acase@tulane.edu / 1 / Bradley J. Mollmann

This study sets John Milton’s Paradise Lost in dialogue with Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder, concentrating on each poem’s portrayal of the Christian redemption narrative as interpreted through typology. Specifically, I focus on the absence of a positive feminine type in Books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost and relocate it in Order and Disorder in the characters, Sarah and Rebecca. In regard to typology, Milton adheres to a traditional typology steeped in patriarchy, which devalues women’s participation, whereas Hutchinson recognizes both paternal and maternal types. Furthermore, Hutchinson views Sarah and Rebecca as vital to the redemption narrative and shapes them as types for Mary, therefore making an original contribution to typology. This study concludes with a reading of Hutchinson’s use of typology through twentieth-century contemporary feminist theology and suggests that Hutchinson’s role as theologian challenges that of Milton’s.

This thesis traces how the drinking house was used by writers of early modern English drama to try to make sense of the period’s culture of exchange. Organised around an examination of five plays, the project focuses on the way in which playwrights engaged with and examined notions of credit, circulation, and the commercialisation of hospitality. By offering close readings through the lens of the drinking house, I make fresh interpretations of the plays. Moreover, I seek to demonstrate the wider literary tradition dealing with this space that, to some extent, has been neglected. With this in mind, I also draw on other popular texts from the period, such as ballads, jest books and rogue pamphlets, which establish certain conventions and narratives that emerge in the drama. In Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV, the reckoning – or tavern bill – is used as an emblem through which Hal negotiates his moral and economic redemption, in the face of Falstaff’s threat to the wider network of credit established in the tavern space. Dekker and Webster’s Westward Ho also stages credit as both a productive and unpredictable force. In the context of its Brentford location, the drinking house in that play is presented as a transformative space that allows for the possibilities of an alternative economic model. Irrepressible forces of commercialism define the Light Heart in Jonson’s The New Inn; forces that effect character transformations and champion a fluid economy in contrast with landed-estate living. In Brome’s The Demoiselle, these conventions are upended, and the commercialism of the New Ordinary is dispensed with in favour of a more settled economy. The thesis testifies to the investment writers made in the drinking house as a dramatic space and as a space to be dramatised, a space through which the possibilities and energies of exchange were staged.

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In early modern Europe, syphilis tormented individuals regardless of social standing. The various stages of infection rendered individuals with visible chancres or “pocky” marks throughout their body. The tertiary stage signaled the spreading of the disease from the infected parts into the brain and cardiovascular system, eventually leading to dementia and a painful death. Beginning with the initial medical responses to venereal disease in the sixteenth century and throughout the early modern period, medical practitioners attempted to identify the cause of syphilis. During the seventeenth century, English practitioners maintained that women were primarily responsible for both the creation and transmission of syphilis. In England, venereal disease became the physical manifestation of illicit sexual behavior and therefore women with syphilis demonstrated their sexual immorality. Contrastingly, French medical practitioners refrained from placing blame on women for venereal infection. The historiography of early modern discourse on venereal disease fails to account for this discrepancy between English and French perceptions of syphilis in the seventeenth century. This thesis seeks to fill the gap in this historiography and suggest why French practitioners abstained from singling out women as the primary source of venereal infection by suggesting the importance that cultural influences and religious practices had toward shaping medical perceptions. The cultural impact of the querelle des femmes and Catholic practices in France plausibly influenced the better portrayal of women within the medical treatises of seventeenth-century France when compared to Protestant England.

