Reading Middle English: Some Resources

This document is intended to direct you towards some resources for reading and working with Middle English that you will find useful throughout the MPhil. Late-medieval Europe had an exceptionally complex linguistic ecology, with a spectrum of vernacular languages interacting with the linguae francae of Latin and the different forms of French used all the way from Britain to the eastern Mediterranean. Medieval England, as well as boasting an exceptionally long history of writings in the vernacular in the centuries before the Norman Conquest, was a place in which languages met and interacted: the distinctive language that scholarship calls ‘Middle English’ emerged from this linguistic mix (although the development of the modern scholarly idea of Middle English has its own complex history — on which see Matthews towards the bottom of this list). In the MPhil, you will be encountering writings in English, French, and Latin. Separate resources are provided for French and Latin, but, as some of the studies in the final section of this book suggest, it is impossible to think about the language and culture of medieval England without thinking seriously about all three of its main written languages. Before the MPhil begins, you should try to have a look at least one of the introductions to Middle English listed below if you can, and play around with some of the dictionaries, too. As you read more writings in Middle English, don’t forget that good-quality editions (e.g. the editions produced for the Early English Text Society, with their distinctive mud- brown livery) are excellent resources for the study of language: through their introductions, their explanatory notes, and (the first port of call for a mystified reader) their glossaries. PK, July 2020

Wide-ranging introductions to Middle English

J.A. Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre, A Book of Middle English, 3rd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 3–65.

J.D. Burnley, The Language of Chaucer (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983).

Simon Horobin, Chaucer’s Language, 2nd edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian, 2013).

Useful Dictionaries

Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1954–2001); < http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/>. [the essential dictionary for definitions and citations of Middle English words]

Oxford English Dictionary, ed. James Murray et al. (3rd edition online, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); < www.oed.com > [as a historical dictionary interested in how words change over time, the OED is often useful for reading Middle English — especially its detailed accounts of the etymologies of words]

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, ed. Louise Stone and William Rothwell (London, 1977–93) [although not a dictionary of English words, there are deep connections between English and French in medieval England, and the AND can be useful for getting a better understanding of words that enter English from the French of England (or the reverse)]

Dictionnaire de Moyen Français (ATILF CNRS / Université de Lorraine, 2012); < http://www.atilf.fr/dmf > [covering the period of Middle French (post c.1300), this is an essential reference work for your reading of Middle French literature, but it can also be useful for exploring how

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, ed. R.E. Latham, D.R. Howlett, and R.K. Ashdowne (Oxford: OUP for the British Academy, 1975–2013); available through searching

Database of Latin Dictionaries, ed. Paul Tombeur et al. available through searching [includes the DMLBS as well as a range of other dictionaries looking at both classical and medieval Latin]

These dictionaries all achieve different things, and you should get used to turning to them for their different purposes. Try, for instance, searching for word glose in both the MED and OED: you will see that the MED gives many more quotations from ME texts (offering some clues, perhaps, for your own further reading as you think about this term), whereas the OED mentions only a handful of ME examples, but gives much more detail on the etymology of the term (stretching back beyond Latin to its origins in Greek). Other uses of the word in different contexts, from both Anglo-Norman (or Anglo-French) and continental French sources can be dug up by searching for the same word, glose, in AND and DMF.

More specialised or technical resources

Tauno F. Mustanoja, A Middle English Syntax, Part I: Parts of Speech (Helsinki, 1960)

Richard Jordan, Handbook of Middle English Grammar: Phonology, tr. E.J. Crook (The Hague: 1974)

Angus McIntosh, M.L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin, A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English, 4 vols (Aberdeen, 1986)

Margaret Laing, A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English 1150–1325 Version 3.2 (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 2013)

Note that the two linguistic atlases listed above are enormously interesting and important resources for the study of dialect, but are not necessarily very user-friendly. The best way to approach these resources is through some case-studies of what dialectology of Middle English has to offer: see, e.g.,

M. L. Samuels, ‘Some Applications of Middle English Dialectology’, English Studies 44 (1963), 81–94.

Middle English Dialectology: Essays on Some Principles and Problems, ed. Margaret Laing (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1989)

Useful studies or reflections on language

Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: OUP, 2009)

Christopher Cannon, The Making of Chaucer’s English: A Study of Words (Cambridge: CUP, 2005)

John Fisher, ‘Chancery and the Emergence of Standard Written English in the Fifteenth Century’, Speculum 52 (1979), 970–99.

Imagining Medieval English: Language Structures and Theories, 500–1500, ed. Tim William Machan, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: CUP, 2016).

Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c.1100–c.1500, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Carolyn P. Collette (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2009)

David Matthews, The Invention of Middle English: An Anthology of Primary Sources (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000).

Tim William Machan, English in the Middle Ages (Oxford: OUP, 2003)

Nicolette Zeeman Images, Relics, Idols and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England (Medieval and Renaissance MPhil: Optional Lent Term Course, Lent term 2021)

Debates about the use and abuse of images raise many questions about the role of mediatory objects within Christian worship. Images and sculptures, famously described by Gregory the Great as the ‘books of the laity’, provided imaginative access to and information about God; they were also a means of encouraging devotion and exciting desire for him. But the more effective they were, the more they also risked drawing attention to themselves and becoming an object of devotion or fetishisation in their own right – ‘idolatry’. Underlying the problem of images is ultimately a problem about the right and wrong uses of the material world and all its objects, bodies, texts, institutions, practices and appearances. For this reason, the problem of images even has implications for certain ‘apophatic’ forms of contemplation, which emphasise the need for the subject to strip away earthly phenomena in order to open her/himself up to the divinity. It also has implications for thinking about the institution and phenomenology of the church. Debates about images become very intense in late medieval England due to the emergence of the English heresy of Lollardy, which attacked images as part of a larger critique of the church, one that focused on shrines, pilgrmages and incense, as well as many other ritual practices and priestly interventions. In response to this, the fifteenth century was witness to a sustained backlash against Lollardy and a renewed espousal of many image-using and related practices. However, Christian theories and anxiety about the image and the idol also find expression thoughout the later Middle Ages in an obsessive interest in the devotional practices of other cultures – both in the gods of classical antiquity and its literature, and in the imagined idols of contemporary Muslim culture (especially self-revealing in this last case, as contemporary Islam was a non image-using religion). Equally interesting, these religious theories also permeate secular medieval culture and find expression in the courtly art, literature and psychology of love.

General Introductory Reading (please read at least one or two of these before the course begins; sections of some of them will be recommended for particular classes). Essential reading for each class appears first (there is more secondary reading for the first class than for subsequent ones). All of the required primary and secondary texts will be scanned and provided on the Faculty Moodle internet site. I can provide references for original-language editions for texts cited here in translation.

Finally, please bring to each seminar photocopies of one image that you have found in your reading or elsewhere that we might discuss!

Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers. Images and Literacy in late Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon Press, 1984), chapter 5; also chapter 4 of her England’s Iconoclasts, vol.1 Laws against Images (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); see also pp.1-34 of this book. Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol. Ideology and Image-making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: CUP, 1989) 2

Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theatre of Devotion . East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) Jeffrey Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary. Art and Female Spirituality in late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone, 1998) Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: OUP, 2001) James Simpson, Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (Oxford: OUP, 2010) Sarah Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) Shannon Gayk, Image, Text, and Religious Reform in fifteenth-century England (Cambridge: CUP, 2010) Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: an Essay on Religion in late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2011) Amy Knight Powell, Depositions. Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum (New York: Zone Books, 2012) Nicolette Zeeman, ‘Theory Transposed: Idols, Knights and Identity’, What is an Image in Medieval and Early Modern England?, ed. Antoinina Bevan Zlatar and Olga Timofeeva, Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 34 (Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempo Verlag, 2017), 39-79

Class 1: Images (and Relics) Letter of Pope Gregory the Great to Serenus of Marseilles: The Letters of Gregory the Great, trans. John R.C. Martyn, 3 vols, Mediaeval Sources in Translation (Toronto: Ponitifcal Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2004), 9,209 (vol.2, p.674). Walter Hilton, De adoracione ymaginum in Walter Hilton’s Latin Writings, ed. John P.H. Clark and Cheryl Taylor, 2 vols, Analecta Cartusiana 124 (Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1987), 1,175-214; selected passages to be provided in translation [Guillaume de Deguileville,] trans. John Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. F.J. Furnivall, 3 vols, EETS, es, 77, 83, 92 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1899-1904), lines 20811-21036 (pp.555-61) Richard Rolle, two short Meditations on the passion of Christ in the English Writings of Richard Rolle, ed. H.E. Allen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), pp.17-36; or in Richard Rolle: Prose and Verse, ed. S.J. Ogilvie-Thomson, EETS, os 293 (Oxford: OUP, 1988), pp.64-83 Julian of Norwich, A Revelation of Divine Love [the Long Text] chapters 1-31: several editions, including The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), pp.121-381 (pp.123-221); or The Shewings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Rowena Ronan Crampton, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994); online at http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/julianfr.htm. Images provided by you!

