Whoso List to Find?

Seeing what Englishwomen saw in the early modern period brings them into view in a variety of new ways, many of them managed and enhanced by the machinery of cheap print. In contrast with Petrarchan poetry, which imagined women with fear and described love as plague, print established other models of health and wellness, and other ways of registering women’s powers. Women known as searchers who were charged to enter houses and locate plague rather than flee from it shared their findings with town officials who printed up statistics in weekly Bills of Mortality. The searcher was both a ‘harbinger of disaster’ and a tool of recovery, and popular ballads of the time frequently deploy her example along with her abilities to avoid ruin and register signs of life. These ballads supply alternatives to Petrarchan demographics, and I examine the ways early modern female poets draw upon their methodology, too.

Shakespeare and Music

William Shakespeare entertained many ideas about music, some of them conflicting, and he frequently represented these ideas in his plays. Music was a multifaceted art and science in early modern England, and debates over the nature and interpretation of music played out in a variety of contexts: academic, religious, political, commercial, and aesthetic. At the same time, music was a vital part of Shakespeare’s theatrical practice. He made use of his company’s musical resources to include performed music in his plays, and his characters frequently sing and quote popular ballads and songs that would have been recognized by his audiences. The combination of words about music and musical performances gave Shakespeare the opportunity to test various theories of music in complex and original ways. His plays are especially demonstrative of the ways in which certain views of music were connected to other ideological perspectives. Shakespeare’s most modern idea about music is the notion that musical meaning derives from its contexts and conventions rather than from an inherent, universal nature. Taken together, his plays provoke skepticism about unified theories of music. At the same time, they demonstrate that the seeming universality of music makes it an extremely powerful tool for both the polemicist and the dramatist.

Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life

The works of Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo) played a critical role in introducing his adopted Japan to a worldwide audience. In Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life, he writes, “The papers composing this volume treat of the inner rather than of the outer life of Japan, — for which reason they have been grouped under the title Kokoro (heart). This word signifies also mind, in the emotional sense; spirit; courage; resolve; sentiment; affection; and inner meaning, — just as we say in English, ‘the heart of things.’” After centuries of isolation Meiji-era Japan was forced to adjust its customs and beliefs to Western influences, and Hearn reflects on the value of these traditions of the “heart” as seen in Japanese popular justice, arts, economy, patriotism, and religion. Chapters include: At a Railway Station • The Genius of Japanese Civilization • A Street Singer • From a Traveling Diary • The Nun of the Temple of Amida • After the War • Haru • A Glimpse of Tendencies • By Force of Karma • A Conservative • In the Twilight of the Gods • The Idea of Preëxistence • In Cholera-Time • Some Thoughts About Ancestor-Worship • Kimiko • Three Popular Ballads: The Ballad of Shūntoku-maru • The Ballad of Oguri-Hangwan • The Ballad of O-Shichi, the Daughter of the Yaoya.

Irish Didos

This chapter examines the Irish interrogation of empire through various receptions of Dido, queen of Carthage, tracing a continuum from the popular ballads of the 1700s to Frank McGuinness’s Carthaginians. The ballad tradition, with a fluid system of referencing unfettered by scholarly or literary norms, challenged more elite literary identifications of Ireland as Carthage by linking the Irish not with the Carthaginians, but with Roman generals. Just as Dido features in these ballads in roles unrelated to Aeneas, so also McGuinness’s Dido as a gay Northern Irish young man is a fluid and independent character. Set in the context of the Northern Irish conflict, McGuinness’s play reclaims high culture for the working class, whose representatives show how in refusing imperial models a means of survival can be found.

Hushed Ballads: Listening to the Printed Text in Multiconfessional Iberia

Early modern editors of Iberian popular ballads, known in Spanish as romances, excluded the poems’ musical notation from their publications. They also catered to contemporary audiences’ tastes by focusing on poems that represented battles among Christian and Muslim nobles. These publications in this way confused the romance’s oral origins at the intersection of medieval Castilian and Arabic cultural practices, one the one hand, and the early modern reception and revival of the genre, on the other hand. This essay examines how and why debate about this complex history of the romance has long served as a test case for Iberian history as a whole. Putting early modern literary theorists and musicians into conversation with late modern scholars influenced by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, the broad argument that emerges from this particular account of the romance is that the printed record better captures oral culture than either Parry and Lord or their successors thought possible.

Calculating History: A Mid-Seventeenth-Century Reader of Robert Persons’ A Conference about the Next Succession (1594/1595)

This article examines one of the Bodleian Library’s copies of Robert Persons’ Elizabethan succession tract A Conference about the Next Succession that a 1650s reader has heavily annotated and used to compile a miscellany of poems and extracts from religious, political and historical works. The annotations and miscellany are concerned primarily with recent religious and political history. The reader compiles copies of popular ballads and poems, quotations from religious polemic by Catholic authors and a set of calculations of the dates of recent events in English Catholic history. This marked book serves as a case study through which to explore historical consciousness and the production of particularly Catholic forms of history and memory in the early modern period. This article seeks to query critical narratives concerning apparently combative seventeenth-century political reading practice by extending the remit of the ‘political’ to encompass different generic forms and approaches. It argues that by combining chronological and analogical perspectives this reader constructs a distinctively recusant history. An appendix identifies all of the works used by the annotator and all of the known editions or manuscripts they may have used.

‘One Stroak of His Razour’: Tales of Self-Gelding in Early Modern England

Summary This article examines stories of men who gelded themselves in early modern England. These events, it argues, were shaped and partly motivated by a culture in which castration was seen as both degrading and potentially empowering. Religious precedents such as that of Origen of Alexandria framed self-gelding as a foolhardy activity, but one which nevertheless indicated an impressive degree of mastery over the body and its urges. Meanwhile, judicial and popular contexts framed castration as a humiliating and emasculating ordeal. Instances of self-gelding in this period are rare but nonetheless illuminating. Relayed in medical texts and popular ballads, such actions typically occurred as a response to emotional distress. In particular, men gelded themselves as a means to express feelings of emasculation within heterosexual relationships, and to dramatically renounce their role in the libidinal economy.

Bunyan’s Reading

The Bible is John Bunyan’s primary text, but the range of his reading, before and after his conversion experience, reveals some of the sources of his imaginative works as well as his pastoral and theological concerns. This chapter discusses, in turn, some of the key books in his intellectual and spiritual formation, including popular ballads, newsbooks, and romances; best-selling religious works by Lewis Bayly and Arthur Dent; Martin Luther’s commentary on Galatians; the terrifying story of the apostate Francis Spira; a treatise by Isaac Ambrose in which (it is claimed) he wrote marginal annotations; and John Foxe’s great ecclesiastical history, Acts and Monuments, a copy of which Bunyan had with him in prison, and to which he refers often in his writings.

Watering Brazil’s Desert

This chapter focuses on the drought agency agronomists who established irrigated smallholder colonies and agricultural extension posts in the sertão, highlighting the challenges they faced from several quarters: civil engineers whose projects competed with theirs for federal funds; elites who opposed the land expropriation and empowerment of marginal farmers inherent in any irrigated smallholding project; and sertanejo farmers who did not readily embrace agronomists’ recommendations for more intensive cultivation methods. The leading figures in this story are IFOCS agronomists José Augusto Trinidade and José Guimarães Duque, a vigorous promoter of dry-farming techniques. Sources include folk poetry (cordéis) and folk songs from the mid-twentieth century about drought and development in the sertão—notably the popular ballads by northeastern musician Luiz Gonzaga—along with a range of reports and materials that were produced by drought agency agronomists to promote irrigated smallholding.