This dissertation argues for the reappraisal of Jacobean boy actors by acknowledging their status as youths. Focussing on the repertory of The Children of the Queen’s Revels and using the acting and playwriting career of Nathan Field as an extensive case-study, it argues, via an investigation into cultural and theatrical bodily excess, that the theatre was a profoundly significant space in which youth culture was shaped and problematised. In defining youth culture as a space for the assertion of an identity that is inherently performative, the theatre stages young men’s social lives to reflect the performativity of masculinity in early modern culture. Chapters One to Three focus on the body of Nathan Field by investigating the roles that he performed in the theatre to claim that the staging of bodily excess amounted to an effort to inculcate correct paths of masculinity. Chapters Four and Five offer detailed analysis of the plays written by Nathan Field, finding that Field was keen to champion positive aspects of youth culture and identity by reforming bodily excess on stage. Chapter One asserts that George Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois (1603) identifies the protagonist’s excessive violence as a failure to adhere to humanist teachings; a sign that youth culture is dependent upon the lessons learnt in school, whereas Chapter Two finds that Eastward Ho (1605) condemns the monstrous youthful drunken body before encouraging the audience to value apprenticeship as a positive site of youth identity. Chapter Three argues that John Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess (1607) reveals a range of polluted young bodies to demonstrate the importance of moderating the humoral fluctuations of youth before Chapter Four finds Field to be a conservative dramatist who ridicules excess with explicit didactic intentions in his Woman is a Weathercock (1610) and Amends for Ladies (1611). Finally Chapter Five locates aspects of excessive service in Field and Fletcher’s The Honest Man’s Fortune (1613) to problematise aspects of youth culture, friendship and eroticism. The dissertation concludes with a retrospective appraisal of Field’s multifarious identities that championed youth culture, morality and celebrity.

This thesis examines interest in the visual arts by patrons of Scottish descent, active in France, c.1445 to c.1545: the Monypenny family, Bérault and Robert Stuart d'Aubigny, and John Stuart, Duke of Albany. During this period the Auld Alliance played a key role in relations between Scotland and France, and large numbers of Scots travelled to France as mercenaries, scholars, and diplomats. Many relocated to France permanently and were granted letters of naturalisation. This thesis argues that an examination of the visual arts commissioned by this group of patrons enhances our understanding of the integration of Scots into French society at this time. It explores how the visual arts reflected, and were used to advance their careers, social standing, and spheres of influence, broaching issues of identity and power relations. The investigation explores how artistic patronage was a vital method by which a patron could express his social identity and aspirations. Examining patronage enables the historian to acquire a greater understanding of the patron's priorities and ambitions, and allows the art historian to situate works of art in a historical framework, thus gaining a clearer understanding of their meanings. This research is important as it covers a large corpus of works that, although linked by the unusual circumstances of their patrons, have not previously been studied together. As the artistic patronage of Scots in France during this period has hitherto not been examined, it cannot be assumed that the same priorities and influences that shaped French patrons during this period also shaped the patronage examined in this study. This thesis demonstrates that in many instances the Scottish heritage of these patrons was instrumental in shaping their demands, and thus the finished work of art. The study of the patronage of the visual arts in France has become a vibrant area of research. Yet the patronage of non-native communities, such as Scots in France, remains largely unstudied. This thesis shows that there is a rich diversity of visual material, both extant and documented, which may be associated with these Scots. Furthermore, it demonstrates how examining a patrons career may provide interesting insights into their works of art; and it shows how discovering biographical details about the patrons permits a more complete reconstruction of the circumstances in which works of art were made, displayed, and understood. Whilst comparatively little visual material survives in Scotland from this period, an examination of the visual arts commissioned by Scots in France tells us a great deal about Scots' relationships to the arts at this time, and their use of works of art as a means of 'self fashioning'. This research has uncovered exciting new information regarding all patrons investigated. Furthermore, it has identified Bremond Domat, a previously unrecognised artist working for John Stuart, Duke of Albany, to whom a small, but important, body of work may unambiguously be attributed.

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This ethnographic case study examines O. Perry Walker, a New Orleans high school the state of Louisiana had previously labeled "failing," during its closure from August 29, 2005 until December 14, 2005, due to the evacuation of New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina. This unprecedented evacuation of a major city closed the school, making its reopening the battleground for diverse actors seeking to shape the future of the school and the school system. This research includes interviews with the stakeholders who worked to control, reopen and reform this urban school: teachers, school administrators, elected officials, the California National Guard and staff with a private "turnaround" company, Alvarez and Marsal. It concerns the management of schools facing multiple disasters. The conversion of Walker from a traditional public school to a charter school provides insights into so-called urban school reforms, including ownership, privatization and control of public schools for numerous contentious stakeholders.