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This thesis investigates the twenty-six manuscripts which survive in the hand of the scribe Ralph Crane (1565?-1632?), and the manuscript culture in which he wrote and circulated these copies. It introduces six previously unknown Crane manuscripts, and fully evaluates Crane's scribal work as a whole for the first time. Chapter One considers the place of manuscript copies in early modern England. It introduces Crane as one of the figures responsible for the production of these copies, and details what is known of his life and career. Chapter Two situates Crane's work alongside that of other scribes, using the manuscript circulation of Sir Henry Mainwaring's early 1620s naval dictionary 'Parts and Things belonging to a Ship' as a case-study. Chapter Three looks at Crane's eight dramatic manuscripts, and argues that the presentational habits for which Crane is known were consciously adopted in order to turn dramatic texts into private, literary, presentation manuscripts. Chapter Four introduces two new Crane manuscripts, both of which contain early copies of Francis Bacon's correspondence. It considers how these Bacon manuscripts fit into the rest of Crane's scribal corpus, and how they capture an early moment in the construction of the statesman's literary legacy. Chapter Five examines Crane's manuscript poetry collections, and the other scribal circles in which these poems can be found. It finds that professional scribes, though operating separately, employed similar strategies. Finally, this thesis concludes by examining how all these copies can help to illuminate a recently discovered manuscript that otherwise gives little away. Crane's manuscripts show that he was an active textual agent: his activity arose from a responsive engagement with his texts, a consideration of their use, and a desire to produce professional and valuable volumes. His manuscripts are important witnesses to the role of the professional scribe and the manuscript circulation of literature in early modern England.

The texts and records of the household performances of early modern women collected and examined in this thesis, which together have not yet been the subject of any extended scholarly work, reveal that women performed in the household far more often and in many more ways than is yet acknowledged in scholarship. These texts and records also show that the household could be an amenable performance space for early modern women, both amateur and professional, aristocratic and not. This reconceptualization of the place of women’s performances in the household, I argue, necessitates an adjustment of received ideas of the ethical and moral status of those performances as well as a reevaluation of the household itself. I reassess the equation between theatrical performance and immorality and interrogate the “inheren[t] subversive[ness]” that one critic argues is found in all women’s household plays. While I maintain that women’s household performances could have multiple significations, this thesis focuses on performances that permitted women to shape their own reputations positively in household space, where women were agents influencing domestic life through their theatre. Chapter 1, the Introduction, outlines the critical field, positions women within the performance tradition of the household, and discusses the status of their performances, centering on the relationship between theatrical performance, agency, and feminine virtue. Chapter 2 focuses on royal progress entertainment, discussing the performances of domestic virtue of Queen Elizabeth’s female hosts which not only had the capacity to be received as virtuous, but worked to promote familial and class legitimacy. Chapter 3 talks about the banquets created and served by women, identifying those banquets as a form of theatre, and linking women’s creativity with their embodiment of domestic ideals through the performance of hospitality. Chapter 4 discusses touring women performers as accepted, acknowledged, and skillful theatre professionals who were licenced by the state to perform and who were permitted to perform in households and towns across England. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2007-09-27 15:08:00.304

In the vestry of the cathedral church of Santa Maria in Toledo hangs a large painting by El Greco entitled El Espolio, the ‘Disrobing of Christ’. Executed shortly after his arrival in Spain the painting marks a major stylistic departure from the artist’s earlier work and would command attention on that basis alone. The subject, while iconographically obscure, is, at another remove, utterly familiar as a Passion scene tied to a well known iconographical canon. Compositionally, the Christ figure predominates but the ‘legionnaire’ occupies a contrasting and almost equivalent space in his carapace of steel. These figures beg for further elaboration I will argue that this painting can be read as a nexus between a reformed liturgy and a post-Tridentine programme of Church renewal in Spain allied to a monarchical programme of nación under Philip II (1527-98) that was essentially one and the same. The salient questions needing a response are these: How, in a vestry, can we expect such a subject to have much impact beyond the very limited audience it was designed for? This is the crux of the matter in many ways. What in the painting suggests more than the straightforward analysis of the subject matter? What in the times suggests another reading of this great work of art? The pursuit of the answers to these questions constitutes the driving force behind this investigation. Biography, the intellectual and artistic formation of the artist, are positioned with reference to the intellectual ferment of the period, the religious upheaval iii in Christendom, the advances in the understanding of the nation state. More specifically, the altered relationship between the monarchy and the church in Spain, following the Council of Trent (1545-63)will be shown to have a reflection in El Espolio. El Greco’s work has mostly been treated as the product of a painter of the spirit, of religiosity, even of mysticism. El Espolio has been interpreted here within a broader frame of reference and the argument suggests our understanding of El Greco’s oeuvre has been somewhat narrow. / Thesis (Master, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-15 16:13:04.047