2007 Abstracts

Bernadette Andrea (University of Texas, San Antonio):
“Early Modern Scheherazades: English Women’s Responses to 1001 Nights”

While individual tales from 1001 Nights had been introduced into the English tradition, it was not until the Arabian Nights Entertainments (1704) was translated that Scheherazade’s role in the frame tale became widely available. This paper argues that Delarivier Manley published first literary response in English to this translation: Almyna: or, The Arabian Vow (1707). Manley focuses on Scheherazade, the Muslim woman narrator of 1001 Nights, to establish the legitimacy of the early modern English woman writer in a hostile patriarchal environment. Women writers of popular prose fiction in eighteenth-century England such as Penelope Aubin (1722) and Eliza Heywood (1741) followed Manley’s lead in emphasizing the possibilities for female agency in the frame tale. This paper will explore these works in relation to each other and to their source in 1001 Nights.

Christopher Baker (Armstrong Atlantic State University):
“Cordelia and the Old Testament Figure of Wisdom”

The roots of Cordelia's characterization have been traced beyond her role in the old play of King Leir to the "white witch" of Celtic mythology, the virgin/virago of medieval Christian theology, and to the self-giving behavior of Christ himself. To these analogues should be added the image of the Lady Wisdom, the female personfication of virtue found in Proverbs and in the apocryphal books of Sirach and The Wisdom of Solomon. Cordelia's perception of her sisters' evil designs, her restraint in speech, her righteous attempt to reestablish sound government, and her individual concern for Lear--with whom he expects to learn divine "mysteries"--all reflect aspects of this Old Testament figure

Sean Benson (Malone College):
“ ‘Yet more strange’: Resurrectionary Failure in King Lear”

This paper re-examines the dying Lear’s hope that Cordelia is coming back to life: “Look thee, look there!” Her quasi-resurrection is no more than that (less—a failure), but the play’s anachronistic Christian tropes subtly but unavoidably remind audiences of the Resurrection. Materialist readings point to resurrectionary failure as an invalidation of redemptionist readings of the play; I suggest that the play is made more poignant precisely because of this failure, which resonates with Shakespeare's understanding of the nature of tragedy. In the end, the pagan setting of King Lear collides quite purposefully with, and perhaps is haunted by, a Christian understanding of life and death, leaving the question of what Lear sees indeterminate.

Greg Bentley (Mississippi State University):
“The Falchion and the Phallus in Shakespeare’s ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ ”

As A. D. Cousins has recently noted, ". . . much of the more recent commentary on 'Lucrece' has focused on the interrelated matters of politics, gender, and subjectivity" (45). While such criticism has provided invaluable insignts into the poem, it has genrally overlooked or interpreted too narrowly one of the most important images--Tarquin's falchion--that Shakespeare employs to reveal the ideological current that connects these three topics. That is, the sword or knife, as it passes figuratively and literally from Tarquin's hand to Lucrecre's and finaloly to that of Brutus, functions as the material and ideological tool by means of which the homo-social order executes and defends the closed circuit of its libidinal economy.

Michael Joseph Berntsen (University of Louisiana at Lafayette):
“The Specter Spectacle from Stage to Screen: Understanding Revenge Tragedies and English Renaissance Audiences”

Contemporary horror films, such as William Castle’s ""The House on Haunted Hill"" and Jack Arnold’s ""Creature from the Black Lagoon,"" are twentieth century revenge tragedies. They reveal that modern audiences crave the same spectacular, visual images that drew Jacobean audiences into London theaters. Resembling revenge drama narrative and thematic techniques, both works include ghosts, illicit lust, and graphic violence, among other gruesome images. ""The House on Haunted Hill"" and ""Creature from the Black Lagoon"" also correspond to ""The Changeling"" and ""The Duchess of Malfi,"" respectively. All four films share similiar characters and themes, demonstrating how audiences separated by four-hundred years are closely related.

Jacob Blevins (McNeese State University):
“Heroism, Humanism, and Milton’s Crisis of Imitation: Anxiety and the Symbolic in John Milton”

There is no other Renaissance writer who engages classical literature more than John Milton. Although Milton quite explicitly recalls classical literature as he positions his own poetic voice within tradition, classicism is also the source of tremendous anxiety for Milton, who must negotiate and come to terms with the ideological gap that exists between his own Christian worldview and the models he invokes. This discussion seeks to establish a new Lacanian reconsideration of Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” and Thomas Greene’s approach to Renaissance imitation in The Light in Troy and to apply this new approach to Milton and his construction of "heroism" as a complex, anxiety-ridden dialogue between classicism and Christian humanism, as a battle between the ideological expectations of his culture and the literary Other that gives him a sense of wholeness with literary tradition.

Jill Blondin (University of Texas at Tyler):
“Shelter from the Storm: S. Maria del Buon Aiuto in Rome”

The founding of S. Maria del Buon Aiuto, located between the Lateran and S. Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome, demonstrates Pope Sixtus IV’s Marian devotion. According to legend, a thunderstorm surprised Sixtus IV one afternoon as he walked from the Lateran to S. Croce. He took cover under a niche on the Aurelian Wall that contained an image of the Virgin and Child, to whom he appealed for help. Out of gratitude for his safety, Sixtus IV ordered the construction of a small church. Despite the importance of its patron and its prominent location in Rome, this church remains little known. This paper examines the style and meaning of S. Maria del Buon Aiuto in the context of Sixtus IV’s architectural patronage and his Marian devotion.

Elizabeth Bobo (University of Louisiana at Lafayette):
“Approaching Seventeenth-Century Poetry through Publishing History”

My work argues for the benefits of shifting the study of seventeenth-century poetry from individual authors to groups of publishers. Rather than focusing on representative authors such as Jonson, Donne, Milton, Dryden, and Behn, I consider the period in context of the successful stationers who published and promoted their works. The scope of this paper is narrowed to three of Milton’s stationers: Humphrey Moseley, Thomas Dring and Jacob Tonson. This shift in focus highlights the author figures and their texts as products in the growing market of cultural capital that coincided with the emergence of English imperialism.

Keith Botelho (Kennesaw State University):
“Elizabeth I as Fama?”

I argue for the validity of viewing Queen Elizabeth I as the embodiment of the classical figure of Fama. Elizabeth I was attuned to the dangers as well as the possibilities inherent in receiving and producing rumor, and during her reign she sought both to combat rumor as well as capitalize upon its political potential. Elizabeth is one of the most information-savvy individuals of the sixteenth century, and the spin she put on seizing rumors for political gain corresponded with the rise of a commercial theater that had at its beginnings an emerging concern with authorizing information. I contend that Elizabeth I becomes the all-hearing authority of information in the sixteenth century and complicates notions of male informational authority in the early modern period. As monarch, Elizabeth becomes a careful listener by design, hyper-aware of the way in which rumor needed to be used for advantage and thwarted when necessary.

William Bouton (Texas Tech University):
“Milton’s Liberty Religious and Always in Mind”

A look at Milton’s major poetry reveals a clear concept of his liberty for the regenerate, saint and unregenerate. It shows a unique liberty of conscience for the regenerate with limits on the unregenerate’s liberty to prevent a free license among them. This view of liberty demonstrated in his Restoration poetry can be seen in his prose work from the Pre-revolution era, through the Commonwealth and into the Restoration. This concept of liberty is unique to Milton and radical in its scope. It shares some similarities with the rhetoric and beliefs of the Levellers and Diggers, but its qualifications for the regenerate and unregenerate set it apart from these other radicals of the Left.

Kathleen Bradley (University of Arizona):
“Writing the Wrongs of the Clergy in the Heptameron”

From an early age, Marguerite de Navarre had demonstrated a serious interest in spiritual matters and religion, which is attested to in various works. She was a mystic who firmly believed in spirituality and the higher power of God; yet in the Heptaméron, she includes many tales which show the shortcomings of men of the cloth, makes fun of them and criticizes their behavior. Why, then, would the Queen of Navarre, considered a reverend woman, want to include such stories? One reason of course is that Marguerite claims her work to be a French version of the fourteenth century Italian Decameron by the irreverent Boccaccio. Another reason is that many of the tales were borrowed and modified from the French conteurs of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, which included anti-clerical fabliaux and satiric tales. Thirdly, Marguerite’s dissatisfaction with the Church and her pre-reformist teachings incited her to write about the blatant corruption of the clergy. I would like to offer a forth reason which includes analyzing Marguerite’s lineage and using transgenerational analysis (as developed by Anne Ancelin Schützenberger) to gain better insight into the psychological motive behind Marguerite’s choice to incorporate themes of lust, love and illicit behavior on the part of friars and monks. [. . .]

N. Rochelle Bradley (Texas A & M University):
“ ‘Nor like I this uncouth dream’: Satanic Dreams and the Temptation of Man”

This paper argues that Milton uses the problem of the satanic dream to highlight more core theological issues that had real significance for the Christian of the seventeenth century, and that consideration of Eve’s prelapsarian dream of a sinful action opens the way for a larger reflection on the implications of satanic or sinful dreams for fallen humanity on the whole. There is evidence in other seventeenth-century literature that such a problem was taken very seriously. Richard Norwood reveals in his Confessions the ways in which temptations and sins in satanic dreams must necessarily differ for fallen man from the situation of Eve.

Dawn Branscum (University of Oklahoma):
“Eve and the Serpent: God’s Dangerous Creations, An Engraving by Hans Sebald Beham, 1500-1550”

Eve was popular among German artists of the Renaissance and Hans Beham proved to be no exception in choosing to create a print of this infamous character—however, his portrayal of Eve in this print is notable for its atypical depiction of the “temptress”. A brief discussion of the role of miniature prints in German Renaissance society and an explanation of the artistic group of artists known as the “Little Masters” will be presented. In this print Eve is depicted as a mature woman with an air of control about her that is intriguing and certainly worthy of consideration.

Mary Brantl (St. Edward's University):
“Constructing Christina: The Netherlandish Connections”

Although only emerging as a collector of sophistication after settling in Seicento Rome, Christina of Sweden’s early activities in art acquisition date to the years leading up to her 1650 coronation, an era in which aesthetics and politics (court and international) rarely could be divorced. This paper addresses the particular position of Netherlandish art in early collecting and patronage activities in Christina’s court. It considers the role Netherlandish (or so identified) objects played in Christina’s experience of art, the connotations they may have carried, and related considerations (often far from aesthetic) as factors in Christina’s developing taste. It raises questions of authorship of a collection but also a collector.

