Good governance is a value-laden concept that is characteristically nebulous; it can mean different things to different people, depending on the context in which it is used. The same applies to leadership. Concepts, as Pauw (1999a, 465) puts it, are ‘tools of thinking’ and contexts are ‘the environments or frameworks in which they [concepts] operate’. Lucidity in the meanings of concepts is fundamentally important for shaping debate and enriching discourses. To maintain their power, concepts must be used in their proper contexts. This necessitates an understanding of the art of contextual discourse. Good governance is used in NEPAD as a principle and emphasised as a sine qua non for sustainable development in Africa. On the other hand, NEPAD premises Africa’s re-birth or Renaissance on good governance and leadership, with a vision and commitment to repositioning the continent in global power balances. In this article good governance and leadership are considered as concepts. NEPAD is a textual context within which the two key concepts are used and should, consequently, be engaged. The article attempts a critical review of African scholarship engagement with good governance and leadership within the NEPAD context to determine the extent to which contextual discourse is practised. It further grapples with the immediate historical background to scholarship on Africa’s development between the 1960s and early 1990s. The exercise reveals that much of the accumulated body of African scholarship and scholarship on Africa’s development reviewed does not sufficiently contextualise discourse on good governance and leadership within NEPAD, and its key assessment and monitoring device, the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), and offers an alternative framework.

This thesis addresses the affinities between rhetoric and architecture. It is an essay in cultural history prompted by the reading of a text: Leon Battista Alberti's famous, mid-Quattrocento treatise on architecture, De re aedificatoria. It is about the interrelation of rhetoric and architecture in the city in Italy between the Trecento and the Cinquecento. The argument is framed by the notion that the city is a duality involving material and discursive cultures. The built and the written city unites architecture and rhetoric as cognate cultural practices, a kinship which suggests that one can be read in terms of the other. Accordingly, this thesis proposes rhetoric as a tool for reading actual cities, and develops a model of rhetoric to apply to Italian medieval/Renaissancec ities basedo n a precedent found in De re aedificatoria. The thesis is arranged into two parts. The first involves a thorough reading of Alberti's treatise. Chapter One focuses on the analogy between rhetoric and architecture in his theory, arguing that De re aedificatoria demonstrates a comprehensive grafting of rhetoric onto architecture that goes beyond analogy. It further suggests that this interdisciplinary approach is a product of the humanist culture of which Alberti was a part. Chapter Two expands this reading by recognizing the long-standing history of association between rhetoric and architecture in literature, a history that has continued into modem discourse. That association is then discussed in general historical and cultural terms extrapolated from Alberti's text. These terms form the basis of case studies presented in the second part of the thesis. Given that rhetoric is integral to the design of the city, the second part of the thesis is a demonstration of two propositions: the first, that rhetoric is a useful way of reading actual cities; and the second, that rhetoric is a useful way of reading the history of actual cities. These propositions are explored in two thematically defined case studies. Chapter Three looks at the relationship between art and power in the urbanism of Florence from 1280 to 1560, with a brief comparative discussion of Herculean Ferrara (1471-1505). Chapter Four examines a rhetorical practice of intertextuality and textualauthority in the late-Quattrocento building projects of Pope Pius II at Pienza and Federico da Montefeltro at Urbino. Both Part One and Part Two are prefaced by introductions that establish the terms of the rhetoric used in this thesis. The Introduction to Part One offers an explanation in general theoretical terms of rhetoric's capacity to be an integrative public discourse. The Introduction to Part Two sketches a proposed rhetoric of the city which is applied comparatively in the case studies that follow. The thesis as a whole works to establish the coexistence of the built and written cities in history and to show how rhetoric is able to integrate them. It argues that rhetoric is an appropriate and flexible means of reading the complex interweaving of aesthetics and politics, memory, text, discourse and material culture, the real and the unreal, in the construction and articulation of the city

