"God's Spies": Reading, Revelation, and the Poetics of Surveillance in Early Modern England The recent material turn in humanities scholarship has yielded fascinating and insightful research in roughly the past decade, especially in the fields of book history and the history of reading. Scholars of material culture have researched the concrete particulars of book production, the places books were sold, and the conditions in which they were read. This dissertation focuses on the clandestine aspects of early modern English material culture, with particular emphasis on the secret spaces in which reading occurred. Early modern English monarchs cultivated a culture of surveillance in an effort to eliminate illicit religious texts, which combined with changes to the conditions in which texts were read to encourage more private and secretive reading habits. Ultimately, technological, religious, and political change became epistemological as readers increasingly applied a hermeneutics of surveillance to the texts they approached, reading for hidden meaning and for total interpretive control of a text. Writers of imaginative fiction staged scenes of what I call textual surveillance in their works, transforming the hermeneutics of surveillance into a poetics of surveillance that scrutinized the validity of this interpretive strategy and explored how these material, religious, and political changes warped the way readers interpreted, thought, and perceived reality.

"Motivation" is the force that drives an individual to perform a certain action. Abraham Maslow (1908-1970), an American psychologist profoundly influenced by the existential and teleological paradigms, expounded a motivation theory that remains precise and replicable, as well as applicable to other spheres of study, including the humanities. Indeed, psychology experts and non-specialists are by and large familiar with Maslow's Pyramid of Human Needs. Moreover, despite the abundance of literary criticism that utilizes Freudian-based theory to analyze the motivations of literary characters, critics have largely neglected the use of other paradigms, including Maslow's. In this thesis, I use Maslow's texts as support for identifying the motivations of women characters who dress as men in Shakespeare's dramas. I also simultaneously employ Maslow's theory to illuminate the parallels in these characters' motivations and the varying need levels that Maslow develops in his hierarchy. After a comprehensive review of the literary criticism that addresses the dramatic motif of cross-dressing in early modern England and an extensive explanation of the history of motivation theory up to and including that of Abraham Maslow, I treat the following plays by William Shakespeare: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, As You Like It, and The Merchant of Venice in conjunction with Maslow's Pyramid of Human Needs. Through this analysis, I demonstrate that Julia cross-dresses to satisfy needs on the level of Love/Belonging; Rosalind cross-dresses for reasons that correspond to the Safety level, then to the Esteem level; and Portia demonstrates motivations that correspond to Maslow's Love/Belonging and Esteem levels.

Recent interest in environmental crises has inspired literary critics to consider how the history of ideas shapes our current ecological debates. Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream sets the stage for assessing how Renaissance attitudes towards nature have influenced current ideologies. While the play appears to be a fantasy, it reveals a relationship with nature, both physically and figuratively. The play's excursion into the woods shows an attempt to heal human relationships. Shakespeare's use of the imagery of nature argues in favor of the green world, for it is a world inhabited by shadows and shamen -- or, as Shakespeare calls them, fairies. A key element for ecocritics concerns the apparent silence of nature in literature and other cultural forms. Christopher Manes' article, "Nature and Silence," alerts readers to nature's lack of voice as a symptom of humanism, especially of theories such as the Great Chain of Being, which place nature in a subordinate role to humans, giving homo sapiens the dubious power to speak for nature. I wish to present Shakespeare's fairies as the speakers of the forest and of nature's values, according to the Early Modern period. By liberating fairies from demonic associations, Shakespeare's forest appears to us as inviting and healing. Furthermore, I argue that the pastoral tradition, which informs the Early Modern attitude towards nature, is superceded by picaresque and shamanic figures within the text. These elements allow for a subversive understanding of nature and our relationship to it. If humans adapted to their environment by developing consciousness, what has been the effect of that consciousness on their environment? Shakespeare's forest and fairies help to confront this issue because they restore human awareness to a healthy state of consciousness. By showing fairies in this light, Shakespeare provocatively proposes that humans "mend" their relationship to their surroundings as well as their own human relationships.

