Browsing by Author "Quilligan, Maureen"

At the community of Little Gidding from the late 1620s through the 1640s, in a special room known as the Concordance Chamber, Mary Ferrar, Anna Collett, and their sisters sliced apart printed Bibles and engravings, then pasted them back together into elaborate collages of text and image that harmonize the four gospels into a single narrative. They then bound these books between elaborate covers using a method taught to them by a bookbinder's daughter from Cambridge. The resulting volumes were so meticulously designed that one family member described the process as "a new kind of printing." Collectively, these books are known as the Little Gidding Harmonies, and they are the subject of Cut/Copy/Paste.

By close-reading the Little Gidding Harmonies, Cut/Copy/Paste illuminates a unique Caroline devotional aesthetic in which poets, designers, and printmakers collaboratively explored the capacity of the codex to harmonize sectarianism. Proceeding chronologically, I begin in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods, when women writers like Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney Herbert, and a range of anonymous needleworkers laid the groundwork for the Harmonies' cut-up aesthetic by marrying the language of text-making to textile labor (Chapter 1). Situating women's authorship in the context of needlework restores an appreciation for the significance and centrality of ideologically gendered skills to the process of authoring the Harmonies. Building on this chapter's argument, I turn next to the earliest Harmony to show how the Ferrar and Collett women of Little Gidding, in conversation with their friend George Herbert, used cutting and pasting as a way of bypassing the stigma of print without giving up the validation that publication, as in making public, brings. This early volume attracted the attention of the court, and Little Gidding soon found itself patronized by King Charles, Archbishop Laud, and an elite coterie who saw in the women's cut-and-paste "handiwork" a mechanism for organizing religious dissention (Chapter 2). In response, Little Gidding developed ever more elaborate collages of text and image, transforming their writing practice into a full-fledged devotional aesthetic. This aesthetic came to define the poetry of an under-appreciated network of affiliated writers, from Frances Quarles and Edward Benlowes to Royalist expatriate John Quarles, Mary Ferrar at Little Gidding, and her close friend Richard Crashaw (Chapter 3). It fell out of favor in the eighteenth century, derided by Alexander Pope and others as derivative and populist; yet annotations and objects left in one Little Gidding Harmony during the nineteenth century witness how women, still denied full access to publishing in print, continued to engage with scissors and paste as tools of a proto-feminist editorial practice (Chapter 4). The second half of the last chapter and a digital supplement turn to the Harmonies today to argue for a reorientation of digital humanities, electronic editing, and "new media" studies around deeper histories of materialist or technical tropes of innovation, histories that do not always begin and end with the perpetual avant-gardism of modernity.

This project participates in what has been called the "material turn" in the humanities. As libraries digitize their collections, the material specificity of textual objects - the inlays, paste-downs, typesetting, and typography occluded by print editions - becomes newly visible through high-resolution facsimiles. Cut/Copy/Paste seizes this moment of mass remediation as an opportunity to rethink the categories, concepts, and relationships that define and delimit Renaissance literature. By reading early modern cultural production materially, I reveal the richness of the long-neglected Caroline period as a time of literary experimentation, when communities like Little Gidding and their affiliates developed a multimedia, multimodal aesthetic of devotion. Yet, even as this project mines electronic collections to situate canonical texts within a wider field of media objects and material writing practices, it also acknowledges that digital media obscure as much as they elucidate, flattening three-dimensional book objects to fit the space of the screen. In my close readings and digital supplement, I always return to the polyphonic dance of folds and openings in the Harmonies - to the page as a palimpsest, thickly layered with paper, ink, glue, annotations, and evidence of later readers' interactions with it. By attending to the emergent materiality of the Harmonies over the longue durée, Cut/Copy/Paste both deepens our knowledge of seventeenth-century devotional literature and widens the narrow lens of periodization to consider the role of Little Gidding's cut-up method in past, present, and future media ecologies.

