This thesis is about the ways in which Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s play The Changeling has been edited, performed, and archived in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It proposes a more integrated way of looking at the histories of performances and texts than is usually employed by the institutions of Shakespeare and early modern studies. Crucially, it suggests that documented archival remains of performance should be admitted as textual witnesses of a play’s history, and given equal status with academic, scholarly editions. I argue that—despite at least a century of arguments to the contrary—performance is still considered secondary to text, and that this relationship needs to become more balanced, particularly since the canon has begun to expand and early modern plays beyond Shakespeare have begun to see more stage time in recent years. In addition, I begin to theorise social media as archives of performance, and begin to suggest ways forward for archiving the performance of early modern drama in the digital turn. In order to support these arguments, I offer a series of twentieth- and twenty-first-century productions of The Changeling as case studies. Through these case studies, I seek to make connections between The Changeling as text, The Changeling as performance, and the various other texts and performances that it has interacted with throughout its life since 1961. In presenting analyses of these texts and performances side-by-side, within the same history, I aim to show the interdependency of these two usually separated strands of early modern studies and make a case for greater integration of the two in both editorial, historiographical, and performance practices.

Souvent méconnues, les beatas de la Couronne de Castille, réunies en petites communautésappelées beaterios, ont jusqu’à présent très peu attiré l’attention de l’historiographie. Considérées commedes femmes laïques se livrant, au milieu du XVe siècle, à des formes de dévotions populaires et à despratiques mystiques jugées hétérodoxes, les beatas recouvrent pourtant une réalité plurielle et complexeque cette thèse entend approfondir. Un dépouillement minutieux de sources inédites dispersées enEspagne et au Vatican a permis de bâtir une vaste enquête prosopographique sur 195 beaterios et354 beatas, dont l’objectif est de mieux définir et appréhender la naissance, l’implantation géographiqueet la répartition de ces foyers dans les royaumes et les villes de Castille, entre 1450 et 1600. Notrerecherche se propose donc d’appréhender les modes de vie et les pratiques spirituelles de cescommunautés féminines dans leur diversité, en insistant sur leur engagement caritatif et leur intégrationdans la société et la vie religieuse castillanes des XVe et XVIe sièclesement le nombre et la répartition de ces foyers, et d’autre part, pour connaître et comprendre leur intégration, leur mode de vie, et définir de la sorte les conditions d’existence éphémère de ces communautés. L’étude de la singularité des pratiques, de l’entourage et des parcours des beatas analysées tout au long de ce travail, permettra, selons nous, de proposer une réflexion mûrie et nuancée sur l’implication de la beata dans la vie sociale et religieuse castillane des XVe et XVIe siècles. / The little-known beatas from the Crown of Castile, who often lived together in smallcommunities called beaterios, have so far drawn little attention from historians. They are usuallyconsidered, in fairly general terms, as mid-15th century lay women who practised popular forms ofdevotion and a form of mysticism which fell foul of the Catholic orthodoxy. Actually, the beatasconstituted a plural, complex phenomenon that this thesis endeavours to explore. Indeed, the carefulanalysis of original sources from various locations in Spain as well as in the Vatican City leads to awide-randing prosopographical survey of 195 beaterios and 354 beatas, in order to better understand thecreation, geography and distribution of these communities in the kingdom and towns of Castile,between 1450 and 1600. This thesis offers to consider the diversity of lifestyles and spiritual practicesof these female communities, with a focus on their charitable work and their integration in Castiliansociety and religious life in the 15th and 16th centuries

Louis XIII's reign has long garnered historians' and popular interest. The king of Cardinal Richelieu and the three musketeers, Louis is traditionally viewed as having presided over the development of the French state and facilitated the rise of absolutism. Yet his court has received comparatively little attention. Traditionally understood as the reflection of its master, Louis XIII's court has been assumed to be backwards and inconsequential. On the contrary, this thesis contends that Louis's court experienced substantial institutional development and expansion over the course of his rule. Neither Louis nor Richelieu was the principal instigator of this growth. The main drivers were the courtiers themselves who sought to expand their prerogatives and to find new ways of profiting from their offices. The changes that were initiated from the top down were not determined by a broad, sweeping agenda held by Louis or his minister-favourites but rather by immediate needs and contingencies. Cardinal Richelieu, nonetheless, recognised that Louis's court really mattered for high politics in this period: the royal households produced key players for the governance of the realm, either gravitating from court office to broader governmental office, or holding both simultaneously. Furthermore, Louis's court helped to bind the realm together, not just because it acted as a hub attracting people from the provinces but also because of the time it spent in the provinces. Richelieu, however, struggled to control this court — so vital to the direction of the French monarchy in this period — because its members were so active and vibrant. They shaped the cultural and social environment surrounding and associated with the court because they were heavily invested in the court as an institution. Indeed, the court did not only serve the needs of the monarch: courts could only operate because a large group of people had a stake in ensuring that they functioned. By establishing the importance of Louis XIII's court for the direction of the French monarchy, and his courtiers' role in moulding it, this thesis seeks to throw light on humans' fundamental relationship with power.

