By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the preponderance of scholarship examining oil paintings made on stone slabs or metal sheets in Western Europe during the early modern period (fifteenth–eighteenth centuries) had settled on an interpretation of these artworks as artifacts of an elite taste that sought objects for inclusion in private collections of whatever was rare, curious, exquisite, or ingenious. In a cabinet of curiosities, naturalia formed by nature and artificialia made by man all complemented each other as demonstrations of marvelous things (mirabilia). Certainly small-scale paintings on stone or metal exhibited amidst these kinds of rarities aided in aggrandizing a noble or bourgeois collector’s social prestige. As well, they might have derived their interest as collectables because of the painter’s fame or increased capacity for miniaturization on copper plates, or because the painter left a slab of lapis lazuli, for example, partially uncovered to reveal its visually arresting stratigraphy or coloration. Nonetheless, while the lithic and metallic supports might have added value to the oil paintings it was not thought to add meaning. A totalizing theory about this type of artwork, based on a perception of them as if they had only served as conspicuous consumables, therefore overlooks that in other circumstances the stone and metal supports did contribute to the iconographic substance of the paintings. As this dissertation will argue, the introduction of metal and stone supports allowed patrons and painters literally to add another layer of meaning to an oil painting’s imagery. These materials mattered not just as passive receptacles of meaning but as active shapers of significance. Evidence for this hypothesis exists in the historical record in at least three identifiable contexts: Leonardo da Vinci’s Portrait of Ginevra de’Benci (ca. 1474–1478) in relation to the epistemological debate known as the Paragone; funerary monuments in Roman churches inclusive of painted portraits in relation to theories about color and lifelikeness; medallion-shaped, chest plates known as Escudos de monjas (Nuns’ Shields) worn by nuns of some religious orders in Colonial Mexico in relation to pre-Hispanic sacral materials. All three of these case studies ultimately concern the paradoxical materialization of the immaterial fame of the painter, the soul of the deceased, and the Christian divine. Observing them in tandem provides an outline of the origins and development of the technique of painting with oils on stone and metal, and consequently broadens our understanding of this wider, early modern phenomenon. / Art History

My dissertation examines how early modern metatheater enabled the Renaissance stage and its original audience to develop a complex and symbiotic relationship. Metatheater--by which I mean a particular mode of theatre, in which actors, playwrights, dramatic characters and/or (in particular) audiences express or share a perception of drama as a fictional and theatrical construct--pervaded Renaissance drama, not by simple happenstance but arising almost inevitably from the complex context within which it functioned. The early modern stage was a particularly conflicted forum, which monarchs and playwrights, town fathers and actors, censors and audiences, impresarios and anti-theatricalists, all strove to influence and control. The use of the metatheatrical mode allowed playwrights and players to better navigate this difficult, sometimes dangerous, space. In particular, the development of Renaissance metatheater derived from (and, simultaneously, affected) the unique nature of its original spectators, who practiced a much more actively engaged participation in the theater than is often recognized. Performers and playwrights regularly used metatheatricality to adapt to the needs and desires of their audience, and to elicit the intellectual and emotional responses they desired. My study utilizes a historically contextualized approach that emphasizes the material conditions under which Renaissance drama arose and functioned. It begins by examining the influence of the surrounding milieu on the Renaissance stage and its spectators, especially its facilitation of the development and use of metatheater. Then, via close readings of four plays--Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare's Henry V and Antony and Cleopatra, and Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle--the dissertation indicates how varied and versatile early modern metatheater was, and how it responded to and influenced the nature of its audiences. My study demonstrates the centrality of metatheater to early modern theatrical practice, delineates its pervasive influence on the stage-audience relationship in Renaissance theaters, and underlines the influence of material conditions on the creation and dissemination of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. / English

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze various texts from Japanese literary history and extract the instances of trans-gender performances from those texts. I define “trans-gender” behaviors as actions that are culturally expected of the gender opposite that of the gender assigned to the performer at birth. In each text, I identify which character or characters perform actions that go against the expectations of the gender they were assigned at birth. I analyze how their performance is portrayed within the narrative, as well as how other characters in the narrative react to their performance. In this way, nuances are extracted that relate to the trope of gender play in these four historical eras. The literary representations of this trans-gender play respond to the needs and values systems of the time periods within which they exist. In the Heian period, this play is caused by external forces and ends due to sexual acts. In the Muromachi period, the character chooses to perform, but eventually revokes the world. By the Edo period, performance is more widely accepted and culturally ingrained because of the availability of spaces where trans-gender performance is allowed. The performers in Edo period literature usually perform in the context of receiving privileges or being allowed into gendered spaces. Finally, In the Meiji period, heteronormative gender roles are strictly enforced, and the literature reflects negative reactions to non-normative behavior. Trans-gender performers in the Meiji period are often punished in the narratives they inhabit.

