University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. / It is the intention of this Doctor of Creative Arts to convey the complexity of viewing art in museums. Concentrating on both the physical and cultural contexts of art, I focus specifically on Italian museums that house artworks of the Renaissance. I argue that the viewing experience in these museums is formed at the intersection of cultures, histories, the past and the present, art and the subjectivity of the viewer's own gaze. In this project the personal, physical, cerebral, sensorial and temporal experiences of art are central to my concerns. The structure of this DCA combines my photographic art practice with this written reflection. I work with both the visual and the textual to most appropriately and effectively express my concerns with the Renaissance and Italian museums. In a peculiar act of doubling, I am making art about the experience of viewing it, and through image-making I am able both to explore and to comment more profoundly on the experience of these museums. While my research and writing at times responds to these images, it also inspires them. Here I integrate the past, history and art, with contemporary theories that are relevant in the study ofvision and today's art viewing, and rely on numerous writers across the broad .fields of visual arts, art history and theory, museology, historiography and cultural tourism. In surveying these extensive interwoven disciplines I engage with the magnitude of the social, historical and theoretical studies that converge in the museum viewer's field of vision. Beyond the glorious artworks themselves Italian Renaissance museums exhibit a dense visual and historic culture that provides an enriched viewing environment. They paradoxically intersect 'high' art with a phenomenal popularity that appears ever-expanding through endless reproductions and representations via modern technologies. Through examining these museums with their multiple histories and contexts I hope to argue for a slower, more considered engagement with art, that encourages the viewer to experience the sensual as well as the intellectual aspects that this opulent environment offers.

This project explores the ways in which early modern English women writers engaged with the rhetoric of ideal male friendship. Early modern writers on friendship, drawing from classical texts such as Cicero's De Amicitia, most often defined friendship as a relationship of equality between two virtuous men. Women writers revised this dominant discourse by arguing for their own ability to practice virtuous friendship, thus investing women's friendships with the political significance long carried by the male tradition. In this dissertation, I discuss Isabella Whitney, Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Cary, and Katherine Philips as writers who depict friendships that overcome class or gender differences through the common virtue of the participants. Placing these works alongside those of male writers on friendship such as Francis Bacon, Michel de Montaigne, and William Shakespeare, I demonstrate the ways in which early modern women writers created a space for their own participation in an often exclusionary discourse.

This dissertation examines the representation of adoption in early modern English drama in order to analyze the language of social and familial relations in early modern culture. I propose that although these plays often ultimately support the traditional idea of a birth family, adoption challenges conventional notions of the family by making artificial, non-consanguine relations appear natural, thereby exposing the family unit as a social construction. I suggest further that adopted characters complicate notions of biological inheritance through their negotiations of language, place, and power. My dissertation thus explores the connections between historical language use and social status in early modern England; it couples early modern rhetorical theories and treatises with modern linguistic theory, drawing upon recent sociolinguistic scholarship. The result is to show that understanding how language demarcates social position is essential to illuminating the cultural intricacies of the plays of the period. In Chapters 1 and 2, I investigate the social and economic repercussions of adoption. Chapter 1 discusses the previously overlooked cultural importance of horticultural metaphors of adoption in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and All’s Well That Ends Well. In this chapter, I explore the ways in which early modern culture explained adoption by depicting it in a particular kind of figurative language. Chapter 2 focuses on the economic consequences of, and motivations for, adoption in Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. In my final two chapters, I scrutinize the relations between the early modern family and linguistic practice. Chapter 3 explores the connections between genetics, physical likeness, and language in Lyly’s Mother Bombie and Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. Finally, in Chapter 4 I investigate familial relation as a source of linguistic and social power. Middleton’s Women Beware Women, I argue, suggests that kinship exists within language and grants particular speakers linguistic and social authority.

Literature and theatre have traditionally used exempla based on historical or classical models as a fundamentally conservative rhetorical technique which aimed to reinforce pre-existing values. However, in the early modern period the reproduction of exemplary figures on stage also created the possibility that the authority of the dominant culture could be used to reinterpret exempla and the tradition they represented. In Troilus and Cressida, instead of presenting an internally consistent alternative version of the Troy story, Shakespeare presents a deconstructed narrative in which nothing is definitive or authoritative. Many of Troilus and Cressidas characters were traditionally presented as exempla, but in Shakespeares story they are divided between the exemplary self and the actual. Shakespeare reproduces and enhances the contradictions of earlier versions of the Troy story, so that the exempla which are supposed to signify a singular virtue instead point to a confusing variety of possible motives and interpretations. Their behaviour is indefinitely open to reinterpretation and resists a singular meaning. Cressidas inherently divided and contradictory nature undermines her traditional position as a negative exemplum with a clear, singular meaning. The contradiction she embodies also applies to the play as a whole. The limited viewpoint the audience is given in Troilus and Cressida and the ambiguity of the characters undermine both specific examples of exemplarity and broader ideas about the value of exempla. The play works to create confusion and multiplicity of meaning, posing questions for the audience to consider rather than providing definitive answers.