John T. Brobeck (University of Arizona):
“A Missing Portrait and Mathieu Gascongne’s Canonic Motet Ista est speciosa: New Evidence for a Reinterpretation of the Origins of Pepys MS 1760”

Scholars have proposed several dates and recipients for the music manuscript Cambridge, Magdalene College, Pepys 1760. Though its music and decoration (some of which is over-painted) indicate French court provenance, the presence of a now missing portrait identified as the “Prince of Wales” at “the time of King Henry VII” has led some to assume that it was created for a king of England. Detailed musical and textual analysis of its contents suggests, however, that the original portrait depicted not Henry VIII but his sister Mary Tudor, briefly the wife of Louis XII of France in 1514. This identification explains the Marian content of the manuscript and suggests that it was originally intended in 1514 to serve as a royal wedding present.

Katherine M. Carey (University of Georgia):
“The Inquisition as Anti-Catholic Propaganda in John Webster’s The White Devil”

The Inquisition as Anti-Catholic Propaganda in John Webster’s Play The White Devil Renaissance England struggled against the perceived evil of the popish Anti-Christ. Anti-Catholic and anti-papist literary rhetoric established the accepted norm, and the theater-going audience recognized stories set in Italy as occurring in a strong Catholic country with its archetypes of the courtesan, the Machiavel, the corrupt pope, and the criminal thug. Steeped in Jacobean religious and political tension, Webster produces his play, The White Devil (1612), which incorporates conventional, exclusive Catholic practices as anti-Catholic propaganda within its text such as an inquisitional trial which serves as merely one more piece of evidence within Webster’s pyramid of political and religious commentary.

Jill Carrington (Stephen F. Austin State University):
“A Quattrocento Venetian Church in Houston: Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church”

Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church in Houston, built in 1927, is based on an unusual model: the church of Santa Maria Miracoli in Venice, built in the 1480s for Franciscan Observant nuns. Palmer was built in memory of Houston banker Edward A. Palmer who drowned at age 25 while trying to rescue his sister Daphne from the Gulf Coast after she had fallen off the family yacht.

Kathryn Carson (Southeast Missouri State University):
“ ‘So I have heard and do in part believe it”: Hamlet’s Hybridized Religion”

This paper investigates England’s forced conversion to Protestantism by King Henry VIII. In particular, it focuses on the history of Purgatory and the “cult of the dead,” noting how the doctrine forged connections between the living and dead. Turning to the English Reformation, I draw on the Ten Articles of 1536 and the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563 to display the deadly impact the Reformation had on the doctrine of Purgatory and the communal culture fostered by Catholicism. By applying this history to Hamlet, I suggest that a main issue of the play is the confusion caused by the competition of two vastly different belief systems, and I argue that Hamlet’s uncertainty is representative of the uncertainty experienced by Shakespeare and the English people.

Dolora Chapelle Wojciehowski (University of Texas, Austin):
“Triangulation in Humanist Friendship: More, Erasmus, Giles.”

In 1515, Thomas More, Under-Sheriff of London, visited the home of Peter Giles, town registrar of Antwerp. Both were friends of the celebrated humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus, who had suggested that they meet. Sometime during or after his visit to that city, More began writing what would become Book II of Utopia, with Peter Giles as one of the three interlocutors of the dialogue. Underpinning this great literary masterpiece of the Renaissance was an extraordinary friendship between More, Erasmus, and Giles--a friendship that energized More’s composition of the work, and that also helped bring his manuscript into print. This friendship would be celebrated in a famous dual portrait of the latter two, painted by the famous Antwerp artist Quentin Matsys in 1517, which Erasmus and Giles sent to More as a token of their deep affection, after they had collaborated on the publication of Utopia.

While triangles may improve the structural integrity of domes or bridges, rarely do they function as a stabilizing feature of human relationships. Such, I shall argue, was the case with these three men of letters, whose triangulated friendship has always been taken at face value—i.e., as an enduring and highly positive experience for all three. In this essay I shall examine all the extant letters between More, Erasmus, and Giles dating from this time period. These letters, though difficult to interpret, present evidence of a possible rupture between More and Giles in 1517, a rupture quite possibly caused by Erasmus. The complicated nature of this triad reveals a great deal about these humanists, including their respect, concern, and love for each other, their rivalries, and finally, perhaps, their betrayals.

An analysis of this complex friendship also sheds light on the Utopia and the circumstances of its creation. The suppression or invisibility of friendship on the island of Utopia, and the foregrounding of family ties there, suggests a tension between the frame narrative of the work and its paratext (letters of endorsement from friends and friends of friends) and the social structure depicted in Book II of Utopia. Why does friendship have no place in the ideal commonwealth, given that it played such an important role in the life of its author and in the production of his most famous work? In response to that question, this essay offers a hypothesis that links the text of Utopia to the lives of the author and his two best friends.

Greg Chaplin (Bridgewater State College):
“Right Healthful Caustics: Physiology, Masculinity, and Renaissance Friendship”

By examining Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona and other texts, this essay seeks to problematize the therapeutic role of the male friend advocated by the humanist revival of classical friendship. In particular, it looks at the triangular relationship that develops when the friend/physician intrudes upon the sexual life of his friend, seeking to cure him of his destabilizing passion. Although cloaked in the language and moral obligations of bodily health, these interventions, I contend, are not innocent. Rather, they work to reincorporate the wayward and supposedly effeminized friend into an economy of male-male relations that is invested in the subordination of sexual desire and the orderly circulation of women as property. At the same time, this aspect of the friendship tradition helps fashion a political discourse as it repeatedly juxtaposes the normative masculinity of male friends to the proliferating desires of tyrants and would-be rapists.

Liana De Girolomi Cheney (University of Massachusetts, Lowell):
“Giorgio Vasari’s Imagery for the Compagnia del Gesu”

In 1554, the Compagnia del Gesù of Cortona commissions Giorgio Vasari to decorate with biblical sacrifices their offertory of their church (Vasari’s Ricordo 224). Vasari assisted by Cristofaro Gherardi depicts twelve sacrifices from the Old Testament (Isaac, Cain, Abel, Enos, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Samuel, Jacob, Aaron, Nehemiah and Melkisedec) in the walls and three scenes from the New Testament (The Conversion of Saul, The Christ in Limbo and The Transfiguration) in the ceiling.

Mike Clody (SUNY, Buffalo):
“Baconian Natural Poiesis”

Using Sir Francis Bacon’s Wisdom of the Ancients as a testing ground, my paper examines the way that the rise of the new science influenced contemporary – and current – understandings of the role of poiesis. Against a classical tradition of inspired poetics, with which both Sidney and Puttenham grapple, Bacon’s works strive for a “literal” language that relies on practical utility as its ultimate guarantor. Poiesis, here and as in the scientific approach at large, strives to bring forth the world “as it really is,” and therefore strips language of its own creative power by limiting “true philosophy” to a language that “echoes most faithfully the voice of nature.”

Sean Conner (Texas State University, San Marcos):
“Necessary Imperfections: The Cognitive Neurobiology of Epistemology and Morality in Milton’s Comus”

Based on recent developments in neurobiology and cognitive science, this essay examines the cognitive framework of moral virtue and epistemology as revealed in John Milton’s Comus. If “moral perception” is indeed “subject to ‘priming’ and ‘masking,’” as Paul Churchland argues, what implications does this have for our understanding of the Lady’s journey? Moreover, what implications does this have for Milton’s understanding of truth, moral progress, temptation, and salvation? This essay attempts to show how Milton’s equivocal presentation of morality in Comus may be read as a dramatic interpretation of the complex way our brains input morally significant situations.

Megan Conway (Louisiana State University - Shreveport):
“Magic and Eros in Jeanne Flore’s Comptes amoureux”

Although recent scholarship on Jeanne Flore has concentrated on questions of authorship based on the disparity of style and content among the Comptes amoureux, I would like to explore a unifying element among the tales. Six of the seven stories contain a shudder of pleasurable terror is prompted by the author’s (or authors’) injection of supernatural elements into the plot. Vengeful goddesses, frightful giants, terrifying shape-shifters, ghostly apparitions and magical buildings enliven these cautionary tales about the perils of spurning True Love. In this paper, I will concentrate on Flore’s insistence on the supernatural and the mythical and examine both the stories and the frame in terms of the relationship between love and magic.

Linda Crippen (Our Lady of the Lake University):
“For Love, Religion or Politics—John Donne’s ‘Elegy XVIII: Love’s Progress’ ”

Critical interpretations of Donne’s work overflow with extremes. Extremes are often found in his creations, and specifically in “Elegy XVIII: Love’s Progress.” Equating this poem as a mere funeral song, as is the usual interpretation, hardly seems just, as the young poet makes a not-so-subtle point regarding sexual gratification in this particular work. Furthermore, the poet, in an intricate web of language and metaphor, also appears to make a statement regarding political and social issues of the time such as colonialism and socioeconomics. According to another perspective, Donne could also relate sexual love to religious love in the poem. Perhaps the author’s meaning included all topics, which he skillfully layered in the text. Moreover, the possibility that the author resorted to a topic of sex to draw readers’ attention in order to ponder social issues demonstrates ingenuity in an already careful craft.

Jean D’Amato Thomas (Northwestern State University):
“Francescus Aretinus (Francesco Griffolini) and the Libellus de mirabilibus Puteolarum et locorum vicinorum”

The Libellus de Mirabilibus Puteolorum (Naples 1475) compiled by Franciscus Aretinus (Francesco Griffolini) conflates three earlier works: an anonymous opusculum about the area’s medicinal baths; an antiquarian guide preserved only in BAV Vat. Lat. 3436; and Alius Pelligrinus’ Vita Homeri. Griffolini first presented the opusculum to Pope Pius II, then amplified and rearranged the material to make it attractive to the humanist audience gathered at the ‘enlightened’ Aragon court. The examination will detail this process of composition by tracing the constituent texts back to material available to Griffolini, perhaps including the precise manuscript of the opusculum used by the humanist, and the very mechanical methodology he employed. It will end by sketching the impact of the work in both texts and engravings of the region

Erika de Young (Texas State University):
“Dürer’s Mark on Venice: Crosscurrents, Nationalism and Identity in the Feast of the Rose Garlands”

Dürer's Feast of the Rose Garlands, painted in 1506 for the German colony's Church in Venice, offers an introspective into the artistic climate of Renaissance Venice at the time of Dürer's second visit to Italy. We find here a lively and well recorded clash of personalities and interests, a mixture of artistic influences and a determined, though isolated German artist. The resulting painting reveals as much about Dürer's motives and visual inspirations, as it comments on his place as a German in Venice and on his quest for elevated status. The work may also have influenced the course of Venetian painting; the young eyes of Titian were certainly tuned to the high praise bestowed on the completed painting by local authorities.

