Language and the Grand Tour: Linguistic Experiences of Travelling in Early Modern Europe by Arturo Tosi

Notes on Contributors

Teaching and Learning Guide for: ‘Representing the Duke of Buckingham: Libel, Counter-Libel and the Example of The Emperor’s Favourite’

Wandering: An Essay on Histories, Genders, Mobilities, and Forms

The Grand Tour was the classical continental trip to France and Italy, undertaken by young aristocratic men in early modern Europe, ostensibly for educational purposes. Using amusing stories and vivid quotations collected from travellers' writings, Arturo Tosi charts the rise of modern vernaculars and the standardisation of European languages. The travellers' writings provide a valuable source of information about language contact, and illuminate how socialisation with the locals led, on the one hand, to conscious borrowings from prestigious foreign peers and, on the other, to linguistic disorientation when confronted with lower-class speech and rural vernaculars. The first of its kind to approach the Grand Tour from a linguistic perspective, this book is a timely addition to this burgeoning area of study, presenting a unique case study of population movement, language change and education in early modern Europe.

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction, Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin Part I: People 1. Religion Inside Out: Dutch House Churches and the Making of Publics in the Dutch Republic, Steven Mullaney, Angela Vanhaelen, Joe Ward 2. Emerging Publics of Religious Reform in the 1530s: Affair of the Placards and the Publication of Antoine de Marcourt's Livre des marchans, Torrance Kirby 3. Academies, Circles, Salons and the Emergence of the Pre-Modern Literary Public Sphere in Sixteenth-Century France, Francois Rouget 4. Pietro Aretino, Thomas Nashe, and Early Modern Rhetorics of Public Address, Wes Folkerth Part II: Things 5. Hamlet and the Social Thing in Early Modern England, Paul Yachnin 6. Petrucci's Publics for the First Motet Prints, Julie E. Cumming 7. Cultural Relations between London and the Provincial Towns: Portraiture and Publics in Early Modern England, Robert Tittler and Anne Thackray 8. Glob(al) Visions: Globes and their Publics in Early Modern Europe, Lesley B. Cormack Part III: Forms of Knowledge 9. Richard Hakluyt and his Publics, c. 1580-1620, David Harris Sacks 10. The Confusion of Faces: Politics of Physiognomy, Concealed Hearts, and Public Visibility, Bronwen Wilson 11. Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Publication of Melancholy, Michael Bristol 12. Specifying Unknown Things: Algebra of Merchant of Venice, Shankar Raman Publics: A Bibliographic Afterword, Yael Margalit List of Contributors Bibliography Index

