If we consider the representation of the body in the epic-romances of Torquato Tasso, Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser, certain instances of wounding and laceration emerge as crucial turning points in the development of their respective narratives: Clorinda’s redemptive mutilation, Parthenia’s blood-drenched pallor, Amavia’s disquieting suicide, Venus’s insatiable orifice, Amoret’s “perfect hole.” This thesis affords a detailed comparative study of such passages, contending that the wound assumed a critical metaphoric dimension in sixteenth-century epic-romance literature, particularly in relation to the perceived association between body condition and erotic desire. Along with its function as a marker of martial valor and somatic sacredness, the wound, I argue, increasingly is designated in these epic-romances as an interiorizing apparatus, one liable to accrue at any instance into a surplus of unanticipated meaning. As such, the wound becomes an emblem in these texts of what I call the phenomenology of desire—the equation of consummation and loss—as well as the aesthetic and metaphoric mechanism by which these writers seek to overcome it. The four chapters of this thesis constitute individual but cumulative points of response to the problem of thinking about desire as a type of wound. For Tasso, a wound poses a challenge to physical, psychological, and spiritual integrity, but its remarkable capacity for aestheticization also allows Tasso to envision it as a synthesizer of sacred and erotic affects. For Sidney, the prospect that a wound could define a body as courageous or pathetic, as sacred or corrupt, became both politically and socially troubling, and the New Arcadia, I argue, proleptically attempts to defend Sidney against interpretations of wounds that register them as manifestations of corrupt desire. For Spenser, body fracture and erotic wounding are analogic (indeed, almost indistinguishable), and The Faerie Queene investigates the prospect that confusing these analogies can become an empowering, even revelatory experience. In each of these epic-romances, a wound serves both a literal and a figurative function and, in this way, is established as the foremost image by which these writers imagine strength and mutilation, affect and heroism, epic and romance as being inextricably bound.

The conception of René Descartes as the arch-rationalist has been sufficiently exploded in recent literature; however, there is still a large lacuna in our understanding of how empirical research and experimentation fits within his philosophy. My dissertation is directed at addressing just this problem. I contend that Descartes’ famed method is not a singular monolith but instead two interdependent methods: one directed at metaphysical and epistemological truth, while the other directed at empirical questions and contingent facts of the world. I claim there is evidence for this position not only in his actual scientific practice, but also in the rhetorical structure of the Discourse on Method and the Principles of Philosophy. In exploring the empirical side of Descartes’ method, I show how his unusual system produces a system of experiment designed to serve both as a discovery and verification tool at the same time. As a further application of my interpretation, I argue that the Passions of the Soul and Descartes’ ethical theory expressed in his correspondence must also be seen as part of his two-fold methodology. Instead of attempting to cast Descartes as a virtue ethicist or deontologist, as is normally done, I emphasize that Descartes’ ethics is centered on the mind-body union, and therefore, includes an empirical element as well. The end result is an ethics that requires a detailed study of mechanics, anatomy, physics, as well as medicine. Lastly, I show how this methodology can help us understand the works of some of his early followers: Claude Gadroys and Jacques Rohault. Both of these philosophers not only serve to ground my interpretation, but also to highlight aspects of Cartesian that have often been passed over. I show how the experimentalism of Jacques Rohault goes beyond the epistemological boundaries set up by Descartes, as signifies a new direction that will ultimately eclipse the Cartesian school of thought. In the case of Claude Gadroys, I present a concrete example of the exploitation of the over generality of Cartesian principles. In so doing, I show that while Descartes’ experimentalism was intended to rule out the possibility of occult causes, he in fact created a system that allowed for them, only under a different guise.

