Introduction to Special Issue: Representing Queens

Authenticity, Antiquity, and Authority: Dares Phrygius in Early Modern Europe Frederic Clark Dares Phrygius, “First Pagan Historiographer” In his Etymologies, Isidore of Seville—the seventh-century compiler whose cataloguing of classical erudition helped lay the groundwork for medieval and early modern encyclopedism—offered a seemingly straightforward definition of historiography, with clear antecedents in Cicero, Quintilian, and Servius.1 Before identifying historical writing as a component of the grammatical arts, and distinguishing histories from poetic fables, Isidore confirmed that “history is a narration of deeds [narratio rei gestae], through which things done in the past are discerned.”2 Thereafter, he equated historical writing with eyewitness observation, insisting that “among the [End Page 183] ancients, no one wrote history unless he had been present and seen those things to be recorded.”3 But Isidore’s further treatment of historiography grew more perplexing. Upon affirming that “among us, Moses first composed a history, on the beginning of the world,” he unexpectedly declared that “among the pagans, Dares Phrygius first composed a history, concerning Greeks and Trojans.”4 Only later did the encyclopedist mention more well-known Greek historians (to modern audiences at least) like Herodotus. 5 Isidore’s invocation of his “first pagan historiographer” referred most likely to the De excidio Troiae historia (henceforth DET), a fifth- or sixth-century Latin pseudo-history billed as an eyewitness account of the Trojan War. Conveyed in sparse, dry, and inelegant language, the DET was long thought to have been the war diary of one Dares Phrygius, purportedly a Trojan participant in the conflict.6 In reality, the Latin DET was a two-part forgery, as its spurious dedicatory epistle—supposedly from the Augustan-era biographer Cornelius Nepos to the historian Sallust—claimed that “Nepos” had discovered the work in an Athenian archive and rendered it “truly and simply” (vere et simpliciter) from Greek into Latin.7 While potentially derived from a Greek antecedent, perhaps composed as an anti-Homeric jeu d’esprit during the Second Sophistic, the Latin Dares was assuredly not an accurate and verbatim translation of any lost Greek original. 8 Notwithstanding its uncertain origins, Isidore’s pagan counterpart to Moses would go on to achieve canonical status in the medieval Latin West, and survives today in approximately 200 manuscripts. Moreover, Dares’s authority was extended through practices of compilation integral to medieval [End Page 184] textual culture.9 This compilatory impulse—which spawned countless multi-text anthologized codices and similarly animated Isidore’s encyclopedism—encouraged the Phrygian’s codicological pairing with numerous sources both ancient and medieval. Not only did the DET serve, codicologically, as a prologue to Trojan origin narratives like Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, but it was also integrated into the structure of universal history, utilized as a means of augmenting the Chronicon of Eusebius-Jerome.10 Throughout the Middle Ages, Dares served not only as a name to invoke, but also as a source to appropriate and rework: to insert into universal chronicles, append to Trojan genealogies, or render into epic verse. Moreover, the pseudo-author’s status as “first pagan historiographer” was hardly lost on medieval sources: for instance, when William of Malmesbury inserted the DET into his anthology of ancient Roman histories, he made sure to include Isidore’s endorsement directly before the text’s incipit.11 For nearly a millennium, Dares’s fabricated claims of antiquity and autopsy constituted airtight guarantors of textual auctoritas. Between Criticism and Credulity: Dares in Early Modern Scholarship But Dares did not remain undisturbed in the canon. Instead, the DET saw its first recorded challenge with the advent of the early Renaissance. Writing in 1400 in his De tyranno, the Florentine Chancellor Coluccio Salutati turned to the Phrygian when debating a favored subject of nascent Italian humanism—the history of early Rome. Here Salutati sought to counter the long-held claim, attested in the DET, that Aeneas was not a pious hero driven from Troy, but rather a duplicitous traitor who had himself betrayed the city to the Greeks.12 The Florentine Chancellor correctly acknowledged that Aeneas’s treason was alleged by “the most ancient historians Dares [End Page 185] Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis” (Dictys, another late antique...