Women and warfare is an emerging field in early modern history with a rapidly growing historiography. Art historians and cultural historians have been captivated by images of feminine martial power that deploy the figures of Athena, Minerva, Diana the Huntress, Judith, and Amazons. Much of the historical literature has focused on queens, regents, and female power in early modern royal states. Political and gender historians have examined powerful female rulers and regents such as Mary of Hungary, Margaret of Parma, and Infanta Isabella in the Habsburg Low Countries; Mary I Tudor and Elizabeth I Tudor in England; Marie de Guise and Mary Stuart in Scotland; Catherine de’ Medici, Maria de’ Medici, and Anne of Austria in France; and Amalia Elizabeth in Hesse—who all engaged in military planning and diplomacy. Historians and gender studies scholars are now setting these women warriors and powerful queens into a much broader context of women, gender, and war in early modern Europe. Noblewomen, city women, and peasant women were all swept up into the maelstrom of war in early modern Europe. This bibliographical essay brings together diverse historiographies of women’s history, gender history, history of sexuality, art history, literary history, history of violence, and war and society history. The essay includes sources on women, gender, and warfare in peasant revolts, urban revolts, noble revolts, civil wars, religious wars, and colonial wars, as well as in conventional interstate wars and coalition wars. An initial section discusses General Overviews and historical surveys of women, gender, and war in early modern Europe. A section on Theoretical and Comparative Studies of Gender and War outlines diverse methodological approaches to studying the subject. Brief sections on Reference Works, Textbooks and Pedagogical Sources, Anthologies, and Journals discuss research and teaching tools in the field. A thematic section on Women, Power, and War in Early Modern Europe goes beyond biographical studies to examine gendered dynamics of authority, agency, and power in the early modern period. Women rulers directed warfare and negotiated peace in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Artistic images and literary representations shaped notions of women and war that influenced contemporary political culture. Women and War in the Renaissance and Reformation (1450s-1550s) then considers women and gender in the Italian Wars and in religious and social conflicts during the Reformation era. Another section on Women and Gender in the European Wars of Religion (1550s-1650s) examines women’s experiences and gender dynamics in the French Wars of Religion, Dutch Revolt, Thirty Years’ War, and British Civil Wars. Gendered dynamics of violence in early modern maritime empires are considered in a section on Women, Gender, and Violence in Maritime Empires, focusing on the Portuguese, Spanish, British, and Dutch empires. Indigenous peoples’ experiences of slavery and colonial warfare are contemplated, along with maritime raiding, privateering, and piracy. Gender in Military Culture considers how gender and honor culture fueled familial and social conflict through dueling, feuds, and vendettas. Military organizations promoted specific forms of masculinity and notions of armed service. Women participated in the “campaign communities” that formed around field armies as soldiers’ wives, sutlers, peddlers, and prostitutes. Another section on Gender and Early Modern State Development (1640s-1700s) examines how the rise of permanent armies in the seventeenth century transformed military culture, gradually pushing women out of the military sphere. The section also surveys women and war in the Ottoman expansion, Russian imperial and Eastern European warfare, and French wars of expansion during the reign of Louis XIV. A final section on Women and Atrocities in Early Modern Warfare contemplates women’s suffering from rape, pillage, and massacre. Discussions of women’s status in warfare and attempts to restrain violence against non-combatants drove the development of laws of war in early modern Europe. Warfare was pervasive in early modern Europe, affecting entire states and societies in profound ways. This bibliographic essay provides an introduction to the myriad connections between war, gender, and society in early modern societies. I would like thank Alexander Sosenko, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Northern Illinois University who served as my graduate research assistant, for his assistance in identifying sources for this bibliographic essay.

Islam in Early Modern Quaker Experience and Writing David Vlasblom (bio) From their beginnings in the mid-seventeenth century to the early twentieth century, the Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as the Quakers, offered a unique and often challenging perspective in the Western world as pioneers of both inter-faith dialogue and social justice issues. This paper will demonstrate that early modern Quakers were uniquely open to befriending and learning from Muslims and that this contact aided Quakers of the latter seventeenth and early eighteenth-centuries in challenging Western social norms, particularly with regard to Western slavery. Lessons learned from Muslims and the process of inter-faith dialogue outside of Western boundaries enabled Quakers enough distance and breadth of perspective to take unique ideological positions that ran counter to the powerful discourses of the West. Contact with Islam aided the early modern Quakers in thinking beyond the discourses of their English, Christian, Western culture and helped them to challenge oppression by presenting alternative models. The Quakers were much better suited than their fellow early modern English and Western European Christian religionists to learn lessons from other cultures because their religion did not prejudice them against Muslims and other cultures but rather encouraged dialogue. Elements of a culture of tolerance in early modern Islamic societies thus filtered through to the West through the pioneering work of the extremely influential Quaker movement. The Quakers adapted this seed of Islamic tolerance that was lacking in their own culture of seventeenth-century England, and they developed it in their own way into a worldview that would evolve with time to promote radical social activism. It is beyond the scope of this paper to consider the direct links between early modern Quaker values of equality and tolerance and the largely Quaker-led reform movements of the nineteenth century including abolition of slavery, rethinking capital punishment and the enfranchisement of minorities and women. Nevertheless it is a premise of this paper that there is a strong continuity of ideology and that these later social movements were a logical outworking of early modern Quaker beliefs and values. While Islam was by no means the only force influencing early modern Quaker ideas, it was a vital ingredient because it presented the Quakers with a different set of cultural discourses with which they could begin their centuries-long challenging and overthrow of Western injustices. This paper will first explore the importance of Islam in forming the uniquely inclusive Quaker worldview in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; [End Page 1] secondly this paper will examine the influence of Islamic culture in early modern Quaker thinking on the issue of slavery, demonstrating how this intercultural and inter-faith exchange stimulated early Quaker social activism. Part I: Relationship with Islam Aids Early Modern Quakerism in Transcending Western Discourses This paper does not claim that Islam was the primary religious influence on the Quakers as they formed their worldview. It is beyond the scope of this project to consider the vast array of religious traditions and Enlightenment thinkers whose ideas filtered into Quakerism. In terms of religious traditions, the early Quakers certainly identified much more closely with the Christian Millenarian and Anabaptist traditions; and, more broadly, with Christianity in general and even Judaism. Derogatory references to Islam, Muslims and the Qur'an outnumber favourable ones in early modern Quaker writings. George Fox, the man who founded Quakerism in the middle of the seventeenth century, believed that Muslims were misguided1 and should be evangelized into Christian truth.2 Even so, Quaker openness to Islam was remarkable for its time. Extensive research of Quaker writings for this paper has failed to uncover any demonic imagery employed against Muslims or characterizations of the Qur'an as a wicked or evil book. As will be demonstrated below, there was an emergence among Quakers of a collective concept of Islam, or the "Turk," that was fundamentally different from the predominating English and Western perceptions. Overwhelmingly, Quaker writers found Muslim society to be morally equal to the Christian societies of Europe, and they often cited examples in which Muslims were acting in a more enlightened way than Christians. This section will demonstrate that early modern...

Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe Noah J. Efron Almost a quarter-century ago Benjamin Nelson published his famous plea for what he called a “differential” and “comparative historical sociology of ‘science’ in civilizational perspective.” 1 Like Max Weber, Robert Merton, and Joseph Needham, Nelson believed that the growth of western science could be better understood when compared to the ways “science” fared in other cultures with other intellectual and institutional and economic sensibilities and structures. A particularly propitious case study for such a differential and comparative historical study of science, as Hillel Levine observed in his 1983 essay about Jewish reactions to heliocentrism, are the Jews of early modern Europe, who constituted “a society geographically and culturally contiguous with those who framed and advanced occidental ‘science.’” 2 Since about the time of Nelson’s plea, David B. Ruderman has been writing the history of Jewish attitudes towards, and engagements with, science during the period in which modern western science was constituting itself. It is no exaggeration to say that he established this as a field of study, producing a steady stream of historical studies, initially of Italian Jews who read and wrote about nature and its study, but continually expanding his compass. 3 The field [End Page 719] Ruderman established and the studies he produced have been “repercussive” (to borrow his own adjective) in many directions—shedding light on Jewish-Christian relations, on early-modern Jewish intellectual history, on the deployments of Kabbalah and magic in early modern times, and so on. One of Ruderman’s achievements—perhaps not the most important in his view (for he considers himself a historian of Jewish thought and culture and not a historian of science) but of great importance nonetheless—has been to begin to lay the groundwork for a comparative history of Jewish and Christian attitudes towards and participation in the “new sciences.” Ruderman’s newest book is a big step towards Nelson’s desideratum, using Jewish attitudes as the comparative case. It is a collection of twelve linked essays (five of which have appeared elsewhere in one form or another) framed by a synthetic introduction and epilogue. The essays are individual or group portraits of Jews who evinced interest in natural philosophy or medicine, in a variety of settings and for a variety of reasons, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Ruderman describes his subject as “three distinct but interrelated groups among early modern Jews”: (1) “converso physicians and other university-trained intellectuals who fled Spain and Portugal in the seventeenth century and settled in Holland, Italy, Germany, England, and even eastern Europe, serving as doctors and purveyors of scientific learning throughout the Jewish communities of Europe, while yielding considerable political and economic power,” (2) “certain circles of Jewish scholars in central and eastern Europe [who] pursued scientific learning, especially astronomy, in more informal settings as a desirable supplement to rabbinic study,” and (3) “the hundreds of Jews who attended Italian medical schools, primarily the University of Padua, from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.” 4 In fact Ruderman covers even more ground than this. As background, he includes a brief essay on the attitudes of tenth- to fifteenth-century Jews towards nature and its study, surely the best survey of the sort available. Of the thirty or so early modern Jews that he describes in the remainder of the book, about twenty fit in at least one of the three camps upon which he focuses. 5 Nine [End Page 720] emerged from different circumstances (though these too were often highly influenced by one or more of the focus populations). This fact does nothing to impugn Ruderman’s typology—the groups he described were, in fact, of particular importance, and his identification of them as the principle populations contemplating and promulgating natural philosophy among Jews is in itself an advance of some moment. But the fact that a third of the cases Ruderman described do not fit into his own typology is testimony both to the complexity of his subject, and to his agility in addressing it. By anthologizing a dozen depictions of different thinkers in different milieus, Ruderman affords what might be called a “hawk...

