<p>In seeking to explain why male authors assumed female pseudonyms in seventeenth-century literature, this dissertation explores male-to-female cross-dressing in Jacobean drama, effeminizing representations of parliament in Civil War propaganda, and parodies of women’s sexualized, political speech during the Interregnum and Restoration periods. My dissertation concludes that the sexualized female persona evolved over the course of the seventeenth century as a vehicle through which male authors could critique rival iterations of patriarchal hierarchy forwarded by Stuart kings and by parliament without challenging their own positions of masculine privilege within those hierarchies.</p> <p>My first chapter explores the political critiques of Jacobean absolutism embedded in the cross-gender performance narratives of Ben Jonson’s <em>Epicoene </em>(1609)<em> </em>and the anonymous play <em>Swetnam the Woman-Hater </em>(1620). In my second chapter I link male-to-female drag’s ability to critique an absolutist patriarchal paradigm to the satirical attacks on parliamentary models of polyvocal patriarchal rule in 1640s print. My final chapter investigates how female authors often find themselves shut out of the political discussions that female impersonations spark by taking up Sarah Jinner’s almanacs of 1658-60. Jinner’s almanacs combine predictions of rampant sexual wantonness with a critique of the waning Protectorate regime. I examine how the pseudonymous response to those almanacs from “Sarah Ginnor” depoliticizes Jinner’s sexual commentary on the Protectorate government.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This study argues that religious orders in early modern Spain developed informal sets of procedures to handle the consequences of melancholia in their communities. It also argues that three influential members of these orders, San Ignacio de Loyola of the Jesuits, and San Teresa de Avila and San Juan de la Cruz of the Discalced Carmelites, tailored these protocols according to their own private concerns and experience with the disease. The changing discourse surrounding melancholia and similar diseases during the early modern period, alongside the unique environmental concerns of these newly founded orders, created a need for new methods of dealing with the disruptions caused by melancholic members of the clergy. These solutions formed out of the immediate needs within each order, but ultimately defined the relationship between melancholic brothers and sisters and their communities.

The general historiography of Stuart diplomacy has, by and large, argued that those who were tasked with carrying out foreign policy were ineffective, amateurish and, in some cases, incompetent. This harsh view is in need of reassessment in the light of a number of incidents, which suggest that much effective foreign policy and general diplomatic work was carried out by lower-ranking diplomats, who were titled agents. These agents have attracted little historical comment or study. This thesis sets out to redress this by considering the agents employed from 1603 to 1688, when the title disappeared due to rank inflation, duties transferred to consuls, and other factors. The texts of the period on the perfect ambassador leave clear omissions in descriptions of diplomatic work, which therefore suggests a role for another type of diplomat, the agent. The initial chapter looks at background and education and offers a portrait of an average agent as typically a well-educated member of the lower gentry. The terms under which agents served are compared with other professional groups of comparable social rank and those in other government positions. Agents’ work in information gathering, including where and from what sources they obtained material and how it was transmitted, is investigated. The existence of an efficient international network is uncovered. Agents’ role in negotiations, unconstrained by protocol, allowed them a greater degree of freedom than ambassadors. This and the element of deniability are key to understanding their importance to Stuart diplomacy. The task of protecting merchants’ rights is demonstrated by a case study in France which shows all the usual stages involved in resolving a dispute. Involvement in buying naval supplies and cultural transfer are also discussed in chapters concerned with agents’ practical activities. Finally, the careers pursued after their agencies are outlined, showing how some, such as Cottington, used their skills and knowledge to their advantage. Having demonstrated the differences amongst, and the utility of, agents it is possible to suggest that some of the criticism of Stuart diplomacy comes from a misunderstanding of the use of both agents and ambassadors, and how, when and why each could be employed for a specific task.

This thesis reconstructs and interprets the evolution of legal culture in the Saxon city of Freiberg in the sixteenth century. It challenges the notion that early modern state institutions were punitive and disciplinary; and instead posits that in Saxony, they were flexible and sought to maintain social harmony. While previous scholarship has favoured a sociological approach, based on the concept of social control, this thesis employs a legal anthropological optic to study the interaction of state institutions and social life holistically. The focus is not just on how state institutions sought to regulate social life, but also on how ordinary people used institutions for their diverse purposes. The goal of this methodological approach, based on Lawrence Friedman’s concept of legal culture, is to assess the relative position and interaction of the people, the judiciary, and the law in early modern Germany. Probing the interactions of the court and the residents of Freiberg reveals that the court was primarily a record-keeper and a mediator. For the former, it logged and transcribed all manner of transactions: peace pacts, loans, and house purchases; and Freibergers readily turned to the court to get a formal record of an obligation. For the latter, the court was rarely a site of punishment, rather it was a place where conflicts were regulated, and bonds forged. At court, Freibergers fostered ties to one another. Neither of these roles, record-keeper or mediator, are ones traditionally ascribed to early modern courts. Only by considering by the culture of a court does either become apparent.