Secondary Literature: Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol, Introduction and chapters 1, 4 and 5 3

______, ‘The Iconoclast’s Desire: Deguileville’s Idolatry in France and England’, in Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm, ed. Dimmick (above), pp.151-71 Shannon Gayk, Image, Text (above), Introduction, chapters 1 and 3 Sarah Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire (above), Introduction and chapter 6

Selected Further Materials to follow up if you are interested: Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Oure Lorde Jesus Christ, ed. Michael J. Sargent (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2004), see, for example, pp.9-41, 163-98 Margery Kempe visits Jerusalem in The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Barry Windeatt (Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp.160-74 ‘The Canterbury Interlude’ in The Canterbury Tales. Fifteenth-century Continuations and Additions, ed. John M. Bowers, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992), lines 1-173; also online at http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/bowers-canterbury-tales-fifteenth- century-interlude-and-marchants-tale-of-beryn Dives and Pauper, ed. Priscilla Heath Barnum, 3 vols, EETS 275, 323 (London: OUP, 1976-2004), 1,81-109 Reginald Pecock, The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy, ed. Churchill Babbington, 2 vols, Rolls series 19 (repr. [Nendeln, Liechtenstein]: Kraus Reprint, 1966), 1,131-274

Michael Sargent, ‘Contemporary Criticism of Richard Rolle’ Analecta Cartusiana 55 (1981), 160-205 L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, ‘Making, Mourning and the Love of Idols’, in Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm, ed. Dimmick (above), pp.25-42 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England c.1400- c.1580, 2nd edn (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2005), chapter 5 Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality (above), chapter 1

Class 2: Iconoclasm, Anti-materialism and Apophaticism ‘Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards’, ‘Images and Pilgrimages’, ‘Miracle Plays’, in Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. Anne Hudson (Cambridge: CUP, 1978), pp.24-9, 83-88, 97-104 Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede in The Piers Plowman Tradition. A Critical Edition of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, Richard the Redeless, Mum and the Sothsegger and The Crowned King, ed. Helen Barr, Everyman (London: Dent, 1993), pp.61-97 The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Patrick J. Gallacher, TEAMS (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), prologue and chapters 1-16 (pp.21-48); online at http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/cloufrm.htm; older edition by Phillis Hodgson, EETS, os 218 (London: OUP, 1943) [Marguerite Porete, Mirouer des simples ames translated into Middle English with commentary insertions by ‘MN’:] ‘Margaret Porete: The Mirror of Simple Souls, A Middle English translation’, Archivio Italiano per la Storia della Pietà 5 (1968), 241- 355 (pp.247-68) 4

Images provided by you!

Secondary Literature: Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers (above), chapter 5; the same essay appears as chapter 4 in her England’s Iconoclasts (above). Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol (above), chapter 4 Shannon Gayk, Image, Text (above), chapter 1 Vincent Gillespie, ‘Postcards from the Edge: Interpreting the Ineffable in Middle English Mystics’ in Interpretation. Medieval and Modern, The J.A.W. Bennett Memorial Lectures, 8th series, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993), pp.137-65

Selected Further Materials to follow up: Marguerite Porete, for extracts with an emphasis on the commentary of the English translator, ‘MN’, in English Mystics of the Middle Ages, ed. Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), pp.237-47; for a full translation of the original French, see Margaret Porette, The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. Ellen L. Babinsky, Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1993) Mankynd in Medieval Drama, ed. Greg Walker (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp.258- 79; and Medieval Drama, ed. David Bevington (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2012), pp.901-38 William Langland, Piers Plowman. A New Annotated Edition of the C-text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008), passus 21-22

Sarah Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire (above), chapter 1 Nicholas Watson, ‘The Middle English Mystics’ in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp.539-65 Alastair Minnis, ‘Affection and Imagination in “The Cloud of Unknowing” and Hilton’s “Scale of Perfection”’, Traditio 39 (1983), 323-66 Denys Turner, The Darkness of God. Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: CUP, 1995) D. Vance Smith, ‘Negative Langland’, YLS 23 (2009), 33-59 David Aers, Beyond Reformation? An Essay on William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2015)

Class 3: The Idols of the Pagans Fall of the Idols ‘Extracts from the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew’, in New Testament Apocrypha, compiled E. Hennecke, ed. Wilhem Schneemelcher, English translation ed. R. McL. Wilson, 2 vols (London : Lutterworth, 1963-1965), 1,412-13 Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), book 2; book 3, chapters 1-17; book 4 Geoffrey Chaucer, House of Fame, Knight’s Tale in The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (3rd ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987) 5

[John Lydgate,] Lydgate's Troy Book: A. D. 1412-20, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 parts, EETS, es 97, 103, 106, 126 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1906-1935), lines 479-1066 (description of Troy), lines 5392-6012 (the gods and the origins of idolatry) (pp.158- 75, 299-316), lines 5383-5754 and 492-722 (Hector’s tomb) and lines 5532-6022 (the ‘relic’ of the Palladium); ie pp.550-61, 577-84, 726-740. Images provided by you!

Secondary Literature: A.J. Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (Cambridge: CUP, 1982) ______, ‘Other Worlds: Chaucer’s Classicism’, in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rita Copeland (Oxford: OUP, 2016), pp.413-34 Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol (above), Introduction and chapter 2

Further Materials to follow up: ‘Third Vatican Mythographer’ in The Vatican Mythographers, trans. Ronald E. Pepin (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp.207-334 (especially 6, Pluto, pp.235-63) Compare the Knight’s Tale with Boccaccio’s description of the three temples in the Teseida, in Chaucer's Boccaccio. Sources for Troilus and the Knight's and Franklin's tales. Translations from the Filostrato, Teseida and Filocolo, trans. N.R. Havely (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1980; repr. 1992), pp.00-00. Chaucer, Franklin’s Tale, in The Riverside Chaucer (above) Robert Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid, in The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. Denton Fox (Oxford: Claendon Press, 1981), pp.111-31

Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (London: Routledge, 1991), chapters 1 and 3 Barbara Nolan, Chaucer and the Tradition of the Roman Antique (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) A.J. Minnis, ‘“Figures of Olde Werk”: Chaucer’s poetic Sculptures’, in Secular Sculpture 1300-1500, ed. Philip Lindley and Thomas Frangenburg (Stamford: Tyas, 2000), pp.124-43. Nicolette Zeeman, ‘The Idol of the Text’ in Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Dimmick (above), pp.43-62 (esp.pp.47-50, 58-60) ______, ‘Mythography and Mythographical Collections’, in The Oxford History of Classical Reception, ed. Copeland (above), pp.121-50 (esp. pp.139- 41) ______, ‘Theory Transposed: Idols, Knights and Identity’, What is an Image in Medieval and Early Modern England?, ed. Antoinina Bevan Zlatar and Olga Timofeeva, Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 34 (Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempo Verlag, 2017), 39-79 Johannes Wolf, ‘An Old Materialism: Saints and Idols in the Katherine Group Hagiographies’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 50 (2020), 269- 91 6

Jamie Fumo, The Legacy of Apollo. Antiquity, Authority and Chaucerian Poetics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010)

Class 4: Either Christian and ‘Saracen’ Gods, Images and Relics

Jean Bodel, Jeu de Saint Nicholas [The Play of St. Nicholas], in Medieval French Plays, trans. Richard Axton and John Stevens (Oxford: Blackwell,1971), pp.71-135 Chaucer, Second Nun’s Tale, in The Riverside Chaucer (above) Mandeville’s Travels, ed. M. C. Seymour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967); The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, ed. C. W. R. D. Moseley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983); The Book of Sir John Mandeville, ed Tamarah Kohanski and David C. Benson, TEAMS Middle English Texts (2007), https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/kohanski-and- benson-the-book-of-john-mandeville The Digby Mary Magdalene in The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS Digby 133 and E Museo 160, ed. Donald Baker, John L. Murphy and Louis B. Hall, EETS, os 283 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp.24-95; The Digby Mary Magdalene Play, ed. Theresa Coletti, TEAMS Middle English Texts (2018), https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/coletti-the-digby-mary-magdalene-play Images provided by you!

Secondary Literature: Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol (above), chapter 3 Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East. European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100-1450 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), chapter 5 Iain Higgins, Writing East. The Fourteenth-Century ‘Travels’ of Sir Thomas Mandeville (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), chapters 3 and 4 Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality (above), chapters 2 and 3

Further Sources to follow up: Margery Kempe visits Jerusalem in The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Barry Windeatt (Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp.160-74 The Sultan of Babylon in Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances. The Sultan of Babylon, The Siege of Milan & The Tale of Ralph the Collier, ed. Alan Lupack, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1990), pp.00-00; online at http:// d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/lupack- three-middle-english- charlemagne- romances-sultan-of-babylon; also in The Sowdone of Babylone and of Ferumbras his sone who conquerede Rome, ed. E. Hausknecht, EETS, es 38 (London: N. Trübner, 1981) The Prophet of Islam in Old French. The Romance of Muhammad (1258) and the Book of Muhammad’s Ladder, trans. Reginald Hyatte (Leiden: Brill, 1977) Arab Historians of the Crusades, ed. and trans. Francesco Gabrieli (London: Routledge, 1969)

F.E. Peters, Jerusalem. The Holy City in the Eyes of Chroniclers, Visitors, Pilgrims, 7

and Prophets from the Days of Abraham to the Beginnings of Modern Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977) Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic. Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), chapter 5

Class 4: Or Love’s Idolatry Selected Occitan, French and English Lyrics Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Frances Horgan (Oxford: OUP, 1994): if not the whole text, then: pp.3-61 (Guillaume de Lorris), pp.62-90 (Jean de Meun, advice of Reason), pp.111-53 (Jean de Meun, advice of Friend) pp.258-335 (Jean de Meun, confession of Nature, preaching of Genius and erotic conclusion) Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls, Prologue to the Legend of Good Women and Pardoner’s Tale in The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (3rd ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987) [Charles of Orleans,] Fortunes Stabilnes: Charles of Orleans’s English Book of Love: A Critical Edition, ed. Mary-Jo Arn (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994), selected poems Images provided by you (you might check out Robertson below)!