This dissertation examines the fortunes of two families of the territorial nobility in Paderborn, the barons (Freiherren) of Büren, and the baronets (Adelherren) of Fürstenberg. In doing so, it provides a paradigm for understanding the history of the territory over the course of the period 1550–1650. In contrast to their contemporaries in southern Germany, the nobles of Westphalia, the area of Germany in which Paderborn is located, are relatively under-studied. My research indicates that this area, with its myriad small territories and relative power vacuum, was also a microcosm for the political developments of the Holy Roman Empire. In studying these families, the culture of politics in the early modern Empire is illuminated. This dissertation is arranged thematically, where each chapter uses an incident in this territory to discuss a broad theme. My first chapter discusses the development of a significant party of Protestant nobles in Paderborn, and discusses the creation and reinforcement of noble identity. Particular attention is paid to the cultures of noble friendships and patronage. The political usefulness of the feud is also discussed. The second chapter examines a case of two conversions. Elisabeth von Büren, a recently-widowed Calvinist noblewoman, converted from Protestantism to Catholicism because of her increasingly difficult social and political situation. In contrast, her son Moritz experienced an internal conversion that led him to join the Jesuit order, an act that in time resulted in the extinction of this family. This chapter discusses not only the motivations for each conversion, but also the political uses of these converts, and their conversion narratives. The third chapter follows the political fortunes of two brothers, Kaspar and Dietrich von Fürstenberg. Due to his vocal alliance to the Catholic faction in Paderborn, Dietrich, who was a priest, was able to become an imperial prince. His brother, Kaspar, who was the head of the family, not only benefited from this rise in status, but also had to change his sexual practices in response to his family's increased notoriety. This chapter discusses the effects of the Counter-Reformation in Paderborn in both the public and private spheres. The fourth chapter discusses the descendant of these two men, Ferdinand von Fürstenberg. Thanks to his connections and the political realities in Westphalia after the Thirty Years' War, Ferdinand was able not only to become the prince-bishop of Paderborn, but also to enact administrative reform in the rural parishes and employ irenicism, a proto-secularist philosophy, as an aspect of his foreign policy. Ferdinand's patronage networks are analyzed in the context of post 1648 elite intellectual and cultural life. The last two chapters concentrate on the physical legacy of the two Fürstenberg bishops previously discussed. The fifth chapter discusses the "Reformation of the Landscape" enacted through the building programs of these two bishops. Through the building and decoration of monumental structures, the two bishops helped to impose a Catholic order on the countryside, and erase the signs of the previous, defeated Protestant faction. The final chapter discusses the funerary monuments of the family from which these two bishops came. Although they are scattered throughout the region, the funerary monuments of this family form a coherent propagandistic message, intended to promote their majesty, nobility and Catholicism.

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. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

Review of Deborah Uman. Women as Translators in Early Modern England. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012. 166 pages. $65.00.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(人間・環境学) / 甲第22515号 / 人博第918号 / 新制||人||220(附属図書館) / 2019||人博||918(吉田南総合図書館) / 京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科共生人間学専攻 / (主査)准教授 桒山 智成, 教授 廣野 由美子, 准教授 池田 寛子 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Human and Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DGAM

Fantasies about warrior women circulated in many forms of writing in early modern England: travel narratives such as Sir Walter Ralegh's The Discoverie of Guiana (1595) portray Amazon encounters in the New World; poems like Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1596) depict women's skill with a spear; and the plays of Shakespeare, John Fletcher, and others stage the adventurous feats of women on the battlefield. In this dissertation, I analyze the social anxieties that emerge when warrior women threaten gender hierarchies in the patriarchal society of early modern England. The battlefield has traditionally been a site for men to prove their masculinity against other men, so when male characters find themselves submitting to a sword-wielding woman, they are forced to reimagine their own masculine identities as they become the objects acted upon by women. In their experience of subjectivity, these literary warrior women often allude to the historical Queen Elizabeth I, whose reign destabilized ideas about gender and power in the period. Negative evaluations of warrior women often indicate anxiety about Elizabeth as an Amazon-like queen. Thus, portrayals of warrior women often end with a celebration of patriarchal dominance once the male characters have successfully contained the threat of the warrior woman through marriage or death. I argue that these depictions of containment indicate a common desire to maintain patriarchal superiority during and after Elizabeth's reign.

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