Transubstantiation and the cult of Corpus Christi became crucial Counter-Reformation symbols which were assigned an even more significant role during the process of Catholic renewal from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. Practices outside Mass, such as pilgrimages, processions, and prayers in front of the consecrated host flourished, in particular, in early modern Bavaria. The former Duchy of Bavaria has generally been regarded as the archetypal ‘confessional' state, as the Bavarian dukes from the House of Wittelsbach took the lead in propagating the cult of the Eucharist. They acted as patrons of Baroque Catholicism which was presented to the public as an obvious visual marker of Catholic identity. This study therefore investigates how the Eucharist was popularised in the Catholic duchy between 1550 and 1750, focusing on three major themes: pilgrimages, confraternities, and the Corpus Christi procession. This study does not, however, approach the renewal of Catholicism in terms of a top-down process implemented by the Wittelsbach dukes as a method of stately power and control. Rather than arguing in favour of a state-sponsored piety imposed from above, this work explores the formation of Catholic confessional identity as a two-way-process of binding together elite and popular piety, and emphasizes the active role of the populace in constituting this identity. This is why this investigation draws primarily on research from local archives, using a rich body of both textual and visual evidence. Focusing especially on the visual aspects of Catholic piety, this project works towards an interdisciplinary approach in order to understand the ways in which Eucharistic devotion outside Mass was presented to and received by local communities within particular visual environments.

This thesis builds upon the existing scholarship such as that by Patricia Crawford, Helen King, Alexandra Lord, and Michael Stolberg, to analyse the ways that all aspects of menstruation were accounted for in early-modern England. Broadly informed by cultural materialism, and starting with the wide-range of medical treatises that were published in the early modern period, which theorise the female body, the thesis incorporates a broad range of material from private journals, diaries, and letters to the more public conventionally literary texts such as poetry, prose fiction, and plays. The thesis is structured according to the physiological order of vaginal bleeding as understood in the early-modern period. Starting with menarche the thesis argues that just as the medical texts broadly agree that the ideal age for menarche is fourteen, so social conventions also saw this as a significant age in a girl s growth to maturity. Since fourteen was considered to be the optimum age for menarche any wide variation in this age was seen as problematic; the thesis includes analysis, therefore of early and late menarche. The thesis next examines the surviving accounts of menstruation, arguing that menstruation was something that women were disinclined to write about, preferring to manage the condition privately. The chapter offers an account of how women might have managed the practical aspects of their cycle such as sanitary protection, theorising that the negative associations of menstrual blood in the Bible influence women s position on the matter. The other significant occasions of female bleeding were hymenal and lochial bleeding and the thesis argues that these were seen as analogous to menstrual bleeding, and theorised as such. The thesis demonstrates that hymenal blood was eroticised in the period because of the importance of virginity to this society. Like all occasions of bleeding, pregnancy and lochial bleeding was seen as a dangerous event. The thesis concludes with a review of the presentation of menopause in the period.

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.

