser’s Response to "Bevis of Hampton" and "Le Morte Darthur"

Edmund Spenser refashioned scenes symbolizing religious conflict from medieval romances to craft ways of expressing England’s new Protestant struggles while maintaining connections to England’s cultural traditions. Book 1 of the Faerie Queene is a sustained response to Malory’s Grail quest, but the climax, the fight with the dragon, draws extensively on Bevis of Hampton, a romance that features prolonged engagement, sometimes friendly and sometimes violent, between Christians and Muslims, and in which the dragon haunts the borders between Christian and Muslim. Spenser also draws more briefly on dragons used by Malory in his story of the Grail to engage in a literary struggle between Christian and Catholic.

JENNA LAY joins the UT Department of English for a year of postdoctoral study.  She works on early modern English literature, with a particular focus on religious and political culture. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and her B.A. from SUNY Buffalo. Her first book project, "Beyond the Cloister: Catholic Englishwomen and Early Modern Book Culture," explores representations of nuns and recusant women in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature. The archival work for this project has been supported by fellowships from Stanford University, the Institute for Historical Research in London, the Huntington Library, and the Renaissance Society of America. Her other research and teaching interests include women's writing, book history, post-Restoration republicanism, and the early modern rhetoric of fancy and reason. (Email: jennalay@stanford.edu)

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

The Reformation of Obedience

Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess transplanted the language and imagery of Protestant propaganda directly onto the English stage. As a result of his dependence upon the pamphlets written in response to the Spanish Match, literary critics and historians have focused their attention on Middleton’s identifiable political allegory and its relevance to court politics, rather than engaging the broader implications of the play’s engagement with religious conflict. My project focuses instead on the pawns’ plot—a struggle over faith that is dominated by the experiences of two doctrinally distinct women—and argues for a view of international religious politics that acknowledges the significance of seemingly marginal figures. To establish my argument, I demonstrate how Middleton’s polemical representation of Protestant and Catholic discourses of religious obedience garners much of its narrative energy from the figure of the Black Queen’s Pawn, a Catholic woman who ultimately rejects clerical hierarchies and undermines the Spanish political threat. Middleton creates a sensationalist vision of religious conflict, but his play also reveals the burgeoning importance of Catholic Englishwomen in seventeenth-century religious and political culture. My readings of A Game at Chess and Gertrude More’s The Spiritual Exercises show how Catholic women’s interventions into debates over spiritual obedience and temporal authority helped to shape England’s post-Reformation literature of religious conflict.

JOSEPH NAVITSKY is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Miss., where he teaches Shakespeare, seventeenth-century literature, and early modern print culture. His book manuscript, The Marprelate Effect: Religious Conflict, Satire, and the Late Tudor State, examines the relationship between religious controversy and the rise of satiric discourse in both manuscript and printed work of the 1590s and beyond. His articles on the religious satirist Martin Marprelate and on verbal violence on the early modern stage have appeared or are forthcoming in Texas Studies of Literature and Language and English Literary Renaissance. In 2009, he co-led a seminar on “The Martin Marprelate Effect” at the Shakespeare Association of America conference in Washington, DC, and held a summer fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where he conducted research on state propaganda and pamphlet warfare in the Elizabethan period.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

The Dark Arts of Personal Destruction:Religious Conflict and Literary Production in the Late Tudor Era

In the aftermath of the notorious Martin Marprelate scandal, the roles of the polemicist and professional writer effectively merged in the decisive decade of the 1590s. This striking convergence accelerated after 1589 during a phase of intense confessional conflict when the Elizabethan Church enlisted professional writers to aid its official spokesmen in neutralizing the "Martinist" influence. Such efforts to humiliate, through a multimedia campaign of comic abuse, the architects of the Marprelate venture exerted a lasting effect on literary production in the period. In a short time, the polemicists Richard Bancroft and Matthew Sutcliffe succeeded in appropriating previously oppositional modes of protest and, in the process, helped impose key limits on the uses of satire and mass publication—key chronological and cultural contexts that have gone largely uncharted. The career of Thomas Nashe, who defended the Elizabethan bishops before exasperating them with his provocative satirical pamphlets, affirms the restraining influence of such thresholds, especially in regard to discursive license and generic development. In this regard, his work represents an ideal test case by which to measure the impact of official culture on the emergence of professional authorship. Specifically, the subtle "instruction" disseminated as part of Sutcliffe’s polemical project compelled Nashe—and a whole generation of writers struggling to build careers in the competitive marketplace of print—to extend the dark arts of personal destruction popularized by Marprelate and his anti-Martinist opponents. This trend, in turn, precluded the growth of a distinctly English tradition of carnivalesque writing in the early modern era and permanently intensified the verbal violence that late Tudor culture both lamented and eagerly promoted.

ANITA GILMAN SHERMAN is an Associate Professor of Literature at American University in Washington, D.C. She studies the intertwining of philosophy and theology typical of Renaissance skepticism, exploring its manifestation in literary forms and techniques. Her recent book, Skepticism and Memory in Shakespeare and Donne (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), examines the effects of skepticism on representations of memory, history and temporality in Shakespeare and Donne, arguing that in their hands the art of memory becomes an art of doubt. Her current book project, “Reforming Minds in the Age of Discovery,” extends her work on early modern epistemology, investigating the depiction of thinking in various authors ranging from Spenser to Milton. The project looks at scenes of intellectual breakthrough and insight, pursuing the way specific texts envision moments of truth in a world beset with uncertainty and religious violence. Professor Sherman holds degrees from Harvard University, Oxford University, and the University of Maryland. She has published essays on Garcilaso de la Vega, Michel de Montaigne, Thomas Heywood and Shakespeare in such journals as Sin Nombre, The Shakespearean International Yearbook, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England and Studies in English Literature.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Best Practices: Reclaiming Conformity in Edward Herbert’s "Of Truth"

This paper claims that Herbert of Cherbury’s metaphysics of conformity serves as the foundation of an ethical program designed to defuse religious conflict. It studies the rhetoric of conformity in De Veritate (1624), arguing that Herbert emphasizes its aesthetic dimension so as to promote his irenic agenda. Dissociating the term from its fraught political association with ecclesiastical sanctions, Herbert declares it a criterion of epistemological truth along with universal consent. By linking conformity with consent, he not only reclaims the moral high ground for conformity, but he also reinvents it as a collective ideal that will unite all peoples, even pagans. The paper compares the utopian usage prevalent in De Veritate and in his poetry with Herbert’s politique approach to conformity and consent in his histories, especially his neglected masterpiece, The Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth. Thanks to his experience as ambassador to Paris, Herbert is a shrewd student of international relations, attuned to shifting alliances and problems of dissent and religious conflict. His skeptical analysis of the onset of the Protestant Reformation offers an instructive counterpoint to his philosophical theorizing of conformity and consent, suggesting not a contradiction in his thought so much as an appreciation of the practical difficulties involved in attaining consensus on religious matters.