2003 Abstracts

Frost, Kate (U. of Texas at Austin) Martha, Martha: Typology and Structure in the Memorandum of Martha Moulsworth

"My Name Was Martha: The Memorandum of Martha Moulsworth, Widdowe," a recently discovered 17th-century poem, presents exegetical and arithmetical underpinnings which align it with the premodern genre of spiritual autobiography. The poem covers Moulsworth's life from 1577 to 1632, providing autobiographical information--parentage, education, religious orientation, marital life. A work that displays artistry and structural coherence, it consists of fifty-five couplets, some bearing marginal notes which refer to Scriptural passages but which contain personal comments as well. I argue that proper examination of The Memorandum in the light of its number structure coupled with its Scriptural references demonstrates that the poem is intricately based on Moulsworth's life years, reflecting four stages of her Christian identity: childhood, the married state, widowhood, eternal life. The Scriptural references, especially to the typological figure of Martha, reify the arithmetical structure, pointing to the theme of conversion, an identifying factor in early spiritual autobiography.

Getz, Christine (U. of Iowa, Iowa City) Liturgical Function and Marketing Strategies in Orfeo Vecchi's Psalmi integri of 1596

Orfeo Vecchi, maestro di cappella at the Hapsburg chapel of Santa Maria della Scala in Milan, was one of the most influential composers of sacred music during the late sixteenth century. Vespers was among Santa Maria della Scala's most visible services, and featured the full participation of the choral beneficiaries on prescribed feasts. Although the chapter specialized in the performance of Ambrosian chant, the Psalmi integri of 1596, like many of Vecchi's other sacred collections, was more suitable to the Roman rite. Vecchi's strategy of creating an ordered polyphonic collection for universal liturgical use not only increased the marketability of the print, but also shaped liturgical practice at Santa Maria della Scala.

Glozer, Letitia (U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) Pietro Bembo and the Madrigal: Jacques du Pont's Cinquanta Stanze del Bembo (1545)

Jacques du Pont's Cinquanta Stanze del Bembo is the earliest datable large-scale madrigal cycle. Published in 1545, the cycle sets a 1507 Carnival text by Pietro Bembo. The unprecedented magnitude of this work has led to speculation about its creation. Although scholars once hypothesized Bembo himself might have commissioned the cycle, evidence points rather to Cardinal Giovanni Salviati, du Pont's employer. Though the occasion for which du Pont set Bembo's text is unknown, I believe I can build a compelling case, based on biographical evidence and musical style, for 1544 as the period of composition.

Hampel, Sharon (U. of Colorado, Boulder) No Agreement Shall Bind: Milton, Selden & the Argument for Divorce and Democracy

Milton proclaims in "The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce" that any covenant that does not fulfill its own terms may, like a contract, be broken. However, this idea is not unique to democratic speculation in the seventeenth century. The Scottish covenanted for their freedom from the Anglican Church. The English Revolution rallied to the cry of "No Bishop, No King." This paper argues that only Milton and one other seventeenth-century legal scholar, John Selden, made the Hebraic marital covenant the central metaphor for democracy.

Heller, Jennifer L. (U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC) "(For Now I Will Play the Blabbe)": Gender, Mimicry, and Queen Elizabeth

Queen Elizabeth inhabited feminine stereotypes as a woman, but her very position as ruler of England simultaneously unsettled this gendered role. Influenced by the work of French feminist Luce Irigaray, I explore the ways in which Elizabeth deployed the strategy of mimicry in speeches she delivered at three different points in her reign. By claiming negative feminine roles, she does not succeed in becoming these stereotypes. She also does not simply reject the feminine, hiding behind her princely robes. Her position as both a woman and a monarch unsettles the feminine cliches she utters, revealing that these stereotypes of woman are not, in fact, natural characteristics.

Henry, Lana (U. of Louisiana at Lafayette) "ÔTroubled with the Mother'" and the Father: The Politics of Breathing in The Tragedy of Mariam

In "Troubled with the Mother' and the Father: The Politics of Breathing in The Tragedy of Mariam" Lana Henry examines associative linguistic devices such as rhyming, repetition, metaphor inversion, and synecdoche through which Elizabeth Cary yokes together speech, sexuality, procreation, and life itself--in short, all generative processes--into one semantic category. In this linguistic system, the censorship, confinement, and control of women's speech becomes both symbol and vehicle for the more inclusive domination of women--their reproductive capacity, their relationships, their identities--in tyrannically patriarchal environment. In her essay Henry examines the dramatic and linguistic strategies Cary employs to illustrate how such an environment produces and is represented by the startling paradox of female smothering wombs and male generative tombs. Then, she contrasts the characters of Mariam and Graphina to illustrate Cary's conviction that even within such restrictive environments, women maintain the ability to access and manipulate a range of behaviors in order to create for themselves inhabitable, domestic spaces.

Herron, Thomas (Hampden-Sidney College) "From Rathlin's Massacre to Kenilworth's Majesty: A Reexamination of the Imperial and Georgic Strains of Elizabeth's Pageantry, 1575-1593"

Criticism focused on the political subtext of Elizabeth's stately pageants--crucial to the construction of her ideological persona--has traditionally stressed their domestic contexts, wherein courtly pastoral dramas mythologize and allegorize the realpolitik of the powerful English players involved in their production. This paper instead situates the major pageants of Kenilworth, Elvetham, and Rycote more fully within the discourse of imperial optimism that typified the outlook of many of Elizabeth's more aggressive courtiers, in particular the hard-line Protestant "Leicester" faction. In so doing it will explore how the agricultural, or georgic, component of Elizabeth's imperial ideology informed these spectacles.

Holtgen, Karl Josef (U. Erlangen-Numberg) Trade and Politics: John Wheeler (1560-1617), Secretary of the Merchant Adventureres at Middelburg and Author of A Treatise of Commerce (1601)

John Wheeler, secretary of the English Merchant Adventurers at Middelburg, is an interesting but elusive figure. His biography needs to be put on a firm base and I trust my research has settled these unresolved questions. W.A.S. Hewins, in a few scanty lines in the DNB, and Wheeler's American editor, George Burton Hotchkiss (in 1932), wrongly identified him with John Wheeler (c. 1553-c. 1610), MP and burgess of Great Yarmouth. It will be shown that the future Merchant Adventurer came from a prosperous commercial background and, like his father, Henry, was a citizen and grocer of London. John was baptized on 19 March 1560 in St Mary Magdalen, Milk Street. The will of his mother, Agnes, mentions him, in 1612, as Ôresiding at Middleburgh beyond the seas'. At his death in London in November 1617, his second wife, Sarah, was still living in Dort (Dordrecht). A year before, writing from Middelburg to James I's Secretary, Winwood, he had complained about being Ôhardly dealt with' by the Merchant Adventurers' Company after working twenty-seven years in their service (from c. 1589 to 1616). Apparently he lost his secretaryship in the upheavals of Alderman Cokayne's crack-brained and short-lived scheme known as the ÔNew Merchant Adventurers' Company'.