Reviewed by: Renaissance Earwitnesses: Rumor and Early Modern Masculinity Jennifer C. Vaught Keith M. Botelho . Renaissance Earwitnesses: Rumor and Early Modern Masculinity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Pp. xiv + 199. $80.00. In this excellent study of rumor and early modern masculinity, Keith M. Botelho begins by contextualizing Renaissance earwitnessing, or judicious listening, in terms of the importance of discerning truth in our noisy, modern world. In the preface, "Listening in an Age of Truthnapping," he contends that our auditory and visual senses are continually subjected to cell phones, the Internet, radio programs, and the nightly news that spins stories as if they were entertainment. These multiple, rapidly changing sources of news contain unverified information that can generate devastating rumors, a distortion and garbling of the truth distinct from gossip because of their large-scale social and political implications. In the Renaissance, "Rumor or Fama" is "an ambiguously gendered figure" that relentlessly undermines masculine and feminine authority, onstage and off (3). In the introduction, "Buzz, Buzz: Rumor in Early Modern England," Botelho outlines the literary, historical, and theoretical implications of his innovative [End Page 361] argument about earwitnessing in plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Cary. Throughout this well-executed, carefully constructed, and witty book, he examines a wide range of texts about rumor and related subjects like cautionary aural discernment. His accessible, detailed analyses of dramatic works are impressive in a project that contributes to existing criticism on sound studies by Bruce Smith, Kenneth Gross, Wes Folkerth, and Gina Bloom (22). He makes an important contribution to early modern scholarship by complicating the restrictive alliance of hearing and its accompanying ideas of "obedience and receptivity" with femininity. Instead, he focuses on dramatists who feature men whose informational authority is based on their earwitnessing when subjected to male rumormongers (3). Despite the vilifying and scapegoating of the tongues of women allied with gossip in Renaissance dramatic works, conduct books, and marriage manuals, Botelho presents the ear as an alternative site of female resistance to their disempowerment in a number of Shakespeare's plays (75). Botelho makes effective use of recent, compelling works on masculinity such as Mark Breitenberg's Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England, Bruce Smith's Shakespeare and Masculinity, and Jennifer A. Low's Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture, among others. The study as a whole could benefit from the inclusion of even more theoretical, secondary sources about gender, masculinity, and femininity to further illuminate the large number of plays he discusses. Nevertheless, his historicizing of early modern concepts of masculinity in relation to earwitnessing and rumor is strong. He deals insightfully with Elizabeth I, whom he calls the "paradigmatic earwitness of the period" (23), Francis Bacon, and humanist education theorists such as Juan Luis Vives and Roger Ascham. Though he sometimes blurs the distinctions between literary and historical men and women with respect to earwitnessing, he points out the common link between historia and storia in an early modern age when opposing and alternative interpretations of current events were printed rapidly and distributed widely like pulp fiction (54). In fact, the rise of print culture and relatively high literacy rates in Renaissance England markedly increased one's vulnerability to rumor and gossip (21). He concludes that "perhaps this pastiche of voices—an historical and theatrical babel—becomes a more accurate representation of truth than any one particular account" (54). In chapter 1, "Table Talk: Marlowe's Mouthy Men," Botelho sets the stage by examining the playwright's rumor-filled life and humanist education treatises that emphasize careful discernment. He then analyzes Dido, Queen of Carthage, The Massacre at Paris, and Edward II in terms of male rumormongers and failures of earwitnessing. Botelho concludes that in these plays, "the uncontrolled speech of men" threatens "to undermine and destroy male authority" despite the fact that multiple early modern discourses tend instead to stigmatize women as gossipers [End Page 362] (36). Yet in Dido, Marlowe relies on "gendered binaries" of male "controlled speech" and "silence" and female "raving" (39). Dido reinforces the stereotype of "the woman who attempts to destroy a man's fame with her loose tongue" (39). In Edward II, Queen Isabella...

JEMCS Forum:What is Early Modern? Thomas Dipiero and Devoney Looser In an 1890 issue of Modern Language Notes, James Garnett of the University of Virginia protested that scholars deployed the terms "Middle English" and "Early English" too cavalierly when they were discussing the language of Chaucer. Garnett proposed to close the Old English period at 1150 and the Middle English period at 1400, with all subsequent strands of the language falling into the category of Modern English. Recognizing that some scholars might seek out more subtlety in their classifications, he suggested that we call "Early Modern" the English spoken and written between 1400 and 1600 (189). The following year, Henry Sweet made a similar argument, but Sweet stipulated that "Early Modern" English was to be confined to the years 1500-1650 (211). Following the 1890s, many philologists and historians of the English language entered into this debate about how to classify and assign dates to the evolving English tongue. In fact, at the turn of the last century, the term "Early Modern" had some of its most specific meanings to date—if dates are, in fact, an index of specificity—precisely when it referred to phases in the chronological development of English. In that respect, the words "Early Modern" performed a more or less purely sequential function, designating the years preceding and following the point in question as only numerically—and not necessarily historically or culturally—different. More recently, however, we have come to question whether the periods— or even the individual years—that appear simply to follow one another are indeed of the same literary, historical, or cultural valence. We have furthermore [End Page 69] begun to interrogate the meanings of successive years and periods when we compare them across cultures, recognizing the Eurocentrism—and, indeed, the Anglocentrism—that has characterized much reflection on the "Early Modern." Does "Early Modern" refer simply to that which came before modern? Is such a designation always and everywhere valid? Or does "Early Modern" have specific historical—and cultural—valences exceeding its ordinal classification? In their introduction to The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller write that the term "Early Modern" allows them "to explore continuities (as well as differences) between the literature of the 1640s and 1650s and the literature preceding and immediately following it. The result is to challenge and complicate traditional chronological boundaries . . ." (5). For Loewenstein and Mueller, "Early Modern" refers at least in part to a contested zone, one that does not simply link two ostensibly known quantities. But "Early Modern" is not simply about a period of time: Loewenstein and Mueller write that they chose the phrase "Early Modern" over the word "Renaissance" because in their view "the word 'Renaissance' meaning rebirth evokes a world of high or urbane literary culture, often associated with the court, humanism and the great revival of antiquity leading to an emulation of classical models for composition" (6). Loewenstein and Mueller's choice of "Early Modern" over "Renaissance" is a sign of the times, in light of the fact that an increasing number of English departments appear to be using the former to replace the latter, perhaps for the very reasons Loewenstein and Mueller delineate. But how do we understand the term "Early Modern" when it refers to a time and a culture other than post-medieval Britain? Does "Early Modern" indicate a break, or perhaps merely a discontinuity, in historical or cultural chronologies—one that separates us decisively from the past? Or does it refer to a period much like our own, save the fact that its analogous institutions, phenomena, modes of knowing, and interrelationships exist in a less developed form? Could "Early Modern" invoke particular intellectual, economic, philosophic, and aesthetic movements and developments largely unrelated to manifestations of those phenomena in our own time? Our own era—or perhaps better, our current moment—is characterized in large part by far-reaching changes in science and technology, communication, globalization, and world economics, and by new aesthetic forms. The years— perhaps in some cases the many years—following what we conventionally call the medieval period were equally profoundly affected by increased empirical [End Page 70] observation...