What role did identification play in the motives, processes, and products of select post-colonial authors who "wrote back" to William Shakespeare and colonialism? How did post-colonial counter-discursive metatheatre function to make select post-colonial adaptations creative and critical texts? In answer to these questions, this dissertation proposes that counter-discursive metatheatre resituates post-colonial plays as criticism of Shakespeare's plays. As particular post-colonial authors identify with marginalized Shakespearean characters and aim to amplify their conflicts from the perspective of a dominated culture, they interpret themes of race, gender, and colonialism in Othello (1604), Antony and Cleopatra (1608), and The Tempest (1611) as explicit problems. This dissertation combines post-colonial theory and other literary theory, particularly by Kenneth Burke, to propose a rhetoric of motives for post-colonial authors who "write back" to Shakespeare through the use of counter-discursive metatheatre. This dissertation, therefore, describes and analyzes how and why the plays of Murray Carlin, Aimé Césaire, and Derek Walcott function both creatively and critically, adapting Shakespeare's plays, and foregrounding post-colonial criticism of his plays. Chapter One analyzes Murray Carlin's motivations for adapting Othello and using the framing narrative of Not Now, Sweet Desdemona (1967) to explicitly critique the conflicts of race, gender, and colonialism in Othello. Chapter Two treats why and how Aimé Césaire adapts The Tempest in 1969, illustrating his explicit critique of Prospero and Caliban as the colonizer and the colonized, exposing Prospero's insistence on controlling the sexuality of his subjects, and, therefore, arguing that race, gender, and colonialism operate concomitantly in the play. Chapter Three analyzes A Branch of the Blue Nile (1983) as both a critique and an adaptation of Antony and Cleopatra, demonstrating how Walcott's framing narrative critiques the notion of a universal "Cleopatra," even one of an "infinite variety," and also evaluates Antony as a character who is marginalized by his Roman culture. The conclusion of this dissertation avers that in "writing back" to Shakespeare, these authors foreground and reframe post-colonial criticism, successfully dismantling the colonial structures that have kept their interpretations, and the subjects of their interpretations, marginalized.

This thesis examines the cartographic works of Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), who spent his last twenty-seven years in Ming China. In particular, by focusing on Ricci's 1602 map, I examine the broader significance of Ricci's cartographic production to understand how it reflected early modern Chinese-European exchanges. In addition to the 1602 map, I use Ricci's letters to construct a framework for his cartographic involvement. In his writings, Ricci revealed his rationale for mapmaking and explained his collection of information. Only one year after his entry into China, in 1584, Ricci compiled a world map in the Chinese language and featured China towards the center of the map. In 1602, he completed the third revision of his map, adding a significant amount of details to his previous versions. This map was reproduced during and after Ricci's lifetime and has become a celebrated map in cartography. In my thesis, I contend that more than a proselytizing tool to attract the attention of the Chinese elites, Ricci used cartography to organize, preserve and transmit the information he collected during his travel in China. In my thesis, I show that while Ricci established himself as a religious man, under the influence of both his humanist education and his travel, he also became increasingly interested in the natural world that surrounded him. Ricci's letters and map reveal his intellectual development. In particular, Ricci's long tenure in China witnessed two phases of his intellectual transformation. The first phase, from 1582 to 1595, displayed Ricci's humanist education as he learned about China through the writing and translation of ancient Chinese and Western classics. In the second phase, from 1596 to 1610, however, Ricci presented himself as a scientist as he applied his scientific skills to collect information while traveling. In the process, he became increasingly interested in cartography which he came to view as a powerful tool to organize and present information. In time, Ricci's cartographic works became more sophisticated, reflecting both his European education and the Chinese culture.

Typescript Includes bibliographical references.

This work is concerned with tracing the historical development of the various functions of the Modern Greek connective pu. This connective has a considerable range of functions, and there have been attempts in the literature to group together these functions in a synchronically valid framework. It is my contention that the most illuminating way of regarding the functional diffusion of pu—and of any content word—is by looking, not only at one synchronic distribution (that of Standard Modern Greek), but at the full range of synchronic distributions in the sundry diatopic variants (dialects) of Modern Greek, and that such a discussion must be informed by the diachrony of the form. / This I attempt to do within the framework of grammaticalisation theory, whereby the development of grammatical forms is considered in the context of reanalysis and analogical extension of forms. As a diachronicist model, this allows for fluidity between function distinctions, and puts in place a historically-oriented alignment of semantic transitions which a strictly synchronicist account would miss. Work on pu has already been done in this framework; however, such work has considered the distribution of pu in Standard Greek alone, with only a brief consideration of its ancient antecedents. I contend that the picture formed of its distribution under such constraints leads to several false generalisations. / In order to arrive at a truer picture of the factors determining the development of pu, there are three facets that need to be considered in detail: / (a) its synchronic distribution in Standard Modern Greek, a variant for which extensive corpora and native speaker judgements are readily available; / (b) its distribution in the various modern dialects—to establish the possible diversification of developments for the particle, and to ensure that one potential pathway is not privileged as a universal tendency at the expense of other, divergent developments (a problem identifiable in treatments of this topic, hitherto looking only at the standard language); / (c) a detailed investigation of the use of the etymon of the particle— hópou—in Ancient Greek. It is one of the major contentions of grammaticalisation theory that the past meaning of a particle influences its subsequent meanings. In order to test the relevance of this principle fully, it is necessary to investigate the functionality of hópou not in isolation, but in the context of the entire Ancient Greek grammatical system. / Due to time and scope constraints, I attempt only these first three tasks in this thesis. I do not attempt a detail look at areal diffusion or the mediaeval Greek semantic transitions involved, nor at the use of pu in collocation.

