scholarly journals EARLY MODERN HOMOPHOBIA IN "EDWARD II" AND "THE LIFE AND DEATH OF JOHN ATHERTON"

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasemin ŞANAL
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Edward Ii

Beyond Sexual Mimesis

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kit Heyam
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Edward Ii ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sex With Men ◽  
Anal Penetration

This chapter investigates how a consensus developed that Edward II was murdered by anal penetration with a red-hot spit. I question its interpretation by scholars as a self-evidently sexually mimetic, punitive murder method: in fact, the earliest accounts of this murder present it primarily as painful, torturous, and undetectable through outward inspection. Importantly, too, these earliest accounts emerge before the formation of a consensus on whether Edward’s transgressions were sexual, let alone whether they specifically constituted sex with men. This analysis prompts a reassessment of the place of this narrative in the history of queer sexuality, and of the murder scene in Marlowe’s Edward II, while also further illuminating the literary priorities of medieval and early modern chroniclers.

Last Acts

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maggie Vinter
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Christopher Marlowe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Economic Management ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Art Of Dying

Last Acts: The Art of Dying on the Early Modern Stage argues that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater offered playwrights, actors, and audiences important opportunities to practice arts of dying. Early modern plays also engage with devotional traditions that understand death less as an occasion for suffering or grieving than as an action to be performed, well or badly. Active deaths belie the narratives of helplessness and loss most often used to analyze representations of mortality and instead suggest ways that marginalized and constrained subjects might participate in the political, social, and economic management of life. Some of these strategies for dying resonate with ecclesiastical forms or with descriptions of biopolitics within the recent work of Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. Yet the art of dying is not solely a discipline imposed upon recalcitrant subjects. Since it offers suffering individuals a way to enact their deaths on their own terms, it discloses both political and dramatic action in their most minimal manifestations. Rather than mournfully marking what we cannot recover, the practice of dying reveals what we can do, even in death. By analyzing representations of dying in plays by writers including Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson alongside both devotional texts and contemporary biopolitical theory, Last Acts shows how theater reflects, enables, and contests the politicization of life and death.

scholarly journals Misery to Mirth

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Newton
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Third ◽  
Normal Life ◽  
Early Modern Medicine ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
Printed Materials

The history of early modern medicine often makes for depressing reading. It implies that people fell ill, took ineffective remedies, and died. This book seeks to rebalance and brighten our overall picture of early modern health by focusing on the neglected subject of recovery from illness in England, c.1580–1720. Drawing on an array of archival and printed materials, Misery to Mirth shows that recovery did exist conceptually at this time, and that it was a widely reported phenomenon. The book takes three main perspectives: the first is physiological or medical, asking what doctors and laypeople meant by recovery, and how they thought it occurred. This includes a discussion of convalescent care, a special branch of medicine designed to restore strength to the patient’s fragile body after illness. Secondly, the book adopts the viewpoint of patients themselves: it investigates how they reacted to the escape from death, the abatement of pain and suffering, and the return to normal life and work. At the heart of getting better was contrast—from ‘paine to ease, sadnesse to mirth, prison to liberty, and death to life’. The third perspective concerns the patient’s loved ones; it shows that family and friends usually shared the feelings of patients, undergoing a dramatic transformation from anguish to elation. This mirroring of experiences, known as ‘fellow-feeling’, reveals the depth of love between many individuals. Through these discussions, the book opens a window onto some of the most profound, as well as the more prosaic, aspects of early modern existence, from attitudes to life and death, to details of what convalescents ate for supper and wore in bed.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kit Heyam
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Medieval History ◽  
Edward Ii ◽  
Sexual Transgression ◽  
History Of ◽  
Insight Into

This introduction discusses the reputation of King Edward II (1307–1327) in medieval and early modern England, and the implications of this reputation beyond its immediate relevance to scholars of Edward II’s reign and afterlife: as a case study for the history of sex and the changing vocabulary of sexual transgression; as a source of positive depictions of love between men; as a paradigmatic exemplum for discussions of favouritism and deposition, and thereby a case study providing insight into the early modern use of medieval history; as a means of developing our understanding of literary texts such as Marlowe’s Edward II; and as a process that illuminates the literary nature of medieval and early modern historical narratives.

Edward II as Political Exemplum

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kit Heyam
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Spectrum Analysis ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Edward Ii ◽  
Political Spectrum

This chapter discusses the continuing political relevance of Edward II’s narrative during the late sixteenth and seventeenth century in England and France. As the first English King to have been deposed, and a paradigmatic example of the dangers of overmighty favourites, Edward was a compelling precedent for writers across the political spectrum. Analysis of the ways in which writers deployed his example provides a valuable case study for investigating how historical examples functioned in early modern political discourse, and reveals the hermeneutic agency of political writers in the process of ‘using’ history, when examples such as Edward’s deposition could be interpreted as supporting either side of a political debate.

