This is a study of Japanese folding screens decorated with a variety of cartographic imagery of European origin. The central argument of this work is that Japanese cartographic namban screens made during the period considered in this dissertation can assist us to further understand the marked Christian eschatological character of the pictorial programmes decorating these screens, reflecting European contemporary hopes about the messianic coming of a universal Christian King, and about the Christian future of Japan at the onset of Shogun Tokugawa Hidetada's ban against Christianity (1614). By taking into account the use of folding screens as diplomatic gifts, this research seeks to argue that the hybridity of namban cartographic screens reveals as much about the expectation of Jesuit missionaries towards the evangelization of the Japanese archipelago as they did about how Japanese artists and observers understood European cartographic knowledge within a pre-existing local ritual use of maps and cartography. This dissertation is composed of four chapters. In chapter one I describe the material qualities of folding screens, the architectural environments in which they were displayed, and how the practice of donating folding screens as diplomatic gifts was eventually co-opted by the Jesuit missionaries operating in Japan. Chapter two is a discussion on the organization and the passage of the first Japanese diplomatic mission in Europe and the role that European cartography and geographical allegories played in this event. In chapter three I will examine the dissemination of Christian sacred images in Japan and the establishment of a Jesuit school to train Japanese artists in western-style painting. Chapter four unpacks the discussion developed in the preceding chapters and focuses on two specific pairs of namban cartographic screens - the Map of the World and Twenty-Eight Cities (today at the Imperial Household Agency in Tokyo) and the Battle of Lepanto and World Map (today at the Kosetsu Museum in Kobe) - for which I propose a new interpretation.

Throughout 2013 the governments of the Austrian Republic and United States of America celebrated the 175th anniversary of diplomatic relations between them. This date marks the accreditation of ambassadors in 1838 but obscures the sixty-year prehistory, begun when the first American envoy reached Vienna in 1778. The Habsburg Monarchy became the last European Great Power to recognise the United States, but the reasons behind this also have eighteenth-century origins. The United States and the successor states to the Habsburg Monarchy, therefore, share a much longer, more complex and deeply entangled history stretching back to the American Revolution. This dissertation focuses on how and why attempts to formalise relations failed between these two states in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period, something which, until now, has received little historical attention. This dissertation uncovers a neglected but illuminating story of US-Habsburg relations between 1763- 1789. In doing so it demonstrates the evolving nature of early modern diplomacy and the wider international struggle of the American founding. In both regards, this dissertation argues the economic motivation of economic agents and the role of personalities were the new and instrumental factors. What follows is a new history of the broader, much deeper impact of the American Revolution and the transatlantic entanglements of the Habsburg Monarchy. A history of a relationship which looks beyond 'desk diplomacy' and towards a more holistic interpretation of the attempted relations between unlikely states. To this end, this dissertation relies upon a broad base of archival material from personal papers to quantative data from both sides of the Atlantic.

abstract: Among the many paradigm shifts brought about in the seventeenth century was an increased dissociation between the subject and time as a lived, shared experience. Clockwork Subjects in the Seventeenth Century: Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton investigates how changes in the social understanding and experience of time, concurrent with changes in timekeeping technologies, were reflected in the literature of the period. This dissertation is closely concerned with the phenomenon of time from the perspective of the subject and the various ways subjects represent themselves as beings in time. Chapter One provides a theoretical introduction, establishing a Heideggerian framework of temporality and ontology, while emphasizing the characteristics of clock-time as time that is movable and separable from what Heidegger would term “originary time.” Chapter Two analyzes metaphors of hearing in Richard II in relation to the play’s pivotal conceit, in which a dethroned Richard compares himself to broken clockwork; exploring temporality in tandem with the phenomenon of hearing, I argue that aural captivation distorts Richard’s perception of his placement in a larger historical framework. Chapter Three employs a reading of Augustinian time George Herbert’s poems, “Even-song” and “Church-monuments,” analyzing the soul’s experience of time in contrast to temporal metaphors that ask, with Augustine, whether time can be measured by and within the self. Chapter Four, analyzing Milton’s Samson Agonistes, explores Samson’s attempt to act and interpret divine intent while in the middle of history, paralleling early modern efforts to construct an interpretive framework for nature and time. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2018

