This thesis explores the affective and professional relationships that sustained the intelligence network of Anthony Bacon (1558-1601), a gentleman-traveller and spymaster for the earl of Essex. Through a series of interventions in the extensive Bacon papers in Lambeth Palace Library, I present four manuscript-based case studies that cast light on a host of relationship-paradigms particular to early modern English culture that are today poorly understood. Chapter 1 focuses on Anthony Bacon’s relationship with the Puritan Nicholas Faunt, and argues for a new understanding of the language of ardent affection between men that acknowledges the influence on such language of Reformed theology. Chapter 2 explores the correspondence of Bacon with Anthony Standen, an imprisoned Catholic spy, and suggests that the early modern prison may have been a facilitating institution in the creation of instrumental friendship between men. Chapter 3 examines the Inns of Court. I argue that the Inns’ concern for the values of friendship was reflected in the widespread political patronage system that operated out of the four societies, a system that was recognised and manipulated by powerful men. In Chapter 4 I explore a context in which the influence of friendship networks was deleterious: the unstable and unhappy political secretariat of the earl of Essex. I argue that the earl’s outmoded concept of ardent service was as damaging to his own household as it was to his relationship with the queen. Taken as a whole, this thesis argues for a new awareness of the place of feeling and the role of friendship in our understanding of relationships between men in the sixteenth century.

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In the burgh of Aberdeen in northeast Scotland, the realm's Reformation of 1559-1560 and the subsequent alteration of the religious landscape were unwelcome developments. Although national authorities required reform, the burgh's powerful governing local oligarchy, mainly comprised of wealthy Catholic burgesses, dictated the speed and shape of conformity to the new religion. Existing scholarship on Aberdeen in the 1560s has concentrated on the ways in which Aberdeen's leaders responded to the Reformation rather than the reasons behind those responses. Thus, the purpose of this thesis is to further the understanding of the implementation and interpretation of the Reformation and Reformed Protestantism in Aberdeen from c. 1560 to 1568. Aberdeen's town council records from 1559 to 1568 and kirk session legislation from 1562-1563 and 1568 are the foundational primary sources for this study. Close textual analysis makes visible the many layers of meaning contained within these sources and unearths the common threads that run throughout. Additional primary sources, such Confession of Faith, Book of Discipline, and relevant entries from the records of St Andrews' kirk session, serve to place Aberdeen in the larger national context and, in many aspects, highlight the burgh's comparative religious conservatism. Chapter One of this thesis provides an overview of the national political and religious history from the early 1540s to the early 1570s. Chapter Two focuses on Aberdeen's response to the Reformation Crisis of 1559-1560 and the subsequent implementation of reform from 1560 to 1568 as administered by the burgh's civic authorities. Finally, Chapter Three explores and explains the interpretation of the Reformation and Reformed Protestantism by the town council and the kirk session. This thesis concludes that the town council of Aberdeen deftly maneuvered through the twists and turns of the Reformation and its immediate aftermath and was successful not only in retaining relative local autonomy, but also in restricting the pace and determining the character of reform. Furthermore, the burgh's kirk session sought common ground between Catholicism and Reformed Protestantism in doctrine and discipline and was able to distract attention from matters of religious belief and practice by concentrating on the regulation of moral behavior.

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This thesis investigates early sixteenth-century motet settings of texts taken from the Song of Songs. By way of contextualization, I will explore the Christian history of Song of Songs exegesis from the third century to the twelfth. I will also consider generic properties of the renaissance motet---contemporary definitions of the genre, performance context, types of texts used, and repertory dissemination---and make a case that both the Song of Songs and the motet occupy a sort of "intermediate" position between the secular and the sacred world, participating in both the earthly and the spiritual. / Several motets---Tota pulchra es by Ludwig Senfl, Tota pulchra es by Nicolaus Craen, Nigra sum sed formosa by Johannis Lheritier, and the anonymous Vulnerasti cor meum from Petrucci's Motetti de la Corona I print---will be analyzed through the lens of the historical Christian exegesis and generic considerations of the motet. I interpret diverse musical parameters---among them, texture, quotation of pre-existent material, motivic structuring, cadential manipulation, mode and modal commixture---as some of the ways in which the composers responded to their Song of Songs texts.

This thesis addresses a significant, though largely unexplored, part of the Marian Counter-Reformation. Queen Mary and her ministers expected the University of Oxford's contribution to the success of their plans for the English Church to be decisive. From her letter to the University in August 1553, only weeks after her accession, in which she announced her intention of laying the foundations of her ecclesiastical policy in Oxford, the academy underwent a transformation. After decades of trauma which had left the University poor, empty and (literally, in some parts) crumbling, Mary's reign gave the University a purpose, something which had been difficult to discern since the Dissolution of the Monasteries had deprived it of a large proportion of its students and lecturers. Mary and, after November 1554, Reginald Cardinal Pole undertook an extensive programme designed to reform and restore the University, a programme which was willingly and tirelessly taken up by those sympathetic to it in the University. This had its theological, ecclesiastical, liturgical and architectural elements, each of which will be considered in this thesis. Its central claim is not just that the existing picture of Mary Tudor's Church is incomplete without the inclusion within it of the restoration of Catholicism in Oxford, but that it is in Oxford, and perhaps only there, that all the different elements of her religious policy can be seen for what they are: a consistent whole, conceived and executed with one purpose: the reintegration of the English Church into the universal Catholic body.

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published_or_final_version / Music / Master / Master of Philosophy

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This thesis examines how the fortunes of poets and the status of poetry were changing at the end of the sixteenth century in Portugal. Centring on the long-neglected verse epistles in Diogo Bernardes's 'O Lima' (1596), I re-evaluate our sense of what it meant to be a poet when writing verse was not a sure-fire way to earn a living and when lyric poetry was regularly lampooned as trifling and immoral. Bernardes's surprisingly forthright cartas, I argue, offer new insights into the protagonists and procedures of literary patronage in Portugal. I use a combination of close readings and sociological methods to illuminate the practical strategies and rhetorical brinkmanship that Bernardes deployed in his quest for favour and highlight the frustrations and moral dilemmas of seeking the support of powerful, but fickle, patrons. Bernardes was a particularly remarkable writer for having printed his verse during his lifetime, and so I also trace how lyric verse was slowly legitimated as a cultural product during the sixteenth century and offer a case study of how an author's reputation was forged in the collaborative enterprise of print, then re-formed by the work of readers, thereby shedding light on the complex mechanisms of early modern canon formation. Paradoxically, I demonstrate that unequivocal praise of a writer's work can harm, rather than help, their chances of remaining in the canon. Although Bernardes's work is an echo chamber for these deep reverberations from the broader history of literature, this thesis also listens closely to Bernardes's distinctive poetic voice and allows it to speak out. Playful, candid, mercurial, it is a poetic voice that here seeks a wider audience.