This study presents a biography of Lucy Harington Russell, Countess of Bedford (1581-1627) and a study of her influence on the poets for whom she was patron and friend. The biography of Lady Bedford in Chapter I includes a character study of her husband, a comment on Lady Bedford's supposed puritanism, and a review of the Bedford finances. Although there is an unfortunate scarcity of information about Lady Bedford's life in the years she was most influential as a literary patron, her life after 1612 is well documented. In particular, thirty-six surviving letters reveal her interests and activities, and her mature character: these are examined in the text of this study, and reproduced in full in Appendix II. Chapter II presents a preliminary study of Lady Bedford as a literar; patron. It begins with a brief general comment on patronage in the Jacobean era and a sketch of Lady Bedford's education. Lady Bedford's relationships with Drayton, Florio and Daniel are then outlined, and important works examined. The chapter concludes with a brief comment on Lady Bedford's life at Twickenham, and an outline of the suggested composition of her Twickenham circle. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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In 1755 Henrietta Louisa Jeffreys, Countess of Pomfret, donated a substantial collection of Greco-Roman statuary to the University of Oxford. Once part of a larger collection assembled under Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel, the statues had descended to Jeffreys through the family of her husband, Thomas Ferrnor, having been purchased in 1691 for their country seat at Easton Neston in Northamptonshire. Oxford gratefully received this benefaction and it was publicly (and variously) commemorated. Emphasis on 'quality' and reliance on 'authority' have previously obscured the importance of the Pomfret statuary, subsuming it within Arundel's iconic connoisseurship. Interdisciplinary in approach, this dissertation employs new archival evidence to resituate the Pomfret marbles within larger historical and art-historical contexts and (citing contemporary images and texts) re-evaluates the collection's cultural significance. Adopting the approach of Dr. Carol Gibson-Wood, my work augments new scholarship concerned with reassessing the character of the early modern art market and its associated collecting practices. The primary concern in the dissertation is restoring the voice of Henrietta Louisa Jeffreys, whose motives for the benefaction have previously been misrepresented. Her personal response to social and cultural conditions actuated both her obtaining the statues and her dispensing of them. A second concern is to contextualize Oxford's status within the socio-political discourse of early Georgian England in order to demonstrate that the Pomfret collection was genuinely valuable to the Ufiiversity. The collection provided a collective symbol of vertu (which implied commitment to correct moral behaviour and taste) for that embattled academic institution and identified Oxford as a location of national importance. The dissertation's structure is provided with a third consideration which ultimately incorporates the other two - the provenance of the statuary. While proceeding chronologically from Arundel's acquisition through Oxford's reception, the historical details are augmented with analyses of how the collection was promoted and perceived. By revealing how ideals and ideologies of vertu informed the collection, its donation, its publicists, and its audience, this dissertation addresses the wider significance of the Pomfret benefaction in early modern England.

