Almost Encountering Ronsard’s Rose

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phillip John Usher
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Book History ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Luce Irigaray ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
The Third ◽  
Cultural Artefact

This chapter takes up the French poet’s most famous ode ‘Mignonne, allons voir si la rose…’ in order to ask a simple but important question: what are the barriers to close-reading a poem such as this one, a poem made of ‘signs’, if we (also) try to access through it the nature—or Nature— of which it perhaps claims to be an imitation? To explore such a question, Usher experiments with three ways of reading the ode. He first explores the cultural/historical approach offered by book history. A second approach seeks out connections between Ronsard’s poem and early modern botany’s own discussion of roses. The third and final method strives to get beyond the poem as cultural artefact by drawing on contemporary plant theory (Jeffrey Nealon, Michael Marder, Luce Irigaray).

Textual Transformations

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Financial Incentives ◽  
Book History ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
Book Production ◽  
Original Essays ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Lucy Hutchinson ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Impact

This collection of twelve original essays by an international team of eminent scholars in the field of book history explores the many ways in which early modern books were subject to reworking, re-presentation, revision and reinterpretation. Their history is often the history of multiple, sometimes competing, agencies as their texts were re-packaged, redirected and transformed in ways that their original authors might hardly recognize. The essays discuss the processes of editing, revision, redaction, selection, abridgement, glossing, disputation, translation and posthumous publication that resulted in a textual elasticity and mobility that could dissolve distinctions between text and paratexts, textuality and intertextuality, manuscript and print, author and reader or editor, such that title and author’s name are no longer sufficient pointers to a book’s identity or contents. The essays are alive to the impact of commercial and technological aspects of book production and distribution (discussing, for example, the career of the pre-eminent bookseller John Nourse, the market appeal of abridgements, and the financial incentives to posthumous publication), but their interest is also in the many additional forms of agency that shaped texts and their meanings as books were repurposed to articulate, and respond to, a variety of cultural and individual needs. They engage with early modern religious, political, philosophical and scholarly trends and debates as they discuss a wide range of genres and kinds of publication (including fictional and non-fictional prose, verse miscellanies, abridgements, sermons, religious controversy) and of authors and booksellers (including Lucy Hutchinson, Richard Baxter, Thomas Burnet, Elizabeth Rowe, John Dryden, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lucy Hutchinson, Henry Maundrell, John Nourse; Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, John Tillotson, Isaac Watts and John Wesley).

CIRCULATING MUSICAL KNOWLEDGE IN EARLY SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY GERMANY: MUSICA POETICA TREATISES OF JOHANN HERMANN SCHEIN AND MICHAEL ALTENBURG IN THE LIBRARY OF JOHANN CASPAR TROST

2016 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 131-201
Author(s):  
Inga Mai Groote ◽  
Dietrich Hakelberg
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Book History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Learning And Teaching ◽  
Musical Education ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Musical Knowledge ◽  
Musica Poetica

Recent research on the library of Johann Caspar Trost the Elder, organist in Halberstadt, has led to the identification of a manuscript with two unknown treatises on musica poetica, one a lost treatise by Johann Hermann Schein and the other an unknown treatise by Michael Altenburg. Together they offer fresh insights into the learning and teaching of music in the early modern period. The books once owned by Trost also have close connections to his personal and professional life. This article situates the newly discovered manuscript in the framework of book history and Trost’s biography, and discusses the two treatises against the background of contemporary books of musical instruction (Calvisius, Lippius, or Finolt). The historical context of the manuscript, its theoretical sources and its origins all serve to contribute to and further the current understanding of musical education in early modern central Germany. An edition of the treatises is provided.