Secondary Literature: Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol (above), pp.298-37 Nicolette Zeeman, ‘The Idol of the Text’ in Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm, ed. Dimmick (above), pp.43-62 ______, ‘The English Charles: Subjectivity, Textuality and Culture’, in Readings in Medieval Textuality. Essays in Honour of A.C. Spearing, ed. Cristina Cervone and D. Vance Smith (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2016), chapter 8 Sarah Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire (above), chapter 3

Selected Further Materials to follow up: Guillaume de Machaut, Le livre dou voir dit (The Book of the True Poem), ed. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, trans. R. Barton Palmer (New York: Garland, 1998), lines 1-1715, 7305-8261 (pp.4-123, 503-63) Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, Knight’s Tale in The Riverside Chaucer (above).

D.W. Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer. Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), figs 8, 9, 15-20, 23-7 etc; in chapter 5 Robertson focuses on ‘love idolatry’ in a very vivid way, though with a now discredited negative slant Sarah Kay, The Romance of the Rose (London: Grant & Cutler, 1995) ______, ‘Desire and Subjectivity’, in The Troubadours: An Introduction, ed. Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 212– 8

27 A.J. Minnis, Magister amoris: the Roman de la rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford: OUP, 2001) A.C. Spearing (on Charles of Orleans), Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp.225-47

Marketing English Books: From Manuscript into Print 1476-1550

This course is about how the earliest printers moulded demand and created new markets. Until the advent of print, the sale of books had been primarily a bespoke trade, but printers faced a new sales challenge: how to sell hundreds of identical books to individuals, who had many other demands on their purses. In this course, we will consider how this forced printers to think carefully about marketing and potential demand, for even if they sold through a middleman—as most did—that wholesaler, bookseller, or chapman needed to be convinced the books would attract customers. During the course, we will explore how markets for a wide range of texts were cultivated by English printers between 1476 and 1550 within a wider, European context. Examples will be drawn from six broad types of ‘bestselling’ print: devotional tracts; forbidden evangelical books; romances, gests, and bawdy tales; news; pilgrimage guides, souvenirs and advertisements; and household advice. Through close analysis of paratexts—including title-pages, prefaces, tables of contents, envoys, colophons, and images—we will re-evaluate the cultural impact of printers in this often overlooked period and consider how this might alter our understanding of books of specific interest to you.

This course will be of particular interest to those taking the Medieval or Renaissance MPhil, but anyone interested in reception or the grubbier (read: commercial) side of literary studies is welcome.

This course will teach you to: • reconsider the role of printers within textual production; • think about readers as consumers and the competing demands on their purses; • understand how the presentation of early printed books could be manipulated; and • make persuasive arguments about the reception of texts based on material evidence.

It will do so by: • making you alert to continuities and discontinuities between manuscript and print instantiations of texts, and between editions; • integrating reception theory with bibliographic studies; and • giving you the opportunity to apply what you learn through studying course examples to texts of specific interest to you.

The course has been designed primarily as an online course, assuming restrictions on library access and face-to-face meetings. Each week, there will be a brief introductory video to watch, reading to do and reflection prompts to consider before the seminar in relation to a printed book you are personally interested in. The seminar will be held either by Zoom or in person under socially-distanced arrangements. Throughout, we will make use of the excellent online facsimiles available of European and English printed editions, as well as databases such as Early English Books Online and Broadside Ballads Online. Although some insights about reception are only forcefully conceived when physically holding an edition – for instance, the attraction of a pocketable volume – this is the kind of work that lends itself to remote learning and give you the opportunity to do excellent research even in the strained (and strange) circumstances of a pandemic.

Week 1: Printers - Producers or Creators? It was Edwards and Meale who first explored the marketing of early English printed books in a substantial way. In this seminar we’ll consider recent scholarship exploring to what extent printers were more than producers – the owners of a means of production – and look at the writings of two printers who expressed themselves much more than their contemporaries: William Caxton and Robert Copland.

Primary Examples Norman F. Blake, Caxton’s Own Prose, read widely from the selections pp. 55-146, available on Google Books.

Mary Erler, Robert Copland: Complete Poems (University of Toronto Press, 2016), begin with introduction (pp. 3-23) and preface to The Seuen Sorowes (pp. 83-85) then read what appeals, https://doi-org.ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/10.3138/9781442679429

Secondary Reading Alexandra da Costa, Marketing English Books, 1476-1550: How Printers Changed Reading (OUP, 2020), introduction.

A.S.G. Edwards and Carol M. Meale, ‘The Marketing of Printed Books in Late Medieval England’, The Library s6.15: 95-124, https://doi.org/10.1093/library/s6-15.2.95 - see also more recent: Tamara Atkin and A.S.G. Edwards, ‘Printers, Publishers and Promoters to 1558’, in Vincent Gillespie and Susan Powell, eds, A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain 1476-1558 (D.S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 27-44, available online through iDiscover

Lotte Hellinga, ‘Advertising and Selling Books in the Fifteenth Century’ in Incunabula in Transit: People and Trade (Brill, 2018), pp. 20-39, https://doi- org.ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/10.1163/9789004340367

Erik Kwakkel, ‘Commercial Organization and Economic Innovation’, in Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin, eds, The Production of Books in England 1350-1500 (CUP, 2011), pp. 173-191, https://doi-org.ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/10.1017/CBO9780511976193

Kathleen Tonry, Agency and Intention in English Print, 1476-1526 (Brepols, 2016), introduction.

Week 2: Readers and Consumers Much of what has been written about readers of late medieval books tends to focus on them as just that, ‘readers’. This makes sense when we consider the expense of books. Among the small percentage of the lay population that could read, many would possess only a few books (if that) and may have had little choice in their acquisition having been bequeathed them or copied them as texts came by chance to hand. Print made books cheaper, increasing the opportunities readers had to possess books of their own choosing. But, while a book of hours might have been an obvious first purchase for a reader until the mid-1520s, any further work ‘was an excess, an extra’ and had to compete against all types of reading matter for a share of the potential buyer’s purse. In this seminar, we’ll consider what is known about readers in this period and how we might reconstruct their reading habits and tastes.

Primary Examples Review primary reading from last week with focus on what is said about readers. Plus title- pages and prefaces to:

The noble experyence of the vertuous handy warke of surgeri (Peter Treveris, 1525, STC 13434) The grete herball (Peter Treveris, 1526, STC 13176) The iudycyall of vryns (Peter Treveris, 1527?, STC 14836.3)

Secondary Reading Julia Boffey, ‘London Readers in a Time of Change’, in her Manuscript and Print in London c.1475-1530 (British Library, 2012), pp. 125-161, available online through iDiscover

Margaret Connolly, Sixteenth-Century Readers, Fifteenth-Century Books (CUP, 2019), pp. 1- 17, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108652421.001 - the introduction to Connolly’s book establishes both the difficulties and importance of working on reception

Anne F. Sutton, ‘Merchants’, and Mary C. Erler, ‘The Laity’ in Vincent Gillespie and Susan Powell, eds, A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain 1476-1558 (D.S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 127-149, available online through iDiscover

‘The Lay Reader’, in Lotte Hellinga and J.B. Trapp, eds, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. III: 1400-1557 (CUP, 1999), https://doi- org.ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/10.1017/CHOL9780521573467 – read whichever chapters appeal to you in this section, e.g. ‘Practical Books for the Gentleman’, ‘Gentlewomen’s Reading’

If time: H.S. Bennett, English Books and Readers 1475-1557 (CUP, 1969), pp. 54-64 - this is a classic book, dated now, but a very readable overview

Week 3: Persuasive Paratexts In a period before book reviews and author interviews helped to sell books and most printers sold books onto middlemen – stationers and travelling chapmen - printers were dependent on paratexts to sell their books. In previous weeks we have looked at prefaces that enabled the printer to speak directly to the potential buyer. This week, we will consider the role played by other kinds of paratext: focusing particularly on title-pages, but also considering tables of contents and rubrics/headings. Next week we will focus on woodcut and engraved illustrations.

Primary Examples Robert the Devil (Wynkyn de Worde, STC 21070, 1500? and STC 21071.5, 1510?) Mary of Nemmegen (Jan van Doesborch, STC 17557, 1518?)

Secondary Reading Alexandra da Costa, ‘“That ye mowe redely fynde…what ye desyre”: Printed Tables of Contents and Indices, 1476–1540’, The Huntington Quarterly 81 (2018): pp. 291-313, https://doi.org/10.1353/hlq.2018.0013

Martha W. Driver, ‘Ideas of Order: Wynkyn De Worde and the Title Page’, in Texts and Their Contexts: Papers from the Early Book Society, edited by John Scattergood and Julia Boffey (1997), pp. 87-149.

Gérard Genette, trans. Marie Maclean, ‘Introduction to the Paratext’, New Literary History 22 (1991), pp. 261-272, https://www.jstor.org/stable/469037

Eleanor F. Shevlin, ‘“To Reconcile Book and Title, and Make ‘Em Kind to One Another”: The Evolution of the Title’s Contractual Function’, Book History 2 (1999): pp. 42-77, https://doi.org/10.1353/bh.1999.0011

Margaret Smith, The Title-Page: Its Early Development, 1460-1510 (The British Library, 2000), available online through iDiscover – no need to read all of this carefully, just get a sense of the development of the title-page over time

Bibliographic resources: Edward Hodnett, English Woodcuts 1480-1535 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). R. B. McKerrow and F. S. Ferguson, Title-page Borders Used in England & Scotland 1485- 1640 (Bibliographical Society, 1931)

Week 4: Meaningful Images Caxton used woodcuts somewhat sparsely in his editions, leaving his successor Wynkyn de Worde to really develop their use. During this period, woodcut images were often reused both within the same work and across works, sometimes in very different settings. This week, we’ll consider how woodcut images might have been used to attract readers and consider the effect of reuse.