Frances E. Dolan, Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern LegacyMarriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy. Frances E. Dolan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Pp. 235.

Narrating Witchcraft:Agency, Discourse, and Power Esther Eidinow and Richard Gordon This collection of thirteen essays—three issues of a special volume of this journal—explores "witchcraft narratives" over time, place, and culture. Most of the contributions are based on papers delivered at a conference entitled "Narrating Witchcraft: Agency, Discourse and Power," held at the University of Erfurt at the end of June 2016, which took up the theoretical challenge of the Lived Ancient Religion project (LAR). This five-year research project, which ran from 2012–17 and which provided funding for the conference, was directed by Professor Jörg Rüpke of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany, and focused on the individual, situational, and larger global trajectories of the pluralistic religions of antiquity. This special volume, Narrating Witchcraft, takes a similarly multi-dimensional approach: scholars of different disciplines, including ancient, early modern and modern history, anthropology, and gender studies, introduced a broad variety of case studies. In acknowledgement of the theme of lived ancient religion, most of the contributions to this special volume—specifically, the articles that appear in the first two issues and that set up the thematic content—focus on malign magic as perceived and practiced in the "Ancient Mediterranean," which includes the Ancient Near East and connected areas over a time span of some thirty-five hundred years. Articles that continue to explore the theme in the early modern and modern worlds are contained in Issue 3. The original conference was explicitly framed as a project in comparative history with an emphasis on the ancient world. While the conference organizers and participants acknowledged the difficulties of cross-cultural translation, we worked with a shared understanding of the term "witchcraft" along [End Page 1] the lines of what Ronald Hutton recently described as standard scholarly definitions of witchcraft: causing "harm to others by mystical means," or "evil magic and sorcery."1 The papers presented at the conference did (and the articles across the volume do) discuss points of terminology (see especially the insights of Peter Geschiere in Issue 3), and work from a wide variety of primary material, introducing diverse methodologies. But they start from the assumption that the conceptual power of witchcraft beliefs and practices is both diachronic and cross-cultural, encompassing both local and global meanings, and with a historical trajectory that extends back to ancient Mediterranean cultures. This starting assumption has allowed them to focus on exploring witchcraft's dynamic, cross-cultural manifestations: in particular, the question of how, across and within widely differing discursive representations, these manifestations each maintain their own distinctive character, while still achieving a "family resemblance," as Esther Eidinow (this issue) describes it. The question of representations introduces the other key term of the conference and volume title—"narrating"—and our concern with the ways in which witchcraft is both engendered by narratives and, in turn, creates them. Narration here is considered as storytelling, and a narrative as a story; as Aristotle suggests of plot, it is a mimesis of a sequence of events with a beginning, middle and end, of a length that can be coherently remembered, of a size which permits a transformation to occur in a probable or necessary sequence of events, from adversity to prosperity, or vice versa. In terms of contemporary theory, we here orient ourselves toward the general theory of narrative elaborated by Albrecht Koschorke, which is useful because its framework is geared to adapting narrative theory to social science. It also considers cognitive processes, where, in an elementary sense, narrative is considered as a kind of "reduction" of knowledge, in which "narrative patterns thus function similarly to cognitive schemas allowing the surplus of unsorted empirical data to be reducted to typical, easily recognizable forms."2 The reduction is not limited to any particular core of real acts or real things; indeed, its interest for us, as for him, has to do with it the way it can both appear to be, and to manipulate, experiential truth; narrative has the capacity to create both orientation and nonsense, both order and disorder. As Koschorke writes, [End Page 2] Like thinking and speaking in general...