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La présente étude examine la construction et plus particulièrement les mécanismes de la paraphrase chez le poète et réformateur français Théodore de Bèze, et ce, à partir de quatre paraphrases psalmiques. Tous les Psaumes bibliques ont été traduits de l’hébreu en prose française en 1551 par Louis Budé, fils du grand humaniste Guillaume Budé (1480-1540) qui avait été directeur d’une bibliothèque royale consacrée à la collection de manuscrits de textes anciens. Théodore de Bèze, poète ayant écrit au début en latin et s’étant converti au calvinisme, s’est réfugié à Genève en 1548, et est devenu professeur de grec ancien à Lausanne. Placé dans un milieu de théologiens, dont Jean Calvin, Bèze a été poussé à réécrire les Psaumes en vers. Pourtant, il n’a pas fait cette réécriture mot à mot, mais a plutôt paraphrasé la prose. Il a terminé ce travail en 1562. Le premier chapitre de cette thèse a pour but de développer une méthodologie pour analyser la paraphrase biblique, méthodologie basée sur l’état présent de la recherche. Il s’agira des processus fondamentaux de la paraphrase biblique, ses fonctionnements. Le deuxième chapitre est consacré à l’analyse des quatre psaumes paraphrasés au moyen de nos fonctionnements, ayant pour objectif de déchiffrer les intentions paraphrastiques de Bèze.

This thesis examines the representations of friendship in letters, collaborations, and paratexts from the Renaissance and the Romantic era to uncover the affection behind the performances taught in classical manuals of friendship. The pairs of Shakespeare-Fletcher and Middleton-Rowley from the Renaissance are compared with Wordsworth-Coleridge and Keats-Brown from the Romantic era to show that the representations did not change even when the myth of the solitary genius began to develop. The representations of friendship based on the ideal of the one true friend allow men to express their affection for other men without being homoerotic or even homosocial. The textual evidence of friendship does not always prove that two people were each other’s “one true friend,” but the signs of friendship signify affectionate friendship for readers who desire such a true friendship for themselves.

This dissertation investigates representations of bureaucracy in early modern drama and culture. Focusing on a group of plays that feature bureaucratic figures among their characters, and reading those plays in the context of contemporary discussions of administration, this project attempts to understand the role played by the increasingly bureaucratic state in developing conceptions of individual subjectivity. Specifically, this dissertation seeks to show that bureaucratic administrative structures and the methods deployed to maintain them provide a conceptual space in which early modern writers could conceive of themselves as possessing a private, inscrutable interiority. Chapter Two argues that whereas the binary relationship of secretary and master is often characterized in contemporary accounts as intensely, and problematically, intimate, the multivalent bureaucratic relationship is characterized, for the most part, as impersonal. Chapter Three links bureaucratic labour with one product of that labour, the bureaucratic document, in order to analyze the way in which early modern representations and discussions of bureaucratic documents constitute a medium through which a form of bureaucratic identity is conceptualized. Chapter Four examines a problem inherent to the bureaucratic delegation of authority – the combination of a desire to see everything and an inability to trust in the observations of others to aid you in fulfilling that desire – and seeks to find a solution to that problem in the way in which Much Ado About Nothing presents a vision of a disciplinary surveillance that is diffused throughout society, rather than residing in one privileged figure. Chapter Five shifts the focus of inquiry from the bureaucracy and those in its employ to the subject of bureaucratic authority. The chapter reads Hamlet’s claims to inscrutable interiority in the context of the state’s desire to see, and document, its subjects. In it, I argue that, rather than deflecting questions, Hamlet’s assertions serve to align him with other targets of disciplinary surveillance. The dissertation ends by considering links between the representational crisis engendered by the growth of the early modern bureaucracy and the representational practices of the early modern theatre. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2007-09-30 12:50:35.596