Submitted by Maike Costa (maiksebas@gmail.com) on 2016-06-27T12:23:20Z No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivo total.pdf: 2597204 bytes, checksum: 93adc2c2f6c11eb964b51941bf768654 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-27T12:23:20Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivo total.pdf: 2597204 bytes, checksum: 93adc2c2f6c11eb964b51941bf768654 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-08-28 / Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico - CNPq / Heavy chains had been keeping Ireland attached to the English colonial system. During seven hundred years, Ireland had been fighting for its political, military, financial and religious independence. The nationalists, arising from the process of seeking for sovereignty, had idealized on the historical roots and on the necessary weaponry for their national project to succeed. This path, nonetheless, pervaded the Celts, the people that became the nation’s spirit for the national movement. Thus, the myths, tales and ancient Gaulish folk tales were freshend. Literature became one of the most important pillars for Ireland’s independence enterprise. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) founds the Celtic Twilight characterized by a group that started, in short, the presentation of the Irish people, by emphasizing to the Celtic inheritance over culture though drama. By this time, Yeats writes The Countess Cathleen, a play that opens both Celtic Twilight and Abbey Theater, in Ireland. The plot presents the conflicts of a community devasted by starvation. It spins around a heroic character, Countless Cathleen, the action evolves with the appeal for the nationalist sacrifice. By offering her soul towards the country people, Cathleen evokes pagan and Christian myths, in a plot that inspires historical facts and political ideals. In this scenario, our work has for its purpose to investigate the building of Cathleen as an Irish heroin, and the folkloric tales used by Yeats during this learning process of this main character for the play, during the action. For this, we turn to theorists like Propp (1984), Sperber (2009), Campbell (2007), Bettelheim (2012). Due to the Romantic aesthetics overlaid Yeat’s plot, we also had to carry a historical and theoretical analysis on Romantic movement main aspects, especially the movement that brought to life medieval feelings through the Medieval Revival during the nineteenth century. The analysis is built as symbolic and allegorical literature reflecting , respectively , the engagement of the work to the Celtic folklore and the political purpose of the nationalist struggle waged by Yeats / Pesadas correntes mantinham a Irlanda presa ao sistema colonial inglês. Durante setecentos anos, os irlandeses lutaram por sua independência política, militar, financeira e religiosa. Os nacionalistas, resultado do processo de busca pela soberania, idealizaram nas raízes históricas do país as armas necessárias para que seu projeto nacional tivesse êxito. Esse caminho, porém, perpassava pelos Celtas, povo que se tornou para o movimento nacionalista o espírito da nação. Sendo assim, os mitos, os contos e as lendas folclóricas ancestrais gaulesas foram revividas. A literatura se tornou um dos pilares mais importes no projeto de independência da Irlanda. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) funda a Renascença Celta que ficou caracterizada como um grupo que começou de forma concisa a representação do povo irlandês, dando ênfase à herança céltica na cultura através da dramaturgia. Com isso, Yeats escreve The Countess Cathleen, peça do dramaturgo que inaugura a Renascença Celta e o Abbey Theater, na Irlanda. A trama encena os conflitos de uma comunidade devastada pela fome. Centralizada em uma personagem heróica, a Condessa Cathleen, a ação desenvolve-se como apelo ao sacrifício nacionalista. Ao ofertar sua alma em prol dos camponeses, Cathleen evoca mitos pagãos e cristãos, numa trama que mimetiza fatos históricos e ideais políticos. Diante desse cenário, nosso trabalho teve como proposta investigar a construção de Cathleen enquanto heroína irlandesa e como os contos folclóricos Celtas foram utilizados por Yeats nesse processo de aprendizado da personagem central da peça durante a ação. Para isso, nos voltamos a teóricos como Propp (1984), Sperber (2009), Campbell (2007), Bettelheim (2012). Devido à estética Romântica que reveste a trama de Yeats, tivemos ainda que fazer uma análise histórica e teórica dos principais pontos Romantismo, principalmente o movimento que reviveu no século XIX os valores e sentimentos medievais através do Medieval Revival. A análise constrói-se, como uma literatura simbólica e alegórica refletindo, respectivamente, o débito da obra ao folclore Celta e ao propósito político da luta nacionalista travada por Yeats.