Phillip J. Donnelly (Baylor University):
“Translation and Rhetorical Ends in ‘Lily’s Grammar’ (1542)”

Latin instruction in Renaissance England was distinguished by the fact that after 1542 only one text, known as “Lily’s Grammar,” was legally authorized for use in schools. After establishing some of the political and pedagogical contexts driving the publication of this text, my argument compares the implied pedagogical practices of “Lily’s Grammar” with those evident in earlier grammars. Ultimately, I contend that state-sponsored grammar text reveals two key shifts in reading practices: first, the enshrinement of prolonged translation as a means to proficiency, and the shift from semantic theory aimed at contemplative reception to rhetorical practice aimed at political or theological persuasion.

Sarah Duncan (Yale University):
“ ‘Fruit of my bodie: Fertility, Power, and Queenship during the Reigns of Mary I and Elizabeth I”

Expectations that both regnant queens Mary I and Elizabeth I would marry stemmed partially from the perceived stability provided by an heir to the throne. Mary’s supposed pregnancy in 1554 gave rise to hopes for the return of masculine-based sovereignty, as well as religious and political unity. Under Elizabeth, the belief that marriage and pregnancy was necessary in order to ensure the stability of the realm remained a large part of the debate over the succession. Over the course of her reign, however, Elizabeth successfully transformed her image into that of a bountiful deliverer of her subjects’ security, in spite of her childless state.

Susan Dunn-Hensley (University of Kansas):
“Shakespeare’s Sacred Virgins: Shadows of Catholicism on the Early Modern Stage”

One of the most striking examples of Catholic reminiscence in Shakespeare’s works can be found in his depiction of the sacred virgin, a character whose purity possesses an almost magical quality that allows her to act as a conduit for God’s power. Medieval examples of the character-type include literary representations of female saints, martyrs, mystics, and the Virgin Mary. Although Shakespeare’s sacred virgins do not technically fit into any of the aforementioned categories, they prove remarkable similar to their medieval predecessors. Through an investigation of the sacred virgin in Shakespeare’s plays, I consider how Shakespeare engaged and reshaped earlier traditions to create a sense of nostalgia for a more idyllic, late medieval past.

Stephanie Eckroth (Texas Tech University):
“Male Homosociality and Displacement of Plague Anxiety in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday”

Thomas Dekker penned The Shoemaker’s Holiday within roughly five years of the 1593 London plague epidemic. Living in Whitechapel at the time, Dekker’s proximity to the outbreak heavily influences his construction of homosocial and heterosocial relationships within The Shoemaker’s Holiday. Dekker offers the play as an opportunity to displace urban anxiety that plague carriers were marginalized male social groups by instead making female characters the source of contamination. This paper explores the ways in which Dekker’s focus on celebrating non-national male homosociality within the play occurs at the expense of women as female bodies become the location of displaced male anxieties about plague and contamination within the play.

Geoffrey B. Elliott (University of Louisiana at Lafayette):
“Here There Be Dragons: Draconic Parallels between Beowulf and The Faerie Queene”

The dragons featured in Beowulf and in cantos xi and xii of Book I of The Faerie Queene are eerily similar in the language used to describe them and in the threats they pose to admirable kingdoms as well as their physical attributes, weaknesses, and the manner in which they die—at the hands of armor-clad, noble-born warriors who are themselves similar in equipment and temperament and whose fights follow oddly similar paths. Though the correspondences between the dragons and dragon-slayers in the two works are not wholly exact, they are quite close, and that proximity invites explication; little if any other work has been done comparing these fantastical aspects of the two English-language epics.

Ashley Elston (University of Kansas):
“Representation, Relics and Reassurance: Siena Duomo’s Reliquary Cupboard and Saintly Presence in the Early Fifteenth Century”

This paper will explore how the reliquary cupboard begun by Benedetto di Bindo in 1411 for the sacristy of Siena Duomo may be read as a bearer of religious and political meaning through its affirmation of the continued presence and protection of the saints during a period of civic and ecclesiastic instability. Built for the storage and display of the cathedral’s relics and reliquaries, the cupboard doors were painted with a True Cross cycle and rows of angels carrying scrolls which refer to the relics housed inside. This piece of liturgical furniture may have functioned as a reminder of the physical presence of the saints through their relics, and may have been intended as an assertion of Siena’s continued importance in an uncertain time.

Lacy Elwood (Texas State University, San Marcos):
“Young maides eyes should like onely where their Father liked”: Arranged Marriage in Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania”

This paper examines three representations of the cultural practice of arranged marriage in Lady Mary Wroth's The Countess of Montgomery's Urania. Throughout her 1621 text, Wroth shows a fascination with arranged marriage, recurringly presenting the subject as it relates to the multitude of characters in her prose romance. In her fictional depictions of arranged marriage in the characters Limena, Liana, and the Princess of Lycia, Wroth critically examines this then common social practice. Through these representations of forced marriage Wroth warns her society that the practice must change and that women need to be given more voice in determining their marital situations.

Rhea Emery-Morris (Independent Scholar):
“Aesthetics and the Style at Elizabeth’s Court”

An Italian bias persists in discussions of English painting before Rembrandt. After Holbein, English painting is assumed to have regressed or failed to match Italian advances. This paper suggests that Elizabeth I made conscious decisions to avoid Italian styles while still hoping to harness the power of instrumental aesthetics. It is my hope that English portraiture will benefit from analyses that do not assume a stylistic void filled only with political art. The persistent fallacy that Elizabeth was not a major patron of painting and therefore did not engage style at a personal, instrumental level is damaging to our understanding of her court’s culture and the history of painting in England.

Leslie Evans (Southeast Missouri State University):
“Mommy Dearest: Richard III’s Relationship with his Mother”

Richard’s relationship with his mother in Shakespeare’s Richard III leaves him scarred, not only physically but emotionally. The resentment that the Duchess shows towards her son in the play is an indicator of the type of behavior shown to him from birth. By examining parenting guides and conduct manuals for mothers from the time period, I will show that the treatment Richard endures from his mother causes his bloody campaign to become king. Although she may have not raised Richard personally, her treatment, comments, and impression of him molds him into the cold murderer he becomes in the play.

Joan Faust (Southeastern Louisiana University):
“Marvell’s ‘The unfortunate Lover’: Welcome to My Nightmare”

Marvell’s enigmatic “The unfortunate Lover” has prompted convincing political, emblematic, allegorical and even religious interpretations. Still, the disjointedness of the poem remains a problem unless one takes the obvious qualities of the poem in the way Marvell often demands we take his poetic wordplay: literally. The incoherent terrors described in “The unfortunate Lover” express the obvious: the poem is a nightmare, and one that links the work with a long-standing interest and genre of literature, the dream vision. An analysis of “The unfortunate Lover” using not only classical to early modern theories of dreams as reflected in dream visions, but also later theories expounded by Freud and other modern psychologists, gives order and meaning to this most perplexing of Marvell’s works.

J. Catilin Finlayson (University of Texas, Dallas):
“Symbolic Design in London Lord Mayor’s Shows”

Spectacle is the crux of Early Modern pageantry, yet how do the sumptuous and tactile spectacles of pageant devices, emblematic characters, and processionals translate into the black and white medium of print? This paper will examine how some pageant authors in their printed accounts create a detailed, objective visuality embodying the complex allegorical meaning of their pageants, rather than explicitly telling the reader their meaning in prose passages of narrative explanation. In part this paper will examine the long undervalued Lord Mayor’s Show by John Squire, The Triumphs of Peace, and how by architectural specificity and visual description, Squire directs the reader’s eye as a means of directing interpretation.

John Ford (Delta State University):
“Welcoming Strangers: Peter Brook and the Mixed Conventions of Theater and Film”

This paper examines the intersection of filmic and theatrical strategies in selected works of Peter Brook, culminating in his Hamlet. Brook, a preeminent director of Shakespeare’s work, both in theater and film, has always exhibited a restless energy in his experiments, testing the conventions of both film and theater to their limit. What emerges from these collisions, for Brook, is an unstable isotope of each play/film in which these multiple conventions are both self-consciously foregrounded and erased, creating for enthusiasts of both theatrical and filmic Shakespeare an unstable and even unrecognizable medium, where text and meaning must be renegotiated. As a consequence of such resistance, theatrical wonder may become re-discovered.

Adrienne Foster (Texas State University, San Marcos):
“The Villainous Male: An Examination of Cruelty in the Arranged Marriages of Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania”

This paper explores three episodes in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania that highlight male characters in arranged marriages: 1) in the Liana episode a cruel and torturing father allows no room for daughterly disobedience; 2) in the Sydelia episode a deceitful brother murders his sister’s husband; and 3) in the Limena episode a brutal husband tortures his wife through physical beating to deal with his own emotional pain. Although Helen Hackett has examined the unloved husband, in Urania, as a villain, I will explore not only the patriarchal husband, but also the masculine roles of fathers and brothers who arrange of loveless unions in the work.

Joyce Frei (Berkeley College):
“When Ladies Meet: The Media Myth of Two Queens in One Isle”

Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots only met in opera, theater, and film. This myth is especially shown in films Mary, Queen of Scots (1971) and Mary of Scotland (1936). Although the later film is lavish as Vanessa Redgrave (Mary) meets her adversary Glenda Jackson (Elizabeth),it is the former film Mary of Scotland that shows the layers of Queen Elizabeth's personality, a mixture of ambition and survival. Florence Eldridge (Elizabeth)is the underdog to the regal Katherine Hepburn (Mary). Although Elizabeth is about to execute her cousin, the audience sympathizes with her and we continue to ponder what would have happened "when ladies meet."

