<p>When debating the structure of the cosmos, Raphael delivers to Adam perhaps Milton's most famous line: "be lowly wise." With the promise to "justify the ways of God to men," Milton does not limit man's knowledge to base matters, but reclaims the heights of "other worlds" for the poet. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the natural philosophers' material explanations of the natural order were slowly gaining authority over other sources of knowledge, the poets prime among them. My dissertation takes up the competing early modern claims to knowledge that Milton lays down for Adam. I argue that natural philosophy, what today we call "science," emerged as the dominant authority over knowledge by appropriating the poet's imagination.</p><p>The poet's imagination had long revealed the divine hand that marked nature--a task that, as Sidney put it, merited the poet a "peerlesse" rank among other professions. For Bacon, Galileo, and Royal Society fellows, the poetic imagination revealed material explanations of nature's order that other orthodox models and methods could not. For the first decades of the seventeenth century, the imagination aligned poetry and natural philosophy as complementary pursuits of knowledge: Sidney's poet was to imagine a "golden" world that revealed the divine order, the material cause of which Bacon's natural philosopher was to discover in nature. But as the Royal Society fellows countered the claim that they peddled fancies, they severed ties with the poet. In one ingenious rhetorical move, Royal Society fellows proclaimed themselves to have perfected the poet's imaginative work, securing the imagination for natural philosophy while disavowing poetry as the product of an idle fancy. Such rhetoric proved as powerful then as it does now. For Margaret Cavendish, the poet occupies the supplemental role that "recreate[s] the mind" once it grows tired of the "serious" natural philosophical studies. After the Restoration, then, the important role of the poetic imagination would go largely unrecognized even as it set itself to work in what would become the separate disciplines of literature and science.</p> / Dissertation

The first animal-to-human blood transfusions performed in seventeenth-century England focused on patients suffering from mental diseases such as melancholy. Many physicians diagnosed melancholy as a disease of the body, mind, and soul in which blood played a key role. Philosophy, religion, and folklore helped formulate blood as an elusive yet powerful substance with access to immaterial mind and soul in addition to the body. English physician Richard Lower conducted these first transfusions yet recorded little about his personal theories regarding how melancholy and blood affected the body, mind, and soul. The philosophies of Lower’s colleagues, Thomas Willis and Robert Boyle, provide a new context and reasoning behind Lower’s experiments. Lower, Willis and Boyle’s combined work explains the theory of blood diseases and how blood transfusions could potentially treat mental diseases including melancholy.

This thesis is a cultural history of the textual afterlives and poetic appropriations of John Donne's verse. I use print and manuscript miscellanies, hitherto unstudied commonplace books, letters, diaries and seventeenth and eighteenth century criticism to ask, who was reading Donne and in what physical forms? By looking at allusive strategies and reading practices of the time, I demonstrate how many different Donnes can be identified when we strip away modern notions of what 'Donne' is and seek multiple afterlives. I nuance the idea of Donne as a determinedly coterie poet, suggesting his print presence might have looked to his early audience like a strategic writer who had not, despite Izaak Walton's narrative, closed off the possibility of public authorship. I find there was a period of radical re-appropriation and re-reading of Donne in the seventeenth and eighteenth century: Donne was as a guiding influence to canonical poets. Rochester is perhaps the poet whose voice most vividly recalls Donne's swaggering persona and intricately-constructed rendering of apparent spontaneity. Katherine Philips's verse makes sophisticated use of Donne's voice in her intimate quasi-erotic verse; I contrast this with the voice of her poems written for state occasions to show how Donne becomes a resource for self-revelation. Dryden offers a sustained critical vision of Donne: although, as the primary mercenary proponent of mass popular literature, he may seem initially wholly unDonnean, I show how his verse both explicitly and obliquely negotiates with Donne's wit and form. I end by looking at the problematic offered by the negotiates with Donne's wit and form. I end by looking at the problematic offered by the dual critique and celebration in Pope's versification of Donne's Satyres, and at the Dunciad, to see where the limits of allusion come up against Pope's cacophonous multiplicity of voices. These four poets take different threads from Donne's canon to different ends and, in so doing, create different Donnes.