This dissertation examines the creation of innovative scholarly environments, publications, and resources in the context of a social knowledge creation affordances engendered by digital technologies. It draws on theoretical and praxis-oriented work undertaken as part of the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory (ETCL), work that sought to model how a socially aware and interconnected domain of scholarly inquiry might operate. It examines and includes two digital projects that provide a way to interrogate the meaning of social knowledge creation as it relates to early modern studies. These digital projects – A Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript (BL Add. 17,492) and the Renaissance Knowledge Network – approach the social in three primary ways: they approach the social as a quality of material textuality, deriving from the editorial theories of D. F. McKenzie and Jerome McGann; as a type of knowledge work that digital technologies can facilitate; and as a function of consciously designed platforms and tools emerging from the digital humanities. In other words, digital humanities practitioners are uniquely placed to move what has until now been customarily an analytical category and enact or embed it in a practical, applied way. The social is simultaneously a theoretical orientation and a way of designing and making digital tools — an act which in turn embeds such a theoretical framework in the material conditions of knowledge production. Digital humanists have sought to explain and often re-contextualise how knowledge work occurs in the humanities; as such, they form a body of scholarship that undergirds and enriches the present discussion around how the basic tasks of humanities work—research, discovery, analysis, publication, editing—might alter in the age of Web 2.0 and 3.0. Through sustained analysis of A Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript (BL Add 17,492) and the Renaissance Knowledge Network, this dissertation argues argues that scholarly communication is shifting from a largely individualistic, single-author system of traditional peer-reviewed publication to a broadly collaborative, socially-invested ecosystem of peer production and public facing digital production. Further, it puts forward the idea that the insights gained from these long-term digital humanities projects – the importance of community investment and maintenance in social knowledge projects, building resources consonant with disciplinary expectations and norms, and the necessity of transparency and consultation in project development – are applicable more widely to shifting norms in scholarly communications. These insights and specific examples may change patters of behaviour that govern how humanities scholars act within a densely interwoven digital humanities. This dissertation is situated at the intersection of digital humanities, early modern studies, and to discussions of humanities knowledge infrastructure. In content it reports on and discusses two major digital humanities projects, putting a number of previous peer-reviewed, collaboratively authored publications in conversation with each other and the field at large. As the introduction discusses, each chapter other than the introduction and conclusion originally stood on its own. Incorporating previously published, peer-reviewed materials from respected journals, as well as grants, white papers, and working group documents, this project represents a departure from the proto-monograph model of dissertation work prevalent in the humanities in the United States and Canada. Each component chapter notes my role as author; for the majority of the included material, I acted as lead author or project manager, coordinating small teams of makers and writers. In form this means that the following intervenes in discussions surrounding graduate training and professionalization. Instead of taking the form of a cohesive monograph, this project is grounded in four years of theory and practice that closely resemble dissertations produced in the natural sciences. / Graduate

This thesis comprises detailed readings of nine early-modern plays featuring female witches in an attempt to recover an understanding of how they were represented on the early-modern stage and what they meant to their first audiences. Drawing on twentieth-century theories of subjectivity, it offers an avenue for the explanation of moments of misogyny in the plays and identifies an unconscious communal anxiety which was revealed and perpetuated by the stage representation of the witch. Although we cannot fully recapture the experience of an audience of 400 years ago, this study attempts to do so in order to place the plays in the context of anxieties detectable in the period. By reading the plays in reference to theatrical conditions, this thesis identifies moments when the drama enlisted the subjectivity of the audience and the witch was constructed as uncanny. Such an approach contributes to the debate on the ages of actors performing certain female characters and suggests potential staging approaches for future performances.

This thesis investigates the history of preposition stranding in the Modern English period from 1500 to 1900, in close relation with the prescriptive movement in the tradition of English grammatical thought. The aim is to assess, or rather re-assess, thee ffect and effectiveness of the (late) eighteenth-century normative tradition on actual language usage. The methodology lies in the comparison of a precept corpus, i.e.meta-linguistic comments, with a usage corpus, i.e. actual language practice. On the one hand, this study will provide insightful observations into the attitudes towards and conceptualisation of end-placed prepositions in the course of the eighteenth century, the age of prescriptivism. Evidence comes from a self-compiled corpus of observations made on this peculiar usage as gathered from a miscellany of precept works (1700-1800). On the other hand, this thesis will trace the diachronic evolution of the use of preposition stranding before, during and after the age of prescriptivism,as collected in two renowned historical corpora, namely the Early Modern English section of the diachronic part of the Helsinki Corpus (1500-1710) and the British part of A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (1650-1899). The evaluation of the evidence from precept and the evidence from usage will shed new light on (a) the origin of the stigmatisation of preposition stranding (micro-level), and(b) the role of the normative tradition on language variation and change(macro-level). First, contrary to what has been taken for granted in the literature hitherto, I will demonstrate that the proscription against ending sentences with prepositions does not go back directly to the late eighteenth-century heyday of publication of precept works (e.g. Robert Lowth's grammar) but to the mid/late seventeenth-century incipient stages of the prescriptive tradition embraced with ideals of correctness and politeness; especially, to the grammarian and rhetorician Joshua Poole and to the literary writer John Dryden. Language change can thus be observed as early as the early eighteenth century. Secondly, I will provide evidence to show that late eighteenth-century precepts did exert an influence on the use of preposition stranding. The effect is manifest in contemporaneous writings and the effectiveness extends into the early nineteenth century. Nonetheless, it is only a temporary one, as the trends reverse in the late nineteenth century when prescriptivism was fading away. It will be argued that the eighteenth-century normative tradition did not trigger linguistic change but rather reinforced an existing trend.