This study examines the sixteenth-century English Reformation background of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Book 3. Recovering this material is not simply a matter of opening a Bible, for various groups in the period, both Catholic and Reformer, interpreted its passages differently. The Book's four primary female characters, Belphoebe, Florimell, Britomart and Amoret, embody different aspects of the virtue, and these come into sharper focus in the light of this background. After a general survey of previous discussions of this topic, Chapter 1 examines the virgin Belphoebe and attitudes about celibacy and virginity current in sixteenth-century England, finding that neither Catholic nor Reformer disparaged this state, although in practice they differed dramatically. Chapter 2, considering the plight of Florimell, shows how her actions demonstrate that her chastity is, as these Reformation writers urge, a matter of the mind and soul, the springs from which virtue and its opposites flow. Her quality derives from such inner conviction. Next, Chapter 3, looking at Britomart, shows that Reformation writers generally do not speak of human love, even in marriage, in a way that comes close to Spenser's poem. However, when they deal with spiritual love, the love the soul is to have for God, they describe it in terms which sound very like those of passionate romantic love. The final chapter brings the insights of the preceding essay to bear on the closing cantos and Amoret's distress. Seen against this background, while she may appear helpless, her mind, like Florimell's, is constant and firm; she remains chaste. Indeed, she prefers imprisonment and even death, to surrendering to her captor. Like both Belphoebe and Britomart, what underlies her behaviour is her prior love for her beloved, which is the basis of her chastity, just as the Reformation writers understand it. The perspective on Spenser's poem provided by this Reformation material gives rise to new insights into the text

Previous studies of the life and thought of Edmund Bishop (1846-1917), an English liturgiologist and convert to Catholicism, have underplayed the change in his attitude from positive to negative with respect to the institutional Catholic Church. This crucial shift in thinking occurred during 1899-1901, and is clearly reflected in his own writings. From then on, he differentiated between the institution that was the Catholic Church and Catholicism as a religion. Although he remained faithful to the latter, his diaries and letters preserve an intentional record of his severe criticism of the Catholic hierarchy. Bishop's views represent those of a layman and of an informed observer at a time when the Catholic Church was confronting the Modernist challenge.

Exile is, as Edward Said so eloquently put it, “the perilous territory of not-belonging.” Exiled peoples operate on the margins of their native culture: part of it, but excluded from it permanently or temporarily. Broadly speaking, my project explores the impact of exile on English literature of the late 15th and early 16th centuries. English exiles appear frequently in literary studies of the period, but little attention has thus far been focused on the effect of exile itself on late medieval and early modern authors. Historical studies on exile have been more prevalent and engaging. My project builds on this work and contributes new and groundbreaking investigations into the literary reflections of these important topics, mapping the influence of exile on trans-Reformation English literature. My dissertation identifies and defines a new, critical lens focusing on later medieval and early modern literature. I call this lens the “mind of exile,” a cognitive phenomenon that influences textual structure, and metaphorical usage, as well as shapes individual and national identities. It contributes new theories regarding the development of polemic as a genre and their contribution to the development of the “nation-state” idea that occurred in the sixteenth century. It identifies a new genre I call polemic chronicle, which adopts and deploys the conventions of chronicle in order to declare a personal and/or national identity. Lastly, it contributes new scholarship to Spenser studies by building on established scholarship exploring the hybrid identity of Edmund Spenser. To these studies, I add fresh critical readings of A View of the State of Ireland and Colin Clouts Comes Home Againe. Both texts represent, I argue, proto-colonial literature influenced by Spenser’s mind of exile that explore England’s new position at the end of the sixteenth century as a burgeoning imperial power.

Husserl’s Logical Investigations contain an apparent discrepancy in their account of meaning. They first present meanings, contra psychologism, as commonly available, reiterable, invariant, possibly valid, and independent of our “acts of meaning”. They then present meaning, almost psychologistically, as a kind of intentional experience on which all truths and other transcendent meanings depend. I offer a critical developmental study of this problem within Husserl’s semantics. I argue (1) that Husserl had reason to adopt his dyadic account of signification, (2) that this “two-sided” account shaped, and was reciprocally informed by, the two-step phenomenological method, and (3) that Husserl’s proposed resolution to the strain within his semantics, while driven by legitimate motivations, is precarious. I begin with the Logical Investigations and their context. I represent their two sets of semantic claims, recalling how the discord between claims of those sets would have been especially conspicuous when the Investigations were published, amid much debate over psychologism, in 1900-01. I then show why Husserl embraced two discordant views of meaning. I survey the 19th century sources for these views, confirming Jocelyn Benoist’s genealogical thesis that Husserl’s semantics took its psychological and logical sides primarily from Franz Brentano and Bernard Bolzano, respectively. And I present the Bolzanian arguments and Brentanian descriptions that served as grounds for Husserl’s semantics, showing how these pieces of reasoning were appropriated, and weighing their strength. Next, I trace how Husserl’s two-sided theory of meaning, and its apparent incoherence, both inspired and determined the transcendental and eidetic reductions. I then examine how Husserl subsequently used the phenomenological method to reinforce, to integrate, and to revise his theory of meaning. And I address a methodological criticism that this circular development prompts. Finally, I assess Husserl’s attempt to explain the division within the phenomenon of meaning by reference to what he called “transcendental subjectivity”. I consider two contrary objections to this explanation. I indicate how Husserl’s explanation is responsive to the insight behind each objection, but contend that it is perhaps not adequately responsive to the insight behind either.

Book Six of The Faerie Queene deals with the complexities of courtesy in a socially changing world. Calidore, the protagonist of Book Six, sets out to defeat the Blatant Beast, the chief enemy of courtesy, but abandons his quest midway through the book in order to live the shepherds’ life. Despite the ethical ambiguity associated with Calidore’s abandoning his quest, this pastoral setting should enable him to deepen his understanding of the nature and practice of courtesy. However, Calidore is unable to grow, and the poet essentially gives up on his own poetic quest.

There is no abstract available for this dissertation.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2005. / Supervisor: Mary Silcox. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 180-204)

Universiẗat, Diss., 2007--Giessen.

Zugl.: Würzburg, Univ., Diss., 2007