Early Modern Women Writers Engendering Descent

Focusing on Mary Sidney Herbert and Mary Sidney Wroth’s use of the figures of origin, descent, and inheritance in their poetry and prose, this book examines how these central women writers situated themselves in terms of early modern England’s rich ancestral cultures, employing these and other genealogical concepts to talk about authorship, family, selfhood, and memory. In turn, both Sidney Herbert and Sidney Wroth also shaped their works in relation to the ways in which writers within their familial communities and literary coteries constructed them as Sidneys, heirs, descendants, and future ancestors, in genres ranging from the patronage dedication and pastoral eclogue to mythographic genealogia and georgic poetry. In the intersection of ancestry, death, sexuality, and reproduction, the book contends that Sidney Herbert and Sidney Wroth develop their authorship within the simultaneous rigidity and flexibility of their world’s genealogical discourses.

Robert Sidney, the first Earl of Leicester (1563–1626), serves as an exemplar of an Elizabethan nobleman who had in his collection a body of work pertinent to the subject of masculine honour in the private realm. Understanding the nuances and evolution of the term private honour as it is represented in Sidney’s artefacts, as well as in the public discourse of the era, is the work and contribution of this book. The permeability between the private and public spheres led to an emergence of new forms of masculine representation. In a time when manhood was intertwined with militaristic qualities (such as courage, strength and fortitude), my investigation shows that in the domestic sphere, a gentler version of masculinity, encouraging humility, constancy and modesty, was fostered amongst the nobility. While worries of effeminacy certainly existed, there also was a strong discourse that encourage men to adopt so-called feminine virtues within the private sphere.

This book explores how the myth of Narcissus, which is at once about self-love and self-destruction, desire and death, beauty and pain, became an ambivalent symbol of humanistic endeavour, and articulated the conflicts of early modern authorship. In early modern literature, there were expressions of humanistic self-congratulation that sometimes verged on narcissism, and at the same time expressions of self-doubt and anxiety that verged on nihilism. The themes of self-love and self-negation had a long history in western thought, and this book shows how the medieval treatments of the themes developed into something distinctive in the sixteenth century. The two themes, either individually or combined, encompass such topics as poverty, unrequited love, transgressive sexuality, sexual violence, suicidality, self-worth, authorship, religious penitence, martyrdom, courtly ambition and tyranny. Archdeacon uses over 100 texts from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to show how the early modern writer existed in a culture of contrary forces pulling towards either self-affirmation or self-erasure. Writers attempted to negotiate between the polarised extremes of self-love and self-negation, realising that they are fundamental to how we respond to each other, our selves and the world.

The essays collected here join in, and contribute to, the current reflection on Dante’s vitality today in a critical, multidisciplinary vein. Their intervention comes at a particularly sensitive juncture in the history of Dante’s global reception and cultural reuse. Dante today is as alive as ever. A cultural icon no less than a cultural product, Dante’s imaginative universe enjoys a pervasive presence in popular culture. The multiformity of approaches represented in the collection matches the variety of the material that is analyzed. The volume documents Dante’s presence in genres as different as graphic novels and theater productions, children’s literature, advertisements and sci-fi narratives, rock and rap music, video- and boardgames, satirical vignettes and political speeches, school curricula and prison-teaching initiatives. Each chapter combines a focused attention to the specificity of the body of evidence it treats with best analytical practices. The volume invites collective reflection on the many different rules of engagement with Dante’s text.

Human Insufficiency argues that early modern writers depict the human political subject as physically vulnerable in order to naturalize slavery. Representations of Man as a weak creature—“poor” and “bare” in King Lear’s words—strategically portrayed English bodies as needing care from people who were imagined to be less fragile. Drawing on Aristotle’s depictions of the natural master and the natural slave in the Politics, English writers distinguished the fully human political subject from the sub-human Slave who would care for his feeble body. This justification of a nascent slaving economy reinvents the violence of enslaving Afro-diasporic peoples as a natural system of care. Human Insufficiency’s most important contribution to early modern critical race studies is expanding the scope of the human as a racialized category by demonstrating how depictions of Man as a vulnerable species were part of a discourse racializing slavery.

This book is about the multiple loves of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained: sanctioned loves and outlawed loves, sincere loves and false loves, Christian loves, classical loves, humanist loves, and love as emotion. In showing how these loves motivate the most significant actions of the Paradise epics, it reveals Milton to have made creative use of the tensions between philosophical ideals, social conventions, and the rather messier ways in which love emerges in practice. Love, so central to Milton’s view of Edenic joy and obedience to God, unsettles earthly and heavenly communities and is the origin of Miltonic transgression. Milton’s Loves sheds new light on some of the most prominent concerns of Milton scholarship, including why Milton’s God is so difficult for readers to connect to, Satan’s apparent heroism, Milton’s radical theology, and the nature of Milton’s muse. It is a book that will appeal to students and scholars of Milton and early modern studies more broadly and is structured in a way that will aid easy reference.

Paradise Lost and the Making of English Literary Criticism identifies the early reception of Paradise Lost as a site of contest over the place of literature in political and religious controversy. Milton’s earliest readers and critics (Dryden, Addison, Dennis, Hume, and Bentley) confronted a poem and author at odds with prevailing culture and the revanchist conservatism of the restored monarchy. Grappling with the epic required navigating Milton’s reputation as a “fanatick” who had called in print for Charles I’s execution, inveighed openly against monarchy on the eve of Charles II’s return, and held heretical views on the trinity, baptism, and divorce. Harper argues that foundational figures in English literary criticism rose to this challenge by innovating new ways of reading: producing creative (and subversive) rewritings of Paradise Lost, articulating new theories of the sublime, explaining the poem in the first substantial body of annotations for an English vernacular text, and by pioneering early forms of textual criticism and editing.

Often cited but rarely studied in their own right, family directories help us reconsider how ancestry and genealogy became objects of widespread commercialization in the 18th century. Employed by contemporaries as reference tools to navigate society, they can be used by historians to explore attitudes towards social status and political events.