There are two parallel discourses on humanism nowadays. One conceives of humanism as a worldview and a philosophical position. The other takes it to be a cultural phenomenon typical of the European Renaissance. The critics interested in considering humanism conceptually, as a rule, are not Renaissance scholars. Operating from either a postmodern or a postcolonial perspective, they often speak of humanism as the backbone of Western thought or the mainstay of European modernity and, in any case, as a bankrupt ideology of the West. Conversely, the Renaissance scholars are more concerned with the task of making sense of the idea of humanism in its original historical context than with considering it in relation to its other, later developments and remain, for the most part, unwilling to address the broader questions posed by humanism. This dissertation purports to bring the philosophical and the historical discourses on humanism together. I focus specifically on Renaissance humanism and ground my reflection firmly in textual analyses of late XV and XVI century sources. More concretely, I put forward a reading of two groups of texts. The first group includes three works exploring the arch-theme of the Renaissance, dignitas hominis, from the perspective of a relational concept of identity formation. These are: Pico della Mirandola's Oratio (1486), Bovelles's De sapiente (1511) and Vives's Fabula de homine (1518). The second group of texts contains three works which fall into the category of Renaissance Americanist literature: Cabeza de Vaca's Naufragios (1542), Galeotto Cei's Viaggio e relazione delle Indie (written after 1553) and Jean de Léry's Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (1578). The bridge between these two bodies of texts is the idea, found in Pico, Bovelles and Vives, that arriving at a sense of self always involves a detour through otherness, as experienced in one's community, Nature and God. The encounter narratives, in illustrating the impact of America on the Renaissance European traveler, bring to life what philosophers theorized in the peace and quiet of their studies - the essential indefiniteness of the self unless inhabited by meanings drawn from without. / 2016-09-29

This dissertation’s aim is to reveal how essential economic mechanics were to playwrights when it came to depicting agency. Rising commercialization in the seventeenth century prompted playwrights to appropriate market behaviors in London as a new discourse for agency. Commerce serves as a metaphor for every part of daily life, and a new kind of “commercial” agency evolves that predicates autonomy upon the exchange networks in which a person participates. Initially, this new agency appears as a variation on the trickster. By the end of the century, playwrights have created a new model for autonomy and a new kind of hero to employ it: the entrepreneur. My chapters chart the defining points in the development of commercial agency, each with a representative text or texts. In chapter II, I analyze how the Jacobean gallant, a variation on the trickster, sells himself as a desirable commodity to gain wealth and influence, the conditions he needs to liberate himself and control his own destiny (Eastward Ho). Chapter III examines characterizations of businesswomen in seventeenth century drama, one of the primary shifts in tone that accompanied the development of commercial agency as playwrights became more skilled in its portrayal (Antony and Cleopatra). Frequently regarded as prostitutes in Elizabethan plays, entrepreneurial women are often seen in later periods as dramatic, even tragic, heroes. When the stage closed during the years of 1642-1659, the print market was playwrights’ main source of income, and it was soon adapted to promote drama and ensure its future production. Chapter IV suggests that the success of William Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes was due to how its preface implicated customers of the print edition in its stage production. Chapter V marks the emergence of the entrepreneurial rake as a romantic and comic hero. The chapter argues that the egalitarian haggling that ends The Man of Mode and The Rover, which is conspicuously absent from The Country Wife, is presented as the ideal basis for any loving, successful, and profitable marriage.

No description available.

