This dissertation offers the first in depth examination of the government of garrisons in England between the 1560s and the 1630s, via the close examination of three case studies: the garrisons at Plymouth, Portsmouth and Berwick-upon-Tweed. The garrisons located at vulnerable locations along England’s frontier existed to help maintain the internal peace and safety of the realm. The central government, the crown and the privy council, and those who lived in these vulnerable areas agreed about the value and necessity of defence. They also agreed that defence served the larger goal of stable and orderly domestic government. They disagreed, however, over the government of garrisons. The central government and those upon whom it relied to govern in the localities thus entered into negotiations over the nature of garrison government. In these negotiations, the Elizabethan central government regularly and successfully asserted the queen’s right to appoint a garrison captain and successfully maintained him in his jurisdiction once appointed. The regime took specific, goal oriented action to maintain the stable and Protestant polity that was, in their view, established under Elizabeth I. The result was expansion of the state. This study questions, therefore, the extent to which the early modern English state expanded through an undirected process of state formation. While the garrisons under study here reveal that England underwent significant military development during this period, these garrisons still did not constitute a standing army. The Elizabethan central government still lacked the physical coercive power to implement their ambitions without recourse to negotiation. Domestic garrisons reveal, however, that state building occurred not in spite of the fact that power was negotiated, but rather because it was negotiated. The central government’s hand at the bargaining table was not as weak as is sometimes portrayed, particularly with regard to military matters. Defence of the realm was part of the royal prerogative and so actions taken concerning the government of garrisons carried considerable legitimacy. Moreover, as the font of all official authority within the state, the central government was the ultimate arbiter of jurisdictional dispute. Those who possessed official authority in early modern England feared the diminution of that authority, through actions perceived as illegitimate, in the eyes of those over whom they governed. Equally unpalatable, however, was the diminishing of one’s authority through the encroachment of the authority of another. Against this eventuality, one’s only recourse was the central government.

This thesis traces the various vievs of Horace held in the seventeenth century and examines translation and imitation in the period. The main focus is on the influence of Horace's Od.es on lyric poetry. For the period 1600-1660, four authors are discussed in detail, Ben Jonson, Herrick, Marvell and Covley. Other authors treated include Drayton, Samuel Daniel, Donne, Campion, Chapman, Wotton, Carev, Randolph, Cartvr4ght, Habington, Vaughan, Lovelace, Fanshave, Mildmay Fane, George Daniel of Besvick, Milton, Oven Felltham, Izaak Walton, Denham, Waller and Alexander Brome. In the period from 1660, authors discussed include Dryden, Rochester, Sedley, Dorset, Mulgrave, Otvay, Etherep;e, Wycherley, Oldham, Prior, Ambrose Philips, Katherine Philips, John Norris, Cotton, Lady Mary Chudleigh, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, John Ranrlet, John Tutchin, Temple and Evelyn. The introduction argues briefly that although Horace is normally associated vith the eighteenth century, in fact his Odes were more Influential in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, and points to some misconceptions about the nature of Horace's poetry that have helped to obscure this. It notes that the interest in the Odes in the period is a change from the Mediaeval and sixteenth-century approach to Horace, and points out that the study of hov a period responds to a particular poet throve light on its general character. Chapter I provides some background information. It outlines the place of Horace in the school curricula and shove that the twin emphases in the school reading of HOrace were on his morals and his style, the latter being studied vith the practical aim of imitation. School textbooks are described. An account of editions of Horace in the period follows. It is pointed out that the text of Horace was more corrupt than it is today* and argued that some of the translators of Horace used the school edition of John Bond. The twin emphases of commentary on Horace are again shown to be on his morals and his style: Parthenio's commentary is examined in some detail. Next, some ideas about Horace's life disseminated by the lives included in editions are mentioned. Finally, the influence of quotation books and emblem books is considered. It is argued that though they contained many of the poet*s favourite Horatian passages, this does not mean that writers did not read Horace directly. It is shown that they present a moral Horace and that they sometimes cause distortion through excerpting passages out of context. Chapter II deals with the volumes of translations of Horace by Thomas Drant, John Ashmore, Thomas Hawkins, Henry Rider, John Smith, 'Unknown Mase', and Richard Panshawe. A brief sketch is given of the development of translation in the century, and it is pointed out that there are some examples of the 'imitation* before Cowley. The books of translations are then examined against this background, and it is argued that Fanshawe should not be viewed as heralding the mid-century revolution in translation but as fitting into his own period. The twin interests of the translators are analysed as being content, primarily moral, and lyric style. Fanshawe is seen as of particular interest as trying to embody Horatian moral ideals in his life and as being most successful in conveying Horace's lyricism. Chapterin discusses various ways in trhich the formal aspects of Horace's Odes influenced seventeenth-century lyric. It is pointed out that this influence has been obscured because English writers do not produce pastiches but recreate Horace in modern modes and because of generic differences between the Odes and seventeenth-century lyric. Some differences in structure and style between the two are then considered, Cowley's translation of C.111.i and Carew's The Spring being used to illustrate the differences of structure. Some exceptions are noted in the poetry of Milton, Jonson, Herrick, etc. Next, the similarities and areas of influence are discussed - blends in tone, methods of making lyric personal and various poetic poses.

Today, the Flemish physician, alchemist and philosopher Jan Baptista Van Helmont (1579-1644) is mostly remembered as one of the founders of modern chemistry and medicine. However, Van Helmont saw himself rather differently: he firmly believed he had been called to articulate a ‘Christian Philosophy’ that would bring together Christian thought and natural philosophy in a harmonious synthesis. His ‘Christian Philosophy’ would be purged of the Aristotelian ‘heathenism’ he felt Scholasticism had been tainted with. Instead, it would convey a unitary view of God, Nature and Man that was in accord with Christian doctrine. The main purpose of this thesis is to understand how Van Helmont attempted to construct this new Christian Philosophy. The thesis will argue that the inspiration for this project lay in the medical alchemy developed by Theophrastus Paracelsus (1493-1541) following medieval precedents. Paracelsus and many of his followers expressed the view that alchemy can act as the Christian key to Nature, and therefore an alliance of alchemical philosophy and Christianity was not only possible, but natural. Van Helmont concurred with this perspective, seeking to ground his Christian Philosophy in both orthodox Christian thought and medical alchemy. His religious ideas drew chiefly upon Biblical and Patristic sources as well as on German medieval mysticism. Van Helmont sought to complement this approach with an alchemical view that emphasised the hidden presence of God in Nature, as well as the role of the alchemist in unveiling this presence in the form of powerful medicine. Indeed, in Van Helmont’s thought Christianity and alchemy were dynamically entwined to such an extent that their discourses were not clearly separate. Van Helmont firmly believed the source of all things was God, and hence both the Book of Grace and the Book of Nature had their common origin in the light of the Holy Spirit.

Venice and Rome was not always on good terms, which the interdict crisis of 1606 and 1607 clearly manifests. Interdicts had been placed on Venice before, but the one of 1606 set about a veritable flood of pamphlets and tracts, either in favour or against the interdict of Pope Paul V (1605–1621).   One of these tracts, which was written in favour of the Papal interdict, was the Nuova Risposta di Giovanni Filoteo di Asti, alla lettera di un theologo incognito scritta ad un sacerdote suo amico, sopra le censure, & interdetto di Papa Paolo V, contro la Signoria di Venetia, which I intend to analyse in this thesis. The Nuova Risposta was a text born out of the Guerra delle scritture. It was published in 1606 in Bologna and in Ferrara, both locations were, at that period of time, a part of the Papal States. This text manifests the troublesome relations between the Venetian government and the Papal Court in Rome, but also the importance of adhering to a historiographical framework in which the author Antonio Possevino elaborates on Papal claim to superiority in spiritual and in temporal matters.

Focusing attention on a neglected aspect of Renaissance scholarship, this study aims to illuminate the rhetorical role of the body in Renaissance literature by exploring the rhetorical nature of three forms of corporeality: stasis, gesture, and dance. Generally speaking, rhetoric of the body is not lacking in early modern scholarship. However, consideration of the literary body as a rhetorical entity that not only articulates but also creates meaning is indeed a neglected area. The body-as-text paradigm that grounds performance studies provides for a unique and nuanced approach to literary text analysis. The methodology employed in this thesis combines a historical and text-based approach, with substantial attention given to classical rhetoric because of its awareness of the rhetorical capacity of the body. The rhetoric of stasis is explored in Sir John Davies’ poem Orchestra and in three works by Shakespeare: The Winter’s Tale, The Rape of Lucrece, and Coriolanus. In this chapter, trauma is presented as a framing mechanism for the characters’ static presence. Gesture and its rhetorical quality are studied through distinctive analyses of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, The Rape of Lucrece, and Titus Andronicus. An analysis of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene provides a comic close to this study of gesture. This chapter also has as its framework the concept of trauma, presenting it as either a cause for or effect of gesture. Finally, the rhetoric of dance is examined in further analyses of Orchestra and The Winter’s Tale and also in Ben Jonson’s Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue. The literary approach to the rhetorical study of stasis, gesture, and dance taken in this study includes its dramaturgical and compositional functions, providing for a new lens through which to view instances of corporeality in Renaissance literature. This project attends to the early modern awareness and understanding of the rhetorical capacity and force of the body, and does so in a way that allows the speaking body to be examined within original contexts, thus bridging literary and performance analysis.

English women writers of the eighteenth century manifested enthusiasm for a form best described as a framed-novelle sequence, that is, a form in which conversations between characters/narrators are interspersed with embedded narratives. This thesis argues that the framed-novelle, with its distinctive juxtaposition of narrative and critical conversation facilitated feminine intervention in the period’s political, social, and literary debates. It demonstrates that Delarivier Manley, Jane Barker, Eliza Haywood, Sarah Scott, Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier used the framed-novelle sequence to develop a feminine but nonetheless authoritative socio-critical voice which allowed them not only to intervene in contemporary literary debates about the risks and rewards of reading fictions (especially with regards to the wider significance of the feminocentric and apparently trivial matter of amatory, romantic tales)but also to construct timely argument about the effect of fictional exemplarity on readers. Consideration of the literary and cultural contexts of the framed-novelle’s production, specifically its relation to other forms of narrative sequences such as the oriental tale and the fairy tale collection and to the period’s ideals of sociable conversation and critical practice also allows this thesis to identify the framed-novelle’s importance within the larger field of eighteenth-century literary development. Through close readings in each main chapter of an earlier and later framed-novelle by each author, this thesis explores the distinctiveness and internal cohesion of the framed-novelle as a subgenre, while also recognizing the particularity of each writer’s protofeminist perspective on their accumulation of feminocentric tales.

Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, both Austria and Persia were each repeatedly at war with the Ottoman Turks. Diplomats travelled between the two countries in an attempt to forge an alliance against their common enemy. Although the alliance never materialized the relationship broadened to cover other concerns. Despite cultural differences, both countries tried to work together and approached each-other as equals. Contact between the countries exposed both cultures to wider influences. Their changing relationship illustrates the priorities of both parties. This thesis, for the first time, uses primary sources to view the evolution of the relationship over the two century reign of the Safavid dynasty. It charts the course of their diplomatic relationship, examines the turning point in this relationship, and explores why the alliance both sides wanted never materialized. By examining Austria's diplomatic initiatives to the east this thesis helps correct the historiographical imbalance in central European history of concentration on only European affairs, and shows that their understanding of the east was more nuanced than is often credited.

Thesis advisor: Elizabeth Rhodes / This dissertation studies the uses of silence in a corpus of Baroque poems about portraits and funerary monuments. I explore silence as a dynamic, dialogic space where poetic voice, implicit reader and work of art interact. Within these poetic texts --written between 1599 and 1650 by poets from Francisco de Rioja to Quevedo or Góngora-- I focus on the question of representation: how, in ekphrastic texts, silence--whether the silence of the poet or that if the object he is describing--reveals certain anxieties about representation. Using enargeia --lifelike vividness--the Baroque poet searches for a new poetic art in which the `speech' of the portrayed breaks the ultimate silence of death. My critical discussion is rooted in an extensive corpus of seventeenth-century poems, an awareness of the moral implications of silence in Spanish Baroque philosophy, and in recent theoretical discussion of intermediality and ekphrasis, such as Mitchell's theory of ekphrasis and otherness (1994), and Foucault's concept of heterotopy (1986). My dissertation also examines the role of silence in its relation to the ideas of presence and absence in funerary ekphrasis, which includes the poetical description of tombs, as well as in the genre of laudatory ekphrasis and the poetical epitaph. I analyze the relationship between these instances of ekphrasis and the visual representations of silence in several books of emblems by Alciato, Kircher, and Vaenius, published in Europe between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My dissertation demonstrates how silence is a central concept of Baroque aesthetics that identifies fictional representation with a "teacher of truth," and functions as a vehicle for the acquisition of moral knowledge in the context of the Baroque idea of desengaño, thus siding with the objectives of the Spanish Counter-Reformation. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Romance Languages and Literatures.

Thesis advisor: Mary T. Crane / Thesis advisor: Andrew Sofer / Spatial Dramaturgy and Domestic Control in Early Modern Drama explores the social components of early modern domestic architecture and the spatial practices that helped to dramatize them. Each chapter examines a particular domestic feature—doors, windows, galleries, studies—and considers its role in a variety of early modern plays. Methodologically, I bridge the gaps between literary study, dramaturgy, and history by analyzing the palimpsest of the physical stage (e.g., the upper playing balcony) and the fictional spaces produced in performance (e.g., Juliet’s window). My work takes its influence from literary scholars, primarily Lena Cowen Orlin and Patricia Fumerton; theater historians, primarily Tim Fitzpatrick, Alan Dessen, Leslie Thompson, and Mariko Ichikawa; and architectural historians, primarily Mark Girouard and Alice T. Friedman. Bringing together these fields of study allows me to reconsider the theory of the unlocalized early modern stage that has largely dominated scholarly and theatrical approaches to early modern theater for half a century. In my first chapter, “Doors and Keys: Enclosure and Spatial Control,” I argue that doors and keys operate in productive tension with the spatial flexibility of the “unlocalized” stage, troubling the fantasy of domestic spatial control in plays such as A Woman Killed With Kindness and The Comedy of Errors. In my second chapter, “Windows: Locus, Platea, and Contested Authority,” I explore the way window scenes in plays such as Romeo and Juliet and Women Beware Women provide a liminal space between house and street where the tiring house façade and the apron of the stage could intersect. My third chapter, “Galleries: Feigned Soliloquy and Interiority,” shows how playwrights used gallery settings to stage feigned soliloquy, exposing the limits of private speech and the struggle to access another person’s most inner thoughts. My final chapter, “Studies: Hauntings and Impossible Privacy,” looks at plays that feature ghosts or devils in studies, such as Doctor Faustus and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, to argues that these supernatural elements reflect the ease with which playwrights could violate presumably protected spaces. In turn, these hauntings explore the danger presented in early modern humanism: that the most haunted place of all is one’s own mind. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Thesis advisor: Mary T. Crane / Thesis advisor: Caroline Bicks / <italic>Disappearing Acts</italic> interrogates the concept of Petrarchism and the role of the Petrarchan mistress in early modern England. Critics from the early modern period onward have viewed Petrarchism as limiting to women, arguing that it obstructs female agency. This view stems from a long history of trying to establish the parameters of Petrarchism itself, a body of literature whose inchoate nature makes it difficult to define. <italic>Disappearing Acts</italic> takes as its starting point the instability of Petrarchism, embracing the ways in which it functions as a discourse without boundaries, whose outlines are further blurred by its engagement with other genres, forms, and contexts. Examining the intersections between Petrarchism and other early modern discourses&mdash;religious, political, theatrical, humanist, romantic&mdash;illuminates the varied ways in which the role of the mistress is deployed in early modern literature and suggests that, as a term, the &ldquo;Petrarchan mistress&rdquo; loses the coherence that critics often impose on it. Rarely ever entirely there or entirely missing, the figure of the mistress instead signifies an unstable, liminal role that results in far more complex representations of women. This project emphasizes the complexities of the Petrarchan mistress and examines this figure as a performative role that is negotiated rather than simply inhabited as a prison. Each chapter traces the intersections between Petrarchism and another early modern discourse in England. Chapter One examines the overlap between Reformist language and Petrarchan language, particularly in the &ldquo;absent presence&rdquo; of the Eucharist and the female beloved. I argue that the elusive persona of the Protestant martyr Anne Askew is produced by the conjunction of Petrarchan and Reformist discourses. Chapter Two interrogates the relationship between the theory of the king&rsquo;s two bodies and the concept of the Petrarchan female double, pairing Edmund Spenser&rsquo;s <italic>Faerie Queene</italic> with the writings of Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. I suggest that female queens of the sixteenth century both secured and imperiled their authenticity by comparing themselves to a false version. Chapter Three examines the relationship between Petrarchism and the figure of the ghost in early modern England. I consider Shakespeare&rsquo;s <italic>The Winter&rsquo;s Tale</italic> in relation to the female complaint, a popular genre appended to sonnet sequences in which a ghost complains about her fate, and I argue that Shakespeare&rsquo;s evocation of ghostliness enables Hermione to return from her immobilized position to perform a Pertrarchan role in which she can speak her own desires. Chapter Four reexamines Mary Wroth&rsquo;s character, Pamphilia, as two different characters produced by two different genres: one by the prose romance <italic>The Countess of Montgomery&rsquo;s Urania</italic> and one by the sonnet sequence <italic>Pamphilia to Amphilanthus</italic>. While the Pamphilia of the sonnets proclaims her constancy, the Pamphilia of the romance exposes the tensions produced by the varied historical uses of the term in discourses from martyrology to stoicism. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.