In the decades following the Peace of Westphalia the foundations of what many consider modern diplomacy were formed. These foundations have been a popular topic for many historians, and extensive work has been made on Diplomatic Theory, and the ideals of what a diplomat should be within the field of new diplomatic history. However, the practices, performativity and persona of the diplomats still needs a deeper level of study, which is the main purpose behind this thesis. This thesis investigates the diplomatic practices in the early 18th century through the correspondence of a controversial Swedish diplomat by the name of Carl Gyllenborg. The controversy surrounding him was because of his involvement with a Jacobite plot to restore the house of Stuart on the British throne, which ultimately failed, called The Swedish Plot. By analysing his correspondence with another ambassador, Erik Sparre, the institutional, material and communicational practices of an early modern diplomat emerge.  What this thesis shows is the way Gyllenborg navigated both the expectations and obstacles inflicted upon diplomatic practices. Some of the obstacles he faced was neglect from his sovereign, which included a lack of a letter of credence, being considered an enemy at his assigned court, and lacking finances to fund his life as an ambassador. He managed to navigate these although lacking the necessities stated by Diplomatic Theory. Gyllenborg’s story brings too light the complexity of early modern diplomatic life which has been lacking in previous research.

Mary Reynolds / Caption title / Typescript / M.A. Florida State College for Women 1908

This study focuses on the praeceptor amoris, or teacher of love, as that persona appears in English poetry between 1500 and 1660. Some attention is given to the background, especially Ovid and his Art of Love. A study of the medieval praeceptor indicates that ideas of love took three main courses: a bawdy strain most evident in Goliardic verse and later in the libertine poetry of Donne and the Cavaliers; a short-lived strain of mutual affection important in England principally with Spenser; and the love known as courtly love, which is traced to England through Dante and Petrarch and which is the subject of most English love poetry. In England, the praeceptor is examined according to three functions he performs: defining love, propounding a philosophy about it, and giving advice. Through examining the praeceptor, poets are seen to define love according to the division between body and soul, with the tendency to return to older definitions in force since the troubadours. The poets as a group never agree what love is. Philosophies given by the praeceptor follow the same division and are physically or spiritually oriented. The rise and fall of Platonism in English poetry is examined through the praeceptor amoris who teaches it, as is the rise of libertinism. Shakespeare and Donne are seen to have attempted a reconciliation of the physical and spiritual. Advice, the major function of the praeceptor, is widely variegated. It includes moral suasion, advice on how to court, how to start an affair, how to maintain one, how to end one, and how to cure oneself of love. Advice also includes warnings. The study concludes that English poets stayed with older ideas of love but added new dimensions to the praeceptor amoris, such as adding definition and philosophical discussion to what Ovid had done. They also added to the use of persona as speaker, particularly with Donne's dramatic monologues.

This dissertation examines the role of aesthetic activity in the pursuit of political agency in readings of several of Shakespeare’s plays, including Hamlet (1600), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), The Tempest (1610), the history plays of the second tetralogy (1595-9), Julius Caesar (1599), and Coriolanus (1605). I demonstrate how Shakespeare models political subjectivity—the capacity for individuals to participate meaningfully in the political realm—as necessitating active aesthetic agency. This aesthetic agency entails the fashioning of artistically conceived public personae that potential political subjects enact in the public sphere and the critical engagement of the aesthetic and political discourses of the subjects’ culture in a self-reflective and appropriative manner. Furthermore, these subjects should be wary auditors of the texts and personae they encounter within the public sphere in order to avoid internalizing constraining ideologies that reify their identities into forms less conducive to the pursuit of liberty and social mobility. Early modern audiences could discover several models for doing so in Shakespeare’s works. For example, Hamlet posits a model of Machiavellian theatricality that masks the Prince's interiority as he resists the biopolitical force and disciplinary discourses of Claudius's Denmark. Julius Caesar and Coriolanus advance a model of citizenship through the plays’ nameless plebeians in which rhetoric offers the means to participate in Rome’s political culture, and Shakespeare’s England for audiences, while authorities manipulate citizen opinion by molding the popularity of public figures. Public, artistic ability affords potential political subjects ways of not only framing their participation in their culture but also ways of conceiving of their identities and relationships to society that may defy normative notions of membership in the community.