Reviewed by: Servants in Rural Europe: 1400-1900 ed. by Jane Whittle Jeanne Clegg Whittle, Jane, ed. – Servants in Rural Europe: 1400-1900. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2017. Pp. 284. After years of neglect in favour of "productive" labour, scholars have, over the past few decades, come to recognize the importance of service labour for understanding the economic, social, and cultural history of Europe and beyond. As the work of the Cambridge Group for the Study of Population and Social Structure showed in the 1960s, in preindustrial England servants made up a significant proportion of the population, and perhaps 60% of its youth. In the late 1970s, the group's founder, Peter Laslett, identified live-in service as one of the three key characteristics of the Western family, and E. A. Wrigley described it as both an essential form of de facto family planning and a mechanism for redeploying surplus labour. Since then, scholars from Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos (Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England, 1994) to Sheila McIsaac Cooper and other contributors to the [End Page 450] Servant Project (Proceedings of the Servant Project = Actes du Servant Project, 2001-2005) have examined the roles played by life-cycle service in the maturing of young men and women from a wide variety of backgrounds, offering opportunities to acquire practical and social skills, contacts, and the economic resources needed to become independent and marry. And since all but the poorest of early modern households included at least one servant, we can—as Tim Meldrum (Domestic Service and Gender, 1660-1750, 2000), Laura Gowing (Common Bodies, 2003), and Paula Humfrey (The Experience of Domestic Service for Women in Early Modern London, 2011) have shown—also learn about employers' lives through the experience of those who served them, while Douglas Hay and Paul Craven's work on master and servant legislation (Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562-1955, 2004) illuminates the ways in which states attempted to regulate the development of wage labour. Running through Servants in Rural Europe is a productive dialogue/debate with the core concepts discussed in these and a myriad of other studies. Christine Fertig confirms the validity of the life-cycle model for northwestern Germany, where in the eighteenth century service offered younger generations training and helped redistribute surplus labour from peasant households with little land to those with high demand. Jeremy Hayhoe shows that throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Burgundy wine harvests continued to employ young men, but also older people and the children of peasant families themselves. Cristina Prytz, on the other hand, focuses closely on the experience of older, highly skilled servants in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Sweden and emphasizes the attractions of life-long service. Writing of rural Norway in the same period, Hanne Østhus investigates mobility between various ways of earning a living, arguing that the very category of "servant" is one with "porous boundaries." Finally, in what is (rather regrettably) the only chapter to deal with southern Europe, Raffaella Sarti analyzes quantitative data available for several regions of Italy and across a broad time span, finding surprisingly high numbers of rural servants and of neo-local, "simple" families, findings that challenge accepted "geographies of service," and question simplistic applications of the European marriage pattern. This book, however, does more than revise received ideas: it opens up a field of research which—with the exception of the work of Ann Kussmaul (Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England,1981)—has been almost wholly neglected. As the volume's editor, Jane Whittle reminds us in her introductory overview, "Early modern Europe was an overwhelmingly rural society: before 1800 at least 85 per cent of the population lived outside of large towns. The great majority of people, including servants, had some involvement in farming. Yet the literature on servants continues to the dominated by studies of urban and domestic servants" (p. 2). The essays brought together here help to redress this imbalance, providing in-depth analyses of the characteristics and working conditions of servants in specific agricultural contexts across Europe over five centuries. No grand, cohesive picture is offered. "The significance of local and regional variations as...

