Browsing by Subject "Early modern"

As a saint with no biblical or historical basis for her legend, St. Anne could change radically over time with cultural and doctrinal shifts even as her status as Mary's mother remained at the core of her legend and provided an appearance of consistency. "Mother, Matron, Matriarch: Sanctity and Social Change in the Cult of St. Anne, 1450-1750" takes issue with the general view that the cult of St. Anne in Northern Europe flourished in the late Middle Ages, only to wither away in the Reformation, and advances a new understanding of it. It does so by taking a longer view, beginning around 1450 and extending to 1750 in order to show how St. Anne's cult and the Holy Kinship elucidated long-term shifts in religious and cultural mores regarding the relationships between domesticity and sanctity, what constituted properly pious lay behavior, and attitudes towards women (in particular older women). Materials used include vita, devotional texts, confraternal records, sermons, treatises, and works of art across the time period under investigation. After a definite period of decline during the mid-sixteenth century (as evidenced by lower pilgrimage statistics, confraternity records, and a lack of text production), St. Anne enjoyed a revival in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Catholicism in a "purified" form, reconfigured to suit new religious and social norms which emphasized patriarchal authority within the household and obedience to the Catholic Church among the laity. In this context, St. Anne became a humble, pious widow whose own purity serves as proof of Mary's Immaculate Conception, and whose meek devotion to her holy daughter and grandson exemplified properly obedient reverence for the laity.

The interdependent phenomena of piracy, privateering, and slave trading have been endemic to the Mediterranean since antiquity. However, from the mid-sixteenth to the beginning of the eighteenth-century, these phenomena – known at the time as corso – grew exponentially, both in volume and impact. For more than a century, corso played a significant role in influencing the commercial and social exchanges in the Western Mediterranean, affecting the lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals from all over Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Although both Europe and North Africa were deeply involved in corso, its image in early modern European culture became almost exclusively associated with the Muslim World and the North African region – known at the time as “Barbary” – giving shape to one of the “Great Fears” of pre-modern Europe. However, besides the anxiety, misapprehensions, and prejudice, corso’s geographical and cultural proximity also sparked significant intercultural and interreligious interactions. My primary corpus examines a collection of non-fictional and fictional texts, including captivity and redemption narratives, pamphlets, and news reports, as well as Romance epics, Baroque novels, novellas, dramas, and comedies. Through this study, I show how corso’s discursive representation ended up playing a crucial role in shaping European understanding of the Western Mediterranean at the time. My study contributes to enriching the predominant Euro-Ottoman orientation of early modern Mediterranean and Orientalist studies by considering the plurality of early modern Orientalisms.

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.