My doctorate is a study of the manuscript transmission of Cicero’s Epistulae ad Atticum: a twenty-book corpus comprising one book Ad M. Brutum, three books Ad Quintum fratrem, sixteen books Ad Atticum and a pseudo-Ciceronian Epistula ad Octauianum. I have made a complete reinspection and partial recollation of the eighty-odd fully extant manuscripts, and reconstructed a new stemma codicum that may be used for both historical and editorial purposes. My thesis consists of four chapters, following the transmission of the corpus of Ad Atticum from the Middle Ages down to the Renaissance and the beginning of printing. In Chapter 1 I discuss the top of the stemma: Petrarch’s (1304–74) rediscovery of these letters in the Chapter Library of Verona in 1345, and the beginning of their dissemination in fifteenth-century Italy, thanks to the Florentine Chancellor Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) and two humanists of his circle: Niccolò Niccoli (1364–1437) and Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370–1444). Editors of Cicero’s letters believe that the top of the stemma is bipartite, and that bipartition reflects separate strands of mediaeval transmission: I argue against their reconstruction and put forward a new pluripartite stemma. In Chapter 1 I also consider manuscripts independent of the Verona archetype: these witnesses survive only in tiny fragments and scattered readings cited by sixteenth-century critics. In Chapter 2 I study the northern Italian progeny of the Veronese archetype: here too I have significantly improved on the editors’ work, thanks to collation of a larger number of independent manuscripts and a more articulated understanding of the intricate dynamics of contamination affecting this branch. In Chapters 3 and 4 I investigate the Florentine transmission of the corpus of Ad Atticum. In Chapter 3 I study the closer descendants of the copy of the Verona archetype that in 1393 came from Milan to Florence at Salutati’s instigation. In Chapter 4 I focus on the thirty-odd descendants of the manuscript that in 1408 the humanist and Papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) copied for Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464). The comprehensive stemmata that I put forward in Chapters 3 and 4 are completely new, since hitherto there has been no systematic attempt to map the genealogy of Salutati’s manuscript.

Lasso was considered the greatest composer of his generation with undisputable mastery of all sixteenth-century genres. The dynamism of the late sixteenth century saw the most sophisticated compositions in the continuation of the psalm motet tradition. However, more flexible applications for the psalms in the form of meditations, vernacular translations, and paraphrases opened the door for new and diverse interpretations. This dissertation is a study of Lasso's engagement with established musical traditions and new trends in psalmody. This study unfolds in two parts. First in the discussion of the Latin psalm motet genre and then ensuing with investigation of the German Lied. In each of the genres (1) there is a focus on the definition and classification of terms and older traditions, (2) the examination of the text and the discussion of ways in which the music engages with the prose and poetic forms, and (3) the evaluation of Lasso's interpretation of psalm texts. From negligible German Lieder to expansive motet cycles, the psalms afforded endless polyphonic inspiration and the diversity of which categorically points to the shifts and development of cultural and aesthetic traditions. The use of psalms to reflect devotion and confession amplifies the Catholic Reform implemented at the Bavarian court during Lasso's lifetime. This context along with Lasso's compositional innovation provides an interesting study for the stylistic development of psalm settings in the late sixteenth century.

Since the Middle Ages, strict regulations had divided the Venetian craft guilds according to the raw materials that they used. Because of this there were few occasions in which to compete over the production of cognate objects. Altarpieces were the major exception. The design and production of an altarpiece, whether its central image was painted or carved from stone or wood, had involved multiple competencies, providing work for different artisans, and facilitating the exchange of ideas across mediums. Over the last third of the fifteenth century, however, sculpted altarpieces flourished and their designs increasingly eschewed participation from painters as polychromy became more and more limited and new classicizing tastes prevailed. While collaboration did not disappear, the dialogical nature of altarpiece production in this period was imbued with a sense of competition. The discourse on media, however, was not restricted to the realm of aesthetics and matters of business or personal pride. Reflection upon the ontologies, merits, and symbolic efficacy of their materials was also informed by these objects' privileged locations on or in proximity to the altar. Previous studies on sculpted altarpieces have focused on morphology, iconography, and patronage. My study, in contrast, examines this object category as an intermediary, in a threefold sense: altarpieces acted as facilitators, as go-betweens engendering practical interaction between professional groups; they constituted a locus of artistic exchange between mediums, and of reflection upon the ontology of the crafts of painting and sculpture; the materiality of sculpted altarpieces engaged in a reciprocal inflection of meaning with their setting, the altar. By virtue of their unique status as a shared object category, altarpieces allow us to chart the interaction between the arts of Venice. Their privileged position at a fulcrum of holy space opens their interpretation to an array of written sources of information. An examination of these sources and of this formal and thematic dialog provides a window into understanding the artistic principles that guided artists and viewers in a city that produced almost no theoretical literature directly addressing the arts until the middle of the sixteenth century.