Introduction Thomas DiPiero and Devoney Looser This post-1660 issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies includes, as is customary, several fine essays and book reviews. The issue begins with Ellen R. Welch's "Dancing the Nation: Performing France in the Seventeenth-Century Ballets des nations," which considers a court entertainment in which costumed dancers impersonated stereotypical national types. Welch uses this dance as an occasion to investigate how Frenchness is defined in contrast to foreign national types, showing how the ballet sets the stage for subsequent conversations on nations and nationhood. Gunhild Eriksdotter's "Did the Little Ice Age Affect Indoor Climate and Comfort?: Re-theorizing Climate History and Architecture from the Early Modern Period" considers the understudied confluence of climate history and architecture, taking as its starting point the need for significantly longer heating periods in the "Little Ice Age." Architectural changes during significant periods of cold in Northern Europe, from 1550 to 1730, allow us to investigate ways that status was linked to comfort during the early modern period. Eriksdotter shows why we need to integrate climate history as a dynamic variable in the study of historical buildings and remains. "The Hazards of Expurgation: Adapting Measure for Measure to the Bowdler Family Shakespeare," by Adam H. Kitzes, shows us that "bowdlerizing," at least in the case of this particular play, involved a more complicated editing process than scholars have previously understood. Kitzes looks over several editions of Family Shakespeare in order to document the full extent of the changes made by Bowdler and to speculate further on why they were undertaken. The essay argues that, rather than merely censor Shakespeare, Bowdler sought to reconcile a longing for a perceived oral culture of literary social coteries with an acceptance of the plays as carefully edited printed texts. Following these three essays readers will find a special section made up of brief explorations and position papers. With this issue, we introduce a forum [End Page 1] on "What is Early Modern?" which will continue through several upcoming issues of JEMCS. Of course, the Editors of JEMCS are keenly aware of the ways in which the term "Early Modern" is variously perceived and used, not to mention debated and misunderstood. The very way in which we have conceived of our enterprise as a journal has been informed by a sense of the differences between "early" and "late" early modern. Indeed, for more than eight years, we have divided our contents into pre- and post-1660 issues, an editorial decision that itself raises questions about the label "Early Modern" and its utility in demarking periods and dates, not to mention its national associations. To further scrutinize and consider this term, in the past and in the present moment, we asked a number of scholars from different disciplinary perspectives to consider what "Early Modern" means and has meant to the scholarly enterprise. We are proud to introduce the first fruits of those invitations, in the form of four thoughtful essays by top scholars Mitchell Greenberg, Laura Mandell, Andrew McConnell Stott, and James Thompson. We look forward to continuing this conversation with our readers and in future issues of JEMCS. [End Page 2] Copyright © 2013 JEMCS, Inc.

“Wanton loves, and yong desires”: Clandestine Marriage in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and Chapman’s Continuation Katharine Cleland Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and George Chapman’s continuation offer commentary on a controversial Elizabethan social practice: clandestine marriage. After the Protestant Reformation, clandestine marriages became more controversial as they violated not only the tradition of arranged marriages in the upper ranks but also the new marriage rituals of the Book of Common Prayer.1 The ecclesiastical courts could punish those who wed secretly but not invalidate their marriages because the marriage vows, not the church ceremony, resulted in a legally binding union.2 The fact that marriages [End Page 215] performed without a church solemnization were transgressive, but not illegal, resulted in confusion over what constituted both a legitimate and a proper match. In light of this controversy, the paradigm of the Hero and Leander myth—a secret courtship and consummation-would have translated in an early modern reader’s imagination into a story about clandestine marriage.3 In his continuation of the myth, Chapman concentrates on the marriage ceremony, confirming that the issues of heterosexual courtship and marriage were originally at stake in Marlowe’s poem. Recent scholarship, however, has been most interested in Marlowe’s exhilarating tour-de-force of young love and sexuality, with particular attention paid to the latent homoeroticism in the description of Leander and in the Neptune episode.4 By neglecting Chapman’s continuation, we neglect an early modern literary conversation that can shed light on Elizabethan marriage practices and the way in which Marlowe’s poetry is likely to have been interpreted in its own day. Whether or not we consider Marlowe’s poem to be a “fragment,” the difference in the style and tone of Chapman’s continuation suggests that he did not finish Marlowe’s Hero and Leander so much as he responded to it.5 [End Page 216] Just as the issues of love and agency are central to most recent criticism, so do they lie at the heart of the early modern discourse on clandestine marriage. Since mutual consent was the only requirement for a match, entering into a clandestine marriage through a handfasting or trothplight gave couples complete freedom in their marital choice.6 Henry Swinburne’s A Treatise of Spousals, or Matrimonial Contracts outlines the meaning and significance of the spousal vows that could accompany a trothplight or handfasting.7 According to Swinburne, such contracts could take the form of de praesenti or de futuro vows. While the de praesenti contract, or vows spoken in the present tense, resulted in a union, the de futuro contract indicated the promise of future marriage.8 The sexual consummation of a betrothal (a de futuro contract) also resulted in a legal union. While the Protestant ideal of companionate marriage might seem to encourage individual freedom when making matches, private spousal contracts (individually, and one might assume, “freely” negotiated) were considered to be motivated by sexual desire rather than mutual love and the common good.9 In an effort to suppress [End Page 217] the practice, spousal vows were eventually absorbed into the public wedding ceremony (as they are today) to help eliminate the possibility of irreversible, and potentially regrettable, clandestine contracts. Complicating the issue further, the formation of spousal contracts did not have to follow a particular formula. A variety of verbal and nonverbal expressions of love could result in, or at least be confused for, a promise of marriage.10 A lack of witnesses and the ambiguity surrounding the practice could make clandestine marriages of any sort difficult to prove in the church courts. In order to assuage the problems associated with early modern marriage, domestic handbooks and marriage pamphlets circulated as a means to instill normative marriage practices and to contain the agency available to couples when making matches.11 During the Elizabethan period, poetry, particularly sonnets, served as a valuable means through which lovers might carry out courtship rituals.12 Marlowe’s evident rejection of the sonnet craze in the 1590s, however, signifies his resistance to the inactive, and thus effeminate, subject position of the Petrarchan lover.13 Edmund Spenser enfolded [End Page 218] the...