My dissertation focuses on the moral philosophy of Descartes, Pascal, and Spinoza in the context of the revival of Stoicism within the seventeenth century. There are many misinterpretations about early modern ethical theories due to a lack of proper awareness of Stoicism in the early modern period. My project rectifies this by highlighting understated Stoic themes in these early modern texts that offer new clarity to their morality. Although these three philosophers hold very different metaphysical commitments, each embraces a different aspect of Stoicism, letting it influence but not define his work. By addressing the Stoic themes on the morality of these three authors, I also hope to help better capture the intellectual climate of the time by bringing Stoic themes into the foreground. Stoicism is a Hellenistic philosophy that considered the passions a sickness of the intellect and the source of all human suffering; they believed the cure was virtue, which was obtained through replacing irrational passions with rational beliefs. Stoicism had a revival in the Renaissance ushering in a wave of Neostoic authors who play an important role in shaping the intellectual landscape of the following centuries. My first two chapters discuss Descartes, who wrote a “provisional morality” early in his public life, only (as I show) to ignore the subject of ethics until near his death. In my first chapter I argue that, though many present-day scholars misread Descartes’ first ethics as part of his final ethics, this earliest “provisional morality” mimics Neostoic Skeptics such as Montaigne and is provisional because his method of doubt is also provisional. In my second chapter I show that Descartes’ late, and more developed, moral theory attempts to synthesize a variety of ancient, and seemingly contradictory, ethical traditions: Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Aristotelianism. In many ways Descartes embraces Stoic morality, but as a mechanist he does not view passions as an intellectual sickness; rather they are a physiological event, an amoral instrument that can be used to help control one’s irrational desires. I further defend my thesis externally by showing that this is the reading supported by Descartes’ contemporaries including critics such as Leibniz and early Cartesians such as Antoine Le Grand and Pierre-Sylvain Régis My third chapter discusses Pascal, who embraces Stoicism differently. Pascal offers Stoicism as the first tier of a binary ethics: modeled after Augustine’s city of God and city of man, it is an alternative moral code for those who are ignorant of the good and true happiness. Finally, in my fourth chapter, I discuss two common misinterpretations of Spinoza’s ethics: one of them neglects the Stoic influence on his thought while the other embraces it too strongly, portraying him as an unadulterated Stoic. Although there are ways that he is more Stoic than Descartes and Pascal, such as in his panpsychism and monism, this does not extend to his morality. Rather than accepting either of the two readings, I highlight anti- Stoic themes that are also present. I conclude that if the discussion is contained to his morality, Spinoza is no more Stoic than the other Neostoics I discuss in previous chapters.

No description available.

The female characters in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI and Richard III; Rowley’s All’s Lost by Lust; Fletcher’s The Tragedy of Valentinian; Rowley, Dekker, and Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton; and Brome and Heywood’s The Late Witches of Lancashire curse their enemies because, as women, they have no other way to fight against the injustices they experience. At once an extension of the early modern belief that words are “women’s weapons,” and dangerously beyond the feminine ideal of silence, the curse, as a performative speech act, resembles the physical weapons wielded by men in its potential to cause serious harm. Using Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performative and J. L. Austin’s theory of performative utterances, this thesis argues that curses function as part of the cursing woman’s performative identity, and by using speech as a weapon, the cursing woman gains a measure of social agency within the social order even if she cannot change her place within it.

Music in the early modern world was an art form fraught with tensions. Writers from a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines engaged in a vibrant debate about the value of hearing and playing music, which could be seen as a useful tool for the refinement of the individual or a dangerous liability, capable of compelling inappropriate thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. This study analyzes music on the early modern stage and its relation to emerging ideas about subjectivity. Early modern philosophies of music, I demonstrate, are concerned with the stability of the body, the soul, and the humours and spirits that unite them, along with the individual’s capacity for autonomy and agency. In the theatre, I argue, music is frequently deployed as a strategy for experimenting with ways of imagining and performing selfhood. On one hand, it can facilitate self-fashioning, acting as a marker for such characteristics as class and spiritual condition; on the other, it can be disruptive to identity and the capacity for agency and autonomy, since music was understood as both penetrative and transformative, facilitating the disruption of one self by an other. Chapter 1, “Meanings of Music in Early Modern England,” surveys a range of early modern texts on music to demonstrate their concerns with both the performance of the self and the threat of its dissolution. Chapter 2, “Many Sorts of Music in Twelfth Night and The Roaring Girl,” examines music’s role as an imaginative strategy for improvising an unstable, hybrid gender identity, an alternative subject-position from which to speak and act in ways ordinarily denied to women. Chapter 3, “Music, Magic, and Community in Early Modern Witchcraft Plays,” explores witches’ uses of music to establish a sense of communal identity and to magically disrupt the communities from which they have been excluded. Finally, Chapter 4, “Noise, the City, and the Subject in Epicoene” makes a case for understanding Morose’s fear of noise in terms of early modern ideas about music, reading noise as a radical instability representative of new ways of fashioning selves in a rapidly expanding urban environment.

