In the early modern world advice literature showed the family as a reflection of the state, a miniature kingdom in which the husband, as family head, acted much as a ruling monarch, with his wife, children and servants rendered his subjects. Although many seventeenth-century individuals chose to uphold traditional social conventions about proper behavior, not all family relationships fit the mold. Therefore, in an effort to uncover the experiences of seventeenth-century families, this thesis will focus on the relationships formed between spouses, parents and children, and siblings. It is on this small sampling of middling and upper class Scottish families, that we can see many common characteristics that were likely present in many early modern family relationships.

In the history of medicine "from below," religious language has been sidelined as a convention that interfered with the expression of peoples genuine experiences and feelings. This thesis uses the autobiographical writings of three well-known seventeenth-century women, Lady Anne Halkett, Lady Ann Fanshawe, and Alice Thornton, to explore how religious language actually facilitated the expression and preservation of their illness experiences. Having suffered considerable loss during the Civil War and Interregnum, these women relied on familiar religious scripts to present their life stories, including many illness experiences, as persuasive apologies for their difficult situations as widows after the Restoration. Considering their individual expressions of thanksgiving, the good death, and balance within a broader literary context reveals the extent to which each woman not only employed but also adapted convention to suit her particular purpose for writing. The womens illness narratives must therefore be read with due attention to their religious language, and both need to be interpreted in light of how the womens particular social situations and writing habits related to the cultural conventions of their time.

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Descartes and Malebranche often seem to argue that the self (or I) is identical to an immaterial thinking substance distinct from the body. But there are also many passages where they insist that the body is part of the self. This means that Descartes and Malebranche have a problem, since they seem to endorse three mutually inconsistent propositions: (1) I am an immaterial thinking thing. (2) Immaterial things don't have bodily parts. (3) I include my body as part of myself. I call this puzzle the self-body problem. It is a problem about understanding how we - the immaterial thinking subjects who engage in the self-reflective project of the Meditations - can incorporate our bodies into ourselves. I argue that Descartes and Malebranche have an elegant solution to this inconsistency. On my interpretation, the Cartesian self is not identical to an immaterial thinking substance. Rather, the Cartesian self is a variably constituted being that has different parts at different times and in different possible situations. Sometimes the self exists with both an immaterial thinking part and a bodily part. Other times it exists with only an immaterial part. The immaterial part is essential to the self, the bodily part is not. When Descartes and Malebranche say that I am immaterial, what they really mean is that I essentially have an immaterial part. But that is consistent with the claim that my body is part of myself. / Philosophy

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This dissertation explores the role of ignorance in the process of early modern self-fashioning. Renaissance historiography has, by and large, been based on a Cartesian-cum-Hegelian understanding of the subject as a subject of knowledge. An individual's recognition of her self-motivated agency, her power to act as an independent self, has been read as the product of the generation of knowledge and epistemologies that assert human ability to pursue and master knowledge. Critical theories of subjectivity have challenged the humanist subject and its epistemological foundations, but ignorance and the unknown have rarely been theorized as anything more than empty spaces to be invaded and filled by knowledge. Building on recent philosophical and cultural materialist investigations into knowledge, ignorance, and the subject, my work studies how ignorance can operate as a positive force in the production of the self and how, paradoxically, knowledge can erode the epistemological foundations of subjectivity. Primarily focused on the literature of early modern Europe, this dissertation advances the study of early modern subjectivity as well as the relationship between epistemology and the self as perceived in contemporary theory by tracing the hitherto ignored operations of ignorance and complicating the assumption of a teleological connection between knowledge and subjectivity. In particular, the major areas of study are: how hegemonic discourses produce not only knowledge but also ignorance in order to stabilize the existence and authority of social hierarchies and empowered subject; how the creation and pursuit of knowledge outside of these demarcations can erode the foundations of social identity and individual subjectivity by revealing the fiction of cultural "truths"; how cultural spaces of ignorance can provide disempowered individuals opportunities for resistance and self-fashioning against socially prescribed norms; and how submission to or acknowledgment of one's own ignorance can become internalized as an essential part of a subjectivity that does not rely on knowledge as a form of power.

