Newberry Essays in Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Newberry Essays in Medieval and Early Modern Studies Volume 7 Edited by Carla Zecher and Karen Christianson Newberry Essays in Medieval and Early Modern Studies Volume 7 Selected Proceedings of the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies 2013 Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference Edited by Carla Zecher and Karen Christianson Contributing Editors: Michelle L. Beer, Megan Gregory, Geoffrey A. Johns, William M. Storm, Christopher Van Den Berge, and Melanie Zefferino Chicago, Illinois Newberry Essays in Medieval and Early Modern Studies Volume 7 Selected Proceedings of the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies 2013 Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference EDITORS Carla Zecher The Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies Karen Christianson The Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Michelle L. Beer William M. Storm Department of History Department of English University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Marquette University Megan Gregory Christopher Van Den Berge Department of English Department of History Illinois State University University of Illinois at Chicago Geoffrey A. Johns Melanie Zefferino Department of English Departments of Theatre Studies and History of Art Michigan State University University of Warwick 2013 by the Newberry Library. All rights to the publication Newberry Essays in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Volume 7, 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/sites/default/files/2013Proceedings.pdf Newberry Essays in Medieval and Early Modern Studies 7 Table of Contents Introduction, by Carla Zecher ............................................................................................................................................ 3 Land, Sea, and Stars The Transmutation of Corpse to Landscape in Laȝamon’s Brut, by Erin Kissick .......................................... 5 Saints in the Seascape: Interconnection, Competition, and Cultural Reproduction at Medieval Ecclesiastical Communities in Northwestern Connemara, by Ryan Lash ............................................................................................................ 17 “These Divine Animals”: Physicality of the Stars in Platonic and Aristotelian Thought, by Stephen Case ......................................................................................................................... 35 Women, Cross-Dressing, and Masculinity Kissing Cousins: Incest and Sex Change in Tristan de Nanteuil, by Karen Adams ........................................ 41 Womb Rhetoric: Volumnia, Tamora, and Elizabeth I in a Trajectory of Martial Maternity, by Lauren J. Rogener .............................................................................................. 55 From Libertine to Femme Fatale: The Fallen Woman in Thomas Southerne’s Sir Anthony Love, by Kirsten Mendoza .................................................................................. 65 News, Law, and Politics Joseph Mead and the “Battle of the Starlings,” by Kirsty Rolfe ........................................................................ 77 Diplomatic Dress: Fashion and the Politics of Display in the Late Stuart Courts, by Emilie M. Brinkman ..................................................................................................... 87 Projectors and Polders: Patenting Trends in England and the Dutch Republic during the 1690s, by Steven Schrum ............................................................................................... 95 An Island Home: Jamaican Local Leaders in the English Imperial World, by John A. Coakley ............................................................................................................... 107 Expressions of Devotion Harmonizing the Auditor Within: Thomas Ford’s Musical Setting of John Donne’s “Lamentations of Jeremy,” by Anna Lewton-Brain .............................................................. 119 “None fitter to do the husband’s work”: Women, Domesticity, and the Household in the Transatlantic Quaker Movement, by Naomi Pullin ........................................................... 133 1 Introduction 2 Newberry Essays in Medieval and Early Modern Studies 7 Introduction By Carla Zecher lthough this online publication of selected conference proceedings is number seven in a series, A the history of the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies annual graduate student conference goes back much further. Fran Dolan (then a graduate student at the University of Chicago, now on the faculty of the University of California, Davis) established the conference in the 1980s, to provide a venue in which graduate students could present scholarly papers to an audience of their peers, before venturing into the more intimidating arena of major national and international conferences. When Megan Moore (then Assistant Director of the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies, now Assistant Professor of French at the University of Missouri) inaugurated the series of online proceedings in 2007, the conference had been held regularly for more than twenty years. Like Fran, Megan sought to create a unique opportunity for graduate students: an online forum in which they could make the preliminary results of their research widely available, while still retaining the right to use their work in future publications, whether digital or printed. Subsequent Center for Renaissance Studies staff members—Karen Christianson (the current Associate Director of the Center), and Laura Aydelotte (former Interim Assistant Director, who recently completed her PhD at the University of Chicago)—have ensured the continuation of the online proceedings. The conference itself has grown from a small annual event to quite a large one, as more institutions have joined the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies consortium, but a team of advanced graduate students still serves as the program committee each year, to vet submissions for presentation at the conference. The program committee members also chair the conference sessions, select papers for the online proceedings, and edit them. The papers included in this year’s proceedings address topics ranging chronologically from the Anglo-Normans to the late Stuart courts, geographically from France to northwest Ireland to Jamaica, and thematically from gender studies to legal history to religious history. The authors and editors of the papers represent a cross- section of the fifty institutions that currently belong to the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies, including universities located in Texas, Pennsylvania, the Midwest, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Carla Zecher is Director of the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies and Newberry Curator of Music. 3 Introduction 4 Newberry Essays in Medieval and Early Modern Studies 7 The Transmutation of Corpse to Landscape in Laȝamon’s Brut By Erin Kissick aȝamon’s Brut is one of several twelfth-century and thirteenth-century retellings of Geoffrey of L Monmouth’s Latin history of Britain, De gestis Britonum/Historia Regum Brittaniae.1 Geoffrey’s text is the oldest extant source not only for many of the legends of King Arthur and Merlin, but also the stories of other famous Briton kings such as Leir, who conquered the area now known as England as well as the surrounding nations, even extending their influence as far as Rome. The history begins with the settlement of Britain by Brutus, the father of the Britons and a descendant of Aeneas, the mythical Trojan founder of Rome, and ends with the conquest of the island by the Angles. Written by one of the later Norman colonizers, Geoffrey’s text creates a narrative exploring the complexities of colonizing a nation of former colonizers. 2 Laȝamon’s text continues this exploration in the vernacular, using the shared landscape to shape a closer relationship between the Anglo-Norman audience and their Briton predecessors by giving their names and stories to the countryside.3 Kings and heroes rise swiftly and fall even faster, buried and absorbed into the land they once ruled, their names and stories permanently inscribed on the landscape. Their corpses, the “boundary that encroaches upon everything,” become part of the reshaping of boundaries in the colonized England.4 This is a history created by Geoffrey and his successors for, rather than by, the Britons. Therefore, while the corpses shape Briton history within the text, this process is directed by 1 Sir Frederic Madden, K.H., ed. and trans., Laȝamon’s Brut, or Chronicle of Britain. (London: Society of Antiquaries of London, 1847; republished New York: AMS Press, 1970). All translated quotes are from Sir Frederic Madden’s 1847 translation of Laȝamon’s Brut, because it remains the most useful for scholarly purposes. The translation is careful and accurate, although some of the punctuation is problematic, and the edition itself also contains parallel transcriptions of the two primary manuscript versions—Cotton Caligula A.ix and Cotton Otho C. xiii. Because Otho is missing a number of fragments in key places, the quotations I have chosen are from the Caligula version, and the endnotes contain Madden’s diplomatic transcriptions from that same manuscript. Many of the line breaks in the translation are approximate, given the nature of translation. 2 Michelle R. Warren, History on the Edge: Excalibur

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