This thesis argues that 17th century polymath Sir Kenelm Digby treats his scientific discourses as psychological romances in his works Loose Fantasies and Two Treatises, with his use of courtly romantic tropes, and that a contemporary audience would have read Digby's scientific treatises as literary. I first argue that science and romance in Digby's narrative romance Loose Fantasies are literary modes of the text's narrative form and that these modes are not mutually exclusive, since science is a "pyschodrama" to Digby, who is both the audience and author of these putative "private memoirs." I then relate Digby's "romantic science" in Loose Fantasies to his "poetike Idea of science" in Digby's Two Treatises in order to argue that while the treatise is traditionally received as a philosophical discourse, it is also a work of literary criticism. I conclude that Digby's "poetike Idea of science" is always unstable, because Digby cannot choose between the primacy of language and ideas in human cognition, due to the rapid rationalistic developments in epistemology during his time.

This dissertation is primarily concerned with women's writing in the mid-seventeenth century, comprising the years from 1624 to 1686. It covers the period immediately following Martin Opitz's vernacular literary reforms in Germany and takes as its primary subject the resultant increase in female authorship. It arises out of an interest in two separate but interrelated issues. The first is out of an interest in female literary production in Germany during the seventeenth century, specifically between 1624 and 1686, dates demarcated by the publication of Martin Opitz's Buch von der deutschen Poeterey and the publication of Susanne Elisabeth Zeidler's collection of poetry, Jungferlicher Zeitvertreiber. The second is the question of women's self-concept within a patriarchal society and the discursive strategies of female authors struggling "against complex odds" to "com[e] to written voice" (Olsen 9). In order to fully explore this subject, I have chosen to focus on the work of two poets, Sibylle Schwarz (1621-1638) and Susanne Elisabeth Zeidler (1657-1706?). Writing at different stages in this period and from dissimilar social positions, the two poets offer contrasting strategies of self-representation and self-authorization. By negotiating the demanding terrain of female authorship in a period inhospitable to female learning in different ways, they illustrate the tensions faced by female poets and the various strategies for overcoming the challenges they faced. I look first at the construction of female gender in the early modern period and the ways female writers could subtly shift the prevailing ideas and definitions to include the act of writing as an acceptable component of female identity. The analysis and comparison of the works of Schwarz and Zeidler also offers a glimpse into the changes in self-awareness and self-concept of female poets across the period. / text

In 1703, the chief scribe (reisü'l-küttab) Rami Mehmed Efendi (d. 1708) was appointed as the grand vizier in the Ottoman Empire. In scholarship, Rami Mehmed epitomizes the transition in the political cadres from the people of the sword/seyfiye to the people of the pen/kalemiye as the first chief scribe to be appointed as the grand vizier. While this transition has long been accepted as a crucial aspect of eighteenth-century Ottoman history, the cultural and intellectual formation of "the people of the pen" as a distinct community before this period has not been adequately examined.

This thesis explores the various manners in which schadenfreude – taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others – functions in the theatrical works of Golden-Age Spain, specifically in three donjuanesque plays of the seventeenth century. The first chapter of the thesis analyses schadenfreude as exercised in Tirso de Molina’s "El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra," a play in which Don Juan’s pleasurable deceptions incur the enjoyment of his demise. In the second chapter, a variation on the theme of Don Juan finds playwright Alonso de Córdoba y Maldonado applying schadenfreude as a literary technique in his play "La venganza en el sepulcro." Finally, a female representative of the Don Juan archetype is examined in the third chapter, which features María de Zayas y Sotomayor’s only known comedy "La traición en la amistad." / Graduate / 0465 / 0294 / 0313 / tmak@uvic.ca

In this thesis I examine the artistic contributions of Gerrit van Honthorst (1592-1656) to the sudden increase in the pictorial representation of musical subjects in Utrecht during the 1620s. Like his contemporaries, Honthorst was profoundly influenced by the complex and dramatic style of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) during his studies in Italy, and he adopted the new Italianate interpretation of realism and chiaroscuro in his painting technique by the time he returned to Utrecht in 1620. However, Honthorst employed a strategy of representation that combined painterly techniques from the milieu of Italian art with subjects and themes from Netherlandish tradition, resulting in an innovative category of genre painting that was both familiar and new to the contemporary viewer. Through an analysis of a representative sample of Honthorst’s paintings of musicians and their relation to contemporary Dutch trends and interests, I consider how his works resonated with the aesthetic tastes of Northern patrons. I argue for the presence in Honthorst’s paintings of musicians of elements from contemporary Dutch culture, such as literary conventions, artistic tradition, and customs of musical performance, and I examine the ways in which these commonalities in ideology appealed to Northern audiences. / text

This study is an examination of Gerrit Dou’s Violin Player (1653, Liechtenstein, Vaduz Castle, Princely Collection). The painting is a visual testimony to Dou’s manual skills and trompe l’oeil manner of painting in his own innovative fijnschilder painting style. The composition incorporates and reinvents devices from a variety of sources from portraiture, genre painting, and emblem literature, such as the arched niche window framing the violinist. The work demonstrates the connection between music and painting in the relationship between the violinist and the background setting of an artist’s workshop. Through an iconographic analysis of works depicting the artist in the studio by Dou and his contemporaries the correlation between music playing and painting becomes evident. In this context, this relationship acts as an important device in fashioning the painter’s image as an elevated and scholarly artist and brings to light the power of music as a mode of inspiration for the painter in the studio. Additionally, tobacco smoking, which appears in many seventeenth-century Dutch self-portraits, in the context of the studio, was also perceived as an inspirational tool for the artist, thus contrasting with smoking in genre scenes of the lower classes as a symbol of waste and idleness. The work, similarly to other Dutch seventeenth-century paintings, is not a realistic representation but a cleverly constructed image that acts as an allegorical master deception for the amusement and entertainment of an educated, upper-class clientele. / Thesis (Master, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-24 23:56:10.869

This dissertation explores the influence of Reformation representational anxiety on early seventeenth-century poetic depictions of Christ. I study the poetic shift from physical to metaphorical portrayals of Christ that occurred after the English Reformation infused religious symbols and visual images with transgressive power. Contextualizing the juncture between visual and verbal representation, I examine the poetry alongside historical artifacts including paternosters, a painted glass window, an emblem, sermons, and the account of a state trial in order to trace signs of sensory “loss” in the verse of John Donne, George Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton. The introduction provides a historical and poetic overview of sixteenth-century influences on religious verse. The first chapter contrasts Donne’s sermons—which vividly describe Christ—with his poems, in which Christ’s face is often obscured or avoided. In the chapter on George Herbert’s The Temple, I show how Herbert’s initial, physical portraits of Christ increasingly give way to metaphorical images as the book progresses, paralleling the Reformation’s internalization of images. The third chapter shows that Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum makes use of pastoral conventions to fashion Christ as a shepherd-spouse, the divine object of desire. In the final chapter I argue that three poems from John Milton’s 1645 volume can be read as containing signs of Milton’s emerging Arianism. Depictions of Christ in the poetry of Donne, Herbert, Lanyer, and Milton reveal the period’s contestation over images; the sensory strain of these metaphorical representations results in memorable, vivid verse.

Physiognomy is generally assumed to be, and has been historicized as, the science of judging human character according to the features of the face. However, the type of physiognomy favoured by seventeenth-century English authors was one which adapted the Aristotelian claim that physiognomy be a full-body study. This project explores how physiognomic focus on the entire body – from the forehead, fingers and feet to the breast, belly and back – was shaped by contemporary religious and “scientific” legitimating claims, and how it interacted with the century’s anxieties regarding disorder and the self. The implicit suggestion that few bodies and the souls which helped shape them were perfectly symmetrical and, by extension, virtuous, illustrated human variety and depravity and stressed the need for self subordination. Only through reason and God’s grace, it was argued, could humans moderate the interconnected and essentializing influences of sin, the stars and the humours, and thereby embody the godly values of truth, virtue and harmony. The full-bodied practice of seventeenth-century physiognomy simultaneously emphasized human uniqueness and God’s omnipotence, and was both a part and product of predominant tensions and mentalities.

By analyzing and contextualizing the polarized discourses on coffee and coffeehouses in post-1652 England, this dissertation argues that the divisive worldviews of the English population at this critical historical juncture shaped the contentious reception of coffee. Countless scholarly efforts dealing with seventeenth-century coffeehouses, those of London in particular, have helped explaining the rapid growing popularity of coffee and the establishments in which it was consumed, the coffeehouse. Building upon exiting literature, this work advances a new approach to shed light the interconnection between social and cultural anxieties, paradoxes and contradictions in seventeenth-century English society, and the contradictory discourses surrounding the rise of coffee in England. My project demonstrates that pervasive anxieties about the rise of religious heterodoxy, the ambiguous dispositions of the English people towards the Ottoman Turks, and the ever-present concerns surrounding the tenuous state of patriarchal manhood collectively helped to both encourage and discourage interactions with the Islamic practice of coffee drinking in coffeehouses. Coffee and coffeehouses came from the Ottoman Empire, the land of the presumed Turks. One sector of society, the optimists, embraced the exotic novelty from the Islamic world and participated enthusiastically in a custom shared with their Turkish, Arab and Persian counterparts since the early sixteenth century. Conversely, the pessimists vilified the adoption of cultural and dietary practices from a non-Christian society; they condemned the enthusiasts' cosmopolitanism as a sign of disloyalty that would only deepen discord in the nation. Indeed, they proclaimed the craze for the Turkish-imported habit as a sign of degeneration, threatening not just Englishmen's religiosity, but also their manliness. Coffee and coffeehouse came from the Ottoman Empire, the land of the presumed effeminate Turks at that. Intimate intermingling with this imported novelty thus compromised England's identity and even sovereignty. By relying upon a borderlands approach that is inspired by gender analysis, this dissertation seeks an alternative theoretical path to explain the controversy and contention swirling around a new drink and novel spaces of sociability among a populace dislocated by years of religious, political and cultural turmoil.

Seventeenth-century division violin music is not considered part of the classical canon, but its background as a European art form may make it seem “too Western” for traditional ethnomusicological study. The purpose of this thesis is twofold: first, I outline the historical context, transmission, and performance practice of division violin playing in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Also of interest to me is the way in which we, as musicologists, study oral tradition within the context of a musical culture that no longer exists today. After an exploration of the ideas of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, Walter Ong, Ruth Finnegan, and Slavica Ranković, I discuss the English division violin’s background and transition from a largely oral to a predominantly literate tradition. I demonstrate this change in transmission, composition, and performance practices through examining the second and sixth editions of John Playford’s The Division Violin (1684).