Throughout these years Wheeler's main duty was the promotion of English trade with the Continent, especially the export of cloth through the Company's Dutch staple town, Middelburg. This town had been chosen instead of Antwerp, about 1589, when English support for the Northern Low Countries increased. The work had to be carried out within an ever-shifting pattern of friendly, hostile or rival powers, such as England, the Netherlands, Spain, the German Empire and its princes, other European nations and port towns, and rival organizations, notably the Hanseatic League and the English Eastland Company. From time to time staples had to be removed, from Antwerp to Middelburg, from Emden to Stade and, later on, to Hamburg. Wheeler's Treatise on Commerce, published in 1601 in Middelburg and London and dedicated to Sir Robert Cecil, has been frequently used as a source of information on economic history, but it is really a lively and often biased piece of nationalist and corporate propaganda. Wheeler also collected ÔThe Lawes, Customes, and Ordinances' of the Merchant Adventurers' Company (British Library, Add. MS 18913). I have consulted about a dozen relevant letters and other documents from the State Papers and Historical Manuscripts series. Wheeler's activities have to be seen in the context of the Company's history and politics.

Howard, W. Scott (U. of Denver) Figural Historicity: Plato to Puttenham

This essay introduces a panel that highlights recent work from a graduate seminar at the University of Denver: "Poetics & Historiography." Following Plato's and Aristotle's quarrel between philosophy, poetry and history, Renaissance theorists variously accounted for the singular temporality of literary language. Only in the early modern era, though, does a coherent notion of 'figural historicity' emerge among both poets and historiographers. As a preface to the other papers in this session, this essay offers some notes toward a theory of figural historicity within a context of recent scholarship and pedagogy.

Howard, W. Scott (U. of Denver) Milton's 'Divorcive' Liberties: Ecclesiastical, Domestic or Private, Civil and Cosmological

Milton's model for commonwealth subjectivity neither separates 'private' from 'public' realms nor simply elides their divisibility, but posits a paradoxical formulation: that domestic liberty, as the nexus of ecclesiastical and civil liberties, is always already socially contingent. This epistemological inversion, I will argue, charges Milton's 'species' of liberty with transgressive energy and consequently grants the imagined subject of the divorce tracts and early political pamphlets increasing 'divorcive' liberty to reform public laws on the basis of private apprehensions of unwritten divine laws of grace and charity as well as in accordance with the individual's apposite faculties of conscience and reason.

Hunt, Maurice (Baylor U., Waco, TX) " Forward Backward' Time and the Apocalypse in Hamlet"

In Hamlet, Shakespeare creates the impression of " forward backward" time--that as certain characters progress in time they simultaneously regress back to the earliest stages of a human life or the world's beginnings. As old Polonius ages, he regresses to the silly habits of childhood, an individual reversion writ large in the play in the return of Danish (and London) society to immature, childish behavior and tastes. In the days and weeks that Hamlet pursues revenge, he seems to journey back through time to the beginnings of Classical and Judeo-Christian culture. In his case, his imaginative, memorial reversions through time bring wisdom rather than foolishness. Allusions to the Apocalypse in Hamlet provide a contemporary context for understanding the singular impression created by characters' reversions as they move forward through time. A conflation of two sixteenth-century ideas--those of the seven ages of humankind and of the seven ages of the world ending in Apocalypse--could suggest in the apocalyptic year 1600 that individuals and society might revert to the foolish behavior of childhood as time possibly passed through its last century. Wise Hamlet represents the exception.

Isaacson, Emily R. (U. of Missouri, Columbia) Relocating Devices: the Masque in Middleton's Your Five Gallants

This paper is part of my master's thesis in which I am exploring the use of the masque Middleton's city comedy. This particular paper is one of exploration of questions that must be addressed when dealing with the masque in Your Five Gallants. Here I discuss the movement of the masque from the court of James I to the public space of the theater. The difference in purpose and audience lend themselves to Middleton's tendencies towards distrust for the upwardly mobile merchant class, but also suggest his concern for marriage as an economic commodity: the masque reveals concerns for the commodification of the feminine.

Jayawardane, M. Neelika (U. of Denver) "for inferior, who is free?": Shakespeare's Richard III and Milton's Satan as Subalterns Who Speak Themselves into History

*No Abstract included*

Kearny, Jennifer (U. of Denver) Poet and Reader as Entelechein in Astrophil and Stella

Sidney's An Apology for Poetry suggests that poetry begins within the mind of the poet and comes to completion in the actions of his readers, and Astrophil and Stella dramatizes the negotiation between the agency of the poet to "lead a man to virtue" and the responsibility of his readers to "learn aright" (147, 145). Through Astrophil's self-delusion, self-sacrifice, self annihilation and self-restriction, Sidney places before his readers an internal struggle which encourages them to reinvent and "[re]figur[e] forth" themselves in contradistinction to his Ôdelivering forth" of "vice...and his cumbersome servant, passion" (A 147, 153).

Kelter, Irving A. (U. of St. Thomas) Cornelius Valerius (1512-1578) and the Dissolution of the Medieval Cosmos

One of the most important debates in early modern science concerned the physical nature of the cosmos and the traditional dichotomy between the heavens and the earth. Catholic and Protestant thinkers alike developed a "Mosaic Cosmology" or "sacred philosophy" that was founded on biblical and patristic authorities to counter the traditional "Aristotelian" cosmology with its "perfect" aether and "solid"/"hard" the celestial spheres. This paper focuses on Catholic authors and especially on the humanist and Louvain professor, Cornelius Valerius, in order to demonstrate the creation of a new, early modern "Mosaic Cosmology."

Khadaward, Hesham (U. of Nebraska-Lincoln) The Merchant of Venice: A Tragedy

*no abstract included*

Kinnett, Randy (Denton, TX) Busnois's On a grant mal/On est bien malade: An Unusual Combinative Chanson

The combinative chanson, written during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, is known for its combination of a courtly forme fixe setting with a simple popular song. Some past scholarship has stressed that the diametric opposition between contrasting elements most prominently defines the genre. However, that observation proves insufficient in some cases. In Busnois's On a grant mal/On est bien malade, the courtly and popular components correlate musically and textually, contributing to the technical and formal complexity of the piece. Here the chanson is distinguished not merely by juxtaposition but also reconciliation of disparate elements.

Klawitter, George (St. Edward's U.) The Discourse of Special Pleading: Sir Charles Blount and John Milton on Divorce

Although Blount and Milton each have an energetic and vivacity in their respective tracts, their purposes differ. Blount the royalist distinguishes three types of laws and appeals to the controller of civil law (the king) to go above the law and excuse one particular violation of the law. Milton the Puritan, champion of the individual conscience, appeals to no earthly magistrate for any special favor: he presumes his public will have the courage to see that the supreme law of sacred charity supersedes all other laws pertaining to marriage. Both men use special pleading, but their aims differ: the one argues for himself, the other for humanity. Blount the disciplined soldier argues within the confines of an established hierarchy where all power to bind and loose coalesces at the top. Milton the independent thinker argues outside the realm of societal tiers into a realm where the only ranks are the individual conscience and its God.