The history of everyday life is an interesting historical branch, which brings the researcher a lot of information about family, work, entertainment, problems and other things that surround everyone and every day. In the same way, these things have influenced lives of our ancestors. The fascination with ordinary lives of early modern history is actually a desire to get to know oneself. Despite the fact that the outlook on everyday things may have changed during the centuries, what has not changed were the topics. The libri testimoniorum are a more than suitable source of information for everyday life research. Owing to the testimonies of the witnesses of the particular trials, the books unwittingly reveal many details about the life of early modern towns. Studies of these books bring motivation for researching not only the everyday history, but also culture and mentality history. Last but not least, it is important to mention research into criminality of early modern towns.

The main subject of the diploma thesis is the view of the war and the military through the early modern opinions of lower nobles, especially by Henry Hýzrl from the Chod (1575- 1665) and Sigmund Chotek of Chotkov (1521-1603). The time frame is set from the 16. to 17. century. Views on contemporary defence of the country are reconstructed on the basis of previously unreleased military debate which is titled Kriegsdiscurs über der hochlöblichen Cron Bohemia Landtdefension by Henry Hýzrl from the Chod. This debate is partly accessible in academic edition at the end of the thesis. The next source, for understanding the intellectual world of the Czech nobility during the wars with the Turks, is military instruction by Sigmund Chotek of Chotkov. The work is based on military debate by Henry Hýzrl from Chod. It is a completely unique view of the war through the view of the Bohemian nobleman.

This thesis considers the perceptions and enactment of social and urban order in the estate society of eighteenth-century Sweden. The central concept of order is approached as something which becomes most readily available when it has been transgressed against, and attempts are made to regain it. This is employed by exploring the practices of Sweden’s first proper police, the Royal Police Chamber of Stockholm founded in 1776, during its establishing year. The analytical part of the thesis is divided into three chapters. The first considers contemporary ideas of order in connection to the new organization, as to give a hint of the ideals which were said to be strived for. The second analytical chapter explores the nature of disorder, asking what, who and where made its way into the registers of the Chamber. Through these questions categories of disorder, norms of identification and abstract geographies are identified and used to tell of the things perceived as disorderly. In the third analytical chapter the how of ordering is considered as the acts taken against disorder are studied. Correction dominated, rather than punishment, thus echoing the ideas of order to a significant degree. Overall, this thesis can be said to accomplish in-depth basic empirical research on a hereto little studied material. The Chamber is shown to from the start to have taken an extremely active part in controlling and constructing society around it, something done by making a good effort towards fulfilling the panoptic ideal. Though not perfectly achieved, its practices are thus shown to adhere to a larger European trend of the period. Three concepts emerge as essential and fundamental to how social and urban order was perceived. These are the street and particularly the visibility thereupon exhibited, adding that order often only could be regained by establishing responsibility for those moving there. The centrality of the public sphere of the streets even goes beyond expectations and it appears as the main feature of enacting order. As such it is found to be both a material concept and imbued with meaning in itself. / Se ståndssamhället! Olikheternas kultur i Sverige under tidigmodern tid

<p>Alcohol has been present in almost every society throughout history, and so has a double standard around alcohol usage: women are stigmatized far more than men for excessive drinking. In this dissertation, I explore the intimate association between wine consumption and gender relations in Spanish late medieval and early modern literature. In late medieval and early modern European society, distinctions of gender, age, class, religion, and occupation were reflected in what one chose to eat and drink. Wine was undoubtedly the most popular and highly regarded beverage, especially in the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of southern Europe. Wine has always been deeply integrated into the Spaniards’ lives, not only as a daily beverage but also as a marker of individual and group identities. While references to wine have flowed through Spanish literature, thorough examinations of women’s drinking have surprisingly been left unexplored. </p> <p>This study fills that gap, analyzing representations of female drinking in Spanish literature, specifically the ambivalent approach to wine as it relates to the construction of gender identities. This study analyzes the representation of female drinking throughout the Spanish literary canon, especially focusing on the <i>Libro de buen amor</i> (ca. 1343), the <i>Arcipreste de Talavera</i> (also called as <i>Corbacho</i>, ca. 1438), and the <i>Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea </i>(also known as <i>Celestina</i>, 1502) with the purpose of demonstrating how wine consumption constitutes, reflects, and questions normative gender roles. In medieval and early modern Europe, gender identities were either masculine or feminine, attached to rigid, stereotypical gender roles for men and women. Drunken women, therefore, presented a threat that needed to be contained. During the Middle Ages, while drunken women were represented as personifying gluttony and violating both moral and gender norms in didactic, moralizing treatises, there were literary fictions that depicted female drunkards who openly enjoyed wine, praised its virtues, and socialized by drinking with other women. The gender ideology of Spanish patriarchy created masculine anxiety around unfeminine women, like female drunkards, who were unsuited to a life of purity and chastity. I argue that this anxiety, evident in the extreme condemnation of drunken women, paradoxically reveals the contradictions underlying the patriarchal agenda. I also interpret female drinking practices as performative acts of resistance against normative gender roles. Drawing on the notion that gender is a performative act, alcohol drinking by women can be understood as a subversive act that transgresses and reconfigures social norms around gendered identities in late medieval and early modern Spain. </p>

