Reading Green in Early Modern England

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...

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

Boy Actors in Early Modern England: Skill and Stagecraft in the Theatre provides a new approach to the study of early modern boy actors, offering a historical re-appraisal of these performers' physical skills in order to reassess their wide-reaching contribution to early modern theatrical culture. Ranging across drama performed from the 1580s to the 1630s by all-boy and adult companies alike, the book argues that the exuberant physicality fostered in boy performers across the early modern repertory shaped not only their own performances, but how and why plays were written for them in the first place. Harry R. McCarthy's ground-breaking approach to boy performance draws on detailed analysis of a wide range of plays, thorough interrogation of the cultural contexts in which they were written and performed, and present-day practice-based research, offering a critical reimagining of this important and unique facet of early modern theatrical culture.

Volume 51 (2021)

Translation was a critical mode of discourse for early modern writers. <i>Gifting Translation in Early Modern England: Women Writers and the Politics of Authorship</i> examines the intersection of translation and the culture of gift-giving in early modern England, arguing that this intersection allowed women to subvert dominant modes of discourse through acts of linguistic and inter-semiotic translation and conventions of gifting. The book considers four early modern translators: Mary Bassett, Jane Lumley, Jane Seager, and Esther Inglis. These women negotiate the rhetorics of translation and gift-culture in order to articulate political and religious affiliations and beliefs in their carefully crafted manuscript gift-books. This book offers a critical lens through which to read early modern translations in relation to the materiality of early modern gift culture.

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

Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England: Gender and Self-Definition in an Emergent Writing Culture. By Kate Narveson. Material Readings in Early Modern Culture. Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2012. x + 238 pp. $99.95 cloth. - Volume 83 Issue 2

and the domestic is a dauntingly capacious rubric for a short review essay, and Geraldo U. de Sousa's At Home in Tragedies and Frederic B. Tromly's Fathers and Sons in Shakespeare: Debt Never Promised have little in common other than a place within that category. De Sousa's book takes as its topic the material space of the home and, more specifically, the dramatic function of dwelling places in the tragedies (3), arguing that Shakespeare represents domestic space as a web of tragic (9). Tromly, on the other hand, focuses more narrowly on common patterns in the relationships between fathers and sons in plays, without singling out a specific genre (although, notably, there are no comedies included in his study). Both of these monographs have been preceded by several decades of historicist and feminist literary scholarship crossing what were once traditional disciplinary boundaries between literary studies, history, sociology, and anthropology creatively explore literary texts as sites of knowledge on the politics and bonds of marriage, family, and the household. Both make contributions this interdisciplinary pursuit, although neither breaks new ground. Of studies that fall under the rubric of and the Domestic, articles and books on marital bonds, customs, and hierarchies are by far the most numerous, too numerous review here in full. Among the most significant studies of marriage from the past thirty years that deserve mention, however, are Linda Fitz's 1980 'What Says the Married Woman': Marriage Theory and Feminism in the English Renaissance; Carol Neely's 1989 Broken Nuptials in Plays; Mary Beth Rose's 1988 Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama and her more recent The Heroics of Marriage in Renaissance Tragedy (1998); B. J. Sokol and Mary Sokol's 2003 Shakespeare, Law, and Marriage; and Loreen L. Giese's recent contribution, Courtship, Marriage Customs, and (2006). Laurie Shannon's Nature's Bias: Renaissance Homonormativity and Elizabethan Comic Likeness (2000) also needs be mentioned, as it offers a crucial corrective the heterocentric view most modern critics have taken affective bonds, marriage, and the cultural work of Shakespearean comedy, the genre most often associated with the triangulated nexus of sexual love, romance, and family. Other important queerings of include Mario DiGangi's Queering the Shakespearean (1996); Julie Crawford's The Homoerotics of Elizabethan Comedies (2006); and Valerie Traub's work, such as The Homoerotics of Shakespearean Comedy (1992), The (In) Significance of 'Lesbian' Desire in Early Modern (1992), and Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (1992). As DiGangi points out, however, Shakespeare's contemporaries often present a fuller picture [than Shakespeare] of the early modern household and the same sex relations enabled by its particular functioning and composition (270). Catherine Belsey's 1999 and the Loss of Eden: Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture is a curious example as a monograph with overt political intentions to historicize and thus denaturalize family values (xiv) but which nevertheless maintains heteronormative assumptions and elides any discussion of homoerotic and homosocial ties in the early modern household. It also focuses solely on the nuclear family of husband, wife, parents, and siblings, although an important distinction between the early modern family and the modern family was the presence in the early modern family of non-kin inmates, sojourners, boarders or lodgers ... as well as indentured apprentices and resident servants (Stone 26-27). In the introduction her edited collection, Domestic Arrangements in Early Modern England (2002) (which includes two essays on plays by Shakespeare), Kari Boyd McBride gives attention the extended nature of the early modern family, particularly female servants. …

This volume traces transformations in attitudes toward, ideas about, and experiences of religion and the senses in the medieval and early modern period. Broad in temporal and geographical scope, it challenges traditional notions of periodisation, highlighting continuities as well as change. Rather than focusing on individual senses, the volume’s organisation emphasises the multisensoriality and embodied nature of religious practices and experiences, refusing easy distinctions between asceticism and excess. The senses were not passive, but rather active and reactive, res-ponding to and initiating change. As the contributions in this collection demonstrate, in the pre-modern era, sensing the sacred was a complex, vexed, and constantly evolving process, shaped by individuals, environment, and religious change. The volume will be essential reading not only for scholars of religion and the senses, but for anyone interested in histories of medieval and early modern bodies, material culture, affects, and affect theory.

Scholars who write about early modern women and crime have focused primarily on prostitution and witchcraft which they deem “feminine” crimes. Removing this gender bias by employing a non-essentialist perspective, reveals a more nuanced picture of women’s participation in crime. Women who were unwilling—or perhaps not feminine enough—to use their sexual attributes to make money existed and are reported in crime statistics and literature. Using both hard evidence from crime studies and soft evidence from literary sources, and considering a wide historical range (from 1600–1800), reveals a steady stream of references to masculine-female criminals on the margins of early modern culture. I argue that future crime studies of early modern periods should allow for the consideration of women who did not conform to their culture’s gender ideals. Making a space for the “masculine-female criminal” contributes to a more nuanced view of gender and early modern culture.

Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England. Joshua Eckhardt and Daniel Starza Smith, eds. Material Readings in Early Modern Culture. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014. xviii + 252 pp. $119.95. - Volume 68 Issue 4

In early modern England the legal definition of rape underwent an important revision and gradually, from crime against property, rape became a crime against the person. While reflecting the classical, medieval and biblical assumptions, the period brought about new concerns. The purpose of this article is to explore representations of rape in a variety of popular texts of the English early modern period, by focussing attention on broadside ballads, cheap pamphlets as well as accounts of trials that took place at the Old Bailey. These texts constitute valuable sources of information about people’s attitudes and beliefs and help us construct the views of rape circulating in early modern English culture.

Notes on Contributors

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.

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. …