A Mirror for Medieval and Early Modern Studies Edited by Laura Aydelotte A Mirror for Medieval and Early Modern Studies: Selected Proceedings of the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies 2012 Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference Edited by Laura Aydelotte Contributing Editors: Mary Channen Caldwell, Julia Finch, Anuradha Gobin, Kati Ihnat, Caryn O’Connell, Abigail Stahl, Jennifer Toms THE NEWBERRY LIBRARY, Chicago, Illinois A Mirror for Medieval and Early Modern Studies: Selected Proceedings of the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies 2012 Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference EDITOR Laura Aydelotte The Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Mary Channen Caldwell Caryn O’Connell Department of Music, Department of English University of Chicago University of Chicago Julia Finch Abigail Stahl Department of History of Art and Architecture Department of French and Francophone Studies University of Pittsburgh Northwestern University Anuradha Gobin Jennifer Toms Department of Art History Department of English McGill University Michigan State Kati Ihnat Department of History Queen Mary, University of London 2012 by the Newberry Library. All rights to the publication A Mirror for Medieval and Early Modern Studies reserved. Copyright in individual articles remains with the authors. For information, please address the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, Illinois 60610, or e-mail renaissance@ newberry.org. Publication URL: http://www.newberry.org/center-renaissance-studies-publications. Cover Image: Theatrum Chemicum Britanicum, Newberry Case Y184.05 A Mirror for Medieval and Early Modern Studies Table of Contents Introduction, by Laura Aydelotte .................................................................................................................................... 3 Turning “wyne into water” The Erasmian Reimagining of the Virgin Mary, by Stephan Bates .................. 5 Ordering Paradise: Structuring the Natural World in the Early Modern French Caribbean, by Andrew Dial ................................................................................................................................................................. 19 “E che giammai puó far femmina imbelle?” Gendered Politics in Francisco António de Almeida’s La Giuditta, by Danielle Kuntz ..................................................................... 27 Discerning Tears in Early Modern Catholicism, by John W. McCormack ........................................................ 49 To Persuade and Connect: Mary Sidney’s Essential Role in Henry Sidney’s Irish Rule, by Catherine Medici ............................................................................................................................................................ 61 Freedom in Determinism: An Argument Against Reading Spinoza as a Hard Determinist, by Nick Nash ..................................................................................................................................................................... 73 Gospel Family Order, Honourable Marriages, and Slavery in Barbados: George Fox’s Response to Quaker Slave Owners and the Question of Marriage Among Slaves, by Kristianna Polder ........................................................................................................................................................... 83 Property and Freedom in the English Revolution, by Lorenzo Sabbadini ....................................................... 95 Decoding the Florentine Codex: Cultural Negotiation through Image in Sixteenth-Century Mexico, by Jennifer Saracino .................................................................................................... 105 Fidelity and the Politics of Appropriation in Sidney Lumet’s The Deadly Affair, by Elizabeth Tavares ........................................................................................................................................................ 119 Harmless Silence? Subjective Agency in Confession and Revenge in The Spanish Tragedy, by Jane Wanninger ........................................................................................................................................................... 133 Women, Heresy, and Crusade: Toward a Context for Jacques de Vitry’s Relationship to the Early Beguines, by Benjamin A. Wright ....................................................................................................... 149 1 Introduction A Mirror for Medieval and Early Modern Studies Introduction By Laura Aydelotte The Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference is an annual event that allows students from any of the forty-nine institutions that are members of the Center for Renaissance Studies consortium an opportunity to gather for a chance to formally present and hear new research across a range of disciplines, and to informally connect with and exchange ideas with fellow early period enthusiasts. The 2012 conference included graduate student participants from thirty-two consortium universities, and from thirteen US states, Canada, England and Scotland. There were sixty-four individual presenters in sixteen sessions across the three days, January 26-28, 2012. Not only was the 2012 multidisciplinary conference an occasion for graduate students to share their work, but the event could not have taken place without the dedicated work of the seven graduate student organizers on the planning committee who, in the midst of their own research and teaching duties, selected papers, formed panels and, on the final day of the conference, chose the twelve papers contained in this collection to represent what they considered to be the very best work from the many excellent conference presentations. Over the course of the next several months these graduate student organizers became editors, each working with one or two authors to get the original conference papers in shape for publication. The title of this collection of essays, A Mirror for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, is inspired by the numerous works across the medieval and early modern periods that presented themselves as a speculum or “mirror” for the reader. Vincent de Beauvais’ Speculum Maius is a fourteenth-century example of such a text, while A Mirror for Magistrates is one well-known title from sixteenth-century England. Containing a diverse assortment of stories, poems, theological works, natural history, and other assorted texts, such speculae or mirrors were intended to present the reader with a reflection of the world, and to cause the reader to engage in intellectual and spiritual reflection in turn. As work by new, upcoming scholars in the field from a variety of disciplines—art history, ecclesiastical history, English, history, medieval studies, music, philosophy—these articles present their reader with both a reflection of the field of early period studies as it stands today, and a chance to reflect upon what changes and new discoveries are beginning to arrive with the next generation of scholarship. Laura Aydelotte is the Interim Assistant Director for the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies, and is soon to complete her Ph.D. in English at the University of Chicago. 3 Introduction A Mirror for Medieval and Early Modern Studies Turning ―wyne into water‖ The Erasmian Reimagining of the Virgin Mary By Stephen Bates In 1535, Thomas Cromwell‘s commissioners issued a set of Articles of Inquiry for the Augustinian monastery of Walsingham. They comprised a detailed list of questions relating to religious devotion at the famous Marian shrine: what relics were there and ―what vertue was esteemed of the people to be in theym‖? Why were they spread about the church rather than kept in one place? What was the annual value of the offerings to the Virgin and the relics? What miracles were claimed or preached? What proof was there that such miracles were carried out by the Virgin, or even her statue at Walsingham, rather than any other image, as opposed to the immediate help of God, or simply natural causes? The visitors expressed particular concern over ―whether our Lady‘s milke be liquid or no?‖ One enigmatic article asked specifically concerning ―the house where the bere skynne is, and of the knyght.‖1 These were unmistakable references to the account given by Desiderius Erasmus (d. 1536) in one of his Colloquies relating his own pilgrimage to Walsingham, thinly veiled as a dialogue from which schoolboys might learn their Latin. Consequently, there is a historiographical assumption that Erasmian skepticism lay at the root of Thomas Cromwell‘s assault on pilgrimages and devotion to the saints.2 Yet the writings of Erasmus are not the work of an anti-Marian iconoclast; rather, they reveal the less polemical intention of recovering the place of the Virgin in popular piety. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore how, in engaging with England‘s particular brand of late medieval devotion to the Virgin, the itinerant humanist reshaped his own Mariological understanding and unintentionally influenced that first wave of Henrician reform. Erasmus added the Pergrinatio Religionis Ergo to the 1526 edition of his Colloquia and it would appear in English translation as The Pilgrimage of Pure Devotion in 1537: a timely fanfare preceding 1 BL, Harleian MS 791, fols 27r-28r; printed in John Gough Nichols, ed., Pilgrimages to Saint Mary of Walsingham and Saint Thomas of Canterbury by Desiderius