Reviewed by: Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean by Ashley M. Williard Frederick C. Staidum Jr. Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean. By Ashley M. Williard. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 312 pages. Cloth, ebook, pdf. Contemporary scholarship often uses intersectionality as a catchall term reducing complex relationships among race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and more into an oversimplified, additive formula (for example, Black + man + deaf = identity) where the essentialized properties of each social position remain discrete. Kimberlé Crenshaw, who originated the term, however, formulated intersectionality to expose and name the processes by which diverse modes of marginalization and privilege compound and co-constitute each other, creating new and unique configurations of oppression and opportunity—and, by extension, new subjectivities.1 For Atlantic history, this concept indicates that one cannot explicate the histories of colonization, slavery, and race without also chronicling gender and sexuality because modern conceptualizations of race were founded on interpretations of so-called grotesque and abhorrent African and Indigenous reproductive anatomies, sexual behaviors, and family formations. These categories, moreover, were mutually constitutive and interacted in ways that created new forms and contexts of vulnerability and privilege.2 Ashley M. Williard’s Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean is an important intervention in this conversation as it interrogates the intersections of gender, race, and (dis)ability in the Atlantic world, especially between the early modern French metropole and its Antillean colonies (particularly the understudied Lesser Antilles). Williard focuses on constructions of social positionalities—specifically masculinity and femininity—from 1635 to 1715, the period when the Compagnie des Îles de l’Amérique and later the French state first introduced and then cultivated slavery in the Antilles. Engendering Islands astutely demonstrates how polymorphous constructions of gender, sex, race, and [End Page 192] ability were woven throughout early modern “juridical, religious, and medical discourses” (1) and practices, which in turn upheld and were upheld by seventeenth-century French colonization and slavery. And she argues that the gendered discursive mechanisms of colonization produced new forms of human alterity, including novel racial and ableist categories. Williard builds on important work on the early modern racialization of gender and sexuality by incorporating concepts and practices of ability, disability, and hyper-ability.3 As she shows, colonization and enslavement generated ontologies of (dis)ability through various modes, ranging from public maiming to adjudicating economic value, and from conceiving nonwhite bodies as malformed Europeans to endowing those same bodies with fantasies of pathological sexuality and even supernatural abilities. She thus joins emerging scholarship focused on the meaning and experiences of disability in early modern colonial societies of the Atlantic world, bringing together two trends in disability studies that rarely overlap.4 First, scholarship focusing on early modern Europe has illuminated how ideas of human deformity influenced Renaissance-era and seventeenth-century developments in language, performance, medicine, science, social organization, crime and punishment, and—above all—gender and sexuality.5 Second, scholars have given increasing attention to the impairing violence of slavery in the Americas, explicating the centrality of race to the shaping of marginalizing categories such as “lame,” “dumb,” “backwards,” and “dependent,” which defined through contrast what it meant to be a human, citizen, and modern subject.6 [End Page 193] Though these two areas of inquiry have developed in parallel, Williard cogently sutures this divide while also extending both approaches and linking their narratives. Moreover, she does not assume a linear, one-way evolution of gender, sexuality, race, and (dis)ability. In her account, French gender constructs were not exported as stable forms from the metropole to the colonies, and race was not singularly devised in the colonies and then conveyed to France as a fixed concept. Rather, these categories were entangled in a cyclical exchange of invention, resignification, and repurposing that remade ideas of human difference on both sides of the Atlantic. Williard examines an array of early modern actors, including Indi- genous Kalinago people, members of Catholic religious orders, enslaved Africans, French pirates, indentured servants, colonial administrators, merchants, and planters. In each of the book’s four chapters...

