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.

This dissertation explores the influence of Reformation representational anxiety on early seventeenth-century poetic depictions of Christ. I study the poetic shift from physical to metaphorical portrayals of Christ that occurred after the English Reformation infused religious symbols and visual images with transgressive power. Contextualizing the juncture between visual and verbal representation, I examine the poetry alongside historical artifacts including paternosters, a painted glass window, an emblem, sermons, and the account of a state trial in order to trace signs of sensory “loss” in the verse of John Donne, George Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton. The introduction provides a historical and poetic overview of sixteenth-century influences on religious verse. The first chapter contrasts Donne’s sermons—which vividly describe Christ—with his poems, in which Christ’s face is often obscured or avoided. In the chapter on George Herbert's The Temple, I show how Herbert’s initial, physical portraits of Christ increasingly give way to metaphorical images as the book progresses, paralleling the Reformation’s internalization of images. The third chapter shows that Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum makes use of pastoral conventions to fashion Christ as a shepherd-spouse, the divine object of desire. In the final chapter I argue that three poems from John Milton’s 1645 volume can be read as containing signs of Milton’s emerging Arianism. Depictions of Christ in the poetry of Donne, Herbert, Lanyer, and Milton reveal the period’s contestation over images; the sensory strain of these metaphorical representations results in memorable, vivid verse.

Building on recent scholarship in the history of art which has started to reappraise the meaning of grotesque and scatological motifs, this thesis examines how digestion was conceived of as a model of creation, and how this was translated visually. Renaissance creativity was increasingly modelled on a series of natural processes like digestion, following a trend in favour of Aristotelian psychology. However, it has been largely overlooked in comparison to the bleeding, the pneumatic, and especially the procreative natural models, which have been extensively studied. The central argument of this thesis is that digestion constituted an alternative-albeit less 'decorous'-model of creation, denoting the intervention of a more 'earthbound' ingenium. I argue that this model was used by certain classes of artists as an acknowledgement of a strong engagement with materials and of the labour of a round-the-clock imagination. Goldsmithing and printmaking are artistic professions whereby the artistic process was often considered as an act of 'soiling' oneself, both in the sense of the body and the phantasia. This thesis focuses on a period spanning c. 1530 to 1675, from Rabelais' works to the facetious printer Jacques Lagniet. It mines a corpus of little-studied textual and visual sources from the north of the Alps, examining a continuity between France and the German lands: geographical areas which both had an especially pronounced 'culture of excretion'. From a broader perspective, this research responds to a widespread scholarly call for more attention to the organic soul and the lower body, nuancing the alleged hegemony of the brain and the higher senses throughout history. It seeks to modify the perception of early modern artists and viewers as cerebral intellectuals, presenting them as individuals who also 'thought with their guts'.

This dissertation argues that in Renaissance discourses of the body the body is progressively evacuated of the spirit, as we move from texts of the late Medieval period to texts of the Jacobean period. Where New Historicists have suggested that the practice of “self-fashioning,” which dictates behaviour, speech and dress, takes place in the Renaissance, I argue that there was a material self-fashioning of the body occurring simultaneously. Such corporeal fashioning, motivated by desire for physical improvement, frustrates the extent to which the soul shapes the body. My Introduction lays theoretical and historical groundwork, situating the body/soul relationship in relation to Christian theology, Senecan-Stoicism, Epicureanism and philosophical materialism. Discourses of artistic creation, informed by neo-Platonism, also influence corporeal fashioning in that the most radical bodily modifications are imagined through literature, where artificers are often privileged as creators. Chapter One examines “The Miracle of the Black Leg,” a transplant, by the doctor-Saints Cosmas and Damian, of a Moor’s black leg to a white Sacristan, whose gangrenous leg is amputated. In written and pictorial representations Cosmas and Damian, initially figured as Saints, are later presented as doctors who perform a medical procedure. Alongside the doctors’ increasing agency, the black leg itself, inflected by Renaissance notions of Moors and Moorishness, troubles the soul’s immanence in the body. Chapter Two examines Elizabeth I’s practices of bodily fashioning through her wigs, dentures and cosmetics. I argue that Elizabeth’s symbolic value, which includes components of monarchical rule, as well as attitudes toward female beauty, is always already pre-empted by her body. In Book III of The Faerie Queene, moreover, Edmund Spenser writes an alternative history of England through Britomart’s body to provide an heir to Elizabeth’s otherwise heirless throne. Chapters Three and Four perform close readings of Book II of The Faerie Queene, Thomas Tomkis’s Lingua, Thomas Middleton’s The Maiden’s Tragedy and Revenger’s Tragedy, and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. I argue that both the allegorical and theatrical modes demand a level of materialism that paradoxically makes the body the centre of attention, and anticipates Cartesian mechanistic dualism. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-25 22:59:31.67

This thesis traces the use of pity in early modern English literature, highlighting in particular the ways in which the emotion prompted personal anxieties and threatened Burckhardtian notions of the self-contained, autonomous individual, even as it acted as a central, crucial component of personal identity. The first chapter considers pity in medieval drama, and ultimately argues that the institutional changes that took place during the Reformation ushered in a new era, in which people felt themselves to be subjected to interpersonal emotions – pity especially – in new, overwhelming, and difficult ways. The remaining three chapters examine how pity complicates questions of personal identity in Renaissance literature. Chapter Two discusses the masculine bid for pity in courtly lyric poetry, including Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and Barnabe Barnes's Parthenophil and Parthenophe, and considers the undercurrents of vulnerability and violation that emerge in the wake of unanswered emotional appeals. This chapter also examines these themes in Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Sidney's Arcadia. Chapter Three also picks up the element of violation, extending it to the pitiable presentation of sexual aggression in Lucrece narratives. Chapter Four explores the recognition of suffering and vulnerability across species boundaries, highlighting the use of pity to define humanity against the rest of the animal kingdom, and focusing in particular on how these questions are handled by Shakespeare in The Tempest and Ben Jonson, in Bartholomew Fair. This work represents the first extended study of pity in early modern English literature, and suggests that the emotion had a constitutive role in personal subjectivity, in addition to structuring various forms of social relation. Ultimately, the thesis contends that the early modern English interest in pity indicates a central worry about vulnerability, but also, crucially, a belief in the necessity of recognising shared, human weakness.