Amy Gant (University of Nebraska, Lincoln):
“ ‘Beating a Path to Heaven’: Toward a Historical/Theological/Literary Context for Nathanael Ranew’s Solitude Improved by Divine Meditation”

Puritan minister Nathanael Ranew (1602?-1677) authored Solitude Improved by Divine Meditation, a work which fits neatly within the middle-to-late portion of the Puritan meditative tradition, yet also has some distinctive features. Among those aspects of this work which merit attention are its biblical bases; its doctrinal bases; its focus on the intellectual aspects of meditation; its focus on the affectionate aspects of meditation; its emphasis on the “four last things”—death, judgment, heaven and hell; and its practical directions for certain sub-groups of individuals. Placing these theological and literary trends within their historical context is crucial for continuing to develop an understanding the Puritan meditative tradition as a whole.

Patricia M. Garcia (Our Lady of the Lake University):
“Voicing the Faith: Rosary Practices in Early Modern England”

During the early modern period in England, Catholics struggled to maintain a public presence by ministering to the faithful privately. Rosary practices were especially helpful as they hearkened to the Catholic past in its retelling of the scripture and its use of vocal prayer and beads. Two rosary treatises that address these issues are John Fen’s 1579 English translation of the Jesuit writer Gaspar Loarte’s Instructions and Advertisements, How to Meditate the Misteries of the Rosarie of the most holy Virgin Mary (1573) and John Bucke’s Instruction for the Use of the Beades, (1589). This paper will examine these guides in light of a shared sense of community, thus providing new insights into the English Catholic community.

Alex Garganigo (Austin College):
“Imposing Oaths in Samson Agonistes”

As recent work has shown, oaths played important and anxiety-producing roles in the lives of many members of the political nation during the Revolution and Restoration. Milton himself claimed to have been prevented from entering the Laudian ministry in part because of the required oath of office and gave oaths a sometimes scathing treatment in his prose works in the quarter century before Samson Agonistes. Written in a context of frequent debates over taking and keeping such state oaths, Samson recreates some of the crises of conscience and strategies for evasion that they imposed on their swearers.

Evan Getz (Baylor University):
“Graces all, and is not anywhere”: Cosmology, Poetics and Beauty in Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder”

In Order and Disorder, Lucy Hutchinson maintains that beauty cannot be defined. In place of a definition, Hutchinson describes beauty as the glory (kabod) of God, which is his being revealed in nature. God alone makes beauty possible through an analogical relationship between himself and creation. Since God is infinite yet crosses all finite boundaries in his triune being, he allows us to see his reflected beauty without lessening its infinite source. For Hutchinson, there is no analogy of correspondence between God and creation; rather, there is an analogy of being between the triune God and creation. Hutchinson sees her poetry participating in God’s being by this analogy, which in turn serves to unite her poetics and cosmology.

Bethany Getz (Baylor University):
“Transparent Rhetoric: The Son’s Restoration of Language in Paradise Regained”

Though most of Paradise Regained is a conversation between Satan and the Son, neither is a dynamic character. In Paradise Lost, the Son is static, for his reasoning and will are one with the Father’s. In Paradise Regained, however, the Son speaks through soliloquy, and he operates on limited knowledge, making it necessary for him to ponder his present lot. In spite of the Son’s different role in Paradise Regained, he is as static in this brief epic as in Paradise Lost. Examining the Son in this brief epic will answer two related questions. First, the question that Regina Schwartz aptly frames: “What does Milton mean by the re-gaining of Paradise?” (26). And second, how is the re-gaining of Paradise also the re-gaining of language?

Ryan Gregg (The Johns Hopkins University):
“Durer’s siege of a Fortress

On the ceiling of the Sala di Clemente VII in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Giovanni Stradano reproduced Albrecht Dürer’s 1527 woodcut Siege of a Fortress as the setting for Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici Is Sent to Hungary, from c. 1556-62. Placed among other topographical views, Vasari hides Dürer’s design behind audience expectations for the truthfulness of such images. Yet an educated viewer would easily recognize the artistic source. In this recognition Vasari acknowledges to the viewer the fictive nature of the history related in the decorations, a rhetorical gesture borrowed from classical historiography.

Gina Guzman (Texas State University, San Marcos):
“Rosalind’s Gender Performance”

Gender binaries in sixteenth century England were often rigidly defined, and according to Thomas Laqueur, such binaries developed what it was to be a man or a woman, as well as social rank and a cultural roles for each gender. In the comedy As You Like It by William Shakespeare, Rosalind’s gender inversion suggests the influence of early modern scientific anatomical theories that developed a one-sex model, wherein female genitals were one in origin with the male’s but became less perfect as the fetus and child developed. In this case, does her performance of gender supersede an idea of her essential sexuality? This paper explores the controversy surrounding the application of performative theory to Rosalind’s Ganymede, and argues that Ganymede’s performance undermines the conventional binaries of gender and sex and suggests a less restrictive and rigid definition of sexuality.

Sharon Hampel (University of Denver Center for Judaic Studies):
“The Great and Awesome Wilderness: Hebrew Covenant and the Puritan Jeremiad”

The Puritan Jeremiad was the first indigenous American literature. The journey from Amsterdam to America became, in the rhetoric of the jeremiad, a contention with a perpetually testing wilderness. Rather than the admonitions of Jeremiah, this form evokes the convenats of the Pentateuch. Like the Pentateuch, the jeremiad reviews history, formulates an historical promise and tells its audience both what it needs to do to affirm that promise and how far it has strayed from original stipulations. In order to understand the peculiarly optimistic nature of the jeremiad, one must refer to Penateuch covenants, both for their narratives and for their dichotomous diction.

Matthew Harkins (St. John’s University):
“Marvell, an English Youth at Rome”

This paper reads Marvell’s “Flecknoe, an English Priest at Rome” as the early work of a young English poet negotiating his political and religious identity while traveling in Rome. Having briefly converted to Catholicism as a student, Marvell faced possible censure from those who might view association with a fellow English traveler as a moral or spiritual relapse. Dramatizing himself as a relatively mature youth, unlike the easily molded “waxen Youth” who acts as Flecknoe’s disciple, Marvell withstands Flecknoe’s attempt to “allure” as “priest, poet and musician.” In rejecting Flecknoe’s artistic guidance, Marvell finds a veiled, mature, and sophisticated way to display his emancipation from Catholic spiritual influence.

Jennifer L. Heller (Lenoir-Rhyne College):
“Praising the Lord’s Anointed: Anne Southwell’s Political Legacy”

Written to her children but dedicated to the King, Lady Anne Southwell’s 1630 manuscript poem “Precepts” critiques “these exorbitant & wicked times” that have fomented dangerous political instability. The text’s genre as a verse mother’s legacy enables these pointed critiques—a composition to her children is an acceptable venue for a writing woman that also allows her political values to be transmitted to subsequent generations. Far more than a private exchange between mother and children, “Precepts” makes a pointed political statement that urges the reader to treasure, as Southwell does, the institution of monarchy.

Thomas Herron (East Carolina University):
“Flourishing Empire: Reconceiving the Iris Portrait”

The Iris Portrait of Queen Elizabeth can reasonably be labeled a propaganda piece, part of the ever-enlarging visual “cult” of the Virgin Queen who was also painted as a fertile Venus. As her cult of personality expanded, so did England’s empire. This paper will not tackle in-depth the questions of attribution, patronage and dating, but rather suggest further avenues of iconographic, literary and political interpretation centered on the word and image, “iris”; in particular, it will suggest new connections between the painting and the portraiture and literature of the age surrounding and relevant to the queen’s monarchic and imperial propaganda.

Marian Hillar (Center for Philosophy and Socinian Studies):
“The First Translation of De Trinitate, the First Part of Christianismi restitutio: An Evaluation of its Theology”

This paper reports the first translation (with Christopher A. Hoffman) of the first part of Christianismi restitutio of Michael Servetus, a treatise containing seven books and entitled De Trinitate. This long overdue English translation of the major Servetus work will stimulate new studies on this fascinating scholar, reformer, and visionary. Servetus was a unique and central figure in European history who originated or anticipated many later new developments and trends produced by the Enlightenment and modern times. We will evaluate the Servetus' investigation, theology, and significance of his treatise in the light of modern biblical scholarship.

Carlton Hughes (University of South Carolina):
“Art and Audacity: The Rhetorical Reach of Michelangelo’s David”

Bold in the way its nudity and gaze confronted viewers with an internal challenge, the David was one of Michelangelo’s most ambitious early works in its rhetorical aspect as well as in its scale. Building on the insights of Charles Seymour, David Summers, and others, the essay begins by analyzing Michelangelo’s relevant artistic strategies, but it also explores the propagandistic meaning of reassigning the statue from the Duomo to the Palazzo della Signoria. In so doing, the regime conducted a political gambit parallel to the artist’s aesthetic one, creating a subtly authoritarian personification of state.

Denna Iammarino (Marquette University):
“Fashioning a Reader: Edmund Spenser’s Inner Meditation Versus ‘outward shows’ ”

This project examines Spenser’s use of inward understanding versus “outward shows” in the proem from Book VI and BK. V canto ii of the Faerie Queene. Yet in these passages his performer still needs an audience, a hearer. This project investigates how this inward understanding relates to Richard Hooker’s right reason. It seems Spenser uses a version of this concept to provide his reader with the interpretative authority to unlock this passage and transcend the text. However, this passage also illustrates Spenser’s poetic paradox: he writes these passages where higher understanding can be achieved yet he needs a reader to unlock them.

Yanmei Jiang (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee):
“The Violation of Edward II’s Two Bodies”

In this paper I want to discuss how Edward II’s failure to govern his physical body directly leads to his misgovernment of the kingdom because of the inseparability of the king’s body natural and body politic. Marlowe portrays a world in which ambition-driven individuals compete for the access to the king’s body natural to plunder his body politic. I will discuss how Edward’s minions violate the king’s body politic by manipulating his body natural and how Edward’s two frustrated lovers, his wife Isabella and Mortimer, avenge their mistreatment by Edward on his two bodies. Making Edward III restore dynastic order, Edward II conveys an important political message to the Elizabethan audience—dynastic continuity depends on the monarch’s proper management of his/her two bodies.

Jared Johnson (SUNY, Stony Brook):
“ ‘That such a slave as this should wear a sword / Who wears no honesty’: Defamation and Debasement in English Renaissance Bastard Plays”

Kent’s vituperation of Oswald in King Lear implicitly reflects the importance of “honor” to early modern English citizens. Similarly, Edmund’s disdain for the “plague of custom” that prevents him from inheriting Gloucester’s wealth problematizes the moral and economic concept of legitimacy. In this paper, I will examine the ways in which concepts of bastardy and defamation interact and construct an ‘other’ category characterized by the lack of nobility. Through the rhetoric of ‘slavery’ in the bastard plays, early modern playwrights inscribe a sense of moral and economic normativity upon those named slaves, sometimes obfuscating and other times complementing the other debased central figures of the plays: bastards.

