This is a study ofWimbome Minster, one of 700 or so small market towns that existed in the early modern period. Urban historians have tended to concentrate on the larger towns and cities, due partly to the lack of archive material. The Wimborne sources allow for a number of themes to be discussed. The study of demography highlights the growth in the urban population between the 1640s and 1670s, whilst the rural population stagnated. In the rural area it was a period of change with enclosure, the development of new crops and the conversion of copyhold to leasehold tenure. The analysis of the urban economy shows that Wimborne had a relatively sophisticated occupational structure. It was also developing as a cultural centre. The administrative structure of a non-corporate town can be investigated, identifying a three-tier hierarchy dominated by kinship and occupational networks. There have been very few attempts to analyse law and order issues of a community 'in the round'; issues discussed are punishment, court jurisdiction, the perceptions of crime and the hierarchy's attitude to morality. The turbulent nature of seventeenth-century politics and religion is apparent in towns both large and small. The hostility between the Arminian and Puritan factions within the established church in the 1620s and 1630s, reactions to the Commonwealth and Restoration, and the persecution of the recusant and Protestant nonconformist communities are analysed to reveal a community in conflict with itself The research concludes by examining the urban/rural interface. It highlights the crucial role that the rural hinterland played in supplying food to the growing urban centre. It discusses the relationship between the rural and urban through occupational groups. Small towns such as Wimbome contained complex societal networks, through kinship, religion, politics and occupations. By studying these inter-relational networks a more complete and valid picture of these communities can be seen.

This study analyzes sex ratios garnered from one hundred and one years of baptismal records from the south-western French town of Villeneuve-sur-Lot, between 1610 and 1711. It is the continuation of a larger project attempting to divine infanticide among married couples in early modern Western Europe. By comparing observed sex ratios (OSRs) in baptisms with the Universal Sex Ratio at Birth (USRB) established by Visaria (1967) it has been suggested a number of times that significant and patterned deviations represent sex-selective infanticide. In the case of Villeneuve, swift shifts between preponderances of girl children and boy children during crises suggest compensatory practice, purposefully engaged in to even out potentially imbalanced sex ratios among adults later. In this way it may be suggested that the preference for boys or girls in Villeneuve over time was balanced, based on circumstance, rather than some inherent perceived value of boys over girls.

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This thesis examines the interrelation of community, the individual and God in the work of the seventeenth-century poet and priest George Herbert. Through a close analysis of poems selected from the first two sections of Herbert’s book, The Temple, I explore the emphasis Herbert places on how various communities and individuals help one another to advance their relationship with God. Community is portrayed within The Temple as a guiding force for the individuals that exist within it, while at the same time various revered individuals act within Herbert’s poetry to lead the entire Christian community to God. Human community is additionally explored in Herbert’s poetry as an important construct in the eyes of God, not only because it was placed by Him to guide the more wayward members of humanity towards Him, but because of the desire He feels to be loved by the community He has created.

This thesis examines the interrelation of community, the individual and God in the work of the seventeenth-century poet and priest George Herbert. Through a close analysis of poems selected from the first two sections of Herbert’s book, The Temple, I explore the emphasis Herbert places on how various communities and individuals help one another to advance their relationship with God. Community is portrayed within The Temple as a guiding force for the individuals that exist within it, while at the same time various revered individuals act within Herbert’s poetry to lead the entire Christian community to God. Human community is additionally explored in Herbert’s poetry as an important construct in the eyes of God, not only because it was placed by Him to guide the more wayward members of humanity towards Him, but because of the desire He feels to be loved by the community He has created.

No description available.

Japan’s early modern period (1568-1868) achieved a break from the violent political and social upheaval of the preceding Warring States period (1467-1568). The return to a stable and more centralized rule was made possible by the development and implementation of an emerging politico-religious trend, in which powerful leaders were posthumously apotheosized and worshiped as tutelary deities. Ieyasu, the first of the Tokugawa shoguns, was deified and venerated at the Tōshōgū Shrine in Nikkō, and the politico-religious movement that was propagated by Ieyasu’s descendants became a central tool for the government’s legitimacy. Because Ieyasu’s cult was the only source of ideological legitimacy that was exclusive to the Tokugawa, the sources of Tokugawa success can be found by examining the development of the Nikkō shrine and its accompanying religious movement.

