16th Century British (Literature)

While John Foxe’s sixteenth century Actes and Monuments (Book of Martyrs) is recognized as a foundational document for an emergent English national identity and a key record of early Protestant subjectivity, I argue that this document of historical progress actually recapitulates rather than discards earlier religious traditions. I demonstrate how The Book of Martyrs renovates the social and sacramental concept of the corpus mysticum, inherited from the Middle Ages, in specifically Protestant martyrological terms. Both textually and visually, Foxe’s work displaces sacramental theology from Eucharistic celebration to martyrological narrative in order to produce a reformed English corpus mysticum. To the extent that Foxe’s work pursues a political as well as theological agenda, this reading reveals how Tudor conceptions of the mystical body perpetuate a communitarian tradition formerly associated with the Catholic Mass.

In The Body in Mystery, Jennifer R. Rust takes the political concept of the mystical body of the commonwealth, back to the corpus mysticum of the medieval church. Rust argues that the communitarian ideal of sacramental sociality had a far longer afterlife than has been previously assumed. Reviving a critical discussion of Ernst Kantorowicz’s masterwork, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957), Rust brings to bear the latest scholarship, and expands the representation of the corpus mysticum through a range of literary genres as well as religious polemics and political discourses. She reclaims the concept as an essential category of social value and historical understanding for the imaginative life of the major literature of Reformation England. The Body in Mystery provides new ways of appreciating the always rich and sometimes difficult continuities between the secular and sacred in early modern England.

This paper illustrates a tradition of English renaissance stage characters that read or carry books on stage. Each of these characters exhibits a mental illness or mental deficiency of some sort. The paper argues that the book is specified as emblematic of an extreme mental condition (i.e. melancholy, foolishness, or madness). In the second part, the paper illustrates a tradition in earlier Catholic penitential exemla (i.e. tales promoting the sacrament of shrift, or penance) where a ghost (or a devil) carries a book containing all the sins of the protagonist of the exemplum and with which he will be judged at the end of his life. The paper argues that this tradition gives precedence to the books carried on stage in Shakespeare's Hamlet and to the ghost of Old Hamlet, and through the influence of Hamlet to the subsequent symbolic use of the book in the tradition illustrated at the opening of the paper.

We propose to read Francis Bacon's doctrine of the idols of the mind as an investigation firmly entrenched in his mental-medicinal concerns and we argue that an important role therein is played by the imagination. Looking at the ways in which the imagination serves to pinpoint several crucial aspects of the idolic mind permits us to signal the explicit or implicit cross-references between what in Bacon's tree of knowledge appear as distinct branches: the various faculties and their arts; the mind, the body, and their league; natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of man. The consequence of this rich picture of the diagnosis of the mind is an equally rich conception of the cure, which comprises both epistemic and physiological aspects. We extract the features of this integrated view out of Bacon's epistemological and medical natural historical writings, which we propose to read in tandem. We also propose a number of sources for Bacon's views on the imagination, whose variety accounts for the multivalent, sometimes elusive, but surely pervasive role of the imagination in the Baconian diagnosis and cure of the mind.

The rarity of female writers in seventeenth century England raises the querelle de femmes or the woman’s question and focuses attention on the few of them who have made an impact. Questioning the concerns and issues they chose to highlight amid the struggle to find a voice. This paper aims to show the effects seventeenth century politics and societal norms had on the work of the two most well known female writers of the time. Analysing the similarities and differences between Aphra Behn’s play The Rover and Margaret Cavendish’s The Covent of Pleasure with regards to women’s issues and which mattered the most.

This article traces how the interplay between visual and tactile knowledge both stimulates and constitutes masculine desire in The Winter’s Tale and in two of its most important sources, Book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Robert Greene’s popular romance, Pandosto (1588).  The figures of Orpheus and Pygmalion, and of course Pygmalion’s statue, form a mythical core around which a logic of voyeurism develops in all three works.  Ovidian themes remain mostly latent in Greene’s Pandosto, whose plot Shakespeare openly cribs, but in Shakespeare’s conclusion, the magical statue scene, the paradoxes of Ovid’s voyeuristic logic erupt and engulf the entire Pandosto plot. 

This article is available in .pdf through the MLA Bibliography and the Thomson-Gale Literature Resource databases.