Moscow: The Third Rome

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Mayhew
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
The Third ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Imperial Ideology ◽  
The City ◽  
Modern Russian

In the mid-19th century, three 16th-century Russian sources were published that alluded to Moscow as the “third Rome.” When 19th-century Russian historians discovered these texts, many interpreted them as evidence of an ancient imperial ideology of endless expansion, an ideology that would go on to define Russian foreign policy from the 16th century to the modern day. But what did these 16th-century depictions of Moscow as the third Rome actually have in mind? Did their meaning remain stable or did it change over the course of the early modern period? And how significant were they to early modern Russian imperial ideology more broadly? Scholars have pointed out that one cannot assume that depictions of Moscow as the third Rome were necessarily meant to be imperial celebrations per se. After all, the Muscovites considered that the first Rome fell for various heretical beliefs, in particular that Christ did not possess a human soul, and the second Rome, Constantinople, fell to the Turks in 1453 precisely because it had accepted some of these heretical “Latin” doctrines. As such, the image of Moscow as the third Rome might have marked a celebration of the city as a new imperial center, but it could also allude to Moscow’s duty to protect the “true” Orthodox faith after the fall—actual and theological—of Rome and Constantinople. As time progressed, however, the nuances of religious polemic once captured by the trope were lost. During the 17th and early 18th centuries, the image of Moscow as the third Rome took on a more unequivocally imperialist tone. Nonetheless, it would be easy to overstate the significance of allusions to Moscow as the third Rome to early modern Russian imperial ideology more broadly. Not only was the trope rare and by no means the only imperial comparison to be found in Muscovite literature, it was also ignored by secular authorities and banned by clerics.

Breeched and Unbridled: Bifurcated Equestrian Garments for Women in Early Modern Europe

Costume ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-185
Author(s):  
Valerio Zanetti
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Affective Meaning ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Modern Europe

This article discusses the wearing of bifurcated equestrian garments for women in early modern Europe. Considering visual representations as well as documentary sources, the first section examines the fashion for red riding breeches between the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Worn for their comfort and functionality in the saddle, these garments were also invested with powerful symbolic and affective meaning. The second section provides new insights about female equestrian outfits in late seventeenth-century France. Through the close reading of two written accounts, the author sheds light on the use of breeches as undergarments in the saddle and discusses the appearance of a hybrid riding uniform that incorporated knee-length culottes. By presenting horsewomen who wore bifurcated garments in the pursuit of leisure rather than transgression, this study revises historical narratives that cast the breeched woman exclusively as a symbol of gender upheaval.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomas Macsotay ◽  
Cornelis van der Haven ◽  
Karel Vanhaesebrouck
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Institutional Context ◽  
Catholic Priest ◽  
The Third ◽  
Modes Of Representation ◽  
Starting Point

Taking the infamous Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum nostri temporis by the Catholic priest Richard Verstegan as its starting point, this chapter introduces the reader to the over-arching agenda of the book, clearly formulating its interdisciplinary research agenda. The Hurt(ful) Body focuses on both literal and metaphorical violence, performed and depicted in early modern performing and visual arts. Indeed, Theatrum Crudelitatum is a very outspoken example of the issues at stake in this book: the violence inflicted on bodies and the representation of this very same violence, in theatres, in pictures and paintings but also in non-artistic modes of representation. In the introduction, the editors describe the threefold structure of the book. The first part will focus mainly on performing bodies (on stage), whereas the second part will discuss the pain of someone who watches the suffering of others, both in regard to theatre audiences and beholders of art, as well as to the onlooker in art: the theatre character or individual on canvas who is watching a(nother) hurt body. The third and final part will analyse how this circulation of gazes and affects functions within a specific institutional context, paying particular interest to the performative context of public space.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Lilo Moessner
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Research Method ◽  
Computational Analysis ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Present Book ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Periods

This chapter sets the present book off against previous studies about the English subjunctive in the historical periods Old English (OE), Middle English (ME), and Early Modern English (EModE). The aim of the book is described as the first comprehensive and consistent description of the history of the present English subjunctive. The key term subjunctive is defined as a realisation of the grammatical category mood and an expression of the semantic/pragmatic category root modality. The corpus used in the book is part of The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, comprising nearly half a million words in 91 files. The research method adopted is a combination of close reading and computational analysis.