Primary Examples Look at title-pages and woodcuts for: Jason (Gheraert Leeu, STC 15384, 1492) Virgilius (Jan van Doesborch, STC 24828, 1518?)

The myrrour or glasse of Christes passion (Robert Redman, STC 14553, 1534)

Secondary Reading

Martha W. Driver, ‘The Illustrated De Worde: An Overview’, Studies in Iconography 17 (1996), pp. 349-403, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23923646 ---, ‘Woodcuts in Early English Books: Sources and Circulation’ in her The Image in Print: Book Illustration in Late Medieval England and its Sources (The British Library, 2004), pp. 33-76 ---, ‘Woodcuts and Decorative Techniques’ in Vincent Gillespie and Susan Powell, eds., A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain 1476-1558, (2014), pp. 95-123, available online through iDiscover

Seth Lerer, ‘The Wiles of a Woodcut: Wynkyn De Worde and the Early Tudor Reader’, The Huntington Library Quarterly 59 (1998): pp. 381-404, pp. 395-96, https://doi.org/10.2307/3817694

Jordi Sánchez-Martí, ‘Illustrating the Printed Middle English Verse Romances, c.1500-c.1535’ in Word and Image 27 (2011): 90-102, https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2010.486266

Lotte Hellinga, ‘The History of Jason’, in Texts in Transit, pp. 304-365, esp. 325-334, https://doi-org.ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/10.1163/9789004279001 - no need to read this fully unless particularly interested, but it does track the specific provenance of the woodcuts in Leeu’s edition of Jason if you want to know more.

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M.Phil. Option Course: Medieval Literature and Visual Culture LT 2021 Dr Jessica Berenbeim

This course explores the connections between medieval literature and visual culture, drawing on methods from the disciplines of art history, archaeology, history, theology, and liturgical history as well as literary studies. In particular, we will think about the possible relationships between reading and architectural space; for example: texts in their architectural contexts, architectural allegory, architecturally generative texts, and the architectural space of the material text.

The course involves thinking about medieval sites and objects, chosen both for their intrinsic importance and for the opportunity that Cambridge affords to experience some of them in person. Each class will explore a different theme, conceived as a physical and textual space: the cloister, the book, the cult centre, and the archive. Topics for the class meetings are below, along with the preparation (both reading and looking) for each meeting. Medieval works are listed under ‘texts’, ‘sites’, or ‘manuscripts’, with modern scholarship under ‘studies’; within the scope of the items here, you will have the freedom to pursue your interests as they develop.

Preparatory reading

The following books are introductory studies, which will help you orient yourself for the term; some may also be useful for reference throughout the course, particularly if you are unfamiliar with the relevant terminology.

—Nicola Coldstream, Medieval Architecture (Oxford 2002), Chapter 4, with section introduction to Part II (available through Moodle) —Christopher De Hamel, The British Library Guide to Manuscript Illumination (London 2001), Chapter 1 (available through Moodle) —C.H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism (4th edn, London 2015) (available through Idiscover) —Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, trans. by Catharine Misrahi (original published 1953; 3rd English edn, New York 1982)(available through Idiscover) Page 2 of 6

I. Cloister

Texts: —The Rule of St Benedict, ed. and trans. by Bruce L. Venarde (Cambridge, MA 2011) (Latin/English facing pages) —Three Middle-English Versions of the Rule of St. Benet and Two Contemporary Rituals for the Ordination of Nuns, ed. by Ernst A. Kock (London 1902)(available through archive.org)

Sites: —Medieval Nunnery of St Radegund (now Jesus College): —Walk carefully around the college in advance of our meeting, following projected plans of the medieval site, for which see esp. Figure 2 on p. 75 of Richard Newman et al., ‘Some Splendid Rooms: Further Archaeological and Architectural Investigations in Jesus College, Cambridge, 1998–2011’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 102 (2013), pp. 73–92 (available through Idiscover) —Visit when you have the opportunity, even if it is earlier in the year, in case you may be unable to do so during the week before our class discussion. You can refresh your memory from home via the ‘virtual tour’, which has aerial views, 3D zoom, and measurement functions: https://www.takealookinside.co.uk/jesus-college-open-day/ (You may enjoy having a look at this anyway!) —Browse archaeological ﬁnds:

Studies: —Wolfgang Braunfels, Monasteries of Western Europe: The Architecture of the Orders, trans. by Alastair Lang (London 1972), Forward and Chapter 1 —Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women (London 1994), Chapters 1, 4, 5, 6 (available through Idiscover) —Glyn Coppack, Abbeys & Priories (Stroud 2006), Chapter 3 (available through Moodle) —James G. Clark, The Benedictines in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge 2011), Introduction, Chapter 2, and Chapter 4 (available through Idiscover) —James Bond, ‘The Medieval Monastery and its Landscape’, in Christopher Gerrard and Alejandra Gutiérrez, eds, Oxford Handbook of Later Medieval Archaeology in Britain (Oxford 2018)(available through Idiscover) Page 3 of 6

II. Book

Texts: —‘Psalms’, in The Vulgate Bible, Volume III: The Poetical Books, Douay-Rheims Translation, ed. by Swift Edgar and Angela Kinney (Cambridge, MA 2011), Chapter 2 (available through Moodle)

Manuscripts: Selected psalter manuscripts (full and partial digital facsimiles): 13th century: —Fitzwilliam 12: —Parker 75: —Parker 468: —UL Ee.4.24: —Wren B.10.9: —Wren B.11.4: —Wren B.11.5: —Wren B.11.27: —Wren R.10.5: —Wren O.4.16: 14th century: —Fitzwilliam 1-2005: —Parker 53: —Parker 278: 15th century: —Wren B.11.6: —Wren O.3.10: Page 4 of 6

Studies: —Victor Leroquais, Les psautiers manuscrits latins des bibliothèques publiques de France, 3 vols (Macon 1940–41), vol. I, Introduction (available through Gallica) —John Harper, The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford 1991, repr. 2001), Chapter 5 (available through Moodle) —Michael Kuczynski, Prophetic Song: The Psalms and Moral Discourse in Late-Medieval England (Philadelphia 1995)(available through Idiscover) —Michael Camille, ‘Bodies, Names, and Gender in a Gothic Psalter’, in The Illuminated Psalter, ed. by F.O. Büttner (Turnhout 2004)(available through Moodle) —Annie Sutherland, English Psalms in the Middle Ages (Oxford 2015), Chapters 1 and 6 (available through Idiscover) —The Psalms and Medieval English Literature: From the Conversion to the Reformation, ed. by Francis Leneghan and Tamara Atkin (Woodbridge 2017), Introduction and Chapters 9 and 12 (available through Idiscover) Page 5 of 6

III. Cult

Texts: —Liber Eliensis, Book I, plus additional passage (pp. 235–36 in the Latin edition; pp. 494– 95 in the English translation)(both available through Moodle): —Edition of the Latin: Liber Eliensis, ed. by E.O. Blake (London 1962) —Modern English translation: Liber Eliensis: A History of the Isle of Ely from the Seventh Century to the Twelfth, Compiled by Monk of Ely in the Twelfth Century, trans. Janet Fairweather (Woodbridge 2005) —Middle English ‘Wilton Life of St Æthelthryth’, in Saints Edith and Æthelthryth, ed. by Mary Dockray-Miller (Turnhout 2009)(available through Moodle); also printed as ‘Vita S. Etheldredae Eliensis’ in Altenglische Legenden, ed. by Carl Horstmann (Heilbronn 1881)(available through archive.org)

Sites: —Medieval Cathedral Priory of Ely (now Ely Cathedral) —Virtual Tour: —Photographs: I have made an image set on the Conway Library’s ‘Art + Architecture’ database; access here:

Studies: —Philip Lindley, ‘The Imagery of the Octagon at Ely’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 139 (1986), 75–99 (available through Idiscover) —Monika Otter, ‘The Temptation of St Æthelthryth’, Exemplaria, 9 (1997), 139–63 (available through Idiscover) —John Maddison, Ely Cathedral: Design and Meaning (Ely 2000), Chapter 4 or 5 (available through Moodle) —A History of Ely Cathedral, ed. by Peter Meadows and Nigel Ramsay (Woodbridge 2003), Chapters 6 and 7 (available through Idiscover) —Paul Binski, ‘Viriditas: Ely and St Etheldreda’, Chapter 4 in Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England, 1170–1300 (New Haven 2004)(available through Moodle) Page 6 of 6

IV. Archive

Texts: —The Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode, ed. by Avril Henry (Oxford 1985–88), Part IV (available through Moodle) —The Abbey of the Holy Ghost, in Middle English Religious Prose, ed. by N.F. Blake (London 1972), pp. 88–102 (available through Moodle); also ed. in Horstmann, below, pp. 321–37 —Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost, in Yorkshire Writers, ed. Carl Horstmann (London 1895), I, 337–62 (available through archive.org) —The English Register of Godstow Nunnery, near Oxford, ed. by Andrew Clark (London 1905–11), I, 1–32 (available through archive.org) —The Latin Cartulary of Godstow Abbey, ed. by Emilie Amt (Oxford 2014)

Manuscripts: —Digital facsimile of British Library, Stowe MS 39: —St Radegund’s Archive catalogue (for browsing):

Studies: —Elisabeth van Houts, ‘Nuns and Goldsmiths: The Foundation and Early Benefactors of St Radegund’s Priory at Cambridge’, in Church and City, 1000–1500, ed. by David Abulaﬁa et al. (Cambridge 1992), pp. 59–79 (available through Moodle) —Julia Boffey, ‘“The Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost” and its Role in Manuscript Anthologies’, Yearbook of English Studies, 33 (2003), 120–30 (available through Moodle) —Christiana Whitehead, Castles of the Mind: A Study of Medieval Architectural Allegory (Cardiff 2003), Introduction and Chapter 5 (available through Moodle) —Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (2nd edn, Cambridge 2008), Introduction and Chapters 1 and 4 (available through Idiscover) Texts, Contexts, Methods Michaelmas 2020 Renaissance Core Course

Each class will consider one or more important texts, and germane literary and/or cultural topics, from the period 1500-1700. The course as a whole will give opportunities to engage with a range of different approaches to early modern literature. The classes will be led by different specialists from the Faculty and will often relate to current research. For each session there is designated core reading, and a set of follow-up possibilities, usually with some indication as to which would be the ones to prioritise. Clearly, if you have exhausted the core material and have more time to prepare for the class, then please do press on into the range of optional possibilities. In some cases there will be opportunities to give presentations in class; individual seminar leaders will be in touch with you about that in due course.