Analysis of Gorboduc (Inner Temple, 1561-2) has long been focussed on the marital suitors to Queen Elizabeth I. This paper looks to resituate Gorboduc and the other Senecan-styled tragedies of the Inns of Court of the 1560s and 1570s within a framework established by the slightly earlier translations and productions of Seneca at the Universities. In this context the conflicting factions of the Elizabethan court at the beginning of her reign (and, as such, after Mary's) recommends a more religiously-aware political reading of Gorboduc than has previously be suggested.

This paper looks at the staging conventions of the trapdoor in the Senecan-styled tragedy of the Elizabethan period. It looks at the development of trapdoor use in the tragedies of the Inns of Court plays of the 1560s and 1570s, and at the slightly earlier University translations and productions of Seneca to establish a frame of reference for the representation of Hell, the underworld, and everything else that lurks beneath the trapdoor of the Elizabethan playhouse. Having established a set of classical underworld referents in the use of the trapdoor in the tradition established in the earlier scholarly settings of the Universities and Inns of Court the paper concludes by looking at the implications of these conventions for the use of the trapdoor in two of Shakespeare’s tragedies: Titus Andronicus, and Hamlet.

""This article examines the texts recounting the trials of Anne Askew (c.1521- 1546) and Anne Hutchinson (c.1591-1643). Anne Askew was burnt for eucharistic views contravening Henry VIII’s Six Articles, whilst Anne Hutchinson was a dissident exiled from the Puritan colony of New England. Scholarship on these two Annes usually focuses either on gender roles or on doctrinal controversy. This article proposes that gender and doctrine are intertwined in the concepts of activity and passivity invoked in these narratives and expressed through the metaphors of sowing seed, pregnancy and birth. These metaphors echo, in unsettling ways, Aristotle, Luther and the Bible.

Key words: heresy trials, female dissidents, Anne Askew, Anne Hutchinson""

""The unpublished work De rebus Dalmaticis (On Dalmatian History), (1602), by the Šibenik humanist and historian Dinko Zavorović (c. 1540-5 October, 1608), is often associated in histories of Croatian literature with a  literary scandal—the loss, under intriguing and unclear circumstances, of the first manuscript of this, the first history of Dalmatia.
Zavorović scholars who have dealt with this so-called scandal, however superficially, all reach the conclusion that the main culprit was a man named Robertus Bonaventura Britanus, thus agreeing with Zavorović’s own opinion.
Because of the scarce data on the aforementioned events,
our knowledge of what really happened to Zavorović’s manuscript remains limited, though the dearth of information does not justify the lack of any detailed scholarly analysis of Zavorović’s written testimony of his meeting with Robertus Bonaventura Britanus, and the basis of his accusation. Despite the crucial role Bonaventura undoubtedly played in
the events leading to the disappearance of the first version of the work De rebus Dalmaticis, the British priest remains almost completely unknown in the international and Croatian scientific community.
Although the main reason for this study is to present recent findings about Robertus Bonaventura Britanus, as well as to integrate the collected data into existing knowledge about the aforementioned literary scandal, the research itself will start with a detailed analysis of the text of two epistles Dinko Zavorović exchanged with Toma Suričević, the archpriest of Šibenik. The contents of these two short texts reveal details about the events that preceded the disappearance of the first version of Zavorović’s De rebus Dalmaticis. Taking into account the
above, this study has two main goals: first, to clarify at least partially the identity of Robertus Bonaventura Britanus and, second, to reconstruct the fragments of important and related events to shed new light on the disappearance of the first version of De rebus Dalmaticis. ""

BL Additional MS 17492, the so-called Devonshire Manuscript of Henrician courtly verse, is a prime example of how social and cultural phenomena contributed to early modern manuscript culture. Among the treasures of the Devonshire MS is a series of lyrics that chronicles a fascinating courtly intrigue of the 1530s: the illicit, clandestine marriage of Lord Thomas Howard and Lady Margaret Douglas, the headstrong niece of Henry VIII. After unpacking this historical drama, this essay advances the first substantial literary analysis of these poems by exploring the textual strategies through which Howard and Douglas attempted to negotiate the crown’s insistent management of their erotic life. This treatment of the Douglas-Howard lyrics provides new opportunity to consider how the Devonshire MS reflects and refracts the gender dynamics of the contemporary Henrician court.