Mark Jones (Trinity Christian College):
“National Imagining in Shakespeare’s Songs of Hiems and Ver”

Louis Montrose has remarked that the songs of Hiems and Ver that conclude Shakespeare’s _Love’s Labour’s Lost_ "are not presented as an expression of the characters’ vision, but as a gift to them--and to the theatre audience--from the playwright." The songs do indeed constitute such a gift—and not least because, in a play notorious for its linguistic intricacy, they are plain spoken and graceful. But there is more: the songs offer characters and audience alike a glimpse of an imagined community where every flower may flourish in its proper sphere and season. Organically related to the setting and main action of the play, the songs symbolize the possibilities of a harmonious commonwealth.

Robert Kellerman (University of Maine, Augusta):
“ ‘Remember You Your Cue’: Ludus and Mimesis in The Merry Wives of Windsor”

Critics have long dismissed The Merry Wives of Windsor as one of Shakespeare’s lesser efforts. This essay proposes a reassessment of the play, based on an examination of the two theatrical traditions that Shakespeare fuses together in the play to a greater extent than in his other comedies: that of ludus, the medieval tradition of drama as literally, “play,” and that of mimesis, the early modern tradition of drama as an imitation vitae.

Susan Kendrick (Emporia State University):
“Death, Grief, Identity: Bereavement, Revenge and the (Re)Construction of the Self in Hamlet”

In the play, revenge is a matter of identity: defending the dead father’s honor and punishing the perpetrator’s crime. In this proclamation he has returned to his senses, so to speak – faced with a vengeful Laertes, he reasserts his noble status in the aristocratic hierarchy. By Act V, all the aspects of Hamlet’s existence have culminated into a single purpose: the murder of Claudius. With Laertes’ public statement, Claudius’ treachery has been revealed. Hamlet does not have to take his revenge; with Laertes’ proclamation and Horatio’s revelation of the story, it is not necessary that Hamlet kill Claudius – yet the circumstances of his grief compel him to follow through, even though it may mean his own damnation.

Jonathan Kim-Reuter (Georgian Court University):
“The Body’s Eye: The Origins of Self-Observation in Montaigne’s Essays”

What is the origin of the Essays by Montaigne? To answer this question, two crucial points must be granted: the death of Etienne de La Boétie; and, Montaigne’s paradoxical faith in the Essays. The method of self-knowledge (the “essay”) was first practiced earlier, in the letters written around La Boétie’s death. In the portraits of the dying La Boétie, the descriptive experience of death—bodily, visible, affective—foreshadows the technique of self-observation from which the Essays sprang (“I am myself the matter of my book”). The method of consolation Montaigne displays toward La Boétie is a bodily recollection of the subject, where the body, trained on its own perceptual life, is both self-perspective (“I”) and sensory faculty “eye.”

George Klawitter (St. Edward’s University):
“The Subliminal Muse in Marvell’s ‘The Unfortunate Lover’.”

“The Unfortunate Lover” deserves more attention than it has received over the years. As a narrative poem, it succeeds, even if the brutal message is tasteless and demeaning. Grosart was more gentle in his assessment of the poem, proclaiming that it “seems a versification of some of the incidents in a tale of romance” (135). Romance for him, of course, meant “exotic tale” rather than what we understand by the term today, but he did sense in the poem something unusual. How satisfying it would be to determine the actual identity of the lover and discover how he fits, if he does fit, into the sketchy web we have of Marvell’s personal love experiences.

Amy Larsen (Texas A & M University):
“ ‘Charm’d with Wit and Beauty’: Romance Fiction and Representations of ‘True’ Love in the Life Writing of Anne Halkett, Mary Boyle Rich, and Elizabeth Delaval”

These women describe their courtship experiences in terms of the prose romance, but acknowledge discrepancies between fiction, in which the couple’s constancy triumphs, and lived experience, in which love is not central to marriage arrangements. They employ the stereotype of the frivolous, credulous female reader to characterize themselves, and the model of the heroical lover for their suitors to explain why they believed these men would be “true,” despite material obstacles. The romance genre provides a structure the writers organize their autobiographical selves within, as wooed heroines who love in the face of opposition, and without, as women whose “true loves” are imposed upon by the world of financial concerns and parental consent.

Alexander Lee (University of Edinburgh):
“Stoicism and ‘Augustinianism’ in Petrarch’s Secretum”

The Secretum is undoubtedly Petrarch's most complete treatment of felicitas and virtue. It is, however, often viewed as a confused and contradictory work, consisting of a series of incompatible 'Stoical' and 'Augustinian' episodes. Examining Petrarch's knowledge and absorbtion of St. Augustine's early works, especially the De vera religione and the Soliloquies, this paper demonstrates that such a view is open to question and explores the possibility of viewing the Secretum as a coherent and logical whole composed under the influence of the young St. Augustine's writings.

Dan Lochman (Texas State University, San Marcos):
“Writing, Patronage, and Constructed Friendships: Colet, Linacre, and Erasmus”

This paper investigates the extant correspondence of the three principles involved in the composition of the Coleti Aeditio (c. 1512)—Linacre, Colet, and Erasmus—in the years surrounding the opening of St. Paul’s School in London. Their correspondence sheds light upon tensions that crop up when utilitarian interests complicate “friendships” (as Lisa Jardine has documented in the Erasmus circle), especially when friendship is understood according to humanist models of the type Kathy Eden locates in Erasmus’s Adagiorum collectanea (1500) and other writings. In contrast to the conventional precepts of friendship found in Tudor courtesy books, these humanists negotiate constructed malleable images of one another whose existence in space and time undermines professed theories of amicitia as a perfect and stable virtue.

Julia Logan-Bourbois (Autry National Center):
“Chasing Don Quixote”

Whether in the 16th century Spain or in their New World possessions, social-cultural order in the empire of Charles V and Philip II depended to some extent on the maintenance of feudal pyramidal systems of patronage, mutual bonds of loyalty formed upon the foundations of the “code” of chivalry. The “code” of chivalry was a set of principles that altered little since the Middle Ages period to meet new socio-economic developments. At its core were the notions of prowess, justice, loyalty, defense, courage, faith, humility, largess, and nobility in act. These values continued to hold relevance for courtiers, kings, and socially ambitious soldiers and served to culturally unify Charles V’s realm. Charles V’s and Philip II’s efforts to promote associations with the idealized knights of the medieval period was facilitated by the literary traditions still highly relevant in 16th century Spain, namely the proliferation of chivalric romances. At the border between the medieval and modern ages, the texts commonly referred to as “chivalric romances” continued to develop during the sixteenth century. Whether in the New World or the old, tales of chivalric acts were immensely popular among the middle and upper classes, as well as the aristocracy. This paper shall discuss the influence of the texts, tentatively to include El Caballero Determinado, Amadis de Gaula and others, on individuals and contemporary military exploits.

Ellen Longsworth (Merrimack College):
“Arnolfo di Cambio and Michelangelo Buonarroti: A Proposition”

From 1496 until May of 1501 when he returned to Florence, Michelangelo was in Rome for the first time. We know that he admired and assimilated into his own designs various examples of antique sculpture, but a more modern work of sculpture by a famous compatriot also caught his eye there: Arnolfo di Cambio's "Presepio" in the great and ancient church of Santa Maria Maggiore. This paper explores the relationships that resulted.

Nathan Martin (University of Nebraska, Lincoln):
“Courtly Blunder: The Anglo-Swedish Marriage Negotiations of Erik XIV and Elizabeth I”

This paper examines the courtly representation of Erik XIV in his bid to marry Queen Elizabeth. Specifically, the study looks at the performance of the Swedish diplomatic corps as they pushed for a union between Sweden and England. It will be argued that the foreign ambassadors lacked a proper understanding of English courtly protocol, suffered a poor representation at court, and miscalculated the sentiments of Queen Elizabeth in her attitudes toward marriage. The study uses a number of different sources, mainly relying, though, on the Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, and the Historisk Handlingar.

Sean McDowell (Seattle University):
“An Anatomy of Marvell’s ‘Smirke’ ”

My essay analyzes Marvell’s habits of psychophysiological delineation and critique in Mr. Smirke, or, the Divine in Mode (1676), a pamphlet that borrows a character from George Etherege’s then popular play, The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter (1676), to indict both Francis Turner, the chaplain to the duke of York, as well as the clergy who, in the 1670s, resisted the notion of compromise among English Protestants. In this pamphlet, Marvell first attacks specific faculties in Turner and in like-minded clergy and proceeds to show how Turner’s Animadversions upon a Late Pamphlet issues from a surfeit of unruly passions left unchecked because of the aforementioned faculties. “Mr. Smirke” cannot help but smirk because of the ugly unruliness within him. This attack against Smirke’s faculties undermines the content of Turner’s argument because the argument is shown to derive from a corrupt process of cognition. Thus, Marvell turns an ad hominem attack into a clinical discussion that renders it all the more plausible.

Timothy McKinney (Baylor University):
“Some Thoughts on Bembo, Willaert, and the Notion of Quality”

Cinquecento literary theorist Pietro Bembo asserted that meaning could be conveyed in poetry by the sound and rhythm of words, positing two categories of qualità called gravità and piacevolezza. Modern scholars have suggested that Bembo’s theory of affective word-sound influenced the way composers set words to music, thus it is particularly interesting that Petrarch’s “Mentre che’l cor” was discussed by Bembo and also set to music by Bembo’s younger contemporary Adrian Willaert. I shall examine the readings of Petrarch’s poem preserved in Bembo’s prose and Willaert’s music and discuss their commonalities and divergences as well as what these tell us about each reader’s approach to interpreting a text.

Melissa Monroe (St. Louis University):
“Thomas More and the Case of Richard Hunne: the Changing Face of Conscience and Justice”

On December 4, 1514, Richard Hunne was found hanged in his cell in the Lollard’s Tower. A Coroner’s jury ruled that Hunne had been murdered and an investigation uncovered that the bishop’s chancellor had committed the act. He had been taken to the Tower three months earlier on a charge of heresy. However, there was substantial evidence that he was sent on account of challenging the church’s jurisdiction over a mortuary gift. Thomas More, Under Sheriff of London at the time, claims to be thoroughly familiar with the facts of the case. Even with mounting evidence for the chancellor’s guilt, More sided with the Catholic Church and the judgments from the King’s Bench in exonerating him. More’s stance on the case has been puzzling to scholars and has subsequently engendered differing theories about his motivations. It has been argued that either More blindly committed himself to the judgments of the king and church and disregarded any nagging evidence of murder, or that he uncomfortably separated his personal and public opinions of the case, because such was life in his society. [. . .]