Military music in Sweden in early modern times is an understudied area of research. Shawm and oboe playersat Swedish regiments during the reigns of Charles XI and XII have previously not been the focus of aconfined study. This study aims to highlight these musicians and their place within Sweden’s musical life ofthe period. The study comprises five sections looking at different aspects of the shawm and oboe players work andlife within the military. Theses aspects include employment, work assignments, education, instruments, andrepertoire. Information on these topics was collected from various contemporary sources, e.g. muster rollsand letters to and from the regiments. The study takes the viewpoint that military music was an integral partof noble culture and identity. The study shows that these shawm and oboe players were an important part of Swedish musical lifeand highlights these musicians’ ties to the noble officers. Likewise, it suggests that shawm and oboe playersin Europe were important for the spread and dissemination of music and musical instruments.

The mode of carrying out literary spatial studies—or literary geography—has largely shifted to embrace digital methods and tools, culminating in the field of geospatial humanities. This shift has affected the scope of research questions that scholars can ask and answer using digital methods. Although there many continuities between non-digital and digital spatial studies, there are some fundamental points of departure in the critical processes that are involved in carrying out geospatial humanities research, including data modelling, prototyping, and multidisciplinary collaboration, that demand a revisit of the ways that knowledge production and analysis are carried out in the humanities. First there is thinking about how data models, prototypes, and digital projects embed within themselves spatial methodologies and spatial theory that form the foundation of humanities-oriented spatial inquiry. In addition, collaborating across multidisciplinary groups involves working toward shared project goals, while ideally ensuring that individual team members are drawing benefit from the collaborative research experience. Another factor has to do with creating rich and accurate data models that can capture the complexity of their subject of inquiry for meaningful humanities research. This dissertation addresses each of the aforementioned challenges through practical applications, by focusing not only on the literary contributions of geospatial humanities, but also engaging the critical processes involved in this form of digital research. By designing and co-creating three geospatial prototypes, TopoText, TopoText 2.0, and A Map of Paradise Lost, my goal is to demonstrate how digital objects can embody spatial theory and methodologies, and to portray how traditional literary studies approaches such as close reading and literary interpretation can be combined with digital methods that enable interactivity and mixed-media visualizations for an immersed literary geography analysis. The first two chapters translate a literary theory and method of analysis, geocriticism, into a digital prototype and iteratively improve on it to demonstrate the type of research made possible through a digital geocritical interpretation. In that part of the dissertation, I also address the challenges involved in translating a literary framework into a digital environment, such as designing under constraint, and discuss what is lost in translation alongside what is gained (McCarty 2008). Chapter three demonstrates how technological advances enable scholars to build community-university partnerships that can contribute to humanities scholarship while also making research findings publicly available. In particular, the chapter argues that scholars can draw on Volunteered Geographical Information to create rich cultural gazetteers that can inform spatial humanities research. The final two chapters demonstrate how a geospatial prototype that is fueled by rich data and embeds other types of media can inform literary interpretation and help make arguments. By focusing on the process of building A Map of Paradise Lost—a geospatial humanities text-to-map project that visualizes the locatable places in John Milton’s Paradise Lost—the closing chapter addresses the question “why map literature?” and demonstrates how the process of research prototyping is in itself a form of knowledge production. Since the methods and technologies that inform geospatial humanities research are rapidly evolving, this dissertation adopts a portfolio model and consists of five released and one forthcoming publications, as well as three published prototypes. Together, they form a digital dissertation, meaning that the digital component comprises a significant part of the intellectual work of the dissertation. Reflecting the collaborative nature of digital humanities research, some articles were co-authored and all three prototypes were co-developed. In all components of this dissertation, I took on the leading role in the publication and prototype development, which is detailed at the beginning of every chapter. / Graduate