Kulmala, Daniel (Fort Hays S.U.) "Art thou but captain of a thousand horse": Itemization and the Practice of Place in Early Modern English Culture"

This study intends to explore the way in which the act of itemizing connects to ideas of place in early modern English culture. Both dramatic and anatomical texts provide examples of itemization and concerns with placement and displacement. Anatomical texts, like Helkiah Crooke's Microcosmographia, offer many examples of the equation between body and place, the body being a microcosm within the macrocosm of the universe. A primary method for identifying anatomy is through itemizing not only the body parts but also their function in relation to the place of the body. A similar practice of itemization occurs in the drama of this period. In plays like Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, Sir Epicure Mammon provides list after list of the items he will procure and activities he will perform once he obtains the philosopher's stone, underscoring the prestigious place he imagines he will attain. In Mammon's case, these items will secure his place. Yet itemization can also signify a loss of place, an act of displacement. In Marlowe's Tamburlaine, characters use the items of power and prestige of the kings who are conquered by Tamburlaine to inflate the strength of Tamburlaine. In this sense, Tamburlaine's power exceeds all the kings whose gold and armaments are merely the shadows of power. Other dramatic texts under consideration include Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday and Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.

Leverett, Emily (Ohio S.U., Columbus) It Only Takes Two: The (re)Assertion of Heterosexual Couples in A Midsummer Night's Dream

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the driving force of the play is the creation or recreation of heterosexual couples at the expense of the other relationships in the play. The critical view that the main sacrifices are by women and that the women are reinscribed into the patriarchal system and left in silence, while useful, fails to fully recognize the repositioning of the men in the play. All of the characters move from barren relationships into more fertile heterosexual relationships. Both the men and women participate in these shifts as Theseus, Egus and Demetrius change their social relationships and Hermia, Helena and Titiana give up female friendships, all in favor of heterosexual marriage.

Levy-Navarro, Elena (U. of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Whitewater, WI) "John Bale and the Revelation of Sodomy"

In describing his design for his Actes or unchaste examples of the Englysh Votaryes (Wesel, 1546; London, 1551 and 1560), John Bale outlines the four parts of his planned work (which was to remain only two parts). His understanding of history owes something to the well established medieval tradition of antifraternalism, in which the proliferation of vice was often seen as a sign of the imminent Apocalypse (Szittya 183). Vulgar antifraternalism that was well established in medieval English poetry made use of sexual innuendo and invective to underscore such multiple vices (King, Milton 269). As Bale writes, "The third part wil declare the crafty upholding of their proud degrees and posessions, by the witty and subtil slaightes of the .iiii. Orders of frires. And the forth part shal manifest their horrible fal in this latter age by the grounded doctrins of the true preachers and wryters" (Bale, First Part, iii). According to Bale's view of history, the church came under the hold of the Antichrist at the millennium, something evident in the rise of a number of false doctrines and practices (King, English Reformation 63-4; Happe 29; Fairfield 94-6). Here, I will focus more specifically on the central role that sexual invective plays in marking the Church of Rome as the false church. In particular, I will reconsider the way that sodomy functions for Bale as a mark of the false church.

McKinney, Timothy R. (Baylor U., Waco, TX) Music and Rhetoric in Vicentino's Solo e pensoso

The principles of classical rhetoric provide theoretical tools that sixteenth-century music theorist Nicola Vicentino applies to music from conception through performance. A close reading of Vicentino's own musical compositions reveals specific ways in which he puts these general principles into practice. The paper examines Vicentino's setting of Petrarch's Solo e pensoso and the manner in which the three most unusual features of its musical style stem from Vicentino's engagement with the text and its rhetorical presentation. In each case, Vicentino went beyond the norm in order to better place the matter before the eyes. In his treatise and in his compositions, Vicentino codified a rudimentary musical rhetoric in theory and practice in a way that was unique up until his time.

Malpezzi, Frances M. (Arkansas S.U., State University, AR) Sylvester Militant: Battering Tobacco for God and Country

In Tobacco Battered Josuah Sylvester projects himself as the Christian militant poet fighting for his Prostestant God and king. His poem is a weapon in the war against Satan and his Spanish and Papist temporal minions, iconically represented by tobacco. In his poetic jeremiad Sylvester delineates the physical, mental, social, and spiritual ill effects brought about by indulgence in the weed antithetical to God's herb of grace, suggests the eventual cleansing of the Augean stable of England by the herculean King James I, and prophesies the worldly and divine retribution that will come to offending tobacconists.

Manes, Claire (Louisiana S.U.-Lafayette) Richard's Approach to Time in Shakespeare's Richard II

If Elizabeth I identified herself with the monarch Richard II, perhaps it behooves us to look once again at the play of the same name. One approach to this study is to examine the concept of time as Richard experiences it. Time figures prominently in Shakespeare's play Richard II. The word itself is used at least 34 times in the course of the five acts and Richard himself uses the word twenty one times including nine times in his final soliloquy. Time is not simply spoken of in the play; it significantly shapes Richard as he comes to an understanding of the role it plays in his life and the way in which he himself has been a poor steward of it. This paper examines Richard's sense of time as it develops in the play. The analysis moves from Richard's misreading of sacramental time to his experience of secular time and finally to the unity of the two views of time in the prison soliloquy. The paper analyzes Richard's first regal assumptions about the limitlessness of his time and power as he wields it royally, convinced that he is king by divine right. Moving from a reading of the pomp and glory of the early play, the paper examines the breakdown that occurs as Richard realizes his time has run out. It then looks at the lessons that Richard learns and expresses in his prison soliloquy where he comes to an admission of his guilt and culpability, an awareness that he has wasted time and that time has thus wasted him. In this new knowledge he comes not only to express guilt and responsibility for his actions but to experience grace and love that ennoble him and arouse him to a final act of commitment before his death. He dies then, not a king but a man who has acted and who is mourned by his usurper who regrets the passing of Richard's untimely bier.

Mann, Richard G. (San Francisco S.U.) El Greco, the Avant Garde, & Sexuality: Towards a Queer Reconstruction of El Greco

During the first half of the twentieth century, several prominent avant-garde writers and artists (including Cocteau, Garcia Lorca, and Hemingway, among others) proposed that queer sexuality directly inspired the unique artistic style of Domenikos Theotokopoulos, usually called El Greco. Their conception of El Greco as the archetypal queer artist was not even mentioned in the numerous scholarly texts, published during the twentieth century. Yet, an awareness of this possibility may explain the intensity with which scholars tried to establish his heterosexuality. A review of documents, concerning El Greco's career, suggests that Francesco Preboste (usually identified as his servant) was his life partner. The apparent validity of the earlier intuitive suppositions about the artist's sexuality raises questions about the relevance of the "usual" scholarly methods for the recovery of the private lives of historical artists. A queer analysis may provide new insights into El Greco's achievements.

Martin, Chris (San Marcos, TX) "The Pot's Cure: Hidden Pleasures and the Androgyny of Desire in The Adventures of Master F.J."

