Constructing the Medieval and Early Modern Across Disciplines
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Constructing the Medieval and Early Modern across Disciplines Edited by Karen Christianson Constructing the Medieval and Early Modern across Disciplines Selected Proceedings of the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies 2011 Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference Edited by Karen Christianson Contributing Editors: Anupam Basu, Elizabeth Black, Andrew Bozio, Glen Doris, David Hitchcock, Matthew Maletz, Brad Mollmann, Renée Anne Poulin, and John Walters THE NEWBERRY LIBRARY, Chicago, Illinois Constructing the Medieval and Early Modern across Disciplines Selected Proceedings of the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies 2011 Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference EDITOR Karen Christianson The Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Anupam Basu Matthew Maletz Department of English, Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison Northern Illinois University Elizabeth Black Brad Mollmann Department of French, Department of History University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Tulane University Andrew Bozio Renée Anne Poulin Department of English, University of Michigan Department of French and Italian University of Wisconsin-Madison Glen Doris Department of History, University of Aberdeen John Walters Department of English, Indiana University David Hitchcock Department of History, University of Warwick 2011 by the Newberry Library. All rights to the publication Constructing the Medieval and Early Modern across Disciplines reserved. Copyright in individual articles remains with the authors. For information, please address the Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, Illinois 60610, or e-mail renaissance@ newberry.org. Publication URL: http://www.newberry.org/renaissance/conf-inst/conferenceproceedings.html Cover image: Compositione di meser Vincenzo Capirola, gentil homo bresano, c. 1517, Newberry Case MS minus VM 140 .C25. Used by permission of The Newberry Library. Table of Contents Introduction, by Karen Christianson .................................................................................................................................. 2 “That melodious linguist”: Birds in Medieval Christian and Islamic Cosmography, by Cam Lindley Cross ..................................................................................................... 5 Prudential Reading: The Didactic Ordinatio of Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee, by Kate Fedewa ................. 19 A Fourteenth-Century Augustinian Approach to the Jews in Riccoldo da Monte Croce’s Ad Nationes Orientales, by Lydia M. Walker ................................................... 33 Didactic Messages in Cassone Panels of the Continence of Scipio, by Rachael L. Mundie..................... 43 Bearing the Cross: Syphilis and the Founding of the Holy Cross Hospital in Fifteenth-Century Nuremberg, by Amy Newhouse ............................................................................................... 53 Architecture, Insignia, and the Cult of Personality: The Chateau of Diane de Poitiers, by Kristen Decker-Ali .................................................................................................................. 61 Maries False and Real: How Music Enabled Mary Carmichael and Mary Hamilton to Posthumously Join the Court of Mary, Queen of Scotts, by Karen M. Woodworth ................................... 73 From Idealization to Repulsion: Gender and Monstrosity in DeBry’s Great Voyages, by Degane Sougal ............................................................................................................. 89 Spenser’s Arthur and Milton’s Alfred: Rethinking the Ideal of Kingship in Early Modern England, by R. Scott Bevill ....................................................................................... 107 The Tlaxcalans: Pleading for What Was Promised, by Tony Hessenthaler........................................................ 119 The Tower of Babylon: The Creation of Identity in the Aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, by Errin T. Stegich ............................................................................................................. 135 The Triumph of Appetite: Authority and Jonsonian Excess in Bartholomew’s Fair, by Jay Simons ......................................................................................................................... 145 Political Discourse and Ethnic Differencing in Diego Velázquez’s Philip III and the Expulsion of the Moriscos, by Aisha Motlani ........................................................................................... 155 Leviathon’s Miracles and the Nature of Hobbes’ Erastianism, by A. I. Jacobs ........................................... 169 Oratory and the Politics of Public Speech in Milton and Civil War Polemic, by Helen Lynch ............... 179 “The Wretched Queen of Love”: Court Politics and Sexual Intrigue in John Blow’s Venus and Adonis, by Beth Hartman ............................................................................................ 187 “In whom the spark of humanity is not completely extinguished”: Portrayls of Slave Owners in British Antislavery, by Matthew Wyman-McCarthy ...................................................................... 197 Bonnets, Muffs, and Trinkets, Oh My: Conspicuous Consumption of Prostitutes in London, by Stephanie Seketa ............................................................................................................ 203 1 Introduction 2 Introduction By Karen Christianson ach year in January the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies holds a multidisciplinary E graduate student conference. Emerging scholars studying the medieval, Renaissance, or early modern periods in Europe, the Atlantic world, or the Mediterranean world come together to share their research, meet future colleagues, and gain experience in organizing, presenting at, or simply attending an academic conference. The participants of the 2011 conference comprised some seventy presenters in eighteen sessions, which were organized and presided over by a group of nine advanced doctoral students from member universities of the Center consortium. Overall, forty- three consortium schools and sixteen disciplines in the humanities were represented, with participants from sixteen U.S. states, three universities in Canada, and two in the United Kingdom. At most of these schools, the graduate students studying these early periods constitute a very small group. Thus the conference provides a rare opportunity for such scholars to not only hear cutting- edge research in their fields, but also get to know and talk informally with others who share their interests. After the conference, the hardworking organizers met to choose the best papers for inclusion in this selected conference proceedings. Each organizer/editor then worked with two authors to help them expand and revise their conference presentations for publication. The result is this volume. It epitomizes the essential idea of multidisciplinarity at the heart of the conference, with essays from scholars in departments of Near Eastern languages, music, comparative religion, art history, English, Spanish, and history. The span of time periods, geographical regions, and methodological approaches of these essays is equally broad, mirroring the richness and vitality of premodern studies. Karen Christianson, Ph.D., is associate director of the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies. 3 Introduction 4 Constructing the Medieval and Early Modern across Disciplines That Melodious Linguist: Eloquence and Piety in Christian and Islamic Songbirds By Cam Lindley Cross irds,” writes Albertus Magnus, “generally call more than other animals. This is due to the “B lightness of their spirits.”1 Although Albertus here employs “lightness” (levitas) as a technical term, the broader valences of the word are very significant; a lightness of spirit does not only indicate one who is fickle, flighty, and unconcerned with the problems of the world, as we see in its cognates légèreté in French and levity in English, but can also suggest a state of moral purity and innocence. The etymological relationship between lightness (levis) and light itself (lux, both from the Indo-European root leuk-)2 adds another level of interpretive meaning—as Dante illustrates in the Divina Commedia, sin is both dark and heavy, a kind of moral weight that crushes the body and hinders spiritual progress.3 As creatures of light and levity, whose wings take them beyond the borders of terra firma that demarcate the domain of man, birds can be seen as residing in a state of proximity to the spiritual world that no other living thing may access; their myriad and musical songs only reinforce their depiction as bearers of secret knowledge, concealed by a secret tongue. Solomon, wisest of all kings, is granted the ability to speak with the birds in both Jewish and Islamic tradition;4 the qur’anic passage “we were taught the language of birds [manṭiq al-ṭayr]” (Qur’an 27:16) is directly referenced by the Persian poet and mystic Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār (d. c. 1221) in his - , a metaphysical journey into the sublime realm of gnosis, usually translated into English as The Conference of the Birds.5 Birds have long played the role of bearers of heavenly 1 Albertus Magnus, On Animals: A Medieval Summa Zoologica, trans. Kenneth F. Kitchell and Irven Michael Resnick, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 23.6, p. 1546. Cf: “Sunt aves generaliter magis vocantes aliis animalibus: et hoc contingit