Early modern literature and politics alike are littered with the language of the classical elements. In particular, elemental language comes to the fore in William Shakespeare and John Fletcher's plays produced in the mid-portion of King James's reign. In this thesis, I argue that Shakespeare and Fletcher to use the language of air, water, and fire, in Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, and Bonduca, to mediate contemporary political concerns plaguing English earth. This elemental language shows how Shakespeare and Fletcher voiced the British people's wavering hopes and fears concerning James's hopes for imperial expansion and his concurrent inability to maintain his realm's lands, finances, unity, and national image. Although recent scholars have begun to focus on how elemental language often functions to elevate authorial status and to personify emotions, there is little recognition of how early modern playwrights use elemental language to speak to Jacobean political concerns. Understanding the political underpinnings of elemental language allows for a better understanding of the discursive relationship between monarch, playwright, and subjects. / Master of Arts / This thesis explores how playwrights William Shakespeare and John Fletcher use the language of the classical elements, water, fire, earth, and air, to express early modern people's hopes and fears regarding the trajectory of the British nation. In particular, I analyze how Shakespeare and Fletcher use elemental language in their plays, Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, and Bonduca, to mediate fears of national degradation drawing from King James's imperial ambitions and mismanagement of the nation's natural and financial resources. I suggest that much like the people of today, early modern peoples also measured the success of their nation in terms of the well-being and stability of its elemental environment.

Insanity, which has long been a favorite theme of Elizabethan drama, summoned the dramatist's imagination to wonderful creations -- creations that were fantastic and grotesque, but unforgettable.

Royal Gifts: Conferring Personhood upon Gifted Artworks in the Courts of England, 1300-1600 aims to uncover the social mechanisms at play when an artwork was given as a courtly gift, with particular interest given to those gifts which could be classed as ‘inalienable’ from the donor. The essay opens with an examination of current anthropological definitions of inalienable artworks and their powerful influence when deployed reciprocally at court as a binding social glue, reinforcing the ties from one individual to another which may not be readily strengthened by any other means. The essay goes on to make an analysis of three such artworks which fit such a definition, in light of how their status as a gift has informed their making, artistry, and meaning.  The specific types of artwork analysed are two illuminated manuscripts commissioned by royal patrons, and a gold jewellery brooch or badge of fealty.Primary issues addressed by the essay are building a picture of existing scholarship which deals with medieval gift-giving, why and how an artwork might be made so as to be inalienable from the owner, and how this can alter a contextual interpretation of the artwork.  The reasoning behind why such gift-giving rituals ceased to be enacted is also explored.The essay found that inalienable possessions, especially artworks, are never given arbitrarily in a court setting. Often, the nature of the artwork given contains vital information about the relationship between donor and recipient.  Making an art historical analysis of such artworks also revealed details about certain artistic choices made at the time to artwork was commissioned. In short, the essay finds that rendering an artwork inalienable was beneficial as a device for strengthening one’s own identity and one’s relation to others.

My dissertation, Inside Out: Cavendish on Self-knowledge, Perception, and Figure explores the works of philosopher, poet, and playwright Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673). Cavendish wrote extensively on natural philosophy and argues that nature is one material substance imbued with reason, perception, and self-motion. Her theory of matter is novel for her time since her contemporaries, the mechanical philosophers, such as Hobbes and Descartes, frequently claim matter is unfeeling, unthinking, and passive. The orderly mechanisms of the natural world, for them, are explained through matter in motion, specifically collisions from contiguous bodies. For example, billiard balls striking one another explains all natural phenomena. For Cavendish, the order of the natural world is similarly explained through matter in motion, but rather than bodies moved by collisions from contiguous bodies, bodies move themselves guided by their own sense and reason. Nature for her is “entirely wise and knowing” (OEP 2001: 48).One major recurring theme in both Cavendish’s works and the secondary literature is how mind-like and agential nature is given Cavendish’s description of nature’s knowledge and its ability to perceive and reason. The existing interpretations either assign Cavendishian matter robust mind-like qualities akin to contemporary panpsychism, or they naturalize her theory so that all matter’s qualities have a metaphysical explanation based on the nature of bodies. The goal of my dissertation is to provide an alternative interpretation that does not view matter through a panpsychist lens but retains its important mind-like quality, which is knowledge. I aim to show that Cavendish’s theory of nature does not explain nature’s qualities in terms of human cognition; instead it explains sense and knowledge that is unique to matter. This unique sense and knowledge is what produces the “peaceable, orderly and wise government” that is nature according to Cavendish (OEP 2001: 232). I argue that this is a viable interpretation by discussing three important phenomena in her theory: perception, self-love, and self-knowledge. We can understand these phenomena as more metaphysical or naturalized, and less mental, by viewing them through two important concepts in Cavendish’s theory: sympathy and the nature of bodies, which Cavendish calls “figures.” In my first two chapters, I explain human perception (i.e., patterning) and Cavendish’s principle of individuation (i.e., self-love) as metaphysical sympathy. I argue that sympathy for her is naturalized and is constituted by the attraction of figures to each other or the imitation of a figure’s actions, behaviors, or properties. The difference between these two phenomena is how much of the figure each imitates: patterning only imitates sensible qualities while self-love imitates the whole figure. Patterning and self-love as sympathy explains these mind-like qualities metaphysically, rather than as mind-like phenomena. Matter does, in my interpretation, retain a mind-like quality, which is self-knowledge. In my third chapter I explain what self-knowledge is for Cavendish, arguing that it is a mental state. I discuss the features of self-knowledge as a mental state and its content, arguing that self-knowledge, for her, is as much about what a subject’s body is doing as it is about a subject’s mental state. In my fourth chapter I return to visual perception in humans and animals and discuss a potential problem in Cavendish’s theory. I argue that given Cavendish’s commitments concerning causation and the self-motion of matter, light plays seemingly no role. Yet, Cavendish must explain how we see external objects in the presence of light but not when it is absent. To solve this problem, I argue that our perception of external objects is mediated by light: light produces copies (i.e., patterns) of external objects and we see these patterns. By discussing these details of Cavendish’s theory and offering metaphysical or naturalized interpretations, I aim to show that my macroscopic view of Cavendish’s theory is plausible. My interpretation restricts mentality rather than removes it entirely from Cavendish's theory of nature. / Philosophy