George Gascoigne's The Adventures of Master F.J. presents from the very beginning the trope of the desirous male as poet/hunter. The purpose of this essay is not to debate pervasiveness of such a metaphor or to deconstruct the terms of the trope to reveal its underside. Resisting such a temptation, this essay presents a counter-trope--the desirous male as the effeminate "'pothecary's pot"--which, rather than canceling out the more predominant (and strictly masculine) figure of the poet/hunter, exists alongside this figure, in a rather irrational manner, suggesting the androgynous nature of the Gascoignean conception of male desire (Gascoigne 41)

Matthews, Steven (U. of Florida, Gainesville, FL) " Implications of the Genesis Fall Narrative for Francis Bacon's Instauratio Magna"

It has been common to assume that Francis Bacon was a Calvinist in some form. However, Bacon's understanding of the Genesis Fall narrative renders his writing clearly incompatible with Calvinism. Bacon interpreted the fall narrative of Genesis as describing a double fall for mankind: a spiritual fall on the one hand, and a material fall on the other. While the solution to the first was found in the Church, the solution to the second fall would be effected at the proper providential time through a reformation of scientific method. This theological reading was required for Bacon to develop his program for the reform of sciences.

May, Steven (Georgetown College) "The Queen Addresses Her Subjects: The Tilbury and 'Golden' Speeches'"

I introduce new evidence to argue that the dual textual states of Elizabeth's Tilbury speech bear witness to a single address that she delivered on the second day of her visit to the camp. Both textual and contextual evidence suggests that Leonel Sharp's version of the speech as set forth in the Cabala of 1654 is as close as we can get to the Queen's actual words on that occasion. I next analyze what the texts of Elizabeth's 'Golden Speech' reveal about how they were transcribed. I conclude that the fourth state of this address as edited in Hartley's Proceedings in Parliament represents the Queen's words as nearly as they can be recovered.

Melchior, Bonnie (U. of Central Arkansas, Conway, AR) King Lear and Ran: A Sea Change into Something Rich and Strange

Comparing Shakespeare's King Lear with Kurosawa's Ran dramatizes differences between Eastern and Western views of the individual and of suffering. Although both works suggest that betrayal and violence threaten the stability and meaning of the whole society and of life itself ("ran" means chaos), the 1985 Japanese film is more transformation than adaptation. Visual images throughout the work signal the importance of interior space and also a different stance toward the autonomy of the individual. The emblematic center in Ran is not the heath scene where Lear howls his defiance at the universe but rather a scene where Lear (Hidetora) sits in motionless meditation amid flames that are engulfing his world.

Meyer, Shannon L. (U. of Nebraska-Lincoln) Shakespeare's Political Commentary: Representations of Tudor Queens in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors, The Winter's Tale, and King Henry VIII (All is True)

*no abstract included*

Mills, Dan (Georgia S.U., Atlanta) Jonson's Volpone and Failed Self-Fashioning

Two fifteenth century Italian publications, Baldesar Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier (1528) and Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince (1513), attempted to establish specific rules and regulations for the expected behavior of Italian citizens; both books are directed at people of noble birth, establishing expectations for Italian courtesans and princes, respectively. This attempt at identity formation through publication is in keeping with an increasing focus on the strength and power of the individual in the Renaissance. The new historicists, on the other hand, assert that this belief in individual autonomy is in fact a myth, holding that society and culture controlled the development outcome of all citizens in the period. Ben Jonson's Volpone displays a greast deal of influence from The Book of the Courtier and The Prince in its portrayals of Venetians; numerous characters in the play attempt to " self-fashion" themselves to the societal expectation laid out in detail in these two works. At times attempting to assimilate into both roles, these characters display a varying degree of success in their endeavors.

Narveson, Kate (Luther C.) "Selected Scripture Sentences: Gender and composition in the meditations of Lady Grace Mildmay"

As titles from Silent but for the Word to This Double Voice indicate, scholars interested in writing by 16th-century English women have paid significant attention to the question of how women writers established their authority to write. There has been less focus, though, on the question of how, once authority is established, women understood what reading and writing involved. One useful exception is Margaret Hannay's recent account of the way that in Psalm translation, a woman "superimposes her own subjectivity on the scripted speaker" so that "reading became rewriting" in her image (Write or be Written 116). Hannay recognizes that this way of reading the Psalms was in fact characteristic of men as well as women, but argues that it was particularly central to women because of other cultural restrictions on women's speech. This paper will look at a related religious genre, the meditative soliloquy, as it was practiced by Lady Grace Mildmay, in order to discuss what can be claimed about her use of Scripture in composing her own meditations, and whether her practice can be seen as gendered female.

Certainly, Mildmay's meditations are a tissue of phrases from Scripture, and this sort of patchwork has been seen as particularly characteristic of women's art, but I wish also to locate this practice in the context of the way that Protestant devotional literature talks about and models the use of Scripture in meditative practice. This discussion will ask how, if meditation through Scripture pastiche itself is practiced broadly by both men and women, it may still be useful to conceive the practice in terms of gender? I will propose that while the practice does reflect the needs of women (and lower status men) to establish an authoritative voice, we also should not neglect the influence of early modern notions of reading. The practice of commonplacing and the pursuit of copia, bearing the footprint of male humanist culture, shape the ways that even new initiates into the ranks of reader and writer are encouraged to consume and produce devotional texts. Even with her carefully circumscribed godly gentlewoman's education and choice of subject matter, and her particularly female way of understanding her authority to write, Mildmay's writing bears traces of male humanist literary habits that we can also see in devotional practice more broadly.

Northway, Kara (U. of Kansas, Lawrence) The Two Noble Kinsmen: Exceeding the " compass" of Politics, Chastity, and Romance

Shakespeare's The Two Noble Kinsmen uses the idea of " compass" to test notions of measure, proportion, moderation, and limits. The 1613 play surpasses the boundaries of its Chaucerian source, but it also transcends limits of time (especially the season of year), explores the limits of a ruler's compass, and exceeds the expected moral compass of its romantic characters, particularly the Jailor's Daughter. We can find in King James's Basilicon Doron a useful and widely known outlining of the measure required of a leader. This tendency of the play to exceed boundaries exaggerates the masque-like qualities found in the romances written a few years before.

Oliver, Matt (Southwest Missouri S.U., Springfield) The 1606 Oath of Allegiance and Power "Plays": James I, John Donne, and Performative Authority in Language

The 1606 Oath of Allegiance had a tremendous impact on the developing concepts of authority and individual conscience in the early Seventeenth Century, an impact that extends to Donne's poetics. Examination of the text of the oath itself reveals that it establishes authority and loyalty through a linguistic performance that requires a statement of the king's inherent, natural God-given authority, thereby masking the oath-taker's role in constructing royal power. Donne's "Womans Constancy" exhibits a similar tension in its poetic structure by implying that promises are performative while at the same time suggesting that the language of promises has an essential, natural meaning.

