Wicked Mysteries and Notorious Conjurors: Magic, Rape, and Violence in Two Early Modern Pamphlets

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 533-551
Author(s):  
Laura Levine
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Body ◽  
Evil Spirits ◽  
The Way

Toward the end of the 1628 pamphlet A Briefe Description of the Notorious Life of Iohn Lambe, the pamphleteer describes the violence a crowd inflicts on John Lambe, a cunning man who dabbled in the dark arts. This violence, ultimately fatal, seems to be a response to Lambe's rape of an eleven-year-old child, a rape which he is convicted of but ultimately pardoned for. Earlier in his career, however, Lambe is indicted for using magic to disable the body of a gentleman as well as for invoking evil spirits. What connection exists between the charges against Lambe as a witch and magician and the charges against him as a rapist? This essay argues that long before Lambe gives those around him a basis for violence, he triggers anxieties about what he is, and that these anxieties play a role in the violence against him. The text of A Briefe Description demonstrates the way mechanisms of justice ultimately repeat—reenact and perform—versions of the crimes they seek to examine.

Denaturalising Security

2020 ◽  
pp. 73-102
Author(s):  
Charlotte Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
State Practice ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Way

This chapter assesses how security was established as the first absolute and natural right of the subject. Thomas Hobbes remains in focus, insofar as he articulated the furthest what had already become an established dogma of early modern thought, notably in natural right theories, and of nascent state practice. The chapter then considers the different kinds of natures that troubled the enterprise of naturalisation. For nature was also appearing, as a result of the scientific revolution, as a source of disorder. It was no longer simply the stable referent for the task of political ordering. This new, epochal instability in the constructions of nature and the way it was addressed by Hobbes in his epistemological writings contains resources for short-circuiting the naturalising work that Hobbes, amongst others, was engaged in. These resources include Hobbes’s nominalism, which marks him as the original constructivist, and his critique of universals, including ‘paternal dominion’, his term for patriarchy. Hence, the purpose of the chapter is to parse the initial naturalisation of security as the subject’s constitutive right, in order to denaturalise it. Ultimately, Hobbes played a central role, not only in theorising the state, but in securing what the author seeks to unsettle with this book: the body as history’s great naturaliser.

scholarly journals Envy's pathology: Historical contexts

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Lina Minou
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Status ◽  
Century Health ◽  
The Way

This article is concerned with the physicality of envy primarily in early –modern, but also in eighteenth-century health contexts. The discussion brings together descriptions of the effects of envy on the body of the envier, mainly from works of physiology and health preservation, but also from literary and spiritual writings. These depictions of envy are studied beyond their symbolism and with a view to establish whether they are meaningful according to the medical theories of the time in which they occur. The discussion begins by acknowledging the status of envy as a ‘disease’ and looks to the specific ways in which the discourse of envy conveys this sense. I find that in the early modern discourse envy is always pathological, that is, it is experienced as disease and signifies disease in general and several diseases in particular. Moreover, envy is uniquely placed to convey pathology on account of its being connected to inherently pathogenic elements of the humoural theory. Specifically, envy is physiologically connected to melancholy, and the way it is presented comes close to attributes assigned to black bile. In addition, envy realizes pathology, the occurrence of disease in the body, by impairing the vital process of digestion and thus depriving the person from proper nourishment and sustenance. The analysis further considers how this impairment of the body fits with the physiological manifestation of envy as ‘corrosion’ and ‘consumption’. Finding commonalities with other maladies mediated by these physiological signs the article concludes by considering the function of pathology in the conception of early modern envy.

scholarly journals Envy's pathology: Historical contexts

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Lina Minou
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Body ◽  
Significant Shift ◽  
The Status ◽  
Century Health ◽  
The Way

This article is concerned with the physicality of envy in early modern- and eighteenth-century health contexts. The discussion brings together descriptions of the effects of envy on the body of the envier, mainly from works of physiology and health preservation, but also from literary and spiritual writings. These depictions of envy are studied beyond their symbolism and with a view to establish whether they are meaningful according to the medical paradigms of the time in which they occur. The discussion begins by acknowledging the status of envy as a ‘disease’ and looks to the specific ways in which the discourse of envy conveys this sense. I find that in the early modern discourse envy is always pathological, that is, it is experienced as disease and signifies disease in general and several diseases in particular. Moreover, envy is uniquely placed to convey pathology on account of its being connected to inherently pathogenic elements of the humoural theory. Specifically, envy is physiologically connected to melancholy, and the way it is presented comes close to attributes assigned to black bile. In addition, envy realizes pathology, the occurrence of disease in the body, by impairing the vital process of digestion and thus depriving the person from proper nourishment and sustenance. This article concludes by looking at envy within an eighteenth-century context. It finds that by the end of the century envy undergoes a significant shift away from its status as disease and considers the reasons for this change.

‘The Nausea of Sin’: The Early Modern Hangover

The Hangover ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 33-68
Author(s):  
Jonathon Shears
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Writing ◽  
The Way ◽  
Recovery Methods ◽  
Robert Herrick

The chapter pursues the representation of the hangover in poetry and drama, religious and political writing and in the culture wars of the seventeenth century in England. It begins by exploring why the hangover has been obscured in writing about early modern depictions of drunkenness through a study of Anacreontic verse by Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick and Richard Lovelace. Hangovers, it contends, are more prominent in other forms of literature such as Protestant tracts and sermons and in bawdy verse and drama of the Restoration. They also feature regularly in what the chapter terms ‘anti-symposiastic’ verse written by Whigs in the 1690s. The chapter argues throughout that the hangover – whether leading to feelings of guilt and shame or defiance – takes us beyond studies of male fellowship and tavern culture, increasing our understanding of the way that the body becomes a route to discuss moral and spiritual failings in this period. It also gives examples of the way Withdrawal-Relief recovery methods – sometimes known as the hair of the dog – became associated with defiance.