Seasons and Sovereigns:

Succession in the Greenworld, 1579 - 1621

Current scholarship on months, seasons, and climates in Renaissance aesthetics has developed along the two-dimensional axis of pastoral and georgic, leaving critics unable to develop an overarching theory of how or why early modern subjects charted environmental stability over time. Seasons and Sovereigns addresses this occlusion by studying the course of nature as it pertains to sudden dissolution, long periods of stability, or constant change in volatile Elizabethan and early Stuart greenworlds.

While environmental stability occupies a central role in two theories of sovereignty - the classical Golden Age, which experienced eternal Spring, and the two-bodied King, where a King's body politic transcends the vicissitude signified by seasonal change - succession crises required rapid changes. By focusing on exceptions to temperate climates, Seasons and Sovereigns argues that many writers of the English Renaissance challenged the prescriptive accounts of innocuous socio-political climates or constant natural spaces by exploring the reasons behind floods, wonders, seasonal usurpation, and other perversions of nature's course found along the fringes of literary greenworlds.

The project begins by examining Queen Elizabeth's cult of ver perpetuum to justify a more capacious interpretation of the theory of the King's Two Bodies as it pertains to the body politic's exemption from the passage of time, including seasonal change. It contextualizes these issues by delineating how genre studies have responded to the presence of calendars and months in literary texts. Chapter 2 argues that a remarkable number of late sixteenth-century texts flood (or threaten to flood) a greenworld to reflect anxiety over succession. The epic-scale dissolution evoked by sea grottos, Parnassus, and the lost city of Atlantis level social distinctions as unequivocal signs of nature's lethal heterogeneity in Lyly's Gallathea, Boboli garden, and Cymbeline.

Chapter 3 argues that Shakespeare replaces an Arcadian landscape with a theater of green wonders and Macduff's knowledge of seasonal decorum in Macbeth. The chapter begins in the "wake" of the Golden Age with Thomas Dekker's decision to revive pastoral in his account of the Queen's funeral in The Wonder-full Yeare, 1603. Chapter 4 shifts the Arcadian impulse inward by exploring resistance to constancy (a pastoral value) in The Changeling, where I juxtapose three normative views of human nature that were active in 1621. Rather than advocate one perspective on constancy, Chapter 5 suggests that Mary Wroth's heroines in the Urania dissolve contracts and engage in post-Golden Age political jurisprudence by promoting duplicity and metamorphosis.

This dissertation argues that the 'realist' ontology implicit in Renaissance allegory is both Aristotelian and neoplatonic, stemming from the need to talk about transcendence in material terms in order to make it comprehensible to fallen human intelligence. At the same time dramatists at the turn of the seventeenth century undermine 'realism' altogether, contributing to the emergence of a new meaning of 'realism' as mimesis, and with it a materialism without immanent forms. My theoretical framework is provided by Aristotle's Metaphysics, Physics and Categories rather than his Poetics, because these provide a better way of translating the concerns of postmodern critics back into premodern terms. I thus avoid reducing the religious culture of premodernity to 'ideology' or 'power' and show how premodern religion can be taken seriously as a critique of secular modernity. My conclusion from readings of Aristotle, Augustine, Hooker, Perkins, Spenser, Shakespeare, Nashe, Jonson and Tourneur is that Hell is conflated with History during the transition to modernity, that sin is revalorized as individualism, and that the translatability of terms argues for the continuing need for a concept of 'substance' in this post-Aristotelian age. I end with a reading of The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous contemplative work from the fourteenth century that was still being read in the sixteenth century, which offers an alternative model of the sovereign individual, and helps me to argue against the view that philosophical idealism is inherently totalitarian.

I argue that the pastoral genre is a literary response to changes in the agrarian economy as landed property is freed from older notions of obligation and political dependence on the monarch. Thus, the Renaissance English pastoral can be read as a cultural form that corresponds to agrarian capitalism and a moment of release of land and natural resources from their embeddedness within local communal formations before they are incorporated into a larger concept of Englishness. While the genre of the pastoral is ostensibly resisting the pressures of modernity - i.e. the corrupting influence of trade and urban life - what struck me is that it does so in ways that look distinctly modern to us, through affirmation of independent forms of intellectual and agrarian labor.