Grant Moss (Utah Valley State College):
“Death and the Maiden: The Image of Elizabeth after 1603”

As might be expected, during the first few years of James I’s reign, the king and his courtiers made references to his predecessor, Queen Elizabeth, in order to create a sense of continuity between the two monarchs and between their two dynasties. However, relatively little attention has been given to how the image of Queen Elizabeth is used (or not used) in relation to later historical periods in England. This essay will examine the image of Elizabeth in relation to later queens regnant, addressing how Elizabeth’s imagery and iconography influenced--whether positively or negatively--such figures as Victoria, Anne, and Mary II.

Benjamin Myers (Oklahoma Baptist University):
“Spenser’s ‘Swan Song’: The Unity of the Prothalamion”

While the Prothalamion does seem to have two various and opposed foci in its treatment on the one hand of exile and decay and on the other hand of the promise of new marriage, it is the interaction of these two themes that creates the unity of the poem. The progress of the poem works as a type of the fall from paradise in its movement from pastoral innocence to the reality of city-life, as does the poet’s own expulsion from London. Along side these tropes of the fall is placed the suggestion of the bridal fall from childhood and virginity. The two seemingly contrasting themes of exile and marriage are placed side by side because the driving force behind the poem is the concept of marriage as consolation for our exile from paradise.

Byron Nelson (West Virginia University):
“Lord Fairfax and the ‘Wanton Mote of Dust’: Action and Indolence in ‘Upon Appleton House’ ”

The apparent assertion of the superiority of contemplation over action in Marvell's "Upon Appleton House" is deceptive; the virtues of the contemplative life are belied by the exuberance of the natural and social life surrounding the garden. Lord Fairfax, who had demonstrated his military skill and moral authority, now imposes military discipline only on his unruly plants. Merely by walking in the garden, Mary Fairfax imposes order upon the unruly meadows and reclaims the lazy poet from his indolent behavior. The transfer of moral authority in the poem from father to daughter recapitulates the formal pattern of Shakespearean romance. For all its emphasis on contemplation, the poem demonstrates an exhilarating range of vigorous actions.

Arlen Nydam (University of Texas, Austin):
“Painting and Protestant Theology in Sidney’s Arcadia and Astrophel and Stella”

Tracing the tensions, detentes, and alliances between seeing and hearing, painting and writing, exterior and interior, wit and will, through key passages of the New Arcadia and Astrophil and Stella, reveals an author with a uniquely deep commitment to the visual arts. This is true of his life no less than his writings, and suggests that the fairly common classification of Sidney as a strict Calvinist or even unambiguously Protestant holds true only when important details are overlooked. Andrew Weiner, for example, has written that Sidney’s poetics is “largely based upon Calvinist theology.” However, Sidney runs afoul of Calvin’s teaching on images, and his works harmonize with a sacramental theology at odds with that preached by the Church of England.

Margaret Oakes: “ ‘First to be hanged and then confessed’: Interrogating Love and Law in Othello”

The metastructure of Othello is the use and abuse of discourses of law: it is informed by legalistic principles and procedures that define the intentions and actions of the characters. Using Katharine Maus’ work on the early modern theater and courtroom, I will focus on the evidentiary standards and interrogatory processes purporting to determine truth and culpability. Standards and processes established as fair are supplanted by those intended by Iago to be biased and deadly. The extraordinary use of procedures of investigation and interrogation, first prescribed by Othello and then distorted through improper questioning and specious evidence, causes concepts of law not only to be applied inappropriately but also to be perverted from their original intentions, resulting in the legal and moral tragedy of Othello.

Martha Oberle (Frederick Community College):
“The Renaissance Books of Four Colonies”

The colonists of Virginia, Massachusetts and Maryland were extraordinary not only for their daring, courage, and patence but also for their learning. This study proposes to examine their necessarily Renaissance books.

Edward Olszewski (Case Western Reserve University):
“Bronzino’s London Venus”

Giorgio Vasari reported that Bronzino’s painting of Venus in the National Gallery, London, was sent to Francis I of France, an avid collector of Italian paintings and artists. This study argues that the king of France for whom the painting was intended was Henry II, husband to Catherine de’ Medici, and that the panel alludes to the king’s extended love affair with Diane de Poitiers. Catherine would have welcomed the painting as a moral allegory, particularly after Henry became king in 1547 and began to favor his mistress over the queen. A new reading of the painting interprets it as an allegory of illicit love in four stages from pleasure to foreplay to love making and syphilis. [. . .]

April Patrick (University of Houston):
“A Would-Be Laureate: Lady Mary Wroth’s Voice and Apostrophic Language”

Scholars studying Lady Mary Wroth over the past 400 years have typically fallen into two groups: those who praise her role in Renaissance poetry as one of Shakespeare’s sisters described by Virgina Woolf or those who compare Wroth to hear male counterparts and criticize her sonnet sequence _Pamphilia to Amphilanthus_ for its lack of a linear plot. In considering Wroth’s use of apostrophe in her revision of the Petrarchan tradition, I seek to provide a case for her position in the canon beyond the fact that she created a voice for the female poet-lover. In her sonnet sequence, the absence of a narrative and linear plot should not be considered weakness, but instead a strength of her poetic challenges to the patriarchal literary legacy.

Tim Peoples (Texas State University, San Marcos):
“Satire in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania and the Problem of Female Authorship”

This paper compares an episode from the _The Countesse of Montgomeries Urania_ by Lady Mary Wroth to an episode from _Don Quixote_ by Miguel de Cervantes to examine methods of satire used by Wroth. In the _Urania_, Pelarina remains constant to an inconstant man. Her love is similar in its foolishness to Don Quixote’s quest as a knight-errant. This episode seems to counter societal expectations about constancy, but an ambiguous narrative intrusion possibly indicates Wroth’s self-censorship. Assessing satire in the _Urania_ and in other women’s writing may give critics new insights about restrictions on feminine authorship.

Lucas Peters (Central Washington University):
“Beyond Theatrical Boundaries: The Echoing Carnivalesque of The Roaring Girl”

This presentation will explore representations of folk dialogue and humor within Middleton and Dekker’s play, The Roaring Girl. Because Mary Frith—the contemporary basis for the play—was, in Katharine Eisaman’s words, “the first positively identifiable living person to be translated into a quasi-fictional dramatic realm,” the subversive humor and language of folk culture becomes magnified. This presentation argues that the economic, gender, and social inversions of patriarchal codification occurring within The Roaring Girl are enabled because of a magnified use of folk dialogue and laughter.

Katherine Powers (California State University, Fullerton):
“Giovanni Bellini and his Recorder-Playing Angel”

Giovanni Bellini is thought to have painted music-making with expert understanding: his string instruments of lute, rebec and lira da braccio, are shown with finely wrought details and accurate performance practice. Bellini's recorder-playing angel for his Santa Maria dei Frari altarpiece in Venice seems outside the artist's standard. In contrast to the authoritative lutenist in the same painting, Bellini's recorder player holds the instrument in a naive manner: the player's lips are pouched outward and the angel's finger position is clumsy. This paper will examine Bellini’s recorder-playing angel musician as an example of his varied approach to musical instruments, as well as the attitude toward the recorder and its use in society.

Nicole Provencher (Our Lady of the Lake University):
“Religious Sexuality and Science: the Joining of the Physical and Spiritual Worlds through the Ecstatic Experiences of Female Mystics in the Early Renaissance”

Throughout the Early Renaissance period female mystics practiced various forms of religious devotion in order to more deeply connect with and express personal religious experience. While engaged in these experiences, mystics were subject to intense states of pleasure and rapture. Female mystics such as Margery Kempe, Teresa of Avila, and the martyr Anne Askew experienced religious callings under the influence of a society that was gradually moving away from the medieval tradition of physical denial and suffering and beginning to embrace the natural and physical world. Although the Renaissance period was host to varying ideas and concepts about religion and the place of man in the modern world, female mystics were able to, through their own ascetic and sensual relationship between the physical world and the religious order, create a space or a connection in which the ideas of science and religion are joined. The sensual experiences of these women demonstrate a blending of the medieval ideas of the divine spiritual world and the modern focus on the natural world through science. By engaging in a thoughtful study of these elements and the influences that colored the lives of these religious women, a more balanced understanding of the relationship between Early Renaissance science and religious sexuality can be obtained.

Timothy Raylor (Carleton College):
“Marvell, Waller, and Cromwell”

Marvell's borrowings from, allusions to, corrections of, and attacks on his senior contemporary, Waller, have been brought into focus by modern scholarship, with much emphasis being placed (understandably) on Marvell; a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between the two poets requires, however, a balanced consideration of both sides. This paper gestures toward a redressing of the balance by examining the (tantalisingly fragmentary) evidence for literary and political connections between Marvell and Waller during the Protectorate, suggesting that they were more closely linked as writers of Cromwellian propaganda than we have yet recognized.

Helaine Razovsky (Northwestern State University):
“Rewriting Romeo and Juliet: Rebellion, the State, and the Family in Three Stuart Variations”

Students of early modern English literature are familiar with the conventional representation of the family hierarchy as a similitude for the socio-political hierarchy. Rebellion against the familial patriarch is thus readable as potential license for rebellion against the patriarchal class and gender structure. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet represents a rebellion by two young lovers against familial restrictions, but the tragedy that develops in Romeo and Juliet arises as much from tragic coincidence as from rebellion against patriarchal conventions. In three Stuart plays, however—Thomas Dekker's The Honest Whore (1604), John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (1623), and John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1633)—judgments of the patriarchy and the rebellions sparked by those judgments can be read in revisions of Romeo and Juliet.