Ortega, James (U. of Louisiana-Lafayette) "'The Mousetrap' in Hamlet"

The Mousetrap" in Hamlet presents a metadramatic representation in the form of a play scene that explores the limits of theatricality by suggesting that realities, theatrical and worldly, may be created through the process of acting. Before Claudius watches " The Mousetrap," he is fairly secure in his crime; no one threatens him directly, and although he frets over Hamlet, Claudius takes no specific action to " cover his tracks," so to speak. After Claudius watches " The Mousetrap," however, he is forever altered; he no longer feels secure about his crime and he behaves, acts, and re-acts just as if his guilt was exposed for all to see. There is no specific reason why Claudius should react so vehemently to a dramatized action, but he does, and his reaction teaches us something about the nature of theatrical and worldy realities. This paper explores how such realities are constructed, elevated, and diminished.

Osherow, Michele (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) "'Give ear o' princes': Deborah, Elizabeth and the Right Word"

Elizabeth I was hailed an English Deborah from the start of her reign until after her death. Though numerous historians note early modern England's regard of Elizabeth as an English Deborah, little study has been made which actively investigates Renaissance perception of this biblical character. This paper unpacks the characterization of Elizabeth as Deborah, exposing the anxieties implicit in the comparison. In particular, I attend to early modern perceptions of the ways speech functions to affirm Deborah's authority and how, in turn, that is reflected in early modern representations of Elizabeth.

Parrish, Paul A. (Texas A&M, College Station, TX) Fitting Paradise Lost to an Audience Not So Few: Organizing a Public Reading of Milton's Epic Poem

In the Spring 2002 semester, students in my Milton classes at Texas A&M University intitiated, organized and participated in a day-long public reading of Paradise Lost. My paper describes our experience, from our beginning considerations (when? where? Who will read? How much? etc.) Through the event itself, and offers some thoughts about its value and success.

Pennington, Giles (Albuquerque Academy) Giovanni Bellini's St. Francis in the Frick Collection: An Unnecessary Mystery

In 1964 one of America's foremost art historians published a landmark monologue on Giovanni Bellini's St. Francis in the Frick Collection. Millard Meiss' piece was a masterful analysis of the painting in which he argued for a new interpretation of the picture. Ironically, Meiss unwittingly set the stage for further interpretation even as he attempted to settle arguments over the meaning of the painting. Taking seriously the groundbreaking nature of Meiss' analysis, the author argues that the Princeton professor's insights into the painting were correct, but that his conclusions were wrong. According to the author's argument, Meiss fails to understand the correct setting of the painting in the Franciscan tradition and therefore misreads the picture.

Phillips, Joshua (U. of Memphis) Preface to Early Modern Alienation: Gamelyn, Lodge, Shakespeare

When, in writing Rosalind, Thomas Lodge decided to name one of his characters Aliena, he knowingly alluded to one of the major crises of Tudor England: the alienability of land. In As You Like It, Shakespeare appropriated Aliena and, as I show, finely elaborated the issue of dispossession that Lodge, and his textual precursor, " The Tale of Gamelyn," had raised. That process, I argue, gives us a significant insight into how sixteenth-century writers, including Lodge and Shakespeare, sublimated important cultural conflicts into their own decorous literary artifacts, as well as into how literary texts from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries made alienation matter.

Plant, Alisa (Yale U., New Haven, CT) Confessional Violence in Early Seventeenth Century France

My paper will investigate the persistence of sectarian violence in France after the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes (1598), focusing on a Huguenot raid on a Catholic monastery near Bordeaux. An anonymous account of this raid was quickly published, and it details a broad spectrum of violence, ranging from physical assaults to arson to the active wrath of God. In many ways, the raid is evocative of the sharp confessional violence that characterized the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century. My paper examines the political and religious implications of this episode.

Prewitt, Kendrick Wheeler (U. of the Ozarks, Clarksville, AR) "Perkins, Puritanism, and Method"

My presentation is part of a larger project of mine, entitled "Renaissance Quarrels with Method," in which I argue that method was becoming an increasingly flexible and useful way of organizing treatises and managing thought. My interest in this presentation is in the intersection of method with religious thought and discourse. In previous work I have explored the resonances of method in the prose treatises of Gabriel Harvey, Francis Bacon, and Robert Burton, to find that "method" --the notion of how people organize their thoughts, words, and actions--was a highly flexible notion in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. One recent study of 16th century divine William Perkins characterizes him as "fully a Ramist Puritan," citing as evidence the Ramist method by which Perkins organized his prose treatises. That is, Perkins would typically arrange and divide the material at hand--a passage of scripture, a discourse on preaching, his treatise on casuistry--resolving issues within one's conscience--accordingly by dividing the subject matter into progressively more specific and detailed pairs. It is certainly beyond dispute that Perkins relentlessly used method--Ramist or otherwise--to order his treatments of the cases of conscience as well as his biblical commentaries and his manual of preaching. While this effort is certainly a contribution to Perkins studies, my interest in method in the time period is less in defining a particular brand of method than in broadening the question to explore the significance of method. I would like to consider Perkins's allegiance to Ramism and "method" in a broader context, in which "method" was becoming a more flexible notion during the period.

Rampone, W. Reginald, Jr. (Lousiana S.U. at Eunice) Mamillia, "The Flower of Venice," in Robert Greene's Early Modern Prose Romance, Mamillia, Part I

In "Mamillia, 'The Flower of Venice," in Robert Greene's Early Modern Prose Romance, Mamillia, Part I," I argue from a feminist perspective taht Pharicles uses Petrarchan rhetoric as a means of containing and controlling female sexuality for his own erotic devices. While Pharicles praises Mamillia as any young lover would with hyperbolic paeans of to her beauty, she is acutely aware of the highly problematic protestations of his affection, for she does not know whether he is using discourse to deceive her or his words are an accurate index of his true intentions; after all, she expresses epistemological uncertainty as to "whether his words are faithful or flattering, or in earnest or jest" (24). At the time that Pharicles uses Petrarchan discourse, he also deploys highly eroticist militaristic metaphors in which a woman's body is compared to a city or fort which is attacked and sacked. Mamillia, who is no fool, realizes that "after Medea had yeelded, {Jason} the fort, and in lieu of lvoed, killed her with kindnesse" (26). No sooner has Pharicles, in Mamillia's words, "wonne the castle that many haue beseiged," does he pursue Pubia as his "new Goddesse," and he recommences his invidious cycle.

Razovsky, Helaine (Northwestern S.U., Natchitoches, LA) Money, Class, and Spiritual Conduct in Seventeenth-Century England

Seventeenth-century English spiritual conduct books illustrate the range of uses of wealth and poverty for spiritual and political manipulation. In most cases, spiritual conduct books support the social, economic, and political status quo of the period's society by encouraging the poor to believe they are more likely to be saved than the rich. Apparently, the prospect of heaven is meant to substitute for adequate nutrition and housing in the world. In rare cases, however, writers of spiritual conduct books encourage the possibility of change by undermining the relatively rigid hierarchy of the early modern period.

Reiner, Martha (Miami-Dade Community College) Market Transformation and Critical Colonial Discourse in Chapman, Jonson, and Marston's Eastward Ho

Eastward Ho, a City Play from 1604-05 about a goldsmith's apprentice and a gallant starting a Virginia venture through the circulations of the gallant marrying the goldsmith's daughter, climaxing with a shipwreck dumping the cashed-out dowry in the Thames and then ending with a series of redemptions, critically represents free trading impulses, trade regulation, and self-regulation of trade through guild rules and culture. The play contains traces of a national identity emerging juxtaposed with interest and loyalty systems of kingdoms and cross-national dynasties. Satirically challenging accelerated colonization, Eastward Ho addresses changes in trading patterns, including the rise of slave trading and the flow of gold and other precious metals as mercantilism emerged.