Introduction David Porter A War of Worlds: Becoming 'Early Modern' and the Challenge of Comparison Ayesha Ramachandran Eurasian Literature Walter Cohen Asia-Centered Approaches to the History of the Early Modern World Luke Clossey Pornography, Chastity, and 'Early Modernity' in China and England, 1500-1640 Katherine Carlitz Hiding in Plane Sight: Accommodating Incompatibilities in Early Visual Modernity Richard Vinograd Cultural Trajectories: The Power of the Traditional within the Early Modern Jack Goldstone Did China's Late Empire have an Early Modern Era? R. Bin Wong Visualizing the State in Early Modern England and China Martin Powers Areas, Networks, and the Search for 'Early Modern' East Asia Kenneth Pomeranz

Reviewed by: The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages by Geraldine Heng Celeste Chamberland The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. By Geraldine Heng. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 493 pages. $49.99 (cloth). Categories of race and ethnicity have long elicited heated debate about the complex ways in which structural conditions and differential access to power have shaped identity and social relations in the modern world. While such discussions have shed much light on contemporary racial paradigms, they have focused less on the pre-modern origins of racial thought. Canonical race theory, in particular, has provided crucial insight into the historical connections between systemic racism and cultural perceptions of race, but has typically focused on the construction of race as a modern phenomenon that emerged in tandem with colonial encounters alongside the Spanish Conquest and the Atlantic Slave Trade. While early modern [End Page 196] constructions of race undeniably aligned with practices of plunder and hegemony in the era of colonialism and imperialism, their ancient and medieval origins are generally overlooked by scholars who have typically regarded the category of race as too presentist to appropriately characterize categories of identity prior to the sixteenth century. As Geraldine Heng persuasively asserts in The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, however, long before the advent of modern constructions of epidermal race, Europeans developed discourses of colonialism as ideological justification for occupying the territories of others and marginalizing Jewish and Muslim communities in their midst. Heng’s masterful analysis traces the nebulous formation of race alongside configurations of power and discourses of difference in medieval Europe. Identifying the development of pre-modern racial disparity and prejudice, as Heng asserts, is not only vital to our understanding of medieval history, but also illuminates contemporary categories of race, since the interplay of the past and the present continues to inform racial thought and the pervasiveness of systemic racism. By providing heretofore widely overlooked historical context through the lens of an innovative multidisciplinary methodological framework, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages will undoubtedly initiate crucial scholarly discussions about the pre-modern origins of race that will likely be of great interest to medieval scholars and critical race theorists alike. Inasmuch as the construction of pre-modern racial thought reflects the shifting intersections of religious dogma, legal theory, mercantile capitalism, and expressions of cultural belief, The Invention of Race adopts a thematic scheme of organization that effectively underscores the complex processes of othering that unfolded from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. As Heng incisively contends, ideas of race in medieval Europe were not only formed as a result of colonial encounters in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, but were also expressed in the cultural treatment of Jews, the conquest of neighboring Christian countries, and anti-Islamic sentiment in the high and late Middle Ages. By focusing on themes [End Page 197] of state, color, empire, slavery, and the European imagination across Europe, Heng’s analysis effectively reflects the complexities of numerous sites and contexts of racial formation. The book, moreover, assesses nascent pre-modern racial thought through the methodological lens of medieval studies and draws theoretical inspiration from an array of disciplines, ranging from Queer Studies to Postcolonial Theory. Rather than merely cataloguing or describing taxonomies of race and ethnicity in medieval Europe, Heng’s aim is to provide new paradigms and an appropriate model with which the notion of pre-modern race can be approached. By considering the construction of race within the context of early Christian Europe, Heng’s brilliant volume not only contributes a sorely needed dimension to the existing scholarship on race, but also sheds light on a central, but long overlooked, component of the socio-cultural history of medieval Europe. In recent years, some medievalists, notably Robert Bartlett and Peter Biller, have addressed the concept of race in medieval Europe, but they have generally focused exclusively on the somatic and biological features of race, such as bloodline, purity, and physiognomy. As Heng ably demonstrates in this shrewd work, however, such narrow focuses overlook the socio-cultural determinants of race in the Middle Ages, particularly religion and concepts of barbarity and civility...