<p>This study addresses the question of change in household structure and the reproduction of “life from day to day”. It is based on structuration theory, time-geography and Allan Pred’s theory of place as historically contingent process. Large households are viewed as tokens of the early modern era, and the appearance of small households can therefore be seen as signs of modernisation. But the decline in size of the average household was not dramatic, it went from 3.53 people per household in 1760 to 3.31 people in 1830. By the composition of different occupational groups in the city in 1760 and 1830, it is evident that the decline of the textile industry, the low activity in the building trades and the decrease of residential sailors – and the subsequent rise of petty trade and traditional handicrafts – gave a strong influx of traditional elements to the evolution of the household. In contrast to this there were a number of “new” or more modern elements that can be seen as precursors to the structure of daily life in the modern era. One of these was a rising number of households which were small and headed by people who earlier in history would have been household members – and not heads of households. The structure of daily life and its reproduction from day-to-day is also analysed in the study. This pattern was both affected by certain changes in the overall household structure, and by two phenomena that directly had an impact on the recreation of life from day to day. The first of these was the “food money”, a substitution of money for the right to food in the employers house, and the second was a move from the right to lodgings in the employers’ home to the need of living quarters elsewhere. Both of these phenomena acted on the “structure of daily life”, and helped to alter the focus of daily life, that is to turn it away from the productive households and put more attention on the streets and on the households that only served as reproductive units.</p>

This dissertation examines beggars, gypsies, rogues, and vagrants presented in early modern English drama, with the discussion of how these peripatetic characters represent the discourses of vagrancy of the period. The first chapter introduces Tudor and early Stuart governments' legislation and proclamations on vagabondage and discusses these governmental policies in their social and economic contexts. The chapter also deals with the literature of roguery to point out that the literature (especially in the Elizabethan era) disseminated such a negative image of beggars as impostors and established the antagonistic atmosphere against the wandering poor. The second chapter explores the anti-theatrical aspect of the discourses of vagrancy. Along with the discussion of early playing companies' traveling convention, this chapter investigates how the long-held association of players with beggars is addressed in the plays that are dated from the early 1570s to the closing of the playhouses in 1642. In the third chapter I read Shakespeare's King Lear with the focus on its critical allusions to the discourses of vagrancy and interpret King Lear's symbolic experience of vagrancy in that context. The chapter demonstrates that King Lear represents the spatial politics embedded in the discourses of vagrancy and evokes a sympathetic understanding of the wandering poor. Chapter IV focuses on Beggars' Bush and analyzes the beggars' utopian community in the play. By juxtaposing the play with a variety of documents relating to the vagrancy issue in the early seventeen century, I contend that Beggars' Bush reflects the cultural aspirations for colonial enterprises in the early Stuart age. Chapter V examines John Taylor's conceptualization of vagrancy as a trope of travel and free mobility, and discusses the "wanderlust" represented in A Jovial Crew: Merry Beggars as an exemplary anecdote showing the mid seventeenth century's perceptions on vagrancy and spatial mobility. Thus, by exploring diverse associations and investments regarding vagrants, this study demonstrates that the early modern discourses of vagrancy have been informed and inflected by shifting economic, socio-historical, and national interests and demands.

This dissertation deals with religious conflict in a number of local communities of Sweden during early modern times, i.e. from 1630 to 1800. Religious conflict, in my understanding, comprises all kinds of conflicts in which the religious element is essential. The area of investigation in the dissertation is the northern part of the county of northern Hälsingland in northern Sweden. It is an area of particular interest in this context, since it featured a multitude of religious conflicts during early modern times. For the area and period of time under consideration here, the study of religious conflicts entails a study of three phenomena: major community conflicts in connection with outbreaks of witchcraze; major community conflicts during religious revivals; and minor conflicts, such as individual court cases involving witchcraft or blasphemy. The purpose of the dissertation is understand the pattern of such religious conflicts in northern Hälsingland in its local context. The local perspective is central and has also made me direct my interests towards the prelude to and aftermath of the conflicts in question. Particularly the latter has, to a large part, been neglected in earlier research. Theoretically the dissertation is inspired by the theoretical discussions of social scientist Walter Korpi. He maintains that identifying the distribution of power resources in society is essential to understanding conflict. This has proved to be a fruitful approach to the understanding of local, religious conflict in northern Hälsingland and I have been able interpret the witchcraze of the 1670s and the religious revivals in the latter part of the 18th century as the results of changes in power relations in the local community. The major community religious conflicts of northern Hälsingland – i.e. the conflicts during the witchcraze and the religious revivals -- were serious local traumas. The dissertation has also dealt with the aftermath of these conflicts, and the result does, among other things, emphasize the importance of honour in early modern society. Those accused during the witch trials of the 1670´s fought extensively for their right to attend communion together with the other members of their congregation -- a struggle to a large part due to the fact that taking part of the communion together with other honourable people could serve to restore their honour and reintegrate them in society. / <p>Sammanfattning på engelska med titeln: Religious conflicts in northern Hälsingland from 1630 to 1800</p>