Cette thèse s’intéresse au marché du crédit à Venise au XVIIIe siècle. Une partie importante de la recherche se concentre sur une offre de crédit spécifique au contexte vénitien, qui avait lieux dans les osterie (auberges) et les bastioni de la ville, des entrepôts où le vin était vendu à emporter. Le vin et l’argent étaient deux éléments intrinsèquement liés et trouvaient un point de contact dans l’activité des osti (aubergistes) et des bastioneri. Ces derniers offraient à leurs clients un service original de prêt sur gage. Ils assumaient le double rôle des fournisseurs de biens de consommation de base et de créanciers, devenant ainsi des figures incontournables dans le contexte urbain, en particulier pour les membres des couches les plus pauvres. L’un des éléments les plus intéressants est la manière dont les intérêts sur les prêts étaient perçus, puisque les créanciers tiraient profit du fait qu’un tiers de la valeur totale des crédits était payé en vin. La valeur faible des prêts confirme que ce service s’adressait principalement aux classes les plus fragiles de la société, c’est à dire les principaux protagonistes de ce que nous avons appelé l’économie ‘du mouchoir’. Il s’agissait surtout d’individus pauvres mais pas ‘très pauvres’, ceux qui n’avaient pas de grandes réserves d’argent et qui étaient vulnérables en raison de l’irrégularité de leurs revenus. Les objectifs de la recherche sont principalement au nombre de deux. Le premier consiste à analyser l’activité de crédit des bastioni et des osterie. Le second est de replacer cette organisation dans le contexte urbain, en analysant le marché dans son ensemble et en évaluant les caractéristiques et les variables qui pouvaient influencer la demande. Par conséquent, afin d’avoir une vision plus complète du marché, toutes les omposantes principales de l’offre ont été prises en considération. Outre les bastioni et les osterie mentionnés ci-dessus, les autres activités de prêts ont été analysés et comparés : l’activité des banques juives dans le Ghetto, mais aussi celle des monts-de-piété des villes de la terre ferme vénitienne, des notaires et des prêteurs privés. De cette façon il a été possible d’enquêter sur les relations existantes entre les différents circuits de crédit, et de démontrer qu’ils n’étaient pas en concurrence les uns avec les autres, mais qu’il s’agissait plutôt d’un marché segmenté. La recherche s’adresse aussi bien aux spécialistes de l’histoire vénitienne qu’aux historiens de l’économie dans d’autres contextes, en proposant une nouvelle méthodologie et un cas d’étude qui appellent à la comparaison dans d’autres villes à l’époque moderne. / This thesis analyses the credit market in Venice during the 18th century. An important part of this research focuses on a quite unique credit system, specific to the Venetian context, that was offer through the inns, or osterie, and the bastioni (warehouses where wine was sold) of the city. In 18th century Venice, wine and money were intrinsically linked through the activity of the innkeepers and the bastioneri (the managers of the bastioni), who originally offered their customers a pawnbroking service. They assumed the double roles of suppliers of basic goods and creditors, thereby becoming central economic figures in Venice’s urban context – especially for the members of the poorest classes. One of the most innovative elements of this research lies in the findings regarding the way that interest on loans was collected: creditors benefited from the fact that one-third of the total value of the transaction was paid in wine. The low average value of the loans confirms that this service was mainly aimed at the lower classes of society, the main actors in what has been defined as ‘the handkerchief economy’. Those who benefited the most from this kind of credit arrangement were essentially poor – but not too poor – people, who had only modest reserves of money, and were thus more vulnerable due to the paucity and irregularity of their income. The main objective of this research is twofold: (a) to analyze the credit activity of bastioni and osterie, and (b) to place it in the Venetian urban context. This study analyzed the Venetian credit market as a whole, and then assessed the characteristics and variables that could influence the demand for credit. Moreover, to develop a more complete view of this specific market, all the main components of the credit offer were taken into consideration. In addition to the already mentioned bastioni and osterie, the activities of Jewish bankers in the Ghetto, the monti di pietà situated on the Venetian mainland, as well as those of the notaries and the private lenders, were also analyzed and compared. In this way, it was possible to investigate the existing relationships between the different credit channels, and to determine that they were actually not in competition with one another; rather, it was discovered that they were, in fact, discretely positioned in a distinctly segmented market. This research is relevant to both specialists in Venetian history, and researchers concerned with economic history in other contexts; this study also proposes a new methodology, and a case study, useful for relative comparison by either constituency.