Mark K. Reuter (University of Nebraska, Lincoln):
“Robert Dudley and William Cecil: Models of Masculinity in Early Modern England”

A shift in the definitions of “courtier” and “councilor” reflected new concepts of masculine behavior at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign. The transformation of these terms and the style of masculinity they represent culminated with Elizabeth’s relationships with William Cecil and Robert Dudley. This paper will focus on comparing the early years of William Cecil and Robert Dudley. Dudley’s noble lineage, his aristocratic education, his circle of friends, and ambitions turned the future Earl of Leiceister into a flamboyant courtier. William Cecil’s humbler antecedents, humanist education, service to the state, and ambitions made the future Lord Burghley the best of councilors. While alternative models of masculinity existed, the masculinity displayed by Dudley and Cecil the dominant models.

Anna Riehl (University of Illinois at Chicago):
"Elizabeth I and the Heraldry of the Face"

In the imagery of the poetic depictions of Elizabeth, the trope of heraldry stands out in its singular descriptive and symbolic fusion, in queen’s face, of her body politic and body natural. In addition, heraldic metaphors provide a poetic outlet for the male writer’s desire to invest his queen’s face with meaning. However, this process of investment is compounded by a strong undercurrent of hidden anxiety and metaphoric violence. The two primary examples discussed in this paper are Edmund Spenser’s and Fulke Greville’s heraldic figurations appearing, respectively, in The Shepheardes Calender and Sonnet 81 from Caelica.

Rhys W. Roark (Louisiana State U., Shreveport):
“Linear Perspective: An Infinite Cosmological Space?”

Contrary to some well-known art historical, scholarly opinion, the realization of linear perspective in Italian Renaissance art, making for the depiction of objects within a consistently receding space, is not a realization or anticipation of an infinite cosmological space. Rather, the cultural milieu of the Renaissance, its understanding of space and even Euclidean geometry and the relation between its art and science is incapable of this conception at this time. Instead, Renaissance linear perspective exists comfortably within the Aristotelian / Ptolemaic cosmic picture, and it will require more than art itself to undo this conception or anticipate a new one.

Clifford Ronan (Texas State University, San Marcos):
“Tracing Threads between Montaigne and Shakespeare”

Of all Shakespeare’s contemporaries, few writers are closer to him than Montaigne in humor, humanity, and multiplicity of (skeptical) vantage points. In the late play _The Tempest_, Shakespeare obviously quotes _Les Essais_ (probably Florio’s tr.). But did the dramatist assuredly use the _Essais_ in _Hamlet_ and other plays written at about that time? If so, watching what the dramatist selects, and hypothesizing why he does so, could become almost as rewarding as peering at his exploitation of Cinthio or Plutarch. There are, I think, more clues than have hitherto been recognized as to Shakespeare’s use of Montaigne, specifically in the sudden intensity of attention afforded to textile images.

Susan Cosby Ronnenberg (Viterbo University):
“The Paralytic Grief of Displaced Princes: Hamlet and Oroonoko”

In William Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy Hamlet, Hamlet’s inability to enact revenge upon Claudius, as his father’s murderer and the usurper of his own political inheritance, stems in part from his excessive grief over the unexpected loss of his father. Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko might initially appear as Hamlet’s opposite, managing an extremely active life, despite his confining circumstances. However, in key instances in the narrative following loss, Oroonoko’s excessive grief negates his capacity for agency, including obtaining revenge. This analysis examines multiple parallels in how Hamlet’s and Oroonoko’s grief-induced inactivity are portrayed, while also exploring cultural shifts in grief, nobility, and masculinity contained in the works.

Hanneke Ronnes (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands):
“A Fashion for Dates and Names: A Study of 16th-Century Inscriptions Incorporated into Dutch, Irish and English Elite Architecture”

The reign of Queen Elizabeth coincides with the proliferation of the phenomenon of 'date and initial stones' in England, the Low Countries and Ireland. The fashion to adorn castles and houses with inscriptions referring to both the date of construction and the owners was a popular practice in Renaissance Europe, arriving, it will be argued in this paper, in the late 15th, early 16th century in the Low Countries, in the first half of the 16th century in England, and, not coincidentally, in the second half of the 16th century – the Elizabethan era – in Ireland. On the basis of an analysis of over 400 English, Dutch and Irish date and initial stones, this paper will explore questions concerning the diffusion of the phenomenon and the meaning of these stones in terms of a burgeoning heritage culture and new spatial and temporal negotiations of identities.

Felicia Yao Sailey (University of South Carolina):
“Heavenly Muses: Stella and the Allegory of Inclination”

I will compare Stella in Sidney’s ‘Astrophil and Stella’ with Artemisia Gentileschi’s late Renaissance painting, ‘Allegory of Inclination.’ I will look at Sidney’s Stella first. I will discuss Stella’s elusive nature and her role as a link between Astrophil and nature. Though central to nature references, she is not directly involved in the natural world. It is Astrophil who can create and engage, not her. I will then discuss Gentileschi’s attention to texture in depicting her muse. Her muse is physical and earthy. She is activley engaged, tilting her head is tilted in thought and offering direction with a compass. She actively guides her artist. In this paper, I will examine representation, historical and artistic contexts for both.

Mark Schneider (Virginia Tech):
“Self-Invention and Deviance: Philibert de l'Orme’s Role in the Creation of the Savant Professional Architect”

When Philibert De L’Orme (1514-1570) published his Premier Tome de l’Architecture in 1567, his objective involved considerably more than just the development of a uniquely French architecture for, in De l’Orme’s view, the new architecture was to coincide with the inauguration of a new professional—the savant architect, who was to have undisputed authority over the master mason and all other building trades. De l’Orme intended to make of himself a prime example of this new professional and in so doing, attempted to stage a major assault on the medieval guild system. Drawing upon a close reading of De l’Orme’s Premier Tome, this paper focuses on his conception of the professional architect’s new authority as he defined and implemented it in his own often acrimonious and conflicted practice.

Anja Schwalen (Texas A & M University):
“Mysticism, Feminine Subjectivity, and Reformist thought in Marguerite de Navarre and Aemilia Lanyer”

This study will compare Marguerite de Navarre's Miroir de Jhesus Christ crucifie from 1549 and Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Iudaeorum from 1611. Both poems contemplate the passion of Christ and its effects on the female speaker, as well as the personal relationship between Christ and the (female) soul. Both speakers identify with Christ as bearer of feminine virtues and suffering, employing mystical language and images. However, mystic references are more prevalent in Marguerite, along with reformist ideas of salvation through faith alone, whereas Lanyer tries to rewrite and renegotiate women's social status in church and society.

Cathy Scott (Northeastern Oklahoma State University):
“Hamlet: A Case of Gender Identity Confusion”

Hamlet’s delay in killing Claudius is due to a psychological disorder, and since the mid-twentieth century this has been the basis of the most prominent interpretations. Hamlet’s behavior in the play goes from that of a depressed young man, who is mourning the death of his father and trying to cope with his mother’s incestuous behavior, to that of a man with the identity of a woman, at least from a psychological perspective. He is psychologically terrorized by this radical change in his identity. Also, this disorder directly challenges the system of patriarchy to its foundations, and the individual with this disorder experiences a roller coaster of emotions: degrading humiliation, absolute fear, crippling depression, and manic episodes. There are few, if any things, more difficult to live with than a change in self-identity from male to female in a society ruled by men. The catalyst for this unlikely change in Hamlet’s identity is referred to what Julia Kristeva calls the horror of the abject (1) aximum.

Brandie R. Siegfried (Brigham Young University):
“As Queens Use Shadows and Veils: Bacon’s Mirror and Elizabeth’s Fine Conceit”

This paper briefly explores Francis Bacon’s Of Tribute in which the historical successes of the queen become exemplifications of political and spiritual transcendence. Such transcendence is, paradoxically, further developed in several passages that linger warmly on the theatricality inherent in Elizabeth’s public presentations. Her courteous behavior has always been “somewhat of a queen,” one character announces, “and as queens use shadows and veils with their rich apparel, so methinks in all her qualities there is somewhat that flieth from ostentation, and yet inviteth the mind to contemplate the more” (47). Ultimately, Bacon’s mirror holds up to Elizabeth the possibility of an afterlife in fame. In an alchemy based on rhetoric, Elizabeth is invited to transform the mundane stuff of historical experience into a transcendent myth of national destiny.

Susan K. Silver (University of Memphis):
“Monsters and Moral Decay in French Renaissance Literature”

My paper will explore late Renaissance scholarly views on witches as part of a wider preoccupation with monsters and the unnatural. I will discuss Ambroise Paré’s medical perspective in conjunction with views elaborated by fervent believers in demons among the humanist class. Jean Bodin’s historico-political demonology will be read against Montaigne’s uniquely skeptical observations on monsters. I will also consider the importance of gender in representations of wickedness-- the means by which views on creation, procreation, and human anatomy help construct women’s occult (and occulted) social powers during this time.

Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler (Texas State University, San Marcos):
“What’s Tragic about Samson Agonistes”

amson Agonistes clearly is a tragedy. But since September 11, 2001, many readers have been asking, "a tragedy about what?" I argue that we may answer this question by reading the drama through two lenses: Walter A. Davis's provocative new book Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche Since 9-11 (2006) and Milton's adaptation of the work of Petrus Ramus, The Art of Logic (1672), published in the year following Samson. Both works are responses to psychic wounds to their cultures and from both we may infer that Samson Agonistes may be an existential tragedy of self-knowledge and risk: Samson's efforts to gain self-knowledge and actualize himself as God's champion are incomplete, and his apparent triumph is an existential failure.

LaRue Love Sloan (University of Louisiana, Monroe):
“Off With Their Heads! Mummers’ Tricks in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well”

Analogues of nineteenth-century mummers plays turn up in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, a play featuring an improbable “doctor” with a magical elixir and the mock beheading of a fool. Helena plays a mumming trick on Bertram, complete with taunts of mock combat, even as his crony Paroles is simultaneously subjected to a mock beheading by two Lords of Misrule. In the event, Paroles is demoted from improbable courtier to licensed Fool, while Helena, in keeping with her advancement at court, transforms from a “poor physician’s daughter” to an accomplished courtly masker who, in a feat totally in keeping with the comic resurrections of the mummers’ plays, even brings herself back to life.

Lindsay Sloas (Southeast Missouri State University):
“Cleopatra and Elizabeth: Androgyny and the Female Throne”

This paper will explore the gender roles that Antony and Cleopatra fill, focusing on Cleopatra’s gender makeup. A close examination of the text will reveal that while Antony’s gender identity is subtracted as he falls into a female gender role, Cleopatra’s gender is multiplied, resulting in her androgyny. Significantly, Cleopatra’s androgyny parallels that of Elizabeth I, another queen that of whom Shakespeare was very familiar. Like Cleopatra, Elizabeth I maintained her feminine mystique but assumed a very masculine position of authority. A comparison of the pair’s feminine powers will yield a more accurate understanding of Cleopatra’s gender function within the text.