This dissertation examines the representation of adoption in early modern English drama in order to analyze the language of social and familial relations in early modern culture. I propose that although these plays often ultimately support the traditional idea of a birth family, adoption challenges conventional notions of the family by making artificial, non-consanguine relations appear natural, thereby exposing the family unit as a social construction. I suggest further that adopted characters complicate notions of biological inheritance through their negotiations of language, place, and power. My dissertation thus explores the connections between historical language use and social status in early modern England; it couples early modern rhetorical theories and treatises with modern linguistic theory, drawing upon recent sociolinguistic scholarship. The result is to show that understanding how language demarcates social position is essential to illuminating the cultural intricacies of the plays of the period. In Chapters 1 and 2, I investigate the social and economic repercussions of adoption. Chapter 1 discusses the previously overlooked cultural importance of horticultural metaphors of adoption in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and All’s Well That Ends Well. In this chapter, I explore the ways in which early modern culture explained adoption by depicting it in a particular kind of figurative language. Chapter 2 focuses on the economic consequences of, and motivations for, adoption in Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. In my final two chapters, I scrutinize the relations between the early modern family and linguistic practice. Chapter 3 explores the connections between genetics, physical likeness, and language in Lyly’s Mother Bombie and Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. Finally, in Chapter 4 I investigate familial relation as a source of linguistic and social power. Middleton’s Women Beware Women, I argue, suggests that kinship exists within language and grants particular speakers linguistic and social authority.

Literature and theatre have traditionally used exempla based on historical or classical models as a fundamentally conservative rhetorical technique which aimed to reinforce pre-existing values. However, in the early modern period the reproduction of exemplary figures on stage also created the possibility that the authority of the dominant culture could be used to reinterpret exempla and the tradition they represented. In Troilus and Cressida, instead of presenting an internally consistent alternative version of the Troy story, Shakespeare presents a deconstructed narrative in which nothing is definitive or authoritative. Many of Troilus and Cressidas characters were traditionally presented as exempla, but in Shakespeares story they are divided between the exemplary self and the actual. Shakespeare reproduces and enhances the contradictions of earlier versions of the Troy story, so that the exempla which are supposed to signify a singular virtue instead point to a confusing variety of possible motives and interpretations. Their behaviour is indefinitely open to reinterpretation and resists a singular meaning. Cressidas inherently divided and contradictory nature undermines her traditional position as a negative exemplum with a clear, singular meaning. The contradiction she embodies also applies to the play as a whole. The limited viewpoint the audience is given in Troilus and Cressida and the ambiguity of the characters undermine both specific examples of exemplarity and broader ideas about the value of exempla. The play works to create confusion and multiplicity of meaning, posing questions for the audience to consider rather than providing definitive answers.

<bold><p>Seasons and Sovereigns:<br></p><p>Succession in the Greenworld, 1579 - 1621<br></p></bold><p><p></p><p> Current scholarship on months, seasons, and climates in Renaissance aesthetics has developed along the two-dimensional axis of pastoral and georgic, leaving critics unable to develop an overarching theory of how or why early modern subjects charted environmental stability over time. <bold>Seasons and Sovereigns</bold> addresses this occlusion by studying the course of nature as it pertains to sudden dissolution, long periods of stability, or constant change in volatile Elizabethan and early Stuart greenworlds.</p><p><p> </p><p>While environmental stability occupies a central role in two theories of sovereignty - the classical Golden Age, which experienced eternal Spring, and the two-bodied King, where a King's body politic transcends the vicissitude signified by seasonal change - succession crises required rapid changes. By focusing on exceptions to temperate climates, <bold>Seasons and Sovereigns </bold> argues that many writers of the English Renaissance challenged the prescriptive accounts of innocuous socio-political climates or constant natural spaces by exploring the reasons behind floods, wonders, seasonal usurpation, and other perversions of nature's course found along the fringes of literary greenworlds. </p><p><p> </p><p>The project begins by examining Queen Elizabeth's cult of <i>ver perpetuum</i> to justify a more capacious interpretation of the theory of the King's Two Bodies as it pertains to the body politic's exemption from the passage of time, including seasonal change. It contextualizes these issues by delineating how genre studies have responded to the presence of calendars and months in literary texts. Chapter 2 argues that a remarkable number of late sixteenth-century texts flood (or threaten to flood) a greenworld to reflect anxiety over succession. The epic-scale dissolution evoked by sea grottos, Parnassus, and the lost city of Atlantis level social distinctions as unequivocal signs of nature's lethal heterogeneity in Lyly's <italic>Gallathea,</italic> Boboli garden, and <italic>Cymbeline.</italic> </p><p> <p>Chapter 3 argues that Shakespeare replaces an Arcadian landscape with a theater of green wonders and Macduff's knowledge of seasonal decorum in <italic>Macbeth.</italic> The chapter begins in the "wake" of the Golden Age with Thomas Dekker's decision to revive pastoral in his account of the Queen's funeral in <italic>The Wonder-full Yeare,</italic> 1603. Chapter 4 shifts the Arcadian impulse inward by exploring resistance to constancy (a pastoral value) in <italic>The Changeling</italic>, where I juxtapose three normative views of human nature that were active in 1621. Rather than advocate one perspective on constancy, Chapter 5 suggests that Mary Wroth's heroines in the <i>Urania</i> dissolve contracts and engage in post-Golden Age political jurisprudence by promoting duplicity and metamorphosis.</p> / Dissertation

Diss.--München--München universität, 1998. / Bibliogr. p. 278-286. Notes bibliogr.

Texte remanié de: Th. de doct.--Littérature française--Lyon 2, 2000. / Contient Les epistres de Diogenes, philosophe cynicque ([trad.] 1546), trad. de grec en francoys par Loys du Puys. Bibliogr. p. [267]-273. Notes bibliogr. Index.

Texte remanié de: Th. Ph. D.--Oxford--Jesus College, 2002. Titre de soutenance : History and I : war and the relations between history and personal identity in Renaissance military memoirs, c. 1450-1600. / Bibliogr. p. 205-218. Index.