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...

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...

Correspondence Calendar, 1931–1977: Letters between Eudora Welty and Frank LyellEudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History Julia Eichelberger Introduction The correspondence calendar is a loosely defined genre. The chief inspiration for this one is chapter 3 of Suzanne Marrs's 1988 book The Welty Collection.1 The Eudora Welty Collection at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) holds a vast storehouse of material that scholars are only beginning to mine, twenty years after her death. She began donating her papers to MDAH in 1957 when Welty's friend Charlotte Capers was director. In 1985, MDAH commissioned Marrs to reorganize the Welty Collection and write a guide, which was published in 1988. "Chapter 3: Correspondence Calendar" enumerates over 200 items of correspondence at MDAH, most of them written to and not by Welty. Since publication of The Welty Collection, fourteen thousand items of correspondence have been added, including hundreds written by Welty and her friend Frank Lyell. Of the 98 archival boxes of letters to and from Welty, ten house the Welty-Lyell correspondence, with eight boxes of letters from Welty. All told, the collection contains over 600 Welty-Lyell letters, documenting a friendship that lasted from 1930 to Lyell's death in July 1977. Publication is clearly warranted, since so few letters have yet been reprinted, [End Page 7] quoted, or even cited;2 thus, I am working on a single volume of selected letters between Welty and Lyell.3 This correspondence calendar enumerates all the Welty-Lyell letters at MDAH. Following Marrs's example, I characterize the correspondence as a whole before beginning the calendar, divided into three sections, where I list and briefly describe each letter. In addition to providing a reference guide for researchers interested in a particular period of time, the calendar offers a glimpse of a larger narrative, the story of a friendship that spanned almost fifty years. In order to recognize this story as it unfolds in my brief summaries, some knowledge of the two correspondents' lives is useful. Welty (1909–2001) and Lyell (1911–1977) were part of an intellectual, talented, fun-loving group from Jackson, many of whom had been friends since childhood. Welty and Lyell, however, became friends as young adults. Both their families moved into the Belhaven neighborhood in 1925. Welty left for college soon afterwards, graduating in 1929, and met Lyell in 1930 as she and several Jackson friends were preparing to begin graduate studies at Columbia University. Upon learning of these plans, Lyell, newly graduated from the University of Virginia at age 19 and bound for Columbia's MA program in English, introduced himself to Welty and the friendship began. She took courses in advertising, but both she and Lyell spent much [End Page 8] of their time enjoying the city. In a scrapbook Lyell later made about his 1930–31 year in New York, letters and memorabilia record how often he and Welty attended plays, movies, concerts, museums, and nightclubs together.4 The first section of the Correspondence Calendar covers the years 1931 to 1946, beginning with a postcard mailed soon after Lyell had finished his MA program and before he set out for a "grand tour" of Europe. The card was mailed to Jackson. Welty was expecting to continue at Columbia that fall, but in September her father had died. She remained in Jackson but often went to New York to enjoy city life, as Lyell did, and to try to land a job or find a publisher for her stories and photographs. Lyell continued his graduate studies at Princeton University, so the friends sometimes met in the city, and they saw each other regularly in Jackson during summers and holidays. In 1935, Lyell got his first teaching job at North Carolina State College in Raleigh. Welty continued living at her family's home, writing fiction, taking photographs, and working a variety of gigs and jobs: journalism and society column-writing, professional photography, substitute teaching, and producing the newsletter of a local radio station.5 In 1936, as "junior publicity agent" for the Works Progress Administration, Welty visited many rural locations in the state and filed press releases on...