CLASS 1 (Sophie Read) Rhetoric I: Figuring God

This opening seminar will look at the art and practice of rhetoric in the period, with a particular focus on ‘divine’ rhetoric, and rhetoric in a religious context. We will start by considering Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesy as a representative (secular) handbook of figures, and thinking a little bit about the history of renaissance rhetoric as a cultural and intellectual phenomenon: its relationship to the vernacular scripture, to contemporary language change, to the arts of mind it anticipates and describes. We will then move on to look at a selection of poems by Donne and Herbert, and one or two extracts from Donne’s other prose writings as well, in order to see the poetic effects, the advantages and difficulties of a developed rhetorical style in a devotional context. For both weeks 1 & 2, I’ve tried to limit core reading to c.60-70 pages; if you have time, the further reading to prioritise is marked with an asterisk. If no edition is specified for primary reading, EEBO or any reliable modern text is fine.

Core Reading:

George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesy, eds Frank Wigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007). The most important parts to read are Book 1, ‘Of Poets and Poesy’, Chs 1-3, and Book 3, ‘Of Ornament’, Chs 1-10 (which is about 30 pages altogether). You might also browse through the rest of Book 3 to get an idea of the kinds of figures Puttenham discusses, and what he thinks about them. John Donne, Holy Sonnets, ‘Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward’, ‘Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness’, ‘A Hymn to God the Father’; Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1623): Meditation XII, Expostulation XIX George Herbert, ‘Jordan’ (I) & (II), ‘Prayer’ (I), ‘Deniall’, ‘A Wreath’, ‘The Forerunners’ Judith H. Anderson, ‘Donne’s Tropic Awareness: Metaphor, Metonymy, and Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions’, in Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 61-76

Further Reading:

Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) Patrick Colm Hogan, ‘Where the Metaphors Are’, in Cognitive Science, Literature and the Arts (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 87-114 *Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), Ch 3 (pp. 68-99) Sophie Read, Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. pp.8-37

CLASS 2 (Sophie Read) Rhetoric II: Decline and Fail

This week’s seminar is about the abuses and misuses of rhetoric. We will start in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries with those dramatized by Shakespeare; plays to concentrate on are indicated below, but we’ll also be bringing our wider knowledge and experience of Renaissance literature to the discussion. Key questions will be: how do we distinguish a genuine error from a deliberate transgression – where do we locate the limits of figurative language? Why are abuses and errors interesting, and what can we learn from them? The second part of our discussion will concern the suspicion of rhetoric that starts to be felt intensely after the Civil War and Interregnum. Core reading for this is brief – a short extract from Hobbes’ Leviathan and a poem by Marvell – but those who know Milton might want to dust off their memories of the temptation scenes of Paradise Lost (Book 9, ll. 532- 989). We will think about the political and cultural impetus behind the decline of rhetoric in the later seventeenth century.

Core Reading:

George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesy, ed Frank Wigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007). This time, it’s the section ‘Of Vices and Deformity in Speech’, Chs 21-22 of Book 3, pp. 335-46 William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost (also Henry IV Part II and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, if you know them) Andrew Marvell, ‘An Horatian Ode on Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ (1650) Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Chs 4 (‘Of Speech’) and 5 (‘Of Reason, and Science’), pp. 24-31 Alice Leonard, ‘Error in Figurative Language’, in Error in Shakespeare: Shakespeare in Error (Palgrave, 2020), pp. 15-65

Further Reading:

Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) Francois Rigolot, ‘The Renaissance Fascination with Error: Mannerism and Early Modern Poetry’, Renaissance Quarterly, 57 (2004), 1219-34 Carla Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), esp. Ch 4. *William Poole, ‘The Vices of Style’, in Renaissance Figures of Speech, eds. Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 237-51 Jenny C. Mann, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012)

CLASS 3 (David Hillman) Temporality I: Dido, the classical heritage and drama

This is the first of two classes configured around themes of temporality, history and otherness. Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage might be said to mark a turning-point in English literary history. Believed by many scholars to be Marlowe’s first play, probably written while still at the University of Cambridge in the early 1580s, the play’s irreverence looks both backwards and forwards: back to the authority of the past – the classical heritage that was so central to humanism and the trajectory of imperium; and forwards to an exuberant new dramaturgy that explores the limits of rhetoric, emergent ideals of the nation and of race, and the contours of early modern selfhood. We will think about the play’s polychronicity, asking, among other things: why did Marlowe choose to dramatise this part of the Aeneid at this historical juncture and in this way? How did this playwright see the relation between looking to the past and looking to the future? What is the relation between forms of anachronism and ideas of racial and sexual alterity?

Core Reading:

Christopher Marlowe [& Thomas Nahse?], Dido, Queen of Carthage [please use the Cambridge University Press edition, ed. Fredson Bowers – available on Moodle] Virgil, The Aeneid, Books 1, 2 and 4, preferably in the Loeb edition, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough Ovid’s Heroides, VII (‘Epistle: Dido to Aeneas’), trans. George Turberville (1567), available on EEBO: http://eebo.chadwyck.com/search/fulltext?SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&ACTION=ByID &ID=D00000239044120000&WARN=N&SIZE=386&FILE=../session/1505139562_ 7084&SEARCHSCREEN=CITATIONS&DISPLAY=AUTHOR&ECCO=default0 Emily C. Bartels, ‘Reproducing Africa: Dido, Queene of Carthage and Colonialist Discourse’, in Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 29-52

In addition, I ask that each participant in the seminar pick at least one of the texts below and to be ready to bring it into our discussion:

Further Reading:

Emily C. Bartels and Emma Smith, eds., Christopher Marlowe in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) [see esp. chapters 3 (‘Catherine Nicholson, ‘Marlowe and the limits of rhetoric’); 8 (Syrithe Pugh, ‘Marlowe and classical literature’); and 18 (Lars Engle, ‘Marlowe and the self’)] Elizabeth J. Bellamy, ‘A Disturbance of Memory in Carthage’, in Translations of Empire: Narcissism and the Unconscious in Epic History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 38-81 Sarah Munson Deats, ‘The Subversion of Gender Hierarchies in Dido, Queene of Carthage’, in and Marlowe, History and Sexuality: New Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Paul Whitfield White (New York: AMS, 1998), 163-78 – on loan from UL; Andrew Duxfield, ‘Building a Statelier Troy: Dido, Queen of Carthage’, in Christopher Marlowe and the Failure to Unify (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2015), 13-38 Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Marlowe and the Will to Absolute Play’, in Renaissance Self- Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 193-221 Clare Kinney, ‘Epic Transgression and the Framing of Agency in Dido Queen of Carthage’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 40.2 (Spring 2000), 261-76 Mathew R. Martin, ‘Trauma, Faith, and Epic History in Dido, Queen of Carthage’, in Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 23-42 Fred B. Tromly, ‘Playing with the Powerless: Dido Queen of Carthage’, in Playing with Desire: Christopher Marlowe and the Art of Tantalization (London: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 46-65

If you are interested in other primary texts that address some of the same issues as Dido, you could look at the following: Robert Garnier, The Tragedie of Antonie (1578), trans. Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (1595), Act V [use either the Early English Books Online (EEBO) edition or the University of Oregon’s Renascence edition (at http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/antonie.html)] – link is broken William Gager, Dido Tragaedia [Dido, A Tragedy] (1583), Act I, available in Latin and English at: http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/gager/plays/dido/ Samuel Daniel, The Tragedie of Cleopatra (1594) [any edition] William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1606/07) [any good edition]

CLASS 4 (David Hillman) Temporality II: Othello’s ‘Now’

‘Even now, now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe’ (Othello, 1.1.88-9): what power does this incantatory ‘now’ hold? In this week’s seminar, which focuses on Othello, we will think about the temporality of the present – specifically, about this play’s concentration on the immediate moment and its complex relation to other or queer forms of time – linear, cyclical, messianic, embodied, rhetorical, reiterative. We will consider changing conceptions of time, and ideas of anachronism and of race, in early modernity and in Shakespeare’s drama. I’d like us to explore the ways in which ‘now’ emerges as a site of embodied, possibly racialized, and deeply charged potentiality with ethical implications in Othello, and more generally.