This thesis basically has a twofold aim: on the one hand, to make a somewhat neglected body of Renaissance prose more readable, by adding, in a punctual and miscellaneous manner, to our historical, philological and thematic understanding of it and by examining it in the light of some of our current theoretical preoccupations; and, on the other hand, to problematize the "realistic" rubric assigned to these works and to do so by cultivating a more thoroughgoing textual realism on the part of readers. / These works, traditionally grouped together because of the interaction of their authors at the end of the 16th century, include Robert Greene's "cony-catching" and "confessional" pamphlets, the texts of the controversy between Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey, and Harvey's manuscript drafts, as well as more familiar works such as Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller. / The theoretical issue of "the real" as a textual effect has been divided up according to the three nominal categories of persons, places and things, but the thesis falls methodologically into two halves. The opening chapters aim at reintroducing the figures of Greene, Nashe and Harvey, and exploring the quasi-genres of confession, invective and rough draft as exemplary models of the textual construction of a realistic person. They also attempt an alternative form of reading which is an amalgam of cento, summary, close reading, theoretical aside, and running commentary. In the second half, microreadings of the Marprelate Tracts, the cony-catching pamphlets, and texts by Nashe are used to shed light on theoretical issues of textual "place" such as the rhetorical construction of "presence" and metaphorical "movement." Once the relationship between premodern and postmodern textuality has been sketched, the final chapter offers a critique of the unreflexive academic practice of doing "readings," and argues for a new literalism and the self-subversion of the figurative in an "extrarhetorical" reading of Nashe's Lenten Stuffe.

This dissertation addresses the profound influence that the shared experience of humans and animals had on the poetics of early modern drama. With reference to a selection of early modern comedies and a range of non-literary texts that includes natural history encyclopedias and animal husbandry manuals, I argue that the vernacular knowledge of animals shaped the early modern imagination generally and the early modern playwright's imagination particularly. I propose an original approach to early modern literature, one which urges integrating a consideration of the real-world referent for animal representation, the collective life lived by humans and animals, and the poetics of early modern drama. / In my introduction, I take up the dissertation's general claims about the ethical and historiographical dimension of interpreting early modern animal representation. I continue to work at this theoretical level in Chapter One, where I consider how the animal-focused disciplines of sociobiology and ecology can help and hinder readers interpret early modern drama. In the following chapters, I work closely with a selection of early modern plays, contexts, and literary and theatrical devices. Chapter Two focuses on a web of comic plays that feature instantiations of animals in stage properties and actor's gestures. The web of plays in Chapter Two includes the anonymous Mucedorus; Lording Barry's Ram Alley; John Fletcher's Women Pleased; Thomas Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament ; William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford's The Witch of Edmonton; Shakespeare's Love's Labor Lost; and Shakespeare and Fletcher's Two Noble Kinsmen. Chapter Three is devoted to the anthropomorphism of the allegorical representations of animals in Ben Jonson's plays Volpone and The Alchemist. In my reading of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in Chapter Four, I move on to consider animals whose representation is removed from reality not merely by anthropomorphism, but also by magic. All of these instances of representation draw animals into a sphere of existence that is commonly understood as the exclusive domain of humans at the same time that they draw humans in the other direction, which is to say into the muck and mire that is the origin of all life.

This thesis examines a mass-produced broadsheet printed during the Great Plague of London (1664-1666), which unites the textual modes of poetry and medical prescription with imagery and statistical tabulation, titled Londons Lord Have Mercy Upon Us. The central woodcut on the broadsheet presents a view of London as a bounded expansion, and relegates the images of death, particularly registered in the personification of Death, to the outskirts of the city. This visual separation of the city from the plague sick (and the plague dead) is most profoundly registered on the border of the broadsheet, which is adorned with momento mori imagery. The ordered presentation of the plague city is likewise established in the mortality tabulations on the sheet. These tabulations, which were culled from the contemporaneous London Bills of Mortality, make visible the extent of the disease in the city, while simultaneously linking the plague to the poor London suburbs. Of particular interest are the representation of faces on the broadsheet – the face of the dead, the face of Death and the face of the city – and how these images relate to the plague orders imposed on the city population by the Corporation of London. These orders sought medically and legally to contain, and spatially to control, the larger social body of London through enacting a kind of erasure upon the identities of the sick and dead. These erasures registered themselves in material form as a kind of facelessness, a motif found on the figure of Death and in the skull-faces of the dead. This motif visually registers the various anxieties expressed towards the faces of the plague-sick by many contemporaries living in plague-London, an anxiety about those who visibly displayed the signs of their contagion and, more threatening still, about those who were asymptomatic. An increasing understanding of the plague as both visible and controllable in the early modern city of London was continuously being challenged by the conflicting belief that plague was a disease of invisible extension and manifestation. This variance is deeply registered in the ambiguous depiction of the plague-dead in the frame of the sheet.

The study of prostitution in early modern England is often informed by incorrect terminology. The modern historiographical use of the term “prostitute” is misleading, as the term did not appear until the sixteenth century, and the act of selling sex did not come to dominate understandings of whoredom until many years later. This thesis examines the etymological history of the term “prostitute” and its cognates, and their changing legal, economic, and cultural meanings. This thesis investigates the intersection of late medieval and early modern conceptions of illicit sex with the rise of commercial capitalism to track the conceptual development of transactional sex as a commodity. Despite the influence of commercial capitalism on aspects of sexual immorality and developing conceptions of difference between paid and unpaid illicit sex, the primary division remained between chaste and unchaste women throughout the whole of the early modern period.