Renaissance Papers 2012

Yearly volume of the best essays submitted to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference, focusing on sexuality in Elizabethan poetry, Renaissance drama and its links to the wider culture, and on seventeenth-century literature. Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The 2012 volume opens with two essays on sexuality in Elizabethan narrative poetry: on homoeroticism in Spenser's Faerie Queene and on Shakespeare's "swerve" into Lucretian imagery in Venus and Adonis. The volume then turns to Renaissance drama and its links to the wider culture: the commodification of spirit in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare's evocation of the Acts of the Apostles in The Comedy of Errors, "summoning" in Hamlet and King Lear, discourses of procreation and generation in Antony and Cleopatra, trade and gender in John Webster's Devil's Law-Case, and an examination of street scenes in Romeo and Juliet in relation to Paul's Cross Churchyard, the hub of the London bookselling market in the early modern period. The volume closes with essays on seventeenth-century literature and literary culture: on the "puritan logic" of the elder Andrew Marvell in his famous son's poem "To His Coy Mistress," on the "sociable lexicography" of a Royalist polymath attempting to reconcile with the English Commonwealth, and on the underestimated roles of Urania in Milton's Paradise Lost. Contributors: David Ainsworth, Thomas W. Dabbs, Sonya Freeman Loftis, Russell Hugh McConnell, Robert L. Reid, Amrita Sen, Susan C. Staub, Emily Stockard, Nathan Stogdill, Christina A. Taormina, Emma Annette Wilson. Andrew Shifflett and Edward Gieskes are Associate Professors of English at the University of South Carolina, Columbia.

In 1345, when Petrarch recovered a lost collection of letters from Cicero to his best friend Atticus, he discovered an intimate Cicero, a man very different from either the well-known orator of the Roman forum or the measured spokesman for the ancient schools of philosophy. It was Petrarch’s encounter with this previously unknown Cicero and his letters that Kathy Eden argues fundamentally changed the way Europeans from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries were expected to read and write. The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy explores the way ancient epistolary theory and practice were understood and imitated in the European Renaissance.Eden draws chiefly upon Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca—but also upon Plato, Demetrius, Quintilian, and many others—to show how the classical genre of the “familiar” letter emerged centuries later in the intimate styles of Petrarch, Erasmus, and Montaigne. Along the way, she reveals how the complex concept of intimacy in the Renaissance—leveraging the legal, affective, and stylistic dimensions of its prehistory in antiquity—pervades the literary production and reception of the period and sets the course for much that is modern in the literature of subsequent centuries. Eden’s important study will interest students and scholars in a number of areas, including classical, Renaissance, and early modern studies; comparative literature; and the history of reading, rhetoric, and writing.

The portrayal of princes plays a central role in the historical literature of the European Renaissance. The sixteen contributions collected in this volume examine such portrayals in a broad variety of historiographical, biographical, and poetic texts. It emerges clearly that historical portrayals were not essentially bound by generic constraints but instead took the form of res gestae or historiae, discrete or collective biographies, panegyric, mirrors for princes, epic poetry, orations, even commonplace books – whatever the occasion called for. Beyond questions of genre, the chapters focus on narrative strategies and the transformation of ancient, medieval, and contemporary authors, as well as on the influence of political, cultural, intellectual, and social contexts. Four broad thematic foci inform the structure of this book: the virtues ascribed to the prince, the cultural and political pretensions inscribed in literary portraits, the historical and literary models on which these portraits were based, and the method that underlay them. The volume is rounded out by a critical summary that considers the portrayal of princes in humanist historiogrpahy from the point of view of transformation theory.

Collection of the best scholarly essays from the 2020 Southeastern Renaissance Conference plus essays submitted directly to the journal. Topics run from the epic to influence studies to the perennial problem of love and beyond. Renaissance Papers 2020 features essays from the conference held virtually at Mercer University, as well as essays submitted directly to the journal. The volume opens with an essay that discusses the "ultimate story," the epic, and argues, pointing to the Henriad and The Faerie Queen, that some of the most ambitious remain unfinished; an essay on "just war" and Henry V follows, suggesting why such epic inconclusion may not be such a bad thing. A trio of influence studies investigate post-Marian virginity, Miltonic environmentalism, and cross-dressing knights. Three essays then interrogate the perennial problem of love: in popular ballads, in Hero and Leander, and in The Rape of Lucrece. An essay argues counterintuitively for Amelia Lanyer and Margaret Cavendish as exemplars of the Cavalier Ideal of the Bonum Vitae; it is followed by an equally provocative reconsideration of the role of Claudio D'Arezzo's rhetorical works for Sicilian national identity. The last essay analyzes the formal signatures of three sixteenth-century queens and how they sought to represent themselves on the public stage.