In 1578, the author, teacher, translator, and lexicographer John Florio wrote of English that it was ‘a language that wyl do you good in England, but passe Dover, it is woorth nothing’. Florio lived in an age when English was a marginal language on the international stage, and when language-learning was central to the English encounter with the wider world. This book is the first major study of how English-speakers learnt a variety of Continental vernaculars. Moving from language lessons in early modern London to the texts, practices, and ideas that underlay vernacular language education in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and offering a new and multilingual understanding of early modern travel practices, it explores how early modern people learnt and used foreign languages, and asks what it meant to be competent in another language in this period. Multilingualism was a fact of life in early modern Europe: it animated and shaped travel, commerce, culture, diplomacy, education, warfare, and cultural encounter. This book offers a new and methodologically innovative study of a set of practices that were crucial to England’s encounter with the wider world, and to the fashioning of English linguistic and cultural identities at home. It argues for the importance of a historicized understanding of linguistic competence, and frames new ways of thinking about language, communication, and identity in a polyglot age.

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...

Reviewed by: Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 by Steve Mentz Gayle K. Brunelle Steve Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 2015) ix + 225 pp. In Shipwreck Modernity, Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 Steve Mentz sets out to disrupt the traditional linear narrative of modernity that posits the Renaissance as a rupture that began the modern era. Scholars of the Renaissance, from Jacob Burkhardt to Stephen Greenblatt, have argued that in attempting to revive the worldview and aesthetics of the Classical era, Greenblatt's "swerve," Renaissance humanists set the stage for modernity. Mentz contends that this paradigm of early modernity as a necessary break [End Page 234] initiating the development of modernity, most notably and recently celebrated by Stephen Greenblatt in his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2012), misses the fundamental complexity not just of the early modern era, but of history, and of the human condition. Mentz is a literary scholar, and his analysis is based on examination of mostly English literature about the ocean and shipwrecks from the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries. His goal is to offer an alternate way of understanding not just pre-modern European culture and the whole concept of "modernity," but also our own culturally and ecologically disrupted era. Mentz argues in Shipwreck Modernity that the traditional interpretation of modernity is too "dry," too "land-based" to serve the needs of contemporary culture. By this Mentz means that our world is now too global, and too ecologically threatened, for a narrative that is Western in outlook, linear in trajectory and optimistic and positivistic in tone to help people make sense of the rapid ecological changes, globalization and fragmentation of the Western-dominated world order that characterizes our century. Mentz questions the usefulness of the periodization of history into medieval, early modern, and modern that still dominates scholarly chronology and the discourse, the actual language we use to describe history. Mentz offers an alternate discourse, a "wet" discourse in which the sea is at the center, not only because interaction with the sea was central to the development of the increasingly global economy and culture of the early modern and modern periods, but also because the formless sea, with no distinct lines or breaks, which reaches in all direction and disorients the human body plunged into it, seems a better way to understand historical change. Mentz argues that early modern European culture was "fundamentally ecological in nature" (2) because what historians have traditionally called the "expansion of Europe" obliged Europeans to interact with the ecologies, human and natural, of the entire globe. Like shipwrecked sailors, Europeans were plunged into a strange, formless ocean of new peoples, plants, animals, geographies, and topographies that they could neither categorize nor control. Survival meant figuring out how to float or swim until they reached the shore. And like the ocean, a single body of water that surrounds all land masses and mingles currents from all parts of the world, the intellectual "ocean" in which early modern Europeans found themselves adrift mingled past and present, hither and yon, indiscriminately. Humans sought ways to catalogue, periodize, and structure the waters around them, but ultimately the fundamental disorder of the oceanic nature of our world rendered any intellectual structures they created fragile and contingent. Surviving a shipwreck requires abandoning the vessel at some point and plunging into the salt water in an effort to reach the shore. The new land cannot be attained without first breaking up the structure of the ship and experiencing the disorientation of the formless ocean. And the shore itself is always contingent, since humans cannot create a global world without experiencing the ocean. This, for Mentz, seems to be his central metaphor for the crisis of modernity, and in particular the effects of climate change with which our own world is contending. Old structures, understandings and solutions are inadequate and in fact are fragmenting under the relentless [End Page 235] pressure of the ocean, rising ever higher to meet us as the global temperature warms. We cannot survive by clinging to a wreck. We must all plunge in and swim...