This dissertation is concerned with the paradox of revelatory deception a form of 'lying' which reveals truth instead of concealing it in four Shakespearean plays: Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Hamlet, and King Lear. Through close analysis, I show that revelatory deceptions in these plays are metatheatrical, and read them as responding to contemporary writers who attacked the theatre for being inherently deceitful. This reading leads to the identification of parallels in the description of theatre in antitheatrical texts and the descriptions of revelatory deceptions in the plays. I suggest that correlations in phrasing and imagery might undermine antitheatrical rhetoric: for example, the plays portray certain theatrical, revelatory deceptions as traps which free their victims instead of killing them. Such 'lies' are differentiated from actual deceits by their potentially relational characteristics: deceptions which reveal the truth require audiences to put aside their self-interest and certainty to consider alternative realities which might reflect, reconfigure, and expand their understanding of the world and of themselves. The resulting truths lead either to the creation or renewal of relationships, as in Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It, or offer glimpses at the possibility of renewal, which is ultimately denied, as in Hamlet and King Lear. In both cases the imperatives for truth and right action are underscored not obscured, as antitheatricalists would have argued through the audience's vicarious experience of either the gains or losses of characters within the plays. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2017. / English / MA / Unrestricted

Economy of three generations of aristocrats from Pernstejn during the 16th century In my work I focus on the management of aristocrats from Pernstejn during the 16th century. On an example of three generations I am trying to show traditional forms of noble business, as well as new attempts for financial gain. I built my work on the data from sixteen urbary of Pernstejn manors reflecting the view of major aristocratic family on their own proactive approach to economic events in estates. Throughout the study I cover the history of aristocrats from Pernstejn from the beginnings to the end of the 16th century. Further I focus on the traditional forms of feudal profits also via more modern ways that started to be used during late medieval and early modern period. After that I describe the urbary and development of their studies. Furthermore, using an extant urbary I describe the economic situation in eight Pernstejn estates. In the final apendix I record all locations that are monitored in the urbary. Overall, I summarize the estates as outdated and not very profitable. According to me the self-interest of Pernstejn family in this area is minimal. Both facts led to financial bankruptcy of the family that during a certain period belonged to a political and property elite of the early modern Czech aristocracy. Key...

This diploma thesis focuses on the issue of oral and written communication through the groups of couriers, who mediated between smaller royal dowry town Dvůr Králové nad Labem and its own villages as well as another distant locations situated in another dominion. Diploma thesis applies to region called Podkrkonoší in the advanced Early Modern Period, describes and analyses some of the preserved archival primary sources of knowledge dedicated to the courier services in Dvůr Králové nad Labem. It mentions the enviroment in which the gateke- epers and other couriers fulfilled their services. This thesis attempts to define the relationship between the distance and courier's income in Dvůr Králové nad Labem's domain and outside of it. In the context of diverse contents of oral and written messages the thesis mentions sever- al other topics, for example the actual filling work of corvée (or statute labour), showing by gatekeepers the way to hussar-soldier at surveying, transport of beggars and vagabonds and even the beginning of postal services in this area. Working method is based on detailed archival probe into rarely preserved municipal bookkeeping, especially into records of gate- keeper's courier services and records of other settled couriers both from the year 1740 and 1768. Results are presented...