The Nature of Nature in Early Modern Europe Lorraine Daston (bio) Introduction: What Was Modern about the Early Modern? The very term “early modern” implies a historical doctrine of preformationism: whatever characterizes modernity was somehow present in embryo—tiny but recognizable—in the period from circa 1500 to 1789. “Early modern” is as screamingly anachronistic and teleological a label as “the Middle Ages”; yet even a generation of historians trained to revile anachronism and teleology as cardinal sins still clings not only to the letter but also to the spirit of the term. The most provocative recent works of cultural, intellectual, social, economic, and political history locate the origins of the modern state, modern capitalism, the modern mind, the modern individual, and, of course, modern science in this pivotal period. The history of science has long underwritten, and continues to underwrite, the validity of the periodization “early modern” by singling out much the same chronological territory with its own portentous label, “the Scientific Revolution.” Despite upheavals in the recent historiography of the Scientific Revolution, the narrative remains one of mythic origins: the remarkable historical work of the past decade presents, for example, seventeenth-century experiments in a very different light than did James Bryant Conant or Marie Boas Hall, but the old and new studies agree that seventeenth-century experiments were at once a dramatic innovation with respect to all that came before, and the ancestor and model for all that came [End Page 149] after. 1 Even those who, like Bruno Latour, loudly assert that “we have never been modern” take this seventeenth-century moment to be seminal of our characteristic brand of unmodernity. 2 Like the preformationist fantasy of uncountably many human generations nested one within another in the womb of Eve, all that is modern, from secularization to commodity capitalism to scientific experiment, is imagined to lie curled within the fertile and capacious womb of the early modern. 3 Mythologies, especially origin mythologies, are notoriously deep-rooted and resilient. Dispense with them in religion, and they crop up in art: nineteenth-century biblical scholars debunked Genesis, only to embrace Der Ring der Nibelungen. Sigmund Freud’s “return of the repressed” was primarily and literally the return of buried mythologies—Oedipus, Jocasta, and company. Myths are tenacious because they defy the too-simple logic of true versus false. They are typically false in all their details, and true in their essences. I cherish no illusions about the efficacy of empirical counterexamples, or rational argument, or even ridicule to loosen the hold of such mythologies on the collective imagination of historians. Rather, I want to examine the most powerful variant of the myth of the early modern pregnant with the modern, the variant that has elevated the Scientific Revolution to epoch-making significance not only in the narratives of the history of science, but also in the grander (and usually gloomier) narratives of cultural critics, from Max Weber to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to Michel Foucault. This is the myth of the disenchantment of nature, here summarized in bare-bones version. Sometime between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries, so runs the myth, nature lost its soul. No longer animated [End Page 150] nor active, nature was reduced to brute, passive, stupid matter. The Scientific Revolution transformed creative nature into a machine, blindly obedient to cause and effect. But as nature’s IQ plummeted, its authority soared. Nature replaced God as the ultimate basis for legitimation: natural law warranted the social and political orders, natural desires justified the expansion and deregulation of commerce, natural theology proved the existence and benevolence of the deity. Mythologists in this tradition resolve the apparent paradox of nature’s simultaneous fall and rise by pointing to the cultural logic of naturalization. Nature’s authority in hotly contested social and political matters such as the subordination of wives to husbands or the subordination of subjects to monarchs or the subordination of infidels to established religion depends on the claim that nature is a neutral party to such strife. And what is more neutral than a stupid machine? The very enslavement of nature to a metaphysics of regularity, necessity, and uniformity recommended it...

During the early modern period, women’s generative abilities were seen as the key to unlocking the secrets of nature and medical publications often included new discoveries or remedies in this area. These proto-gynecological publications were written in the vernacular and either directly addressed women or had women in mind as part of their prospective audiences. However, despite the prevalence of treatments and texts, infertility is rarely discussed in early modern scholarship, far less in early modern Iberian Studies. Looking at medical texts, their readers and the images that accompanied them, this paper examines the gaps in the historical record that deal with infertility, its causes, its cures and ultimately its impact on its sufferers.