In his Defence of Poetry (c. 1580), Philip Sidney argues that poetry—a category in which he includes all imaginative fiction—aims at the education of its readers. Archepollycyes studies the attempts of a loose group of sixteenth-century writers around Sidney to write fiction that lives up to this aim, in order to understand the methods they developed to educate readers and the relationship between this education and the politics of the monarchical state. Sidnean fiction demands long study on the part of its readers because it aims to transform their mental habits and create new internal resources for right action. The works of fiction I study here—Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton’s Gorboduc, George Buchanan’s Baptistes, Sidney’s Arcadia, Mary Sidney Herbert’s Antonius and A Discourse of Life and Death, and Fulke Greville’s Mustapha—were products of their authors’ experiments with genre, narrative, translation, and style as tools to achieve this aim. Through the reading experience these works invite, readers exercise their judgment in the interpretation of fictional examples and reflect explicitly on the mental habits of generalization and application that inform decisions about how to act in new circumstances. Readers also come to see these habits of judgment as shared with others and experience the act of reading as participation in both real and imagined interpretive communities. I argue that these interpretive communities are best understood as loose political institutions, networks of organization and affiliation whose members could think and act together through common habits of judgment and the mutual resolution that results from recognizing this commonality. I adopt the term “archepollycyes” from Gabriel Harvey in order to describe the role of such institutions in monarchical politics. Harvey coins the term to describe the foundational forms of political knowledge, action, and organization, in contrast to the day-to-day work of government and the business of political rule. “Archepollycyes” hold a political community together in spite of changes in its ruler or government; understanding and creating such institutions was thus a means of responding to the escalating crises of succession, absolutism, and civil war that confronted early modern monarchies. By reading and writing fiction, I argue, Sidney and a broader network of writers aimed to act at a distance from contemporary political conflicts by founding “archepollycyes,” loose institutions capable of acting independent of the monarchical state and outside of existing structures of government, but on behalf of the long-term stability of a political community. In this way, I offer a new way of thinking about fiction and political institution in relation to the contested emergence of the modern sovereign state.

Countess Urraca Lope de Haro was the daughter of the noble Lord Diego Lope de Haro, friend and advisor to King Alfonso VIII of Castilla-León and granddaughter of Lord Lope Díaz de Haro and Lady Aldonza Ruiz de Castro, aristocratic courtiers as well as popular monastic patrons. As a young and wealthy widow, Countess Urraca took monastic vows at the Cistercian nunnery of Santa María de Cañas founded by her grandparents. Within a short time of uniting herself to this monastery, she was chosen as its fourth abbess in 1225, a position she held for thirty-seven years until her death in 1262. Following the tradition of monastic patronage established by her noble family members, Countess Urraca expanded the monastery's small real estate holdings, oversaw extensive building projects to create permanent structures for the nunnery, and patronized artistic projects including statuettes of the Virgin Mary and St. Peter in addition to her own decorative stone sarcophagus during her term as abbess. This thesis examines the artistic decoration and architectural patronage of this powerful woman and the influences she incorporated into the monastic structures at Cañas as she oversaw their construction. In dating the original buildings of the monastery at Cañas to the period of Countess Urraca's leadership, the predominant architectural features and decorative details of female Cistercian foundations in northern Spain are discussed. Comparisons with additional thirteenth-century Cistercian monasteries from the same region in northern Spain are offered to demonstrate the artistic connections with the structures Countess Urraca patronized. In addition, this thesis examines Countess Urraca's obvious devotion to the Virgin Mary and St. Peter by considering the medieval monastic world in which she lived and the strong emphasis the Cistercian Order placed on such worship practices. The potent spiritual connections Countess Urraca made by commissioning images of essential, holy intercessors testifies to her devotion to them and the powerful salvatory role she herself played in the lives of the nuns for whom she was responsible. As a nun and abbess, Countess Urraca was urged to emulate Mary's mothering, nurturing qualities, and, as she did so was simultaneously empowered by the Virgin's heavenly authority as administrator of mercy. Indeed, through studying her art it is clear that she saw herself as an intercessor on behalf of the nuns for whom she was responsible. Furthermore, discussion of the imagery displayed on Countess Urraca's decorative stone sarcophagus demonstrates not only a similar message of salvation through intercessors such as Peter and Mary, but also testifies of Abbess Urraca's aristocratic lineage. Through this artistic commission, the Abbess creates another direct, personal link between herself and the Virgin by including the symbol of the rosary throughout the iconography of her tomb. Such a symbol represents her devotion to Mary as Queen of Heaven and simultaneously empowers Countess Urraca as an intercessor herself. All of these architectural and artistic commissions confirm that she was a powerful woman who wielded a great deal of influence.