Reinert, Dana and Jerome Dees (Kansas S.U., Manhattan) "Parts is Parts": The Blazon in Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World

*No Abstract included*

Riehl, Anna (University of Illinois at Chicago) "'A Seeming Seat for Princely Grace': The Politics of Describing Elizabeth I"

An examination of descriptions of the aging Elizabeth I by her contemporaries, this presentation focuses on the logic of the inconsistencies in these texts. More or less willingly, both foreign and domestic observers end up having to grapple with the imperfections of the queen's appearance. Although many stylistic choices betray the authors' individual representational agendas, the resulting rhetorical patterns turn out to be surprisingly similar. Moreover, it is the affinity of these rhetorical patterns that engenders the ultimate effect of these descriptions: the shortcomings of the queen's body natural are veiled and redeemed by the magnificence of her body politic.

Rosendale, Tim (Southern Methodist U., Dallas, TX) The Liturgical Dialect

This paper argues that the function of liturgy in early modern English culture, and indeed the English Reformation itself, is misunderstood when reduced to a triumph of either the individual or the collective order. Rather, these forces must be understood in a more complex dialectical relation to one another. The Book of Common Prayer provides a particularly important and illuminating instance of this: in it, these forces are textually suspended into a relationship of mutually-sustaining, and reciprocally-constituting, tension.

Ruiter, David (U. of Texas at El Paso) "Anon, anon, sir': The Economy of Authority in the Boar's Head Tavern"

Generally, the tavern in Henry IV is seen as Hal's playground or playhouse, and there is certainly good reason for that view; following Hal's "imitate the sun" speech (1 Henry IV, 1.2), the audience feels assured that what they witness in the Boar's Head is merely an act, or a series of actions, put on for the benefit of the Prince's overall political plan. Because we know that Hal becomes the glorious Henry V, the plan appears to work, and therefore the bar-room action is neatly categorized as instrumental-to-the-kingship. Still, viewing the Boar's Head as a combination of recess from responsibility and rehearsal for kingship does not exactly match with our first experience in the bar. Here (1 Henry IV, 2.4), Hal opens the scene, enthusiastically explaining to Poins how he will eventually "command" his new-formed "brothers," those loggerhead drawers Tom, Dick and Francis, but the Prince immediately goes on to relate to Francis in such a way as to strain any definition of either brotherhood or commanding rule. For instance, when he attempts the jest on Francis, the waiter does become flummoxed, but ultimately returns to his most pressing duty-serving the thirsty patrons; and when Hal tries to call the waiter a second time, the Prince finds himself now treated as a common customer. The rationale for master, the vintner, to service first. Now and later, the tavern is not especially instrumental to Hal's kingship, unless it is useful as a dramatized object lesson in royalty's peripheral, belittled, and tenuous authority. My paper will revisit the issues of authority and brotherhood in Henry IV, but it will do so specifically in terms of the tavern and its own economy of authority.

Salamon, Linda Bradley (George Washington U., Washington D.C.) "Vagabond Veterans: The Roguish Company of Martin Guerre and Henry V"

Among the vagrant beggars scorned as "masterless men" in 16th-century England, military veterans played an elusive role. As all cultural practices were under transformative pressure, army life too was revolutionized; ex-soldiers, caught between violent action and uncertain reintegration, offered special menace to society. I explore veterans as commodified bodies, initially in such 'rogue' pamphlets as Harman's Caveat for Common Cursitors (1566) with their ascriptions of transgressive begging, drinking, gambling, and promiscuity. I unpack the case of Martin Guerre which, in Montaigne's anecdote and Vigne's film, incorporates constitutive features of roguery--imposture, high risk, folk ritual, illicit sexuality--and ends with a veteran's execution. Henry V presents hardened veterans who, motivated for the French campaign by profiteering and looting, follow the same signature practices; post-war, the leading entrepreneur will become pimp, thief, and faker of war-wounds. Such representations police veterans by characterizing them as outlaw objects.

Schneider, Brian (U. of Manchester, UK) "Brother-sister incest in Renaissance Drama: Desire, Power and Conflict"

Of the various forms of incest depicted, discussed or alluded to in English Renaissance Drama, erotic desire between siblings is the most prevalent. The conflicts arising from this form of forbidden sexual congress involve religious, social and political arguments as well as complex gender issues. The transgressive potential of incestuous urges--conscious, subconscious, fulfilled or avoided--is particularly examined in a number of plays in which a brother rather than a father tries to force his sister to marry a man of his selection, instead of allowing her to follow her own inclination. The conscious motives for such selection include the gaining of wealth and status, or the satisfaction of honour, but the more provocative reasons often involve a sublimation of desire for his sister by giving control of her sexual life, through marriage, to the person of whom he approves. My paper explores this form of sibling erotic desire as the most interesting and potentially most transgressive form of incest within the family using it as a paradigm for larger issues of power, domination and repression.

Shawcross, John T. (U. of Kentucky) Form, Tone, and Circumstance: Poetic Meditation

In 1954 with revision in 1962, Louis Martz analyzed some seventeenth-century poetry as reflecting the practice of methodical meditation, drawn largely from the Spiritual Exercises of the Jesuit order. The revision primarily replaced the concept of a "meditative style" with the genre "meditative poem." The analysis pointed to the significance of form and tone (and thus intentionality) that not only devotional but also secular poems might evidence, setting up a level of interpretation and circumstance for a poem that up to that time had been little recognized. The Catholic underpinnings created antagonisms, which argued a Protestant poetic at work instead. Putting such controversy aside, I return to Professor Martz's major contribution in The Poetry of Meditation to the literary criticism of poetry: the compositional analysis of a poem as to form, tone and circumstance of writing. Discussed as examples of the meditative poem, including ones that may be labeled "devotional," "religious but non-devotional," and "secular," are poems by Philip Pain, Edward Benlowes, John Saffin, and Edward Herbert, Lord Cherbury. Such analysis yields a quite different dimension from that offered in past criticism.

Shipers, Carrie " "Murder, mischief, or civil sword at length" : Videna and the Politics of Estragnement in Gorboduc

My paper examines how Videna's actions, and their consequences, dramatize the divisions--between her natural female body and her traditionally male authority, between her private desires regarding marriage and children and the very public issue of succession--utilized by Queen Elizabeth in her efforts to maintain her authority over her body natural. My conclusion is that through Videna, Norton and Sackville illustrate the disastrous consequences that can befall a kingdom in which the body natural and the body politic act independently of one another.