Hester Pulter addresses personal and spiritual transformation in a unique way. The elusive nature of alchemical language allows Pulter to express the incomplete, ongoing process of internal transformation, with all its difficulties and inconsistencies. By means of a rich alchemical lexicon, Pulter stresses suffering rather than consolation, conflict rather than reconciliation, and lack of resolution rather than closure in her poetry. She repeatedly tries to see a divine order in earthly suffering, but she insists upon this suffering, and she often argues for a gendered element to this pain, particularly as a mother grieving her dead children. The lack of resolution we see in Pulter's writing pushes against conventional constructions of the ideal female Christian as passively accepting God's plan, and shows the limits of the religious lyric to truly provide consolation. My thesis will extend the discussion of Pulter's use of alchemical imagery and symbols in her poetry, and will argue that she uses alchemical language to reflect how transformation and healing are never, in fact, fully achieved during our physical existence. The promise of literary alchemy as a vehicle for transformation and spiritual regeneration is not always fulfilled in Pulter's work.

The question of adverbs and the meaning of the present perfect across varieties of English is central to sociolinguistic variationist methodologies that have approached the study of the present perfect (Winford, 1993; Tagliamonte, 1997; van Herk, 2008, 2010; Davydova, 2010; Tagliamonte, 2013). This dissertation attempts to disentangle the effect of adverbial support from the three canonical readings of the present perfect (Resultative, Experiential and Continuative). Canadian English, an understudied variety of English, is used to situate the results seen in the Early Modern English data. Early Modern English reflects the time period in which English has acquired the full modern use of the present perfect with the three readings. In order to address both these questions and current controversies over statistical models in sociolinguistics, different statistical models are used: both the traditional Goldvarb X (Sankoff, Tagliamonte and Smith, 2005) and the newer mixed-effects logistic regression (Johnson, 2009). What is missing from the previous literature in sociolinguistics that advocates logistic mixed-effects models, and provided in this dissertation, is a clear statement of where they are inappropriate to use and their limitations. The rate of adverbial marking of the present perfect in Canadian English falls between rates reported for US and British English in previous studies. The data show in both time periods that while adverbs are highly favored in continuative contexts, they are strongly disfavored in experiential and resultative contexts. In Early Modern English, adverbial support functions statistically differently for resultatives and experientials, but that difference collapses in the Canadian English sample. Both this and the other linguistic contexts support a different analysis for each set of data with respect to adverbial independence from the meaning of the present perfect form. Finally, when the focus of the analysis is on linguistic rather than social factors, both the traditional and newer models provide similar results. Where there are differences, however, these can be accounted for by the number of tokens and different estimation techniques for each model.

The purpose of the present dissertation is to investigate the judicial status of townswomen in 17th- centuiy Sweden. How is the gender system reproduced during this period? Did any decisive changes in gender relations take place, and if so, how should they be understood? Both secular and church legislation is studied, along with the deliberations of the legal commission of 1686. The investigation of actual legal practice concentrates on the municipal court of Gävle. Differences between town and country as far as inheritance and marital property are concerned in­dicate that the married couple was seen as the central unit in the urban environment, while the male members of the family, particularly those belonging to the paternal line, had greater importance in the countryside. Women could be prosecuted for the crimes they committed. In special cases, women were allowed to act as witnesses, and in practice, they were allowed to witness in criminal cases. Unmarried women appeared in salary conflicts and criminal cases, while affluent unmarried women did not appear bef­ore the court. Wives were under the legal guardianship of their husbands, but the law gave women the right to en­ter into contracts and appear in court in certain instances. They could buy and sell, enter into debt, hire and dismiss servants. The legal capacity of the wife was dependent upon her husband's. As a rule, affluent wives did not appear in court. The husband administered his wife's property, though her con­sent was required in land transactions. Widows "reacted" more often than they acted as far as concerns property. They were prevented from influencing the rules of the economic game in which they were involved. During the 17th cen­tury, affluent widows were increasingly represented by male delegates, which can be explained by the professionalization of the courts. This meant that the women actually seen and heard in court by the end of the century were often destitute and criminal. Church orthodoxy implied that the "double standard" was weaker during the 17th-century than it was both before and after. Men as well as women turned to the courts to defend themselves against de­famation of their sexual character. Matrimony was the basis for controlling women. It was in their best interests to marry, in order to establish a household, raise children and achieve the status of married woman. Matrimony was im­portant to men, too, in order to make contacts and create a network, acquire property, and establish a household. Marriage was basically hierarchical, though built on an idea of consensus. The implements available to the legal system for restraining wife-beating were very blunt. Matri­mony was the responsibility of the church. Here, one spoke rather of the "obligations" a man had tow­ard his wife — who was his own "flesh" — than defined exactly when a man crossed over the boundary of the acceptable. The woman's own actions — fulfilling her marital duties and remaining subordinate to her husband — were also significant for the rulings of the court. / digitalisering@umu