Browsing by Subject "Renaissance"
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Item Open Access "Am not I your Rosalind?": Ovidian Identity and Transformation in Shakespeare's "As You Like It"(2008-12-01) Liu, Aileen"'Am not I your Rosalind?': Negotiating Ovidian Identity and Transformation in Shakespeare's As You Like It" argues that the theatrical self-masquerade, that rare and uniquely Shakespearean moment in which a character explicitly plays a version of him or herself onstage, is an ideal site to explore the intersection of language, identity, and transformation. The self-masquerade foregrounds the intimate relationship between language and subjectivity, by enabling characters to fruitfully exploit language in order to imagine, stage, and enact their own identity constitution and transformation. Although many Shakespearean characters participate in disguise-making, only Rosalind (As You Like It) and Prince Hal (1 Henry IV) have the linguistic and imaginative capabilities to perform a self-masquerade. While the disguise relies upon overtly donning a costume or otherwise changing one's appearance to conceal a "true" identity, the self-masquerade does not feed off of the ignorance of others to generate the power and persuasiveness of its fiction. Just as the audience must participate in the fiction-making that occurs whenever they enter the space of the theater, the self-masquerade draws other characters onstage into its imaginative circle as active participants. The self-masquerade is not initiated by a simple announcement, nor indicated by a mere change in clothes, but instead must be perpetually enacted through language. Engaging with Jacques Lacan, Lynn Enterline, Stephen Greenblatt, Stanley Cavell, Valeria Finucci, Stuart Hall, Garrett Sullivan, Jean-François Lyotard and others, I argue that As You Like It goes beyond Shakespeare's earlier work to suggest that everyone has the capacity, via the self-transformative and self-constitutive power of speech, to enact genuine agency over their self-constitution and self-transformation as they like it.Item Open Access Before the Academy: research trends in the history of French early modern architecture before the age of Louis XIV(Perspective, 2013-06-30) Galletti, SItem Open Access Seasons and Sovereigns: Succession in the Greenworld, 1579 - 1621(2009) Kelley, Shannon ElizabethSeasons 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.
Item Open Access The Bourbon Ideology: Civic Eudaemonism in Habsburg and Bourbon Spain, 1600-1800(2021) Costa, ElsaThe intellectual historian Gabriel Paquette has identified the propaganda language of the eighteenth-century Spanish Bourbon monarchy with a “pliable rhetoric of public happiness” of which the monarchy claimed to be “linchpin.” In a process beginning in the sixteenth century, by the late eighteenth century, the phrase “public happiness” had substantially replaced the “common good” in Spanish political thought. This project excavates the emergence of Spanish civic eudaemonism from Renaissance debates on reason of state, demonstrating the historical processes by which it repeatedly changed hands in subsequent centuries. Civic eudaemonism allowed Renaissance authors to allude to reason of state without instrumentalizing virtue, thereby putting the needs of the State over the doctrinal demands of the Church. The result was a new emphasis on the absolute sovereignty of the monarch, on whose shoulders rested the secular happiness of Spain. There was no consensual definition of public happiness. At the turn of the seventeenth century the sum of justice, security and civic virtue was meant. Later in the century the definition of mercantile success appeared, and by 1750 justice and virtue were disappearing. After 1780 mercantile definitions gave way to the personal industry of individual subjects, independent of regal influence and taken collectively. Public happiness, although associated with regalism throughout Europe, appeared earliest in Italy and Spain; in Spain it took longest to defeat the individual otherworldly happiness promised in Christianity. In Spain, as elsewhere, the alliance with regalism collapsed as soon as Christianity was purged from political writing.
Item Open Access The End of the Age of Miracles: Substance and Accident in the English Renaissance(2009) Tangney, John RichardThis 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.
Item Open Access The Statues Speak: Political Rhetoric in the Sculpture of Orsanmichele(2015-04-28) Beauvais, Julie K.*Designated as an Exemplary Master's Project for 2014-15*
Orsanmichele was an important civic center in Renaissance Florence, dedicated to a series of miracle-producing images of the Virgin Mary. The guilds of Florence were patrons of the building and responsible for much of the construction and decoration of the space during a tumultuous political period that saw the peak of the citizen republic and its eventual fall as the Medici rose and seized control of the commune. This paper draws on scholarly historical research and first hand visual analysis of Orsanmichele’s external statuary. My question is whether the messages signaled by the statues of this religious cultural center went beyond the immediately apparent religious level. By examining four statues within the political and religious context of the period, I hope to demonstrate the role that these statues played in telegraphing the shifting political and civic values of the commune. Nanni di Banco’s Four Crowned Martyrs represents the voice of the citizen guild members intent on reinforcing their roles as community leaders. Ghiberti’s Saint Matthew represents the voice of the bankers at the time when financial leaders were a rising political force. Donatello’s Saint Louis of Toulouse speaks for the Parte Guelfa, the old line elite and historical leaders of church and state. And Verrocchio’s Christ and Saint Thomas asserts the moral authority of the Medici through their control of the Mercantzia. Together, these and other statuary of Orsanmichele do more than represent historical saints and a miraculous Madonna: they tell of the ongoing political struggle for control and influence in Renaissance Florence.