Simons, Louise Imaging the Life of Lettice Morison Cary, Second Viscountess Falkland

Lettice Morison married Lucius Cary in the summer of 1629. Her older brother Henry had just died, an even commemorated by Ben Jonson with "To the Immortall Memorie, and Friendship of That Noble Paire, Sir Lucius Cary, and Sir H. Morison." Lucius Cary memorialized his friend's death with "An Elegie on the death of my dearest (and all most only) friend Syr Henry Moryson," which he used as a tool to woo Lettice Morison. The life of Lettice Morison Cary, who became second Viscountess Falkland, is interesting in its own right, and fortunately we have notations and poems, as well at the funerary account, The Returns of Spiritual Comfort and Grief in a Devout Soul, compiled by her chaplain, John Duncon, after her death in 1646.

Smith, Kimball (U. of Iowa) Mapping Gold and Illusion: Sir Walter Ralegh's ÔDiscoverie of...Guiana'

As an explorer of the New World, trying simultaneously to recreate and diminish Spain's rich successes and having only a passing acquaintance with the new region of the Americas, Sir Walter Ralegh was forced to practice a kind of sleight of hand on the land he was describing. In the report of his 1595 journey, "The Discoverie of the large, rich, and bewtiful empyre of Guiana, " he claimed to reveal to his audience a land that was "large, rich, and bewtiful," yet Ralegh himself had no way of being sure of any but the last of these. In the way he presents this new land, the way he repeatedly offers its promise in place of its reality, Ralegh is drawing on a new rhetorical effort to master the sprawling vastness of the world, rhetoric which is only possible because of the new epistemology of precision and objectivity mobilized by the recent development of the "new geography" in England.

Smith, Rachel Hostetter (Taylor U., Upland, IN) Old Age and the Venetian Dogate-A Republican Ideal?

This paper will consider the way in which Renaissance portraits of the doge of Venice manifest the qualities of the ideal republican statesman which were first codified during the Roman Republican period and then embraced by the Venetians of the Renaissance. As one surveys the corpus of these portraits, one is struck by their uncanny sameness. In spite of the care with which each man's individual physiognomic characteristics are rendered, they share a common demeanor, an attitude which reflects the subject's membership in an exclusive fraternity whose mission it was to ensure the stability and continuity of the Republic.

Stillman, Robert E. (University of Tennessee at Knoxville) "Resisting Readers: Elizabeth, Hermeneutics, and The Quenes Majesties Passage"

The rhetoric that informs The Quenes Majesties Passage represents the ideology of the Elizabethan state at the moment of its inception and derives its authority from the Verbum Dei. As such, it constitutes an essential component of what Lacan might call the symbolic order of Elizabethan England, a map of the culture's political unconscious. It is a map, however, whose topography is shaped by the historically specific linguistic assumptions of English humanists. Awareness about those assumptions gives better historical substance to abstract discourse about the symbolic order and a corrective to theoretical claims about the determining power of ideologies.

Strong, David (U. of Texas at Tyler) Supra-Natural Creation in Dunbar's The Goldyn Targe

William Dunbar's The Goldyn Targe occupies a significant place in courtly love poetry. As critics point out, the speaker undergoes great emotional upheaval battling beauty's enticements; he is held love's prisoner and questions himself as to why reason could not detect and reflect upon beauty's wonder. This traditional portrayal of love made the poem accessible to its noble audience. However, in spite of its ties to this tradition, this paper asserts that the concept of love presented expands beyond a courtly purpose, one that includes an indebtedness to an exemplarist poetic. An exemplarist poetic focuses on the idea that the natural world contains vestiges, images, and similitudes of a higher good, the Exemplar. As this philosophy achieves its greatest expression in Bonaventure's Itinerarium mentis, its presence in the poem exalts not only the type of love the speaker seeks but also the creative talents of the poet. The famous opening of the poem depicts on idyllic setting that highlights a transcendent beauty conceivable through nature. Taken by itself, the opening appears merely to be an ornate aubade. However, later in the poem, when Beauty abandons the lover, the lover awakens in another natural setting. The fact that the allegory of a pagan celebration of love, which ultimately fails, is enclosed by two pastoral landscapes asserts the dominance of a higher splendor founded upon nature. Indeed, the paper will conduct a close examination of these scenes and how nature's beauty enlightens the lover of a more secure, elevating good. Following this discussion, the a series of slides will be shown of late medieval and early modern paintings depicting nature's connection to the divine, including the "English Gothic Artist's Sketchbook" at Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Stump, Donald (Saint Louis University) "Elizabeth, the French Duke, and the English Bible Thumpers: Reshaping Royal Iconography, 1578-1603"

It is puzzling that, in the 1580s, precisely when Protestant fervor in England was rising to fever pitch because of Catholic assassination threats against the Queen and the looming threat of the Spanish Armada, the use of biblical heroes and heroines as exemplars and metaphors for Elizabeth was swiftly declining at Court, supplanted by representations of her as a pagan goddess, a Petrarchan mistress, a shepherdess, or a fairy. I examine a number of possible reasons that even Protestant writers--including the Queen herself--turned away from biblical figures.

Swan, Jesse G. (U. of Northern Iowa) "Imitation and the English Reformation's Humanism: William Baldwin's Beware the Cat

Characterized as "arguably the most enjoyable work to come out of the brief Reformist days of Edward VI, a satire that is by turns robust and shy, direct and wildly-I am tempted to say eccentrically-witty"(Kinney 38), William Baldwin's A Marvelous Hystory, intitulede, Beware the Cat (written in 1553, published in 1570) has been interpreted mostly in terms of modern, prose narrative theory, since its recovery first by William P. Holden in 1963 and more recently and influentially by William A. Ringler, Jr., and Michael Flachmann in 1988. Central to modernist interpretations is the view of the orator Gregory Streamer as a narrator who is a wholly fictionalized "divine" and mouthpiece for Protestantism. The historical context of English Reformation Humanism, however, coupled with several other literary and historical facts, suggest that Gregory Streamer is an actual person whom Baldwin burlesques, an actor who impersonates a divine for George Ferrers at the court of Edward VI, and a nominal Protestant who is, more significantly, a secular animalist, or, in John King's words, "a negative example of the human capacity for rationality and moral regeneration" (394). Interpreted as such, we can see the work for what it is: the first Reformation paradoxical encomium in English, and not, as the most recent modern editors propose, the first English novel.

Thomas, Jennifer (U. of Florida School of Music, Gainesville) Personal Narrative Through Textual Allusions in a Music Manuscript

During Katherine of Arabon's demise as queen of England, her former sister-in-law, Marguerite of Austria, sent a sumptuous music manuscript to the Tudor court. Scholars have puzzled over the enigmatic secrets of this manuscript, London Royal 8.G.vii, but the mysteries of its dating and purpose unfold only when we view the messages conveyed by the texts of its motets as a personal message from one woman to another. As significant as the personal themes Marguerite addresses is the demonstration of her broad and detailed knowledge, her skill and artistry in assembling this collage of meanings, and her subtly nuanced communication.