Consagrado pela doutrina de que o nosso mundo é o melhor dos mundos possíveise por seu otimismo em relação à humanidade, o filósofo alemão G. W. Leibniz (1646-1716) não poderia deixar de tecer considerações sobre o problema da felicidade humana.Mas, em face das inúmeras mazelas que afligem a humanidade, e sendoo leibnizianismo um otimismo teísta, fundado naconvicçãoa respeitodo governo soberanode um Deusbom, segundo oqual se admite a existência de uma ordem moral e divina no Universo, apresentam-se para o pensador algumas dificuldades no que tange àdefesa da tese do melhor dos mundos, se quisermos admitir que este melhor consiste de um plano divino que diz respeito de alguma forma à humanidade e a seu bem estar, demandando-se, assim, a justificaçãodesua posiçãoà luz da experiência humana observável e dos aspectos metafísicos, teológicos e moraisde seu pensamento. O presente trabalho visa, assim, tratardo problema da felicidade humana no melhor dos mundos possíveis, partindo-se da exploração da concepção leibniziana de felicidade, elucidando-se o sentido da tese do melhor dos mundos possíveis, e culminando com a defesa da tese de que, a despeito das aparências em sentido contrário, neste melhor mundo, a felicidade dos espíritos é o principal embora não o único desígnio de Deus, considerando-se também o papel de uma solução escatológicae levando-se em contaque a felicidade, para o autor, não é um atributo estáticodo mundo, mas parte de um progresso perpétuo em perfeição e na direção de novos prazeres. / Establishedby his doctrine that our world is the best of the possible worldsand by his optimism about humanity, the german philosopher G. W. Leibniz (1646-1716) could not depart himself from considering the problem of human happiness. But, in face of the numerous ills that afflict humanity, and since leibnizianism is a theisticoptimism, founded on the conviction aboutthe sovereigngovernment of a goodGod, according to which the existence of a moral and divine order in the universe is admitted, some difficulties arise for the thinker in defending the thesis of the best of the possible worlds, if we want to admit that this \"best\" consists of a divine plan that somehow concerns humanity and its welfare, demandingthe justificationof his position in the light of observable human experience and the metaphysical, theological, and moral aspects of his thought. The present work, therefore, proposesdealing with the problem of human happiness in the best of possible worlds, starting from the exploration of the leibnizian conception of happiness, elucidating the meaning of the thesis of the best of possible worlds, culminating in the defense of the thesis that, in spite of appearances incontrary, in this \"best world\" the happiness of the spirits is the principal -though not the only of God\'s designs,andalso considering the role of an eschatological solution,and taking into account that happiness, for the author, is not a staticattribute of the world, but part of a perpetual progress in perfection and in the direction of new pleasures.

Thesis advisor: Caroline Bicks / Routinely recognized as deeply patriarchal, early modern England is an era in which men and characteristics of the male gender are assumed to have held unrelenting sway over their female counterparts. This description is largely justifiable, particularly given the era's legal codes. However, this thesis seeks to enrich discussions on early modern England by examining its male-female relationships through a markedly different lens. By highlighting the close relationships that existed alongside patriarchal mandates in the era - husband and wife, father and daughter, mother and son - a fuller portrait of the period is sketched. Through an examination of how a variety of genres - medical, religious, and dramatic - grappled with moments of union between the two sexes, particularly physical union and its concurrent or resultant emotional bonds, this thesis offers greater insight into how walls to male-female connection were both raised and bridged in the time period. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2008. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

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