Book Summary:This volume celebrates the considerable contributions of Edward Muir to the history of Renaissance Italy and early modern Europe. In keeping with Muir’s signature interdisciplinary approach to history, the fifteen essays in this volume include contributions on the ritual dimensions of early modern politics, religion, literature, and art and range from the Venetian and Florentine capitals of Renaissance high culture to Germany, Spain, the Low Countries, and China. Janus-faced, like all good historians, the volume looks forward and back, combining distinguished senior scholars and new voices with venerable debates and new fields. In doing so, the collection testifies to the vibrancy, vitality, and significance of early modern studies today and the degree to which Muir’s scholarship over the past thirty years has powerfully fueled the field’s dynamism.

Michael Talbot, British-Ottoman Relations, 1661-1807: Commerce and Diplomatic Practice in Eighteenth-Century Instanbul, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017, 270 pp. ISBN 978-1-783-27202-0. $120.00.

Over four chapters, this study extends and focuses recent critical work on religious sects in literature to examine five plays and one theatrical prose work from the late medieval period through the late seventeenth century in England. Specifically, this study charts the appearance and conduct of antinomians, or those whose faith in Christ is the sole guide for their actions and who eschew all outward behavioral constraints. Antinomianism is, in some ways, a logical step for newly empowered individual believers with no direct mediator between themselves and the Word, but it represents a dangerous potential for religious and social anarchy. For some of the characters I consider, antinomianism has been mapped onto them by modern literary critics precisely because their transgressive agency is so frightening to their contemporaries. For others, antinomianism is depicted as a positive mode of interacting with the unenlightened, but it is clear that these figures are allowed privilege outside the reach of mainstream believers. A negative parody of these normal believers is also represented in my project, and these characters' buffoonish misinterpretations and selfish motives negate any positive reading of their "liberating" antinomian belief. All of these characters--whether positive, negative, or even truly antinomian at all--reveal a key anxiety about personal belief and the well-being of civic and religious society in the mercurial landscape of pre- and post-Reformation England and the atmosphere of social and religious uncertainty that preceded the English Civil War. As such, an attention to the interconnections between the works under primary study and those circulating in the culture at the time is crucial to accurately identifying and understanding the myriad shades of religious belief that populate the pages of literature and polemics alike. In part, my project works to create a more complete and nuanced picture of the religious and literary landscapes of early modern England.

This project asserts that in works by Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne and Aemilia Lanyer, early modern knowledge of Galenic brain physiology is an essential part of Renaissance formulations of identity. As the accepted residence of the soul, the Galenic brain is a place where important questions about subjectivity can be addressed, and my project reads references to the brain in early modern literature as confluences of anatomical knowledge and Christian theories of spiritual identity. These readings uncover a more nuanced picture of the early modern subject as a complex union of flesh and spirit. I begin with an in depth overview of the legacy of Renaissance Galenism. I then read Galenic brain theories that are influential in the early modern texts in my study. This discussion progresses through my reading of the reconciliation of Galenic medicine with Christian doctrine that occurs over several centuries. Chapter two is a focused analysis of how Edmund Spenser constructs the character of Prince Arthur as a compromise between current medical and Christian ideas. I argue that in a critically popular passage in Book II of Spenser's Faerie Queene, contemporary theories of the brain ventricles contribute to a anatomical definition of Christian temperance and that attempts to account for the complexity of Prince Arthur's behavior. In chapter three, I read Richard's famous prison speech in act 5, scene 5 of Richard II as a theory of his cognition, or the process by which his behavior becomes manifest, and I argue that this reveals the interdependent relationship between early modern personality and the physical body it inhabits. In my chapter on John Donne's poem "The Crosse," I argue that Donne deliberately departs from accepted anatomies of the cranial sutures in order to assert spiritual causation that maintains and disciplines the passions. Finally, in my concluding chapter on Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judeaeorum, I argue that Lanyer constructs a female brain that requires the masculine dominance of God's grace in a highly sexualized relationship, and that her model mirrors patriarchal physiological models of women.