Turrentine, Herbert C. (Southern Methodist U., Dallas, TX) "Pieter Isaacz' Vanity: Venus and the Lute Player: A Titian Parody"

Pieter Isaacsz (1569-1625) was a Dutch painter and draftsman who entered the service of the Danish king Christian IV (c. 1610), and worked intermittently as a court painter for this royal patron of the arts for the remainder of his life. There is a strong influence of Venetian art in Isaacsz' paintings executed in Denmark, and this is apparent in his Vanity: Venus and the Lute Player (c. 1610), a work that is based on Titian's famous painting on the same figures. Nevertheless, the work reveals a gifted artist, who not only had the audacity and wit to parody a notorious painting, but also the imagination to project a unique twist on the familiar Vanitas theme.

van den Berg, Sara (Saint Louis U.) Vignette, Metaphor and Vituperation in Milton's Divorce Tracts

Many commentators have noted Milton's thinly-veiled autobiographical vignettes in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, while comparatively few critics have addressed his strategic use of metaphor, especially those of motherhood and childhood. In this paper, I will argue that vignette, metaphor and vituperation are three related rhetorical strategies in Milton's tracts that together augment his rational argument with indirect and direct passionate feeling. These strategies express the hope and desire that motivate a marriage, and the shock, sorrow and rage that mark its failure.

van den Berg Sara (Saint Louis University) Meditating on The Poetry of Meditation

In 1954, when members of the Yale English Department were national leaders in the New Criticism, a young Turk named Louis Martz published The Poetry of Meditation, a book that altered the way critics read the poetry of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and other 17th-century religious poets. Unlike Herbert Grierson and other critics who celebrated these poets for their "metaphysical" wit and philosophical erudition, Martz traced the poetic practice of Donne and his contemporaries to a specific historical model that was far more accessible and popular: religious meditation, pioneered by Jesuits and Franciscans, but adopted as well by Richard Baxter and other Protestant writers. The Poetry of Meditation was followed by two major anthologies, The Meditative Poem (1963) and Volume I of The Anchor Anthology of Seventeenth Century Verse (1963), subsequently kept in print by W.W. Norton. Like the other New Critics at Yale, Martz was committed to the techniques of close reading; but as a scholar who placed literature in its cultural context, Martz provided a model for the New Historicists of the next generation.

Villeponteaux, Mary (U. of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg) An Elizabethan Portia

This essay is an exploration of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice in the context of its historical moment: the late 1590s, the final decade of the reign of Elizabeth I. Focusing on the figure of Portia and reading Merchant alongside another product of the late 1590s--The Faerie Queene Book 5--I analyze the play's participation in the construction of a political mythology of Queen Elizabeth. Though Elizabeth wielded authority in the 1590s more confidently than she had in the 1560s, there were still anxieties that she was unable or unwilling to defend the godly nation of England against the threat posed by foreign and religious enemies. An ongoing conflict over where authority resides--the person of the monarch or the corporate entity of monarch--and councilors--and a distrust of Elizabeth's exercise of mercy in dealing with England's enemies are two tensions that Shakespeare dramatizes in the figure of Portia.

Watkins, John (University of Minnesota) "Elizabeth Through Venetian Eyes"

In the last month of Elizabeth I's reign, the Republic of Venice reestablished formal diplomatic relations with England after a gap of forty-five years. This paper examines the politics underlying Elizabeth's dream of receiving a Venetian ambassador, a dream that went unfulfilled for four decades. By examining Elizabeth's complex relationship with Venice, a state that was resolutely Catholic but also resolutely anti-papal, we can complicate the analysis of her reign, and especially of her diplomatic artistry, in terms of a reductive Catholic/Protestant opposition.

Weaver, Andrew H. (Yale U., New Haven, CT) "Sacred Music and Monarchical Representation in tempore belli: The Austrian Habsburgs at the End of the Thirty Years" War

The public images cultivated by monarchs have long been important in our interpretations of early-modern rulers. Such issues have nonetheless been neglected in studies of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors during the mid-seventeenth century, due primarily to their losing position at the end of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). This paper seeks to remedy that by focusing on Ferdinand III (1637-1657), the emperor who was instrumental in ending the war. In the early years of his reign, Ferdinand's public image as a victorious warrior was extolled in word, image, drama, and music. As the Habsburg's fortunes turned, however, the production of grand artworks ceased. Monarchical representation nonetheless remained important, and this paper examines how the emperor continued to propagate his image via the sacred music written by his court musicians.

Winston, Jessica (Idaho S.U., Pocatello) The Politics of Form in A Mirror for Magistrates

This essay examines the Mirror (1559) in the context of the medieval de casibus genre in which it was written, showing that William Baldwin and his fellow authors altered the social function of this genre in order to promote a public political discourse in Elizabethan England. While critics have historically viewed the Mirror as a derivative example of didactic advice-to princes poetry, I argue that it was an innovative work, aimed at a broad audience, which helped to facilitate public discussion about the rule of the state in the sixteenth century.

Wolters, Wendy (Ohio S.U., Columbus) " Sh'as made her name an empress by that act" : Dead Women's Justice in The Revenger's Tragedy

Male witnesses and chaste female bodies are central to the composition of a revenge plot. In analyses of The Revenger's Tragedy, many critics have explored the ways in which Gloriana's body not only incites revenge, but also participates in it. However, another dead woman, Antonio's wife, uses the connection between chastity and the dead female body, and the men who bear witness to it, to secure her own justice. Antonio's wife's suicide in the aftermath of her rape appears to reiterate a classic image of a raped woman as ruined male property. Yet it is through this appearance, and its crucial relationship to the revenge plot, that Antonio's wife actually achieves revenge for her attack, refuses her objectification in male strategies for revenge and power, and presents an alternative means of agency and justice in a corrupt Renaissance court. In this paper I will discuss the alternative representation of women's justice that can be found in the unlikely character of a dead woman with no lines and no name.

Woodall, Richardine (York U., Toronto, Canada) Shakespeare and the Paradox of History: Colonialism and Anti-Colonialism in The Tempest

*no abstract included*

Yermolenko, Galina (DeSales U., Allentown PA) ÔThe Bride of Suleiman': Hurrem Sultan in European History and Fiction

This paper looks at the legendary Hasseki el Hurrem Hatun (known in the West as Roxelana)--a sixteenth-century Ukrainian woman who was sold into Ottoman captivity as a teenager and worked her way up from a slave and a harem concubine to the pinnacle of personal and political power in the Ottoman empire--the beloved wife and close advisor of sultan Suleiman the Great. Hurrem's long-term power grip over Suleiman I and the unprecedented breaks from the Ottoman harem protocol the sultan made for the sake of his favorite bride have for centuries been the subject of much speculation and mystification by European diplomats, historians, writers, and artists. This paper examines various historical and literary legends and myths surrounding Hurrem's life, focusing on the historical, political, and geo-political shifts in the representations of her ascendance to power and her impact on the sultan. The study reveals that behind the traditional castigations of Hurrem as a "witch" and the "Lady Macbeth of Ukraine" lie not only European misconceptions of power structure and gender relations in the early modern Ottoman court, but also the unacknowledged approval of such cultural divides as "East-West" and "Europe-Asia." To illustrate the operation of these cultural divides, the paper compares western European and eastern European writings about Roxelana, showing how the latter celebrate this extraordinary woman's success in foreign captivity as a matter of national pride and tenacity.