Introduction

2013 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Michael Fishbane ◽  
Joanna Weinberg
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Cultural Performance ◽  
The Third ◽  
Cultural Pedagogy ◽  
And Diffusion ◽  
Historical Periods

This chapter summarizes the four fundamental historical periods of development. The first period roughly covers the first to fifth centuries where certain foundational elements of literary genre, translation, displacement, and diffusion are considered. The next period takes up the fifth to eleventh centuries and focuses on the deepening and thickening of the midrashic enterprise as it expands into liturgy, theological polemics, narrative elaborations, and cultural performance. The third period includes the development of intense lexical annotation of midrashic texts and traditions, their acute scholastic examination, assorted uses of midrashic teachings for cultural pedagogy, and creative uses of Midrash to deepen the sense of history and time. The last period considers some of the early modern and modern traditions of Midrash and its transformations.

25 March 1616

2021 ◽  
pp. 143-195
Author(s):  
Lena Cowen Orlin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Personal Meaning ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Second Best

This chapter is a close reading of William Shakespeare’s last will of 25 March 1616. The three-page document, signed by Shakespeare on each page, comprises one page from an earlier will and two new pages. Thorough revision was required in consequence of the February marriage of Shakespeare’s daughter Judith to Thomas Quiney, the son of Richard and Elizabeth Quiney. Shakespeare ensured that Judith was provided for and protected in the eventuality of her husband’s death. His principal heir was his older daughter Susanna, who had married the physician John Hall. The chapter reviews many aspects of early modern inheritance, including the duties of executors, customs surrounding children’s ‘portions’, and dower rights for widows. While other biographers doubt that Anne Shakespeare would have been protected by dower law, in fact her dower rights in the family’s property holdings were assured. Shakespeare also bequeathed her his second-best bed, and the chapter reviews evidence from other wills of the period about best beds, second-best beds, third- and fourth-best beds, and worst beds; it concludes that these were identifying terms (how to tell one bed from another) and not expressions of approval or disapproval. Like all men of property, Shakespeare concentrated on the distribution of property, and he made very few direct chattel gifts. For this reason, the goods he gave may have had personal meaning, and the chapter speculates about what that significance may have been.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 213-216
Author(s):  
J. V. Fesko
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
De Novo ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Roman Catholics

The conclusion summarizes the study. The doctrine stands in continuity with patristic versions and does not arise de novo in the sixteenth century. Roman Catholics were also some of the first sixteenth-century theologians to teach an Adamic covenant. The doctrine is a construct based on a good and necessary consequence. This means that the doctrine has a broad scriptural foundation. There are also different variants of the doctrine and even confessional formulations allow for a diversity of opinion. These points stand in contrast to the claims of critics who rarely engage a close reading of primary sources. Moreover, with the development of biblicism, critics have approached the question with a different hermeneutic methodology than early modern Reformed theologians. Lastly, one of the most important themes in the covenant of works is love, something that most critics of the doctrine fail to factor.

Simulations and difficult problems

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David L Hoover
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Authorship Attribution ◽  
The Third ◽  
Adequate Number ◽  
Uncertain Evidence ◽  
N Gram ◽  
Problematic Situations ◽  
Initial Uncertainty ◽  
Number Of Authors

Abstract An authorship attribution investigation ideally begins with a well-defined set of possible authors and an adequate number of firmly attributed roughly contemporaneous long texts in the same genre by those authors. Many significant or intriguing problems, however, suffer from deficiencies or limitations that reduce the effectiveness or validity of some kinds of analysis and make others impossible. These problematic situations can be approached by creating simulations that are designed to overcome or mitigate the difficulties of the problems. The results of the simulations can be used to suggest at least tentative solutions. Here, simulations are used to investigate four difficult problems. One involves fewer and shorter texts than would be ideal–texts that are also chronologically earlier than the known texts by the target author. The second involves too small a number of well attributed texts by the authors in question, and initial uncertainty about the genres of the texts, the number of authors involved, and their genders. The third is a tricky case of co-authorship with only relatively vague and uncertain evidence about the nature and extent of each author’s contribution; here simulations with sections of well-attributed texts by the two authors are used to test Rolling Classify. The fourth addresses the sparsity of well-attributed and confidently-dated Early Modern plays, using simulations to evaluate Brian Vickers’ rare n-gram approach to the attribution of such plays.

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