published_or_final_version / Literary Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Literary Studies / Master / Master of Arts

This dissertation explores the relationship between the imperial city of Nuremberg and its extramural, contagious disease hospitals (i.e. for leprosy, plague and syphilis) between 1490 and 1585. It analyzes to what extent the patients in these outlying institutions belonged to the city or were ostracized from it. The diseases presented in three drastically different ways, providing a comparative framework to analyze early modern concepts of vulnerability to disease and levels of accepted responsibility for its citizens, inhabitants, and foreigners. My project takes Nuremberg as a conceptual unit and analytically slices it multiple ways in order to explore whether the outlying patients were inside or outside of the boundaries of the city. I begin by focusing on the hospitals' fundamental "separated status" as geographically outside the boundary of the city walls. I then complicate this simple definition by exploring the geographic and physical movements of the contagious disease workers as they were the corporal instruments of disease care; the expenditure of the city's resources in the supply of nutrition to the patients; and the provision of patients' spiritual services as their symbolic participation in Nuremberg's Body of Christ. I argue that the inhabitants of Nuremberg's contagious disease hospitals were separated outside the walls in order to limit the city's vulnerability to their contaminating physical condition, but they still belonged under the city’s administration, provision, and protection, and, therefore, within the boundary of civic responsibility. In the movement of bodies, all of these seemingly competing boundaries were observed simultaneous, creating the paradoxical position of the extramural patients and continuously redefining Nuremberg as a civic unit.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This study analyzes figurations of masculine pregnancy in early modern texts. Because no systematic methodology for conducting such an analysis yet exists, I have synthesized scholarship from anthropology, medicine, and psychoanalysis to construct an appropriate paradigm. Specifically, I bring together the anthropologist's "couvade," the physician's "couvade syndrome," and the psychoanalyst's gender-inflected model of the unconscious. Informed by this interdisciplinary scholarship, I offer a composite theory of couvade desire. I then apply that theoretical model to early modern figurations of masculine pregnancy. I find that the pervasive use of such figurations during the period results from ahistorical bodily disparities and historically-specific epistemological circumstances. The so-called "literary couvade" thus modulates: it directly challenges essentialist claims on the one hand, while simultaneously acknowledging the inexorable link between masculinity and a bodily incapability to give birth. Masculinity, in this model, appears disabled.Mitigating the disability, however, is a cultural imaginary unfettered by modern anatomical knowledge. Key aspects of human reproduction were still seductively obscure in the early modern period. Women birthed babies, that much was plain; but, perhaps men had a compensatory system of reproduction. Perhaps, some speculated, that system was superior to the messy, merely material capability exclusive to women. Masculinity could, in this regard, rival maternity for social significance without disclosing any act of appropriation from maternity. Such a dynamic resembles closely Rene Girard's paradigm of "mimetic desire." Crucial to mimetic desire is an indifference to the ostensible object on the part of both rival subjects. Relating this to the early modern "literary couvade," I conclude that figurations of masculine pregnancy emerge from a compensatory desire: the desire to mollify an apparent lack with the reduction in significance of the rival's manifest capability.

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.