This article sets Robert Sidney’s annotations in his copy of the Lipsius edition of C. Cornelii Taciti Opera Quæ Exstant (Antwerp, Christopher Plantin, 1585, British Library Shelfmark C.142.e13) in the context of humanist habits of reading and Sidney’s service in the Low Countries during the Earl of Leicester’s ill-fated campaigns of the mid-1580s.  Unlike Gabriel Harvey’s well-known annotations of Livy, Robert Sidney’s comments are mostly aimed at pragmatic purposes: navigating treacherous and paranoid courts, manipulating mob psychology (especially concerning mutinous troops), and dealing with sometimes tyrannical princes form a position of weakness.  A few of Sidney’s comments make direct reference to contemporary events, and these indicate an unsentimental if not wholly amoral appreciation of the Empire of Philip II, which he compares obliquely to England’s quasi-imperialist adventures in Ireland.  All references are keyed both to the Lipius edition and the Loeb translation of Tacitus.

This essay considers the place of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in the diplomatic imagination of Henrician England, and how the discourse of early modern diplomacy contributed to his (oft-hated) public political persona. In the flood of anti-Wolsey satires that emerged in the 1520s—such as Skelton’s Colin Clout and Why Come Ye Not To Court, Roy and Barlow’s Rede Me and Be Not Wroth, and the anonymous ballads An Impeachment of Wolsey and Of the Cardinal Wolsey—poets indict Wolsey’s diplomatic identity in a series of increasingly expansive charges. I argue that the concerns about diplomatic and political representation evident in the satires figure crucially into Wolsey’s ultimate ruin—and that the mechanism of his downfall must be understood in terms of contemporary diplomatic concerns.

In "So crewell prison," the poet earl of Surrey mourns both the death of an intimate boyhood friend—the duke of Richmond, illegitimate son and probable heir to King Henry VIII—and the loss of the adolescent life they shared together. While recent scholars have (rightly) emphasized the eroticized component of Surrey’s grief, this essay argues that “So crewell prison” is equally marked by a darker affective register: the sentiments of envy, jealousy, and aggression that fester in Surrey’s memory. By unpacking the ambivalent, rivalrous dynamics of “So crewell prison”—and reading them alongside Surrey and Richmond’s historical relationship—I offer an emotionally-inclusive, contextually-sensitive account of the poem’s elegiac operation, with aims to expand the focus of recent critical treatments.

This article argues that, although we tend to see in Wyatt’s oeuvre and his experiments with Petrarchism the beginnings of a significant new phase in the national literature of England, the evidence of three poems he wrote during his second embassy to the court of Charles V reveals, to the contrary, a series of sophisticated defensive gestures that arise in response to Wyatt’s perceived “contamination” by the imperial court. Comparing Wyatt’s poems, “Off cartage hee,” “Tagus, farewell,” and “So feble is the threde” to Garcilaso’s justly praised Elegy II and the “Sonnet from Carthage” throws into relief the varied inflections of Petrarchism caused by the differences between Wyatt’s and Garcilaso’s relations to the court of Charles V. Wyatt’s poems turn to Petrarchism as one means to articulate resistance against colonization at the hands of Charles V; Garcilaso’s poems use Petarchism in a more familiar way, to subvert the discourse of imperialism from within. A larger part of Wyatt’s poetry than is typically acknowledged exhibits well-developed Petrarchan characteristics, including the propensity for evoking its own “counterdiscourses.” It is, paradoxically, Wyatt’s success as a Petrarchan poet that makes his poetry appear, from our perspective, to stumble only partly toward a well-developed English Petrarchism, and it is the failure of Wyatt’s poetic attempts to claim an English subjectivity free of the taint of Charles V’s court that makes his poetry appear to be attempting to enrich his native English literature.

Available in .pdf format via MLA bibliography, JSTOR, and project MUSE.

A brief discussion of Hatfield House, Cecil MS, 83/67. This “abbreviatt of the examinacions concerninge the purpose of some Apprentizes to deliver the Earle of Essex out of the Tower" contains an understudied moment of literary/political interaction in the Essex rising.