This dissertation seeks to articulate how early modern texts formalize their affective qualities in instances of ambiguity. Positioned within the recent turn away from humoral theories of the passions and toward the rhetorical underpinnings of affect in early modern criticism, my project offers an interpretive strategy that privileges the perspective of the text by attending to the vulnerabilities of first-person perspectives in ambiguous rhetorical structures and figures. I argue that these forms signal more than sites of critical debate encoded in the text, as Shoshanna Feldman has suggested; they also privilege textual perspective and reveal affect to be a feature of form. I argue that textual ambivalence may be approached through the logic of catachresis in order to examine how these instances may be read in ways that maintain the strangeness of their didactic and disruptive capability. Reorienting how one approaches ambiguity, I suggest, exposes the potential of often ignored textual elements and suggests that early modern literature models an interpretive agenda dependent upon vulnerable perspectives. Reconceiving the interpretive strategies solicited by each text, I argue that early modern literature embraces the benefits of individual and collective vulnerability. I examine how Marlowe’s Edward II disrupts the binary structure of the king’s two bodies in order to turn an accusation of weakness against authority itself. I turn to Donne’s poetry and prose to argue that it models a hospitable interpretive method that uses form to manage ambiguity from the perspectives of his textual voices while orienting readers to welcome the strangeness of his contradictions. I then pursue an analysis of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I that reorients Falstaff’s function in the play as its unlikely focal perspective, a position that stages a resistance to the play’s power structures. Finally, I briefly consider how my analysis bears on familial and rhetorical conventions in Shakespeare’s Tempest and Webster’s Duchess of Malfi. Attending to the formal practices that construct literary affect, this project reconsiders the ways in which early modern English literature navigates the intersections of vulnerability that articulate a text’s orientation to the cultural networks in which it was produced.

abstract: This dissertation explores the relationship between motherhood and power in seventeenth-century England. While historians have traditionally researched the role of mothers within the family unit, this study explores the more public and discursive roles of motherhood. It argues that the various threads of discourse surrounding maternity betray a common desire to circumscribe and condemn maternal authority, as this authority was threatening to masculinity and patriarchal rule. It finds that maternity was frequently cited as harmful and dangerous; household conduct books condemned the passionate and irrational nature of maternal love and its deleterious effects upon both mother and child. Furthermore, various images of ‘unnatural motherhood’ reveal larger concerns over social disorder. Sensationalistic infanticide and monstrous birth stories in cheap print display contemporary fears of lascivious, scolding, and unregulated women who were subversive to patriarchal authority and thus threatened the social status quo. The female reproductive body similarly threatened masculinity; an analysis of midwifery manuals show that contemporary authors had to reconcile women’s reproductive power with what they believed to be an inferior corporeal body. This study ends with a discussion of the representation of mothers in published funeral sermons as these mothers were textually crafted to serve as examples of ‘good mothering,’ offering a striking comparison to the ‘unnatural mothers’ presented in other sources. Motherhood in seventeenth-century England, then, involved a great deal more than the relationship between mother and child. It was a cultural site in which power was contested, and a site in which authors expressed anxiety over the irrational female mind and the unregulated, sexual female body. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation History 2015

The relationship between form and content in the religious verse of the metaphysical poets is of great importance in tracing the development of a tradition which includes such dissimilar poets as Donne and Traherne. The nature of the personal religious experience, as expressed in the religious poetry of the first half of the seventeenth century, undergoes significant change. This change is most apparent in the verse of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne, and may be described basically in terms of the time when individual soul and God are united. For Donne this union is unattainable in the present and is to be found only after death, as the Divine Poems and the Anniversaries demonstrate; in the poems of Traherne, however, it is experienced at the moment of birth and becomes a continuing, present reality. As we trace in the work of the four poets the gradual bringing into this world of the soul's union with God, we discover also a process in which the barriers of the self are broken down. Individual personality becomes increasingly identified with the Divine Personality, and finally nothing intervenes between present reality and the long-sought vision. This vision, symbolized in Donne's Anniversaries by the liberation after death of the soul of Elizabeth Drury, is progressively interiorized in the verse of the later poets, and in Traherne's lyrics finds a new embodiment in the living experience of the poet. Such a change can be traced in the forms the poets use. We may find not only in the inner structure of line and stanza, but also in the total visual arrangement and organizing principle of a poem or group of poems, formal equivalents to the kind of vision expressed. The Anniversaries and Divine Poems of Donne and the poems in Herbert's The Temple are notable for the complexity of their controlling figures and the intricacy of their verbal structure. In Vaughan's Silex Scintillans and in the poems of Traherne, however, we find simpler and more flexible organizing principles and a corresponding decline in the use of complex symbols and conceits„ In general, the formal and structural changes which occur between Donne and Traherne may best be seen as a progressive simplifying and paring down -- a removal, in the verse itself, of all that might stand between individual soul and God. But while the nature of the actual religious experience changes in the four poets, and with it the inner structures and outer forms of their verse, there remains one single, informing vision of God. God is encountered and described in different ways, but His essential nature is recognized as changeless and unconditioned. In the same way we must examine the different formal principles within a larger context. In all four poets the concept of the poem as a celebration of and a sacrifice to God remains constant. In all four poets the act of poetic creation itself is analogous to the greater creative Act of God; the poems themselves are individual acts of praise which celebrate as they embody the multiplicity-in-unity of the Creation. Within this context a study of the best and most characteristic verse of these poets shows that there is nothing accidental or unplanned in the methods of organization each used to convey his religious experience. The different poetic forms we encounter, many of them unique, are our first and most compelling guide to the spiritual core of the poetry; they are the means by which we recognize not only the uniqueness of the individual experience, but also its place in the larger framework of universal praise. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate