A notorious challenge in the study of the diachrony of English is to determine whether developments in syntax, including changing frequencies of a particular construction, or word-order changes as suggested by perceived patterns in extant texts, represent genuine linguistic changes or are due to changes in conventions of writing. What is intuitively clear, however, even to a casual eye, is that a piece of English prose from, say, the 16th-century differs markedly from texts from the 18th-century. Yet such judgements cannot be based on syntactic changes alone, since essential grammatical features of Present-Day English are in place already by the end of the Late Middle English period. As a result, these differences are often simply ascribed to the notoriously elusive domain of style. The current study attempts to come to grips with the issue of period-specific conventions of writing by focusing on features of discourse structure and textual organisation as of the Early Modern English period. It can be positioned at the meso-level between large-scale quantitative approaches of sentence-level linguistic features and detailed, small-scale discourse-analytic studies of individual texts. Texts selected for the current purpose, manuals for equine care, derive from a sub-domain of instructional writing with a long history in the vernacular. As these texts share similar communicative purposes and deal with the same "global" topics of feeding and looking after a horse, any differences between them cannot be attributed to different genres or differences in subject matter. This permits us to zoom in on 'agnates', different ways of expressing the same meanings, and allows us to see how the stylistic options selected by authors achieve the various communicative goals that have to be negotiated, such as discourse coherence or the transition to new topics. The three main sections in this dissertation offer different ways to identifying developments in discourse organisation. The first section explores the traditional corpus-based approach that is frequently used to measure the parameter of "personal involvement", an indicator of periodic style. Initially, this approach restricts itself to measuring the contribution of frequencies of individual lexical items like first and second person pronouns. Next, this section will focus on the presence and linguistic realisation of the interlocutors of these instructional texts, i.e. the writer and the reader. The second main section will try to diagnose such varying styles by employing a completely data-driven, quantitative methodology which offers a linguistically unbiased and theory-independent perspective on the data in the corpus. This second approach offers cues as to how `subliminal' patterns of grammar may affect perceptions of style, and how quantitative measures may aid in assessing whether the texts in our corpus cluster in expected or unexpected ways. The third section draws on theories of referential coherence and textual progression. By charting the variation with which texts from different periods in the history of English apply conventions for discourse organisation, it offers an insight into developments of hierarchical discourse structures (i.e., coordinated versus subordinated discourse relations) and practices of co-reference. Taken together, these three independent measures offer a novel, multi-angled approach to stylistic developments in prose writing. Combining features `above the sentence' level which involve discourse and information structural changes, this dissertation affords a glimpse into the emergence of written textual conventions, or 'grammars of prose', in the history of English.

This thesis presents a detailed study of the seventeenth century diplomat Sir Anthony Sherley's Relation of his Travels into Persia (1613). Sherley and his younger brother Robert travelled to Persia with a sizeable company of experienced English military officers who had originally been detailed to bolster the defences of Ferrara against an expected invasion by the Papal States in late 1597. Sherley remained in Persia for six months, which coincided with the Shah's return from a military expedition that had effectively secured his eastern frontiers against invasion, and as he embarked on preparations for a war of reconquest against the Ottomans, which was seized on by Sherley and his brothers to produce a stream of books, assuming credit for the later outbreak of war between the Muslim powers. Anthony and Robert Sherley were celebrated for inciting the Persians to war against the Turks, and their reputation was cemented with the publication of John Day, William Rowley and George Wilkins' play entitled Travails of the Three English Brothers (1607). Day, Rowley and Wilkins' Travails, as well as the brothers' persistent self-promotion through the medium of popular print, has led to the erroneous notion that they were responsible for the establishment of Anglo-Persian diplomatic relations. This thesis provides an account of Sir Anthony Sherley's experiences prior to his journey to Persia, traces his shifting objectives as reflected in the clusters of texts published by and about the Sherley brothers, argues that his account was partly presented as an allegorical romance, and highlights the Machiavellian and Tacitean influences behind the Relation.

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This thesis is a study of the religious culture of the market-town parish of Wimborne Minster, Dorset, from c.1403-1640. Broadly, it is a contribution to the history of the English Reformation (or Reformations, as the historian pleases; capital 'R' or lower-case). Religious change is the most significant focus, but over a longer period of time than is usually allowed for. Such themes as lay control, tithe controversies, relations with the ordinary, and popular support for preaching and church music are considered, as well as theological issues about the nature of English and European Protestantism. The thesis includes quantitative evidence drawn from the parish churchwardens' accounts and also wills. The date range was chosen for a number of reasons. First, because the available evidence for the parish is unusually rich, and allows for a kind of sustained attention that cannot be directed towards other such parishes: Wimborne has among the earliest and most complete surviving churchwardens' accounts in England (beginning in 1403), as well as myriad other sources, including hundreds of wills, and corporation and church-court records. Secondly, as a means of pursuing Alexandra Walsham's 'migrations of the holy' agenda. Walsham believes that investigation of religious change in the late medieval and early modern periods is hindered by those very periodisations, which are in fact products of the changes in question; how, then, to study religious change without presupposing too much? To that end, the structure of this thesis is both chronological and thematic; and an attempt has been made to preserve what was unique and so important about the changes of the mid-sixteenth century, during the reigns of Henry VIII and his progeny, at the same time as revealing deeper structural changes - and continuities too. The broad division of the thesis is into two parts. This first three chapters, part one, establish the early religious scene in the parish, examining the legacy of the Minster's place as a mother church in the Anglo-Saxon landscape of east Dorset, and how parish identity and forms of self-organisation were put to the test during the reigns of Henry VIII and his son, Edward VI. In part two, the focus is the interaction between the parishioners and the parish's new governing structure, a closed corporation of 12 lay worthies; in particular, the governors' attempts to provide regular preaching of the most sophisticated kind, as well as elaborate polyphonic music, and disputes arising from their management of the tithes and the divisive behaviour of one preacher in particular.

This thesis offers a materialist account of dramatic genre. It shows how English revenge tragedies were mediated by the social circumstances of their early modern dramatic production, and how in turn such circumstances found expression in dramatic form. Its method draws on Marxist critical theory, but the work also makes extensive use of traditions in English social history and more conventional literary criticism. Influenced by Walter Benjamin’s early work, 'Urprung des deutschen Trauerspiels', in which ‘origin’ (Ursprung) is distinguished from ‘genesis’ (Entstehung), the dissertation offers an account of the genre’s dialectical relationship with the social realities and legal circumscriptions accompanying theatrical performance at the time revenge plays became popular. Focusing on the characterization of avenging protagonists, the dissertation suggests how the ambivalent disposition of such figures to narrative and scene drew on historical problems of social and occupational identity in early modern England. The first chapter dwells on the ambiguities of the avenger’s marginalisation in Thomas Kyd’s seminal revenge play, The Spanish Tragedy. This chapter realizes the problem of revenge as one relating to the household, and in turn connects this to the image of the early professional theatre as a disorderly house. Building on this analysis of the historical grounds of Hieronimo’s disenfranchisement and revenge, the second chapter explores the resources of characterization provided for such avengers by the dramatic tradition of the Vice which, by the 1570s and 1580s, had become associated with the professional actor. The third chapter examines how the idiom of the ruin in the two tragedies of John Webster might invite a Benjaminian analysis of the revenge play as a vulnerable allegory of production. This chapter looks to link revenge plays’ representations of death to contingencies of performance. The final two chapters are connected by an interest in the relationship between characterization and forms of historical risk. Chapter 4 explores the duel at Hamlet’s climax from a variety of perspectives, arguing that its debased nature as a ritual of valour interacted in highly sophisticated ways with the problems of intentionality and invention associated with earlier revenge plays as well as with performance itself. The final chapter builds on the arguments of Chapter 4 while recalling many of the arguments made earlier in the thesis. Demonstrating the dialectical interaction of the actor-as-servant and the servant-intriguer, this fifth chapter situates the study of such characterization within the historiographical controversies surrounding the early-modern wage labourer. This dissertation aims (i) to provide innovative criticism of English revenge tragedy, insisting upon the genre’s dialectical foundation in processes of dramatic production; (ii) to outline a viable, dialectically materialist genre criticism; (iii) to show how changes in socio-economic dependencies produced specific dramaturgical effects, particularly as these related to the process of characterization.

This thesis explores identity as it was portrayed, constructed, and upheld through court festivals within the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in the period between the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 and the coronation of Friedrich V, Elector Palatine, as King of Bohemia in 1619. The thesis is made up of five inter-related thematic chapters. Chapter I analyses the role of ‘Lineage, Legitimacy, and History’. This chapter acknowledges the enduring importance of lineage, genealogy, and history to noble legitimacy, and discusses the threats and questions posed by newly rising families. It demonstrates how competing claims and counter-claims to legitimacy were made as festival occasions attempted to weave their protagonists into the fabric of ‘German’ history together with an associated possession of ‘German’ virtues, and how these claims to legitimacy were buttressed by representations of popular acclaim. Chapter II discusses ‘Mortality, Masculinity, Femininity, and Mutability’. At festivals both the mortality of members of dynasties and gendered roles, ideals, and identities as noble men and women were visible. This chapter argues that the evidence of these festivals complicates any stark delineation between male and female identities, instead stressing the degree of mutability of these categories as well as the centrality of virtue demonstrated, primarily, through skill. The themes of mutability and virtue continue into Chapter III, which addresses ‘Nature and the German Land’. Festivals often incorporated performed claims to possession of, and endorsement from, the German land itself. The land and its topographical features could be represented within cities as part of festival occasions, or the journeys to, and between elements of, festivals could incorporate the landscape into the rhetoric of these spectacles. This rhetoric could be confessionalised and politicised, but representations of nature also served to bolster a universalising rhetoric of virtue through the skilled manipulation of nature to the whim of the ruler. Chapter IV deals with the theme of ‘Religion, Piety, and Confessional Difference’. It discusses the role which displays of piety, including humility before God and the Church, played in these occasions, and draws out elements of confessionalised rhetoric present. However, the analysis shows that directly antagonistic religious imagery and language, seen elsewhere in European festival culture, does not feature. Instead, the emphasis is on non-divisive language and a unifying notion of Christendom. This was, of course, set against the dipole of the ‘Other’ which is addressed in Chapter V, ‘Language, Custom, Othering, and Unity’. Festivals drew attendees from across Europe and often included performed representations of non-Christian ‘Others’ such as Turks, Moors, and inhabitants of the New World. While the foreign, even the Ottoman, could be seen as exotic and luxurious, a rhetoric of superiority nurtured through appropriation and trivialisation of the threat which the Ottomans posed again contributed to the creation of common notions of identity. Finally, far from being an impediment to common identity, the meeting and use of different languages at festivals also served to highlight skill, learning, and virtue in the rhetoric of identity at these occasions.

This dissertation considers the influence that sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century mathematical thinking exerted on popular drama in the final sixteen years of Elizabeth I’s reign. It concentrates upon six plays by five dramatists, and attempts to analyse how the terms, concepts, and implications of contemporary mathematics impacted upon their vocabularies, forms, and aesthetic and dramaturgical effects and affects. Chapter 1 is an introductory chapter, which sets out the scope of the whole project. It locates the dissertation in its critical and scholarly context, and provides a history of the technical and conceptual overlap between the mathematical and literary arts, before traversing the body of intellectual-historical information necessary to situate contextually the ensuing five chapters. This includes a survey of mathematical practice and pedagogy in Elizabethan England. Chapter 2, ‘Algebra and the Art of War’, considers the role of algebra in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays. It explores the function of algebraic concepts in early modern military theory, and argues that Marlowe utilised the overlap he found between the two disciplines to create a unique theatrical spectacle. Marlowe’s ‘algebraic stage’, I suggest, enabled its audiences to perceive the enormous scope and aesthetic beauty of warfare within the practical and spatial limitations of the Elizabethan playhouse. Chapter 3, ‘Magic, and the Mathematic Rules’, explores the distinction between magic and mathematics presented in Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. It considers early modern debates surrounding what magic is, and how it was often confused and/or conflated with mathematical skill. It argues that Greene utilised the set of difficult, ambiguous distinctions that arose from such debates for their dramatic potential, because they lay also at the heart of similar anxieties surrounding theatrical spectacles. Chapter 4, ‘Circular Geometries’, considers the circular poetics effected in Dekker’s Old Fortunatus. It contends that Dekker found an epistemological role for drama by having Old Fortunatus acknowledge a set of geometrical affiliations which it proceeds to inscribe itself into. The circular entities which permeate its form and content are as disparate as geometric points, the Ptolemaic cosmos, and the architecture of the Elizabethan playhouses, and yet, Old Fortunatus unifies these entities to praise God and the monarchy. Chapter 5, ‘Infinities and Infinitesimals’, considers how the infinitely large and infinitely small permeate the language and structure of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It argues that the play is embroiled with the mathematical implications of Copernican cosmography and its Brunian atomistic extension, and offers a linkage between the social circles of Shakespeare and Thomas Harriot. Hamlet, it suggests, courts such ideas at the cutting-edge of contemporary science in order to complicate the ontological context within which Hamlet’s revenge act must take place. Chapter 6, ‘Quantifying Death, Calculating Revenge’, proposes that the quantification of death, and the concomitant calculation of an appropriate revenge, are made an explicit component of Chettle’s Tragedy of Hoffman. It suggests that Chettle enters two distinctly mathematical models of revenge into productive counterpoint in the play in order to interrogate the ethics of revenge, and to dramatise attempts at quantifying the parameters of equality and excess, parity and profit.

This dissertation is a study of the reception of the Jesuit-trained Italian author, Giovanni Botero (1544–1617) in early-seventeenth century England. It examines how Botero was translated for an English audience, and reconstructs the debates to which Botero was relevant and helped stimulate in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Part I examines the publication history of Botero’s books in England and finds that the translators and printers edited Botero significantly. Its primary focus is thus on who was translating Botero and for what purposes, and who was printing and selling the resulting books. It establishes that the most prominent of Botero’s books in England were the Della grandezza della città (1588), Della ragion di stato (1589), Relazioni Universali (1591–1595). Chapters I–III accordingly consider these works in turn. Chapter IV then briefly turns to consider Botero’s other works, including I prencipi (1600). Part II then turns to look at Botero’s readers. Four further chapters consider Botero’s reception in relation to four broad themes: geography and travel (Chapter I); climate and situation (Chapter II); colonies and commerce (Chapter III); and responses to Machiavelli (Chapter IV). Each of these chapters examine Botero’s contributions to these themes, other contemporary authors whom he was read alongside, and how and why people were reading him to speak to these debates. Ultimately, the backdrop to this story is English colonialism in the Americas and Ireland and a growing interest in understanding the political significance of trade. The dissertation therefore contributes to our understanding of the history of early modern political thought, translation and reception, and English-Italian intellectual exchange in the early modern period. Ultimately, the thesis tells two stories – one about the importance of this Italian author in seventeenth-century England, the other about the intellectual origins of certain key themes in British political thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This dissertation provides a critical assessment of Laura Terracina (1519-c.1577) and her works. It argues that she was a consummate product of her age, embodying the tensions which ruled the Italian peninsula. Terracina published eight books and left a ninth in manuscript at the time of her death, winning legions of admirers and making her sixteenth-century Italy's most commercially successful female author. Yet in spite of her enormous popularity amongst her contemporaries, scholarship has largely neglected Terracina. This dissertation will open up an overdue field of enquiry into her life and works, exploring the significance of her role as a sixteenth-century female poet through the lenses of gender and class. By mapping her place in the literary landscape, it is hoped that this thesis will encourage scholars to afford Terracina the attention she so richly deserves. The first chapter of the dissertation situates Terracina as a poet of Naples, seeing her as a product of her family's political standing within the city, her academician status, and her own construction of an urban coterie of supporters. The second chapter considers the mechanics of the journey into print, assessing Terracina's own input and her close collaboration with male editors and publishers. It proposes a greater attribution of agency to Terracina than has thus far been made, arguing that she is, in fact, an important figure in the process of her texts reaching the hands of readers. The third chapter considers how the poet used her printed books as social tools, employing them to gain social and literary capital. The second section of the dissertation looks at two thematic strands within Terracina's poetry. Chapter four considers her political poetry, including her attitude towards the harm done to civilian populations across Europe. Chapter five looks at the religious dimension to Terracina's work, the spiritual poetry written in her later years, and the relationship this bears to her secular lyric. Finally, the dissertation concludes with a chapter on the contemporary reception of Terracina's texts, providing preliminary thoughts on how she was read, before closing with a consideration of her literary afterlife in the centuries that followed.

"True and Home-Born" intervenes in critical debates about early modern domestic tragedy, arguing that--far from being a form concerned exclusively with moral admonition or the domestic sphere--it is a centrally important site for dramatic experimentation and theorization at a key moment in England's evolving theatrical culture. Encompassing texts such as Arden of Faversham (1592), A Warning for Fair Women (1599), and A Woman Killed with Kindness (1607), the term groups plays that share an interest in "ordinary," nonaristocratic life, dramatize domestic events of a sensational and violent nature, and stage detailed and accurate representations of household settings and domestic ideology. While domestic tragedy has a significant forty-year theatrical history--comparable to the early modern revenge tragedy--and is associated with prominent dramatists such as Thomas Heywood, John Ford, and William Shakespeare, these plays continue to be regarded as marginal dramatic texts, mainly of interest as archives of early modern domestic ideology and experience. I argue, in contrast, that domestic tragedies represent a key strand in the development of English tragic drama. Their heightened reflexivity about their dramatic and tragic form suggests a deep and abiding interest in dramatic and theatrical matters: in how drama creates verisimilitude, how it represents "truth," and how it imagines and participates in a new, native, and national theatrical culture. The first half of "True and Home-Born" focuses on a number of plays traditionally identified as domestic tragedies, showing that their interests are not confined to the household, but extend to the dramatic and theatrical implications of faithfully recreating the reality of domestic experience on stage. Heywood and Shakespeare, I suggest, are particularly attuned to these implications, and develop and critique a form of theatrical verisimilitude in their respective engagements with the form. In the second half, I suggest that the subgenre's boundaries are more permeable than previous criticism has allowed. By considering both the revenge tragedy and history play subgenres in terms of the domestic, I show the extent to which domestic tragedy was fully imbricated in the period's dramatic traditions and theatrical culture. The revenge tragedies of Thomas Kyd and Shakespeare, I argue, turn to the household as a site in which to imagine a new form of revenge drama that differs from its classical forebears and is thus suited to the English stage. Finally, I contend that in a group of historical dramas that I call the "British history plays," focused on historical events set in ancient Britain, the domestic sphere becomes central to the staging of history, offering early modern historical dramatists a means of bridging the gap between ancient past and early modern present.