Edward II and Piers Gaveston

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kit Heyam
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Valuable Source ◽  
Edward Ii ◽  
Emotional Dimension ◽  
Romance Genre ◽  
Literary Influences ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Insight Into

This chapter takes up the emotional dimension of Edward’s relationships with his favourites, considering the significance and decline of medieval claims that Edward ‘called Gaveston his brother’; engagements in early modern narratives of Edward’s reign with classical ideals of friendship; and the increasing romanticization of his relationship with Gaveston. I show that accounts of Edward’s love for his favourites, and his grief at their deaths, are often crafted to elicit sympathy and pathos, and thus represent a valuable source of positive depictions of relationships between men. Moreover, analysis of these depictions in texts of all genres provides insight into the literary influences and motivations of early modern chroniclers, including their incorporation of tropes of the romance genre, and the impact of Marlowe’s Edward II.

Conclusion: The Literary Transformation of History

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kit Heyam
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
Edward Ii ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
Productive Potential ◽  
Literary Process ◽  
Historical Accounts

This conclusion explores the implications of this study for two key areas of scholarship: the study of Marlowe’s Edward II, and our understanding of medieval and early modern history-writing. I argue for the productive potential of acknowledging the extent to which the medieval and early modern writing of history was a literary process, one significantly shaped by literary techniques and literary texts. Medieval and early modern writers constructed historical accounts in all genres – chronicles and political texts as well as drama and poetry – for an imagined reading public. In this way, writers’ consideration for imagined readers – based on knowledge of the actual tastes of the reading public – directly shaped the reputations of historical figures.

The Politics of Access and Representations of the Sodomite King in Early Modern England

2000 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 1054-1083 ◽  
Author(s):  
Curtis Perry
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
James I ◽  
Edward Ii

This essay treats the image of the sodomite king—in Marlowe's Edward II and in the gossip surrounding James I and his favorites — as a figurative response to resentments stemming from the regulation of access to the monarch. Animosities in Marlowe's play anticipate criticism of the Jacobean Bedchamber in part because Marlowe was responding to libels provoked by innovations in the chamber politics of the French king Henri III that also anticipate Jacobean practice. The figure of the sodomite king offers a useful vehicle to explore tensions between personal and bureaucratic monarchy that are exacerbated by the regulation of access.

Waterways as Landmarks, Challenges, and Barriers for Medieval Protagonists

2018 ◽  
Vol 78 (4) ◽  
pp. 441-467
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Narrative Context

Abstract In light of recent ecocritical approaches to literary analysis, this paper endeavors to analyze how creeks, rivers, and other waterways function in a variety of medieval and early modern texts. As the discussion of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival and Titurel, of the Nibelungenlied, Njál’s Saga, Dante’s Inferno, and Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron indicates, the inclusion of creeks or rivers within the narrative context indicates that major events are to occur in the protagonist’s life. Life and death are determined by the experiences at, on, or even in the river. Even if the poets do not necessarily discuss the waterways as such in their geophysical properties and dimensions, the consistent reference to and inclusion of rivers in those literary works illustrates the true extent to which pre-modern poets were already fully aware of the epistemological function which waterways could carry in human life.

scholarly journals The Reputation of Edward II, 1305–1697

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kit Heyam
Keyword(s):  
Romantic Relationships ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
The Past ◽  
Edward Ii ◽  
Sexual Transgression ◽  
Political Pamphlets

During his lifetime and the four centuries following his death, King Edward II (1307-1327) acquired a reputation for having engaged in sexual and romantic relationships with his male favourites, and having been murdered by penetration with a red-hot spit. This book provides the first account of how this reputation developed, providing new insights into the processes and priorities that shaped narratives of sexual transgression in medieval and early modern England. In doing so, it analyses the changing vocabulary of sexual transgression in English, Latin and French; the conditions that created space for sympathetic depictions of same-sex love; and the use of medieval history in early modern political polemic. It also focuses, in particular, on the cultural impact of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (c.1591-92). Through such close readings of poetry and drama, alongside chronicle accounts and political pamphlets, it demonstrates that Edward’s medieval and early modern afterlife was significantly shaped by the influence of literary texts and techniques. A ‘literary transformation’ of historiographical methodology is, it argues, an apposite response to the factors that shaped medieval and early modern narratives of the past.

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