Reviewed by: Bewitched and Bedeviled: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Early English Possession by Kirsten C. Uszkalo Patrick J. Murray KEYWORDS Patrick J. Murray, K. Uszkalo, possession, embodied religion, English Christianity, Early Modern Christianity, demonic possession, demonology, demons, witchcraft, English witchcraft, Early Modern witchcraft, demonology kirsten c. uszkalo. Bewitched and Bedeviled: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Early English Possession. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. 264. The study of bedeviling and its attendant literature offers a unique insight into the world of possession in early modern culture. As Kirsten C. Uszkalo [End Page 268] writes in the opening chapter to this new book Bewitched and Bedeviled: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Early English Possession, "As we read our own literature, fiction and nonfiction, as reflecting something of the human condition, in describing the demoniac's language, gestures, and torments, possession literatures provide insight into 'real' experiences that underpin early modern possessions" (1). Consequently, by interrogating what possession meant for Renaissance thinkers and writers, we gain insight into not only those deemed "bedeviled," but also, more profoundly, an understanding of their ostensibly clearheaded contemporaries. The performance and recording of possessions, and the subsequent dissemination of "possession literature" was a minor, but nonetheless substantial field of early modern literary production. According to Uszkalo there were approximately 133 people recorded as being possessed between 1564 and 1699, out of a total of 621 "victims of witchcraft in early modern English texts counted so far" (3). Within this, the corpus varied dramatically in genre—some were ephemeral accounts, others depositions, while many of the most well known (such as that of Charity Philipot in 1681) were extended narratives, containing details such as current medical case histories. Uszkalo guides us through this body of work, attempting to synthesize recent findings in neuroscience with theoretical paradigms of sociocultural discourse and practice to help elucidate our understanding of what possession meant for the tumultuous age of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. "This project," the author writes, "couples close reading with the use of concepts from cognitive science and discoveries from neuroscience as interpretive tools useful to interrogate various stages of possession" (3). Always, however, Uszkalo is mindful of the very real human experience at the heart of the literature—"[t]he experience [of possession]," she correctly notes, "is embodied, not transcendent; it is a situated event" (7). Direct consideration of both theoretical and actual environments are at the forefront of the book. Analyzing the experiential accounts of figures such as the aforementioned Philipot, Mary Hall, and Joyce Dovey, Uszkalo attempts to interpret the discourses at play within the social dynamic between the possessed and the recorder. Beginning appropriately with how possession was first diagnosed in a patient, Bewitched and Bedeviled shows how symptoms were deemed psychological as well as physiological—convulsions and glossolalia, rage, and ulcers were deemed as signifying preternatural influence. In addition to this broad scope of manifestation, causes were similarly multiple. While physiological theory made its interventions, the dominant debate of the period—which centered on these symptoms' religious meaning—held sway. "Reformation [End Page 269] ideas of election and reprobation meant that no 'good works' one did on earth would change the state of one's soul in the afterlife," Uszkalo informs us, and thus, "damnation was a thread that tied the bewitched and bedeviled together" (7). Fear of inescapable hell understandably drove some—such as Joan Drake (who swallowed pins) and Hannah Allen (who entombed herself beneath the floorboards of her attic)—to seemingly possessed behaviors. If Chapter 1 provides a survey of the types of possession recorded, Chapter 2 sketches out how they were interpreted and understood in their own time. Here Uszkalo touches upon the seminal ideas of early modern theoretical approaches developed by the likes of Helkiah Crooke, Thomas Adams, and John Downame. Furthermore, in keeping with her attempt to comprehend and diagnose the underlying causes of possessive behaviors, Uszkalo pays particular attention not only to contemporaneous medicinal textbooks such as Crooke's Microcosmographia (1616), but also late-twentieth- and early-twentyfirst-century approaches to possession literature. Citing the important work of Diane Purkiss and Nathan Johnstone, Uszkalo shows how historians of medicine, sociology...

Volume 51 (2021)

Varieties of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English radicalism in context, edited by Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan, Famham & Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2011, xiv + 271 pp., £65.00/$124.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-7546-6905-0The rule of moderation: violence, religion and the politics of restraint in early modern England, by Ethan H. Shagan, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge University Press, 2011, xiii + 381 pp., £19.99/$32.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-521-13556-6Despite their repeated efforts, historians are never immune to making anachronisms and misinterpretations. We either use modern terms to designate early modern phenomena or, conversely, we too often understand early modern terms in their modern sense, which inevitably influences our approach to a given subject. These two books aim to rectify this each in their own way and ought as a result to be read together. Both came out the same year and are arranged chronologically; they respectively cover the first and second half of the early modern period, with an overlap on the seventeenth century and the English Revolution in particular. Both brilliantly challenge our understanding of two key-related notions characterising the turmoils of the early modern period: radicalism and moderation. Since one can hardly go without considering the other, a combined reading seems more appropriate and fruitful in the present case.Shagan's Rule of Moderation focuses on the English Reformation and therefore should be considered first. Right from the introduction, the author debunks our modern idea of by looking at contemporary definitions of the term. Moderation, as he demonstrates, denoted an exertion of authority through restraint and often proved aggressive, coercive, brutal, and violent. In other (modern) words, early modern was immoderate, a definition that the editors of Varieties find sometimes unnecessarily restrictive (12).After considering the moral of sin, the passions, and women in Part I, Shagan examines its political implementation in Tudor England. His account of the execution of six priests (three Catholics and three Evangelical reformers ) by Henry VIII in 1540 is a fascinating case in point of royal via media in a heterodox religious landscape. The Anglican middle way was not one of compromise and negotiation between two extremes or radicalisms, but rather a powerful weapon enforcing Royal authority and public order. Subsequent chapters explore the rhetoric of in a religious context in the Elizabethan period, showing how Anglicans used to enforce their authority, whilst nonconformists did the same to emphasise self-discipline as part of a moderation (177).Although some of its contributors also draw on early Reformation heterodoxy, Varieties does not begin until the English Civil Wars. The book is the product of an interdisciplinary conference held in 2006 at Goldsmiths, London. It offers a fresh and much needed look at the subject with twelve essays challenging modern semantics applied to early modern case studies. The editors do a remarkable job at surveying definitions and approaches to radicalism in their introduction. They successively examine the nominalist approach to radicalism (2), which advocates purging modern concepts from the early modern reality, and a substantive approach, especially favoured by Marxist historians seeking to legitimise their own political views by constructing an English radical tradition (13-17). Hessayon and Finnegan object to these two approaches, settling instead for a third one called functional. Despite the risk of anachronisms and inconsistencies it involves, this functional approach uses radicalism as a workable term easily understood by the modern reader, but also calls in return for greater and systematic contextualisation in order to truly grasp its practical implications.Like Tudor and Stuart moderation, the twelve case studies in Varieties suggest not one, but many forms of radicalism in the seventeenth century. …