The thesis begins with a cursory discussion of the Classical literary and visual sources for Renaissance uomini illustri cycles. The conveyance of these specific Classical sources to medieval France is touched upon, which leads to the rebirth of the uomini illustri genre in the guise of the chivalric NeufPreux. The discussion of the conceptual and artistic genesis of the uomini illustri genre creates an extensive time line, with some lacuna, that allows us to visualize the development of this theme right up to Renaissance Italy. A synopsis of the many uomini illustri cycles on the Italian peninsula is then given. The significance that the cycles may have embodied in relation to the environment for which they were created, as well as the meaning that they may have held for the viewer and patron is examined. Subsequently, a biography of Francesco di Marco Datini is given, touching on his early sojourn in Avignon, his activities in Italy during the construction and decoration of the Palazzo Datini, as well as his artistic patronage as a whole. Datini's friendships with the foremost humanist thinkers of the time is analyzed. This study, as well as the analysis of Francesco di Marco Datini as a merchant and a man living on the cusp between the Tre and Quattrocento, provides the context in which to visualize the creation of the uomini illustri cycle in Palazzo Datini, although the decoration of the cortile extends beyond simply the representation of historical figures to include virtues, vices, the sciences and philosophers, a trait common in other contemporary uomini illustri cycles. The complicated and diverse stages of the construction and decoration of Palazzo Datini is closely scrutinized, so that together with documentary evidence from the fecund Archivio di Stato di Prato (much of which has not been previously published) a clear reconstruction of the building of the palazzo and its decoration can be given for the first time. I discuss the careers of artists working for Datini, particularly Niccolo v di Piero Gerini, the main artist working on the extended uomini illustri cycle of Palazzo Datini. The final goal is the physical, iconographical, and conceptual reconstruction of the courtyard decoration of Palazzo Datini.

In The Painting Career ofPiero di Cosimo (1462-1522), I have sought to assemble a critical, monographic study of Piero's painting oeuvre that presently includes close to fifty works that are either extant or exist only in references and sources. The Florentine painter has historically proven to be among the most elusive artists of the Italian Renaissance and yet acted as a seminal figure in the artistic transitions occurring from the close of the fifteenth century to the beginnings of Mannerism in Florence. My thesis consists of close iconographic and stylistic analyses that have been balanced by archival work and technical examination. The latter involved numerous meetings with restorers in United States and European conservation laboratories. The resulting in-depth study of the physical states of Piero's paintings as objects involving painting technique, working methods and present condition produces some of the most revealing results. My research with original documents and other primary sources in Florence also introduces a number of new discoveries, particularly from the early and middle stages of the painter's life and career. The varied nature of Piero's art calls for a multidisciplinary approach. Combining iconographic, conservational and archival methods, I aim to contribute new insights into several specific areas. These include: a biographical grounding of Piero's life and those of his known patrons; Piero's advances in portraiture; the use of visual narrative forms and literary sources in Piero's mythologies; and the painter's large-scale devotional works. The questioning of past assumptions concerning Piero's work and biography also leads me to consider the larger scope of influence, legacy and modes of transmission between Piero and other contemporary artists. As one of the most important older innovators, living well into the sixteenth century, Piero was a major catalyst for the new generation of highly inventive artists such as Andrea del Sarto and Pontormo, both of whom passed through his studio. It was Piero, however, who proved to be perhaps the most groundbreaking practitioner in the domestic secular painting tradition before his pupils' ascendance.

This thesis considers the Renaissance understanding of the virtue of chastity within the French court, countering the view that the Renaissance courtier perceived chastity to be simply an attribute properly assigned to women as a protective virtue. From within a context of Renaissance moral paradigms, religious and secular, this study demonstrates how the French nobility championed individual perfectibility and denounced passion, embracing reason as paramount moral virtue and valorizing social codes of conduct as signs of rational activity. The rational control of the body in a social context was perceived to be necessary to the smooth- running of the State, and this control was symbolically represented as 'chastity', being grounded upon principles of self-restraint familiar to women, who were nominally pre-eminent in this area of behaviour. Such an analysis informed the discourse of Perfect Love played out at court, in which a chaste female beloved stood as an icon of universal concord. Through her perfect status she induced a publicly chaste conduct in her lover, whose pursuit was rational and stabilizing to the social milieu. This 'chaste' game was a fiction which had little relevance to private morality, but was concerned with exhibiting chaste harmony to the public gaze. It exalted the female form as an icon of the purified social body, thereby bestowing symbolic control upon woman. This study also explores the extent to which the Renaissance noblewoman was a prisoner of her own corporeal nature within this chaste discourse of love. She was influential by reason of the sexual purity attributed to her, but precariously so, because her very sexuality risked the accusation that her real 'virtue' lay not in her purity, but in her dissimulation of desire.

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