Randi Marie Smith (University of Florida):
“A Melancholic Nature: Nature and its Place in the Poetry of Francis Quarles and Robert Southwell”

Many poems of the Renaissance examine the potential physical and spiritual parallels between the world of nature and their speakers. The poets may treat nature as a partner in melancholy, as a tool of condemnation, as the structure for a lament, or as a celebration of the culmination of mourning. Several of these facets are presented in the poetry of Robert Southwell and Francis Quarles. In this paper, I will argue that the parallels created in these poems strengthen the ties between spiritual appetite, mourning, and the earth that are characteristic of both of their works as well as continuing a tradition of images like the wandering wood of Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

Louis Charles Stagg (University of Memphis):
“Shakespeare’s Cressida ‘Real’ but ‘Unwomanly’ vs. ‘Sneaking Fellow’ Troilus: Tragic Heroine in a Bitterly Ironic World”

Cressida’s involvement in the war came when traded to the Greeks as “Beautiful Woman” for “Captive General.” She adopted Diomedes as protector against the army, choosing in grief to adjust to her surroundings, since once-loved Troilus demanded her loyalty to him even if it were inconvenient or dangerous for him to comfort or rescue her. As king’s son, it was his “fault.” Determined to fulfill duty to herself instead of worshipping Troilus’ empty rhetoric, she undergoes a shattering, irrevocable break with her previous existence, a “sea change” with crushing anguish of spirit in a dramatic, ironic negative parable.

Brian Steele (Texas Tech University):
“Magnificent in Her Repentance: Two Representations of the Magdalen”

This paper examines critically two representations of Mary Magdalene, that by Donatello (ca. 1455) and that by Titian (ca. 1533), as distinctive embodiments of pre-Tridentine concepts. Although Giorgio Vasari thought Donatello’s statue to be beautiful, modern critics have termed it “ugly” and “repulsive;” the severity of this image can be better understood by interpretation with reference to theological notions of repentance and to characterizations offered in Jacobus da Voragine’s Legenda Aurea. As Bernard Aikema has argued, the image by Titian incorporates sexual attraction in order to tempt a viewer, a test esteemed in pro-Erasmian ideas about piety. Interpretation with recourse to the afore-mentioned factors and to the concept of magnificence augments that offered by Aikema and suggests ways in which the image engaged different types of viewing audiences.

Mary Stripling (Dallas Baptist University):
“King John: Elizabeth’s History Play”

In my paper I consider two of Shakespeare’s most neglected female characters, Constance and Eleanor. Both Constance and Eleanor embody the destabilizing potential of queen mother figures--mothers who have the exclusive knowledge of the legitimacy of the heirs who claim the English throne. King John demonstrates the ability of savvy political women such as Constance and Eleanor, who, as I will argue, mirror the battling cousins Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth, to exploit prevailing fears about maternity in their quests for political power.

Noel Sugimura (Cambridge University):
“The Glow-worms of Extinction: Marvell & ‘The Mower Against Gardens’ ”

In the poem, 'The Mower Against Gardens', I argue that Marvell is exploring the age-old epistemological problem of absolute esse (being) versus an esse defined by its percipi. In the final stanza, I propose that Marvell hits an ecstatic extinction of consciousness, which is in itself a paradox that signals an epistemological breakdown: implied in the language of pastoral — in which there already is present a wound in nature made by the imposition of poetic art — Marvell now reflects on the wound, or division, between essence and perception, and then between thought and what we perceive that thought to be. By going over its consequences in a poetics of negation, Marvell is — as he is in ‘The Garden’ — anti-rational without being anti-mind. And this, in turn, reflects his engagement with, and contribution to, Renaissance theories of the philosophy of mind and epistemology.

Sara Trevisan (University of Padua):
“Mildmay Fane’s Masque ‘Raguaillo D’Oceano’ (1640):
A Case Study in Seventeenth-Century Private Indoor Entertainment”

A case study on seventeenth-century private indoor entertainment, this paper examines Mildmay Fane’s masque Raguaillo D’Oceano (1640). In this masque fourteen Nations want to conquer Terra Australis, but are prevented by King Oceanus, who condemns them to sink because of their presumption. Sharing features common to travel plays, maritime spectacles, reformed masques, Royalist entertainment, and political theatre, Fane’s masque is an interesting example of the metamorphosis of theatrical themes, structures and audience expectations during the crisis of the 1640s, as well as a theatrical instance of Lois Potter’s “secret writing”.

Beverly M. Van Note (Texas A & M University):
“ ‘An you can cuck me, spare not!’: Moll’s Freedom of Discourse in The Roaring Girl”

In The Roaring Girl, Moll Cutpurse freely fashions a self that bends established social, class, and gender categories, in no small part thanks to her facility with various speech registers. Her appropriation of various styles of discourse and her open defiance of the cucking stool in the play’s final scene clearly suggest the play’s concern with the boundaries of women’s speech, especially within marriage. Approaching Moll from the standpoint of her freedom of discourse enables us to see how Moll both maintains the status quo and moves beyond it, opening a space within the world of the play where possible alterations to convention can be actively imagined.

Nicholas von Maltzahn (University of Ottowa):
“Death by Drowning: Marvell’s ‘Lycidas’ ”

Andrew Marvell did not contribute to the Cambridge memorial volume _Justa Edovardo King naufrago_ (1638), although he had already in 1637 contributed two poems to another such collegiate collection. But one poem in _Justa_ made a profound impression on Marvell: John Milton’s “Lycidas”, a commanding display by an alumnus come back to challenge collegiate honours. When a few years later Marvell’s father drowned in crossing the Humber, Marvell might further meditate Milton’s evocation of a loss where “the shores, and sounding seas / Wash far away” an unrecovered body. Marvell alludes most often to “Lycidas” of all Milton’s works. It is also a poem, I shall argue, that he comes variously to rewrite, early and late.

Louis A. Waldman (University of Texas):
“Sophonisba Anguissola’s Self-Portrait in the Walters Art Gallery”

Sofonisba Anguissola’s self-portrait miniature in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is one of her most beautiful works, and one of her most enigmatic. The central field of the medallion is filled with a large and complicated monogram. Although it is generally agreed that this monogram encodes the name of the portrait’s intended recipient, none of the attempts yet made at “cracking” it have succeeded in explaining every letter or letter-fragment contained in it. This paper proposes a new decipherment of the monogram in the Boston portrait--and with it a new hypothesis about the work’s original purpose and recipient.

Christie Wilson (St. Edward’s University):
“Imposition of Order: The Edict of Nantes and the Price of Stability”

This paper is an investigation of the imposition of the Edict of Nantes at the end of the sixteenth century and its role in transforming the monarchy and its institutions. The work of the royal government and its agents, along with that of local communities, laid the groundwork for the development of relatively peaceful co-existence between Catholics and Protestants in France. At the same time, these years saw the creation of an environment in which confessional identity could be openly expressed in ways that clearly separated Protestant adherents from their Catholic neighbors. While royal authority was enhanced through these actions, the principle unity was dealt a blow as the basis for separation, both legal and social, was laid.

Emma Annette Wilson (University of St. Andrews, Scotland):
“The ‘The Mower Against Gardens’: Andrew Marvell and the Politics of Garden Maintenance.”

I propose to discuss the implications for Marvell’s political poems of the psychology of establishing dominion present in his pastoral verse. His political verse is criticized for lacking coherence. As he supports both Cromwell and Charles II depending on who is in power, this may be accurate. His pastoral verse is described as politically disengaged. I argue that these modes inform one another in terms of how dominion is established over nations and gardens. In both his political and pastoral, Marvell sees the need for a single ruler around whom a nation or garden can be constructed. Using the pastoral as an index for the political, I suggest that in his thoughts on establishing dominion, Marvell’s views are more coherent than they appear.

Lisa Wolffe (Northwestern State University):
“French Women, a Not Entirely French Civil War, and the Reformation”

The various wars fought by France caused the long absences of many men and provided liberty to the women they left behind. Some women became involved in politics and running the country. Other women stayed closer to home but had great influence through their roles as châtelaines, sisters, and mothers. Many embraced Protestant ideas and passed them on to their children and their domestics. Their influence both at home and in the political arena probably helped fuel the religious wars in France.

Dena Woodall (Case Western Reserve):
“Saint Luke Painting the Virgin and Veronica’s Veil: Religious Icons and their Impression on Portrait-Making made Double in Renaissance Italy”

The popularity in Renaissance Europe of the stories of Saint Luke Painting the Virgin and Saint Veronica’s veil produced many painted images of these saints with their respective portraits of the Virgin and of Christ. In this paper, I discuss how these legends were utilized and transformed for the secular purpose of portrait-making in Cinquecento Italy. I demonstrate their impact on Italian double portraits, defined as images in which two figures virtually cohabitate within a single format, and more specifically, their role in the visual construction of a "portrait within a portrait", by such artists as Pontormo, Anguissola, Cambiaso, and Licinio.

Wooseong Yeom (University of Texas, Austin):
“Reassessing the Aside/Soliloquy Convention”

My inquiry focuses on the anachronistic deformations of the aside/soliloquy convention, initiated by exigencies of the changing performance tradition and critical prescription, which have infiltrated the works of editors and critics of early modern plays. I claim that this has lead to the misevaluation of the aside and soliloquy convention as the representation of unspoken thought, effectively relegating the spectator from active participant to passive voyeur. I conclude that the aside and the soliloquy are simply permutations of a single, coherent and continuous conventional complex almost exclusively predicated upon the direct address of the dramatic character to the audience.

Cinta Zunino-Garrido (University of Jaén):
“Exploring Euphuism in the Plays: John Lyly’s Rhetoric of Character”

Renaissance men believed that the versatile and flexible conditions of words—verba—turn them into the appropriate vehicle to explore things—res. But as these res exist in many different ways, so verba need to shape accordingly. In this paper I shall attempt to analyse how, by means of his euphuistic style, John Lyly tries to explore the different possibilities of language regarding characterization. I shall examine how he takes advantage of the search for this res–verba agreement, and of the resultant linguistic inadequacy when this agreement fails, in order to depict the secondary characters of his comedies.