My dissertation explores literature’s participation in these cross-disciplinary debates over nothingness; I argue that literary forms create the possibilities of scientific discourse later in the century. To fully understand the complex network of relationships that formed early modern science as well as, in consequence, our own experimental philosophy requires examining the challenges that literature issues to science. To demonstrate the mutually productive relationship between the literature and science of the period, my dissertation charts the seventeenth century's different literary conceptions of nothingness, and the contribution of writers such as John Donne, William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish to these debates over both the nature of nothingness and, more broadly, how we come to know anything at all. Literary texts – in the form of sonnets, tragicomedies, and even proto-science fiction – produce knowledge in ways that anticipate and subtly revise scientific processes.

The first chapter, “Encompassing Nothingness in Donne’s Poetry” evaluates two of John Donne’s poems from Songs and Sonnets alongside the introduction of the symbol of zero into Western systems of calculation and the invention of the microscope. I argue for a re-reading of poems such as “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” and “The Flea” that accounts for their seemingly paradoxical representation of absence and presence by considering Donne’s thought in terms of mathematical developments as well as developing literary technologies. The culmination in the poem’s well-known image of the compass, drawing a circle centered on a point inscribes the Arabic symbol for zero; the poem thus participates in the broader project of transforming nothingness into an appropriate object for scientific inquiry. Donne’s poetry also anticipates scientific method by forming imagined communities of observers whom he addresses and leads through a process of witnessing nothingness, thus revealing its status as an object of scientific inquiry, and consequently, as something after all.

Chapter 2, “Playing at Nothing in The Winter’s Tale,” looks at the treatment of nothingness in this play as a model for literature’s production of experimental science in the seventeenth century. In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes’s solipsistic assurance of his wife’s infidelity and the infallibility of his own senses gives way to knowledge formed collectively by a performance that reforms and reconciles the community. This performance suggests that the community, rather than the solitary individual, is the basis for building knowledge. Through analyzing Leontes’s method of knowledge production versus the communal models that close the play, I argue that The Winter’s Tale preemptively figures the shift from a patronage-based court philosophy to an experimental philosophy. In doing so, The Winter’s Tale helps to revise the dominant narrative about when the idea of communal witnessing begins by emphasizing the importance of literary contributions to conceptualizing the history of science.

Chapter 3, “Experience in Paradise Lost” pays particular attention to the shift from observation to experience as represented in Milton’s poetry. Engaging with critical debates over Milton’s materialism, I read Milton’s epic as it rejects the idea of creation ex nihilo and instead focuses on creation out of Chaos. Just as Boyle justified his explorations into atomistic philosophy and rejected the idea of a universe created by random atomic interactions, Milton’s universe, too, is established and ordered by a divine Creator. Unlike Boyle, however, Milton rejects the experiment, which he identifies with a fallen world, in favor of experience – described in Paradise Lost as wisely used, individually mediated reason.

Chapter 4, “‘To Make Your World of Nothing’: Nothingness in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World” examines Cavendish’s 1666 utopian proto-science fiction romance in conjunction with Robert Hooke’s 1665 Micrographia, a text that explores the minute worlds opened to human observation with the microscope’s invention. Cavendish’s text envisions a world-building that is entirely the result of individual human invention – in her words, one made of “Nothing but Wit.” Cavendish focuses on the imaginative possibilities opened by a creation focused on seeming nothingness; her text fantasizes about a world in which this act of creation forces multiple boundaries to break down (human / animal, scientist / experiment). The Blazing World challenges the rules for scientific practice enshrined by the Royal Society by imagining experiments that create hybrids that challenge the seemingly objective stance of the scientific observer as well as the facts produced in the laboratory itself.