This dissertation investigates the origin of the architectural typology of the Renaissance palace as it emerged in Florence between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries. This was a period characterized by a dramatic shift in domestic architecture, mirroring a parallel transformation of the Florentine society under the political regime of the Albizi oligarchy. This study fills a clear gap in existing scholarship, comprehensively addressing the private palatial architecture built in Florence in the sixty years before the construction of Palazzo Medici in 1446. Three palaces and their family archives have been studied for the first time: Palazzo Alessandri (built in the 1370s), Palazzo da Uzzano-Capponi (built circa 1411), and Palazzo Busini-Bardi (built before 1425). Their patrons, all pairs of brothers, used the size and urban prominence of their new residences to assess their political and social dominance on the city. They eliminated all commercial functions from their palaces and organized the space around a central courtyard with loggias, with a multiplication of dedicated rooms for the different public and private functions of the household. These palaces are representative of a period of transition in domestic architecture that inaugurated a new, successful domestic typology that was subjected to little change in—at least—the following three centuries. Built in a period of rising individuality, these private buildings, together with the ones that followed, helped set the modern concepts of the apartment and family privacy.

This dissertation investigates the introduction and development of a musical instrument, the viola da gamba (viol), in sixteenth-century France by articulating the wider cultural consequences of introducing new musical instruments from one culture to another. The research examines cultural exchange with foreign courts, the effects of patronage, social perceptions and changing attitudes during the introduction of the viol into France. Using the viol as a focal point to explore Renaissance material culture, this thesis is an interdisciplinary study into music, art, language and terminology, foreign connections and cultural interaction. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of the viol’s introduction, development and establishment into sixteenth-century France. Rare archival sources, visual media and printed books never before connected to the viol have been identified and analysed to construct a detailed framework of the social, artistic and musical culture within which the viol was used. The five chapters explore professional viol use in the royal court and regional areas, artistic representations of the viol, triumphal entries and festivals, the changing role of viol players from professional to amateur and the viol in sixteenth-century instrument making. The appendices include a catalogue of images depicting the viol in French visual media, identifying allegorical and religious associations, making foreign connections, exploring methods of artistic creation and analysing physical depictions.

This thesis explores the shifting targets of evil in English Reformation allegory during particularly turbulent social and religious changes, between 1534 and 1575, when the notion of evil was used as a polemical weapon by authors with a progressive reformist agenda. I examine how the concept of evil, as delineated by the philosophy of ‘moral absolutism', and its associated theological theories, although remained static (good and evil are defined in a diametrically opposed construct, and determined by a deity), the nature of evil (whether evil is something we all have within us or is an external force) changed from a pre-Reformation construct to a Reformation configuration, and the targets of that which was considered evil shifted thereafter. I employ a historicist and intertextual approach, where meaning does not reside in the text. Instead, meaning is produced by my own reading in relation both to each text under scruitiny and to the network of texts invoked in the reading process, which is conducted within the context of each of these texts' social, political, theological and cultural history. I draw on biographical, political, and theological accounts, alongside literary texts and analysis, focusing on five specific case studies from 1515 to 1575. Plays by John Skelton, John Bale, Nicolas Udall, Lewis Wager and prose by William Baldwin are analysed in conjunction with contemporary literary works and tracts, which include those by William Tyndale, Bernadino Ochino, John Frith, Robert Crowley, Edmund Dudley, Thomas More, John Knox and Anthony Gilby. I examine texts that have received considerable scholarly attention, with the aim of focusing on their polemical targeting of individuals, groups and institutions via allegorical evil characterisation. I argue that scholarship has neglected to engage with a crucial facet of the texts under scrutiny: one that can provide important additional insights into Reformation allegory, and the particularly fractious and contested instances of Tudor history that produced them.