Birth of the State

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The State ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
The Body ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Religious Toleration ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Universe ◽  
The Way

This book uses the body to peel back the layers of time and taken-for-granted-ness upon the two defining political forms of modernity, the state and the subject of rights. It traces, under the lens of the body, how the state and the subject mutually constituted each other all the way down, by going all the way back, to their original crafting in the seventeenth century. It considers multiple sites of theory and practice and two revolutions. The first, scientific, threw humanity out of the centre of the universe, and transformed the very meanings of matter, space, and the body; while the second, legal and political, re-established humans as the centre-point of a framework of rights. The book analyses the fundamental rights to security, liberty, and property, respectively, as the initial knots where the state-subject relation was first sealed. It develops three arguments, that the body served to naturalise security, to individualise liberty, and to privatise property. Covering a wide range of materials—from early modern anatomy lesson paintings, to the Anglo-Scottish legal struggles of naturalisation, to the emergence of discrete practices of religious toleration in Central Europe—it shows both how the body has operated as history’s great naturaliser, and how it can be mobilised instead as a critical tool that lays bare the deeply racialised and gendered constructions that made both the state and the subject of rights. The book returns to the origins of constructivist and constitutive theorising to reclaim their radical and critical potential.

Interiority

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Preiss
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Modern Theatre ◽  
History Of ◽  
Negative Space ◽  
Revenge Plays ◽  
Plot Structure ◽  
Complex Characters ◽  
The Way

This chapter traces the history of theatrical interiority and shows when and why early modern theatre became invested in it. More specifically, it examines the way the enclosure of the theatres made possible not only a newly commercialized drama but also characterization and plot-structure that depended on an implied but unrevealed depth. The chapter first considers the analogy between round amphitheatres and ‘round’, complex characters before discussing the culture of the money box to establish the link between early modern theatrical economics and its aesthetics. It then looks at the play’s resistance to closure, its messiness and overcomplication, and the ‘interiority’ of its characters and how characters in later revenge plays construct interiority as negative space. It argues that characters are not people so much as playhouses, propagating the illusion of depth after depth has run out, and explains how ‘interiority’ in the early modern theatre begins as merely its exterior reinscribed—its circle reduced into the body of the actor until it became a point, elemental and ‘inviolate’.

“I'd make thee eat the mischief thou hast vented”: Discourse of Law in Ben Jonson's Catiline His Conspiracy

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-45
Author(s):  
Akihiko Shimizu
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Legal Discourse ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
Gunpowder Plot ◽  
Effective Use ◽  
Legal Procedures ◽  
The Way

This essay explores the discourse of law that constitutes the controversial apprehension of Cicero's issuing of the ultimate decree of the Senate (senatus consultum ultimum) in Catiline. The play juxtaposes the struggle of Cicero, whose moral character and legitimacy are at stake in regards to the extra-legal uses of espionage, with the supposedly mischievous Catilinarians who appear to observe legal procedures more carefully throughout their plot. To mitigate this ambivalence, the play defends Cicero's actions by depicting the way in which Cicero establishes the rhetoric of public counsel to convince the citizens of his legitimacy in his unprecedented dealing with Catiline. To understand the contemporaneousness of Catiline, I will explore the way the play integrates the early modern discourses of counsel and the legal maxim of ‘better to suffer an inconvenience than mischief,’ suggesting Jonson's subtle sensibility towards King James's legal reformation which aimed to establish and deploy monarchical authority in the state of emergency (such as the Gunpowder Plot of 1605). The play's climactic trial scene highlights the display of the collected evidence, such as hand-written letters and the testimonies obtained through Cicero's spies, the Allbroges, as proof of Catiline's mischievous character. I argue that the tactical negotiating skills of the virtuous and vicious characters rely heavily on the effective use of rhetoric exemplified by both the political discourse of classical Rome and the legal discourse of Tudor and Jacobean England.

Shakespeare Afoot

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kerrigan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

That Shakespeare adds a limp to the received characterization of Richard III is only the most conspicuous instance of his interest in how actors walked, ran, danced, and wandered. His attention to actors’ footwork, as an originating condition of performance, can be traced from Richard III through A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It into Macbeth, which is preoccupied with the topic and activity all the way to the protagonist’s melancholy conclusion that ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player | That struts and frets his hour upon the stage’. Drawing on classical and early modern accounts of how people walk and should walk, on ideas about time and prosody, and the experience of disability, this chapter cites episodes in the history of performance to show how actors, including Alleyn, Garrick, and Olivier, have worked with the opportunities to dramatize footwork that are provided by Shakespeare’s plays.

Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies

2019 ◽  
pp. 172-196
Author(s):  
Brandon Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Somatic Psychology ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Early Modern Times

Romeo’s well-known excuse that he cannot dance because he has soles of lead is demonstrative of the autonomous volitional quality Shakespeare ascribes to body parts, his utilization of humoral somatic psychology, and the horizontally divided body according to early modern dance practice and theory. This chapter considers the autonomy of and disagreement between the body parts and the unruliness of the humors within Shakespeare’s dramas, particularly Romeo and Juliet. An understanding of the body as a house of conflicting parts can be applied to the feet of the dancing body in early modern times, as is evinced not only by literary texts, but dance manuals as well. The visuality dominating the dance floor provided opportunity for social advancement as well as ridicule, as contemporary sources document. Dance practice is compared with early modern swordplay in their shared approaches to the training and social significance of bodily proportion and rhythm.

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