The Mirror for Magistrates, the collection of de casibus complaint poems compiled by William Baldwin in the 1550s and expanded and revised between 1559 and 1610, was central to the development of imaginative literature in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Additions by John Higgins, Thomas Blenerhasset and Richard Niccols extended the Mirror’s scope, shifted its focus, and prolonged its popularity; in particular, the 1587 edition of the original text with Higgins’s ancient British and Roman complaint collections profoundly influenced the work of Spenser and Shakespeare. However, while there has been a recent resurgence of critical interest in the editions of 1559 and its 1563 ‘Second Part’, the later additions are still largely neglected and disparaged, and the transmission of the original text beyond 1563 has never been fully explored. Without an understanding of this transmission and expansion, the importance of the Mirror to sixteenth-century intellectual culture is dramatically distorted. Higgins, Blenerhasset and Niccols’s contributions are invaluable witnesses to how verse history was conceptualised, written and read across the period, and to the way in which the Mirror tradition was repeatedly reinterpreted and redeployed in response to changing contemporary concerns. The Mirror corpus encompasses topical allegory, nationalist polemic, and historiographical scepticism. What has not been recognised is the complex interaction of these themes right across the Mirror’s history. This thesis provides a comprehensive reassessment of the Mirror’s expansion, transmission, and appropriation between 1559 and 1610, focusing in particular on Higgins, Blenerhasset, and Niccols’s work. By comparing editions and tracing editorial revisions, the changing contexts and attitudes which shaped the early texts’ development are explored. Higgins, Blenerhasset, and Niccols’s contributions are analysed against this backdrop for the first time here, both within their own literary and historiographical contexts, and in dialogue with the early editions. A broad reading of the themes and concerns of these recensions, rather than the limited approach which has characterised previous scholarship, takes account of their depth and variety, and provides a new understanding of the extent of the Mirror’s influence and ubiquity in early modern literary culture.

The reception of the Huguenot poet Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas' Semaines (1578, 1584 et seq.) is an important episode in early modern literary history for understanding relations between Scottish, English and French literature, interactions between contemporary reading and writing practices, and developments in divine poetry. This thesis surveys translations (Part I), allusions and quotations in prose (Part II) and verse imitations (Part III) from the period when English translations of the Semaines were being printed in order to identify historical trends in how readers absorbed and adapted the poems. Early translations show that the Semaines quickly acquired political and diplomatic affiliations, particularly at the Jacobean Scottish Court, which persisted in subsequent decades (Chapter 1). William Scott's treatise The Model of Poesy (c. 1599) and translations indicate how attractive the Semaines' combination of humanist learning and sacred rhetoric was, but the poems' potential appeal was only realized once Josuah Sylvester's Devine Weeks (1605 et seq.) finally made the complete work available in English (Chapter 2). Different communities of readers developed in early modern England and Scotland once this edition became available (Chapter 3), and we can observe how individuals marked, copied out, quoted and appropriated passages from their copies of the poems in ways dependent on textual and authorial circumstances (Chapter 4). The Semaines, both in French and in Sylvester's translation, were used as a stylistic model in late-Elizabethan playtexts and Zachary Boyd's Zions Flowers (Chapter 5), and inspired Jacobean poems that help us to assess Du Bartas' influence on early modern poetry (Chapter 6). The great variety of responses to the Semaines demonstrates new ways that intertextuality was a constituent feature of vernacular religious literature that was being read and written in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain.

The thesis deals with the works of the Czech baroque in Latin writing authors of non- Catholic and Catholic confession: Pavel Stránský (1583-1657), Jan Amos Komenský (1592- 1670), Jan Laetus-Veselský (1609-1659), Julius Solimanus (1595-1639), Bohuslav Balbín (1621-1688), Tomáš Pešina of Čechorod (1629-1680) and Jan Florián Hammerschmidt (1652- 1735). The focus of the thesis is (apart from the comparism of the point of view of the authors on personality and reign of Rudolph II. with the aspect on the ideal of the sovereign at that time) the description of their life and work as well, because some of them haven't been subject of interest of the researchers so far. The thesis brings also the stylistic and content escription of their historiographical works and selected passages from them are edited in the final part of the work.