Core Reading:

Shakespeare, Othello – I suggest we all use the Arden3 edition (ed. E.A.J. Honigmann, rev. ed. Ayanna Thompson, 2016), though the Oxford University Press edition (ed. Michael Neill, 2008) and the Cambridge University Press edition (ed. Norman Sanders, 2003) are also excellent Isaac Ambrose, Redeeming the Time: a Sermon preached at Preston in Lancashire, January 4th, 1657. At the funeral of the honourable lady, the Lady Margaret Houghton (London: Rowland Reynalds, 1674) Melissa Sanchez, ‘The Colour of Monogamy’, Chapter 2 of Queer Faith: Reading, Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 83-127

Again, I ask that each participant in the seminar pick at least one of the texts below and to be ready to bring it into our discussion:

Further Reading:

J.K. Barret, Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), Introduction Sharon A. Beeher, ‘“Confederate Season”: Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Understanding of Kairos’, in Shakespeare Matters: History, Teaching, Performance, ed. Brian Way (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 74-88 Jane Desborough, The Changing Face of Early Modern Time, 1550-1770 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Introduction Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), Introduction Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (NY: Columbia University Press, 2014 [1983]), Introduction Angus Fletcher, Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), Introduction Helen Ngo, ‘“Get Over It?” Racialised Temporalities and Bodily Orientations in Time’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 40:2 (2019), 239-53 Ricardo J. Quinones, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1972), Introduction Valerie Rohy, Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009), Introduction Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) David Houston Wood, Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2016), Introduction

CLASS 5 (Raphael Lyne) Isabella Whitney

This is the first of two classes about how early modern poets represented and constructed social networks: how their works position themselves in society, and how they portray readerships and configure their own relationships with readers. Isabella Whitney’s poetry places itself carefully – and not simply – in London’s social landscape. It gives alert readers (especially, no doubt, those of her own time) many points of entry into her specific social commentary. In addition to focusing on her uses of different genres to map out social relations, we’ll also keep an eye on how her poetry presents its own aspirations. Classical references; proverbs; letter and reply; personal reminiscence; frankness; clarity of style – all of these (and other poetic resources) are used to manage her poems’ prestigious and popular qualities.

Core Reading: Isabella Whitney, The Copy of a Letter (1567). Although some poems are reprinted in modern collections, it would be better to read the whole thing in its original form, via Early English Books Online. Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay (1573). Only ‘Her Last Wyll and Testament’ is on the core list, but this collection too is worth addressing as a whole if you have the time. Elaine Beilin, ‘Writing Public Poetry: Humanism and the Woman Writer’, Modern Language Quarterly, 51 (1990), 249-71.

Further Reading: Laurie Ellinghausen, ‘”Tis all I have”: Print Authorship and Occupational Identity in Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosgay, in Labor and Writing in Early Modern England, 1567- 1667 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 17-35 Elizabeth Heale, ‘“To make my self be known of many”: Miscellanies and the Well-Formed Gentleman’, in Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse: Chronicles of the Self (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 11-40 Whitney Trettien, ‘Isabella Whitney’s Slips: Textile Labor, Gendered Authorship, and the Early Modern Miscellany’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 45 (2015), 505-21.

If you are interested in Whitney’s style and its difference from the touchstones of later Elizabethan literature, you could look at the Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, ed. Pincombe and Shrank, which aimed to contextualise and rehabilitate a number of writers of the time. I think Barnabe Googe is an interesting reference point for Whitney. If you are interested in her ‘popular classicism’ (as we might call it), this might lead towards other writers who combine the popular and the classical. Thomas Nashe, the Ages plays of Thomas Heywood, even Shakespeare (see Colin Burrow, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity), other writers of the mid-century (Gascoigne); perhaps most intriguing of all, John Skelton, perhaps the most prodigious case of combining scholarly learning with the sounds of the street.

CLASS 6 (Raphael Lyne) Katherine Philips

In the second of two classes about the ways that poets represent and create social networks in and for their poems, Katherine Philips’s poems feature. They interact with a number of different communities united by family, friendship, royalist politics, and more. The focus will mainly be on how the stability and instability of these networks as they develop in her poems, but a set of interesting comparisons will also come into view.

Core Reading: Katherine Philips, poems in Women poets of the English Civil War, ed. Sarah C.E. Ross and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Manchester University Press, 2017) Aemilia Lanyer, ‘At Cooke-ham’, in Salve Deus Rex Iudaeorum, available via EEBO amongst others. Robert Herrick, ‘An Eclogue, or Pastorall between Endimion Porter and Lycidas Herrick’, ‘The Hock-Cart, or Harvest Home’, ‘A Country Life: To his Brother, Mr Tho. Herrick’, ‘Corinna’s Going A-Maying’, in The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, ed. by T. G. S. Cain and Ruth Connolly, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) --- the unexpected presence of Herrick here is prompted by this article: Line Cottegnies, ‘“Leaves of Fame”: Katherine Philips and Robert Herrick’s Shared Community’, in ‘Lords of Wine and Oile’: Community and Conviviality in the Poetry of Robert Herrick, ed. Ruth Connolly and Tom Cain (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Further Reading: Katherine Philips, The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda, ed. by Patrick Thomas, Germaine Greer, and R. Little (Stump Cross: Stump Cross Books, 1993) Carol Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 1649-1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996) Hero Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 1650-1689 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004) Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Forms of Engagement: Women, Poetry, and Culture 1640-1680 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)

CLASS 7 and CLASS 8: Jason Scott-Warren

Reading in the Age of Apocalypse

These two linked seminars will focus on the question of what the climate crisis means for our reading: how it might change what we read, the way we read and the ethical stakes of literary studies more broadly. How does the reframing of literature in relationship to environmental collapse reconfigure our understanding of texts and transform the kinds of questions we ask of them? What new terms or languages of analysis do we need to understand the intertwining of literary culture with the economic and extractive regimes that hindsight is forcing us to reconsider with increasing urgency? What does the long historical vantage point offered by early modern cultural history allow us to bring to the table, in terms of understanding our current predicament, and how might early modern imaginings of apocalypse help or hinder our comprehension of our own future(s)? What becomes of literary study within universities when we contemplate how enmeshed those universities are with the systems that are causing the collapse of the biosphere? And among the various strategies of ‘reconnection’, what hope for reconnecting the academic study of literature with the challenges we currently face?

Core Reading for seminar 7 is Shakespeare’s King Lear, and for seminar 8 is Andrew Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ and Margaret Cavendish’s ‘The Blazing World’. You may also want to read Marvell’s Mower poems, ‘The Garden’, and ‘The Nymph Complaining’, and Cavendish’s ‘The Hunting of the Hare’ and ‘The Hunting of the Stag’, in her Poems and Fancies. The secondary literature in this area is expanding rapidly; please choose one piece of secondary literature or more general reading to report back on in each seminar.

Further Reading: The Age of Apocalypse

Jem Bendell, ‘Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy’ https://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf (see also the critique at https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/faulty-science-doomism-and-flawed- conclusions-deep-adaptation/) Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber, The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017) Wendell Berry, The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry (London: Allen Lane, 2017) Pascal Bruckner, The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse: Save the Earth, Punish Human Beings, trans. Steven Rendell (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013) Frances Carey, ed., The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come (London: British Museum Press, 1999) William Franke, Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown, Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect our Lives, Our World (Gabriola Island, B.C. : New Society Publishers, 1998) R. Netzley, Lyric Apocalypse: Milton, Marvell and the Nature of Events (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015) C. A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich, eds, The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984) Karen Pinkus, Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016) Will Steffen et al., ‘Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene’, https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252 Jennifer Wallace, Tragedy Since 9/11 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), ch. 7 David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future (London: Penguin, 2019) Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)

ANIMAL AND HUMAN IN THE RENAISSANCE

MPhil Lent Term Seminar / Raphael Lyne

This seminar will feature a range of perspectives on animals, animal-human relations, and humans-as- animals, in the early modern period. The aim will be to think about (i) historical ideas about, and representations of, animals and their implications for the category of ‘the human’; (ii) the ways that different literary forms make space for (or don’t) animal bodies, behaviours, and minds; (iii) the ways that a set of 21st-century concerns about the treatment of animals and the animal-human distinction may be illuminated by early modern writings, and vice versa.

This outline presents core questions and materials, and suggestions of possible further topics for discussion. I hope the course will adapt to reflect participants’ interests.

Shakespeare Two Shakespeare plays will act as key sources for a renaissance menagerie-imaginary: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It. These plays open up some of the key topics of the course: (i) the hunt / predator and prey; (ii non-human reason and speech; (iii) working and farming (with) animals; (iv) everyday and exotic animals / animals and travel; (v) the human animal.

Critical Approaches We’ll turn to a set of critical works, including the following, to consider how different critical approaches catch, and miss, crucial interfaces between early modern texts and our own ecological and ethical concerns:

Catherine Bates, Masculinity and the Hunt: Wyatt to Spenser (Cambridge UP, 2013)

Gabriel Egan, Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (Routledge, 2006); also Shakespeare and Ecocritical Theory (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality and Humanity in Early Modern England (Cornell UP, 2006); also numerous other works depending on your interests.

Karen Raber, Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); also Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory (Bloomsbury, 2018). Robert N. Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006)

Spenser One key point of comparison with these Shakespeare plays of the 1590s is likely to be Spenser’s Faerie Queene, more or less extensively depending on the experience and enthusiasm of the group. This poem engages interestingly with hunting, the pastoral, metamorphoses, wildness, and more. Key moments will include (i) Una’s lion in Book I, (ii) the temperate and intemperate creatures of Book II, and (iii) the hunts of Book III. This poem (like the other literary works we look at, but perhaps with extra sharpness because of its allegorical structure) will require us to think about metaphorical as well as literal animality.

Natural Histories The early modern period saw some key writings about the animal world, of which at least three will feature as extracts (and may play a larger role, again depending on the group’s interests). Edward Topsell’s History of Four-footed Beasts (1607) is comprehensive and ranges fascinatingly from the native to the foreign, the real to the fantastical; George Gascoigne’s Book of Venery or Hunting (1575) focuses on the habits and vulnerabilities of the hunter’s quarry; Thomas Harriot’s Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588) includes thoughts on fauna among its commodifying descriptions of the environment encountered by the English colonists. These works depict but also enact a rich and problematic range of human-animal interactions.

Earlier Tudor Writings I would like to complement the Shakespeare / Spenser work, if (yet once more) it works out when we have thought through the group’s interests, with some investigation of earlier 16th century works that (I think) constitute an interesting cluster of thinking with and about animals in literary form. They are:

Robert Henryson’s Aesopian beast fables, especially ‘The Preaching of the Swallow’

Thomas More’s Utopia

John Skelton’s ‘Speak, Parrot’ and ‘Philip Sparrow’ Thomas Wyatt’s poems, especially for their evocations of hunting, e.g. re. the ‘hind’ of ‘Whoso list to hunt’, his ‘fair falcon’, the ‘heart’s forest’, and the town mouse and country mouse from ‘My mother’s maids…’. The hunting poems could usefully be compared to poems on a hunting theme from the court songbook known as Henry VIII’s Manuscript.

Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern England: Interdisciplinary Approaches Subha Mukherji ([email protected])

Early modern England was a culture at a crossroads, not least in its ways of knowing. A time of intense literary production, it also saw the cultural forces of humanism and the Reformation in a grand collision; crucial shifts in the law; scientific advancement; and dramatic growth in trade and travel. At stake across the board was knowledge: its theories and technologies, its excitements and anxieties. But the questions this culture asks and seeks to answer about knowledge, how to get there, and where to stop, do not neatly fall within the remit of any one discipline, let alone the broad categories of science and the arts.

The overlaps and negotiations at the boundaries between disciplines committed to knowing or conceptualising knowledge invite and deserve systematic research. For it is at these crossings that resolutions conditioned by disciplinary interests are challenged by the different aims and responsibilities of alternative knowledge systems. Literary texts, relatively unconstrained by specialised discourse or quantitative evidence, are uniquely syncretic in the way they capture mental habits produced by epistemic cross-currents. Less obviously, non-literary texts - be they natural philosophical essays, legal treatises, sermons or economic pamphlets – also adopt literary strategies in their attempt to communicate and persuade. But in their explorations of the dynamic tensions of this energetic but far-from unified period, they are distinct from each other as well as from mainstream ‘literature’.

Again, material objects elude discursive restrictions and find their own way of knowing, of carrying certain knowledges, and of imparting these to human understanding.

This set of seminars will probe the interface between the imaginative literature of the time and epistemology in its wider sense. Subsequent disciplinary segregation has obscured the ‘understood relations’ among these disciplines: epistemic transactions that went to the heart of the experiences of knowledge and belief which so deeply vexed and shaped the period’s thought. We will approach this field through the specific intervention of literary texts in this wider conversation. What do they ‘know’, or tell us, that the other discourses cannot, or do not, because of their particular disciplinary investments? What claims to demonstrability or assurance will literature not share with science or religion or the law? Crucially, how do these cognate practices in turn engage with literary constitutions of knowledge? Why, and how, are epistemic exchange at discursive thresholds specifically productive? And finally, how does the material world of things mediate knowledge?

In the first three classes, will examine the intersections between literary forms and three key, but apparently disparate, areas of thinking on the condition of knowledge, and the ends and means of knowing: law, theology and economics. In the fourth session, we will focus on physical objects of knowledge and explore methodologies for approaching the question of material knowledge and its imaginative purchase.

experiment with tracing epistemic metaphors to try and understand the period’s thinking about the process, ethics and psychology of knowing.

Class I Law and rhetoric, equity and drama

The study of ‘law and literature’ has flourished in recent years, and early modern England, in particular its theatrical production, has been one of the central areas of critical interest. The first class will try and go behind this phenomenon and ask some basic questions. Why are plays interested in legal scenarios? What approaches to knowledge does literature share with the law, and what can their dialogue, and our interdisciplinary questions, tell us about these? To start thinking about these issues, we will focus, in Class 1, on Vittoria’s trial in Webster’s The White Devil (and, briefly, the final scene of Jonson’s Volpone) to examine the notion of equitable drama, the relation between rhetoric and law,

the body as a text in court, and the larger issues of representation and method raised by these considerations.

Primary texts: Anon., A Warning for Fair Women (1599), ed. Charles Dale Cannon (The Hague, 1975), scene xvi, esp. ll. 2174-2379, where Anne Sanders appears in court. I will put a copy on reserve in the Faculty library nearer the time. Ben Jonson, Volpone, IV.ii, V.vii. William Shakespeare, All’s Well that Ends Well, V.iii. Henry Swinburne, A Treatise of Spousals, or Matrimonial Contracts, ed. Randolph Trumbach (London, 1985) (extract will be provided) John Webster, The White Devil, III.ii – ‘The Arraignment of Vittoria’ Extracts from Aristotle and Quintilian will be circulated or recommended nearer the time. They will include, centrally, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 3.11 and Poetics, 17, 1455a22-26; 17.1; 4.2.123; and Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 6.2.27-35.

Background and secondary reading (unmissables asterisked) Aristotle, Poetics Terence Cave, Recognitions (Oxford, 1990): Introduction and if possible pp. 1-24 (‘Odysseus’s Scar’). Kathy Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition ((Princeton, N.J., 1986), Ch. 3: ‘Rhetoric and Psychology: the Aristotelian Foundations of the Poetic Image’ (62-111). *Peter Goodrich, entry on ‘Law’, in T. Sloane, ed., Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (Oxford, 2001). *Ina Haberman, “She has that in your belly will dry up your ink”: Femininity as Challenge in the “Equitable Drama” of John Webster, in Erica Sheen and Lorna Hutson, eds, Literature, Politics and Law in Renaissance England (London, 2005), pp. 100-120 Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford, 2007), intro. and ch. 2. ------‘Law, Probability and Character in Shakespeare’, in Yota Batsaki, Subha Mukherji and Jan-Melissa Schramm, eds., Fictions of Knowledge: Fact, Evidence, Doubt (London, 2012). Subha Mukherji, Law and Representation in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2006), chs. 1 and 4. ------‘Understood Relations: law and literature in early modern studies’, Literature Compass, Vol. 6 (2009), 706-25. Barbara Shapiro, ‘Classical Rhetoric and the English Law of Evidence’, in Kahn and Hutson, eds, Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe, pp. 54-72. *------A Culture of Fact; England, 1550-1730 (Ithaca/London, 2000), esp. pp. 11-12 (section on juries). Julie Stone Peters, ‘Law, Literature, and the Vanishing Real: On the Future of an Interdisciplinary Illusion’, PMLA 120.2 (2005), pp. 442-453 (UL classmark: P700.b.152.199 – the catalogue only refers you to the online resource and this particular year’s publication may not be accessible there); and Peter Brook’s response to it in a letter to the editor, followed by Stone Peters’s reply, in PMLA 120.5 (2005), pp. 1645-1647.

Class II Trust and doubt: from law to theology

In Class II, we will look at the uses of proof across legal, theological and ‘literary’ material, to ask how the aims and investments of specific domains of knowledge inflect the status of certainty and knowability. We will address literary/imaginative mediations of the wider cultural meanings and epistemologies of faith across religious and secular contexts. We will pause on the grammar of unknowing – possibly using Herbert’s ‘Prayer I’ as a point of entry. We might also reflect on how tracing – and thinking with - a concept such as evidence across fields of knowledge can be methodologically productive.

Primary texts: Please familiarise yourselves with these plays, but we will concentrate on the specified scenes in discussion. William Shakespeare, All’s Well that Ends Well: final scene Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale: ditto Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Bottom’s report of his dream (IV.i.197-211 in New Cambridge edition) Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus, II.iii (in both 1604 text and 1616 text) George Herbert, ‘Prayer I’ + Henry Swinburne, A Treatise of Spousals (written c. 1600, pub. 1686) (extracts will be provided nearer the time) Richard Hooker, ‘A Learned and Comfortable Sermon of the Certainty and Perpetuity of Faith in the Elect’ (preached 1586? printed 1612) in The Works of Richard Hooker (London, 1682), 527-32 (527- 28).

As there are several texts here, I am not suggesting any secondary or background reading at this point, other than revisiting Aristotle and Cave from Class I’s reading list.

Selected extracts will put on Moodle nearer the time. Further details and instructions will be circulated a week ahead of each class.

Class III: Epistemic metaphors: a case-study and a methodological experiment

We will begin by focusing on the labyrinth as a metaphor of knowing than runs through several domains of knowing in the period – I will introduce this and invite comments. This will also be our route into natural philosophy, or at least a peek into that discourse. We will then have presentations from volunteers from the group on a selection of epistemic metaphors of their choice, reflecting on the yield and risks of such a critical approach, and conclude by thinking together about the concepts methodological challenges and possibilities of interdisciplinary studies.

This sort of inquiry lends itself to computational search and analysis. Digital approaches help us track patterns that we cannot track manually. I plan to introduce you to these approaches at the simplest level in this class.

Prelim reading:

Wendy Beth Hyman, “‘Deductions from Metaphors’: Figurative Truth, Poetical Language, and Early Modern Science”, in Howard Marchitello and Evelyn Tribble, The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science, pp. 27-48. Ricoeur, Paul, The rule of metaphor: Multidisciplinary studies of the creation of meaning in language, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: University Toronto Press, 1975)

Further reading suggestions on this class will be provided nearer the time, and to an extent in discussion with the group.

Class IV Objects of Knowledge

Please note that this seminar needs to take place in the Graham Robertson seminar room in the Fitzwilliam Museum. Whether this is possible will not be known to us till later in the year. If not, we will have to adjust the topic.

This session will involve physical objects from the Fitzwilliam collection. It will consider the intersection of literature, epistemology and materiality in the early modern world, asking how knowledge informs, and interacts with, the material world. We will consider a range of questions in the presence of a selection of objects: what, and how, do objects know? How do we construct knowledge through objects? Are there historically specific dimensions to the relationship between knowledge and materiality in this period, and does literature play a role in negotiating these? How does the physical presence of objects shape what we think and say about the historical knowledge they carry and the cultures they existed within?

Presenters for this week will be asked to choose an object from the Fitzwilliam catalogue for discussion; it is recommended that you liaise with the curators (details will be provided) in order to visit your object beforehand (if it is not already on display) and have it in the room to present with on the day. There will also be a selection of other objects present around which we will focus our discussion.

Primary texts: Please visit the Fitzwilliam Museum before the class takes place!

Background and secondary reading Arjun Appadurai, ed. The Social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective (Cambridge, 1986) Rayna Kalas, Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance (New York, 2007) Natasha Korda, Shakespeare's domestic economies: gender and property in early modern England (Pennsylvania, 2002) esp. ‘Housekeeping and Household Stuff’ *Helen Smith, Grossly Material Things (Cambridge, 2013) *Bruce R Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago, 2009) Gordon Teskey, ‘Allegory, Materialism, Violence’ in The Production of English Renaissance Culture, eds. David Lee Miller, Sharon O’Dair and Harold Weber (Alabama, 1994) 293-318.

The Exuvial Renaissance: Distributing Personhood in Early Modern Texts

As humans, we spread out into the world in innumerable ways. Our breath fans from our mouths and nostrils. Our body odours and perfumes waft on the air currents. Our bodies expel waste matter through urination and defecation as well as by less visible moultings of skin and hair. We can gesture with our faces or our bodies, and we can broadcast ourselves through speech, song and shouting. We can send our gazes roving across space; we can throw things. Much of this we can amplify with technological aids (megaphones, TV sets, rocket launchers). Then, of course, we can shape objects, environments, and monuments that project our identities out into the world. Among the most powerful of these projective devices are works of art and literature, which have long been understood as vehicles for secular immortality (the survival of the creator’s name for eternity). All of the foregoing might be thought of as forms of distributed personhood, a category that for all its rich implications has to date received little sustained attention from scholars in the humanities. This module brings together perspectives from anthropology, cultural history and literary studies to reflect on the circulation of the self in the early modern period, across a range of media, from paintings and clothing to printed books, manuscripts and stage plays.

The concept of the distributed self is outlined by Alfred Gell, in his posthumous Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (1998). As humans, he suggests, ‘we are present, not just in our singular bodies, but in everything in our surroundings which bears witness to our existence, our attributes, and our agency’. He starts out with a curiosity about the agency of objects, the sense in which objects can do things. Objects have agency partly in and of themselves, but partly because they distribute the agency of people. The world is full of things that transmit the wills of their creators in absentia; indeed, Gell proposes, ‘objectification in artefact-form is how social agency manifests and realizes itself’.

Gell’s analysis then takes a startling turn, as he begins to meditate upon exuviae, meaning the cast-off shells, skins or coverings of insects, snakes and other animals. The word has a wider range of meaning in Latin, where it denotes ‘garments stripped off, skins of animals, [and] the spoils of an enemy’. Gell uses it to make sense of volt sorcery, the kind of magic that aims to harm an individual by harming their likeness, often with some incorporation of the victim’s hair, nail- clippings, food-leftovers or excreta. His crucial move here is to argue that both the image and the empowering additional extras are exuviae—the cast-offs, remnants or leavings through which being spreads out into the world. Equally important is his observation that the exuviae that are thrown off by the body remain intimately linked with it; they are at once detached from and in some sense still a part of the person that produced them. This licenses us to think of images in exuvial terms, rather than seeing them as detached representations (so a portrait is a distributed part or an extra limb of its sitter). Ancient accounts of sight understood this sense to work by means of emanations, ‘pictures of things and thin shapes ... emitted from things off their surface’. According to Lucretius, these pictures resemble ‘the gossamer coats which at times cicades doff in summer, and the films which calves at their birth cast from the surface of their body, as well as the vesture which the slippery serpent puts off among the thorns’. Such a passage opens the way to a powerful model for thinking about the self, not in the familiar terms of mind and body but rather as a life-force which constantly pushes out from from the body via its various excretions, extensions and distributions. Although all of this may seem strange to us, versions of exuvial thinking were widespread in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and they have considerable resonance with the way we think about our identities in the age of social media.

The structure of this four-seminar module will be roughly as follows: 1: Gell and early modern thing theory; 2: Donne, Herrick, & manuscript personhood; 3: Thomas Nashe and the printed self; 4: Distributing the self on stage. My approach will be exploratory and experimental, with the aim of testing out a concept that offers a new way of thinking about literature and identity.

Relevant Reading

Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) Martina Bagnoli et al., eds, Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe (2010) Warren Boutcher, ‘Literary Art and Agency? Gell and the Magic of the Early Modern Book’, in Liana Chua and Mark Elliott, eds, Distributed Objects: Meaning and Mattering after Alfred Gell (2013), 155-75 --- The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols (2017) Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry 28/1 (2001), 1-22 Douglas Bruster, Shakespeare and the Question of Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), ch. 8 (‘The New Materialism in Renaissance Studies’) Margreta de Grazia et al., eds, Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (1996) Stephen Deng, Coinage and State Formation in Early Modern English Literature (2011) Hildegard Diemberger and Stephen Hugh-Jones, eds, L’objet livre, Terrain 59 (2012), online at https://journals.openedition.org/terrain/14877?lang=en Margret Fetzer, John Donne’s Performances: Sermons, Poems, Letters and Devotions (2010) Will Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern Literature and Culture (2006) David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (1998) Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (1998) --- The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams, ed. Eric Hirsch (1999) Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘Shakespeare’s Hair: Staging the Object of Material Culture’, Shakespeare Quarterly 52 (2001): 479-491. --- Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (2008) Sarah Howe, ‘The Authority of Presence: the Development of the English Author Portrait, 1500-1640’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 102 (2008), 465-99 Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (2011) Farah Karim-Cooper, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (2012) Jessen Kelly, ‘The Material Efficacy of the Elizabethan Jeweled Miniature: A Gellian Experiment’, in Robin Osborne and Jeremy Tanner, eds, Art’s Agency and Art History (2007), 114-34 James A. Knapp and Jeffrey Pence, ‘Between Thing and Theory’, Poetics Today 24 (4), 641-71 Daniel Miller, Stuff (2010) Louis Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation (2006) Christopher Pinney and Nicholas Thomas, Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of Enchantment (2001) Jason Scott-Warren, ‘The Exuvial Book’, in Alexandra Gillespie and Deidre Lynch, eds, The Unfinished Book (2020) Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (2000) Matthew Steggle, Wars of the Theatres: The Poetics of Personation in the Age of Jonson (1998) Gary A. Stringer, ‘The Composition and Dissemination of Donne’s Writings’, in Jeanne Shami et al., eds, The Oxford Handbook of John Donne (2011), 12-25 Ramie Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul (2008) Emma Tarlo, Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair (2016) Caroline van Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object (2015) Alexandra Walsham, ed, Relics and Remains (2010)

Introduction to Textual Studies: Outline

This is a course about early modern texts and the forms in which they circulated. Its premise is that an understanding of the early modern ‘textual condition’ is central to literary studies. The physical forms in which texts are materialized have a powerful shaping influence upon interpretation. As D.F. McKenzie put it, neatly and powerfully: ‘forms effect meaning’.

The course is normally taught in the Cambridge University Library using primary manuscript and printed materials from its collections. The shape that the course takes in 2020-21 will depend on how much access we can get to the library. We have plans to teach in a large seminar room in a socially-distanced way, but we will have to fine- tune those plans over the next month, and remain flexible in case things change at short notice. There is now an abundance of materials online and research can get a long way using digital surrogates (indeed, one might argue that the ‘material turn’ in literary studies has been driven by digital technologies). So if we have to do things online, we can do.

Although it isn’t easy to disentangle production from consumption, the broad movement of the course is from the making of books to their circulation in the world and their reception by readers. Along the way, it will equip you for practical encounters with the archive, in manuscript and print, and will introduce some of the technical vocabularies of textual analysis.

Week 1: Introductory

(1) ‘Introduction’ to Allison K. Deutermann and András Kiséry, eds, Formal Matters: Reading the Materials of English Renaissance Literature (2013)

(2) ‘Introduction’ to Adam Smyth, Material Texts in Early Modern England (2018)

(3) ‘Introduction’ to Helen Smith, ed., Grossly Material Things: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (2012)

Week 2: Making and Interpreting Early Modern Books

(1) Sarah Werner, Studying Early Printed Books 1450-1800 (2019), parts 1 and 2

(2) Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (corrected edn, 1974), 1-145.

Week 3: Forms of Textual Instability

familiarise yourself with the debate between:

Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (1983), 3- 25 (chapter 1 and part of chapter 2)

Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book (1998), 1-33 (part of the introduction)

Smyth, Material Texts, ch. 3: ‘Errors and Corrections’

Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Reading and Writing in Early Modern England (1984), introduction.

Week 4: Paratexts and Illustrations

Werner, Studying Early Printed Books, part 3.

Helen Smith and Louise Wilson, eds, Renaissance Paratexts (2011)

Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth, eds, Book Parts (2019)

Claire M. L. Bourne, Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (2020)

Week 5: Manuscripts

Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700 (http://www.celmms. org.uk)

Kathryn James, English Palaeography and Manuscript Culture 1500-1800 (2020)

Joshua Eckhardt and Daniel Starza Smith, eds., Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England (2014)

Week 6: Afterlives

Werner, Studying Early Printed Books, part 5.

Katherine Acheson, ed., Early Modern English Marginalia (2018)

Jeffrey Todd Knight, Bound to Read: Compiling, Book Collection, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (2013)

William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (1995), 53-78