Search

Layouts and paratexts of Elizabethan prose psalters advocate two competing reading methods: reading sequentially according to the church calendar or selecting psalms by occasion. Marked psalters and bibles, however, show that Elizabethan readers often disregarded printed prescription, practicing either method, or both, as they chose. To capitalize on reader independence, printers eventually produced texts that encouraged comparative reading across multiple translations, culminating in the two-text psalter of the 1578 Geneva Bible. This episode in the history of devotional reading demonstrates the tendency of Elizabethans to slip the confessional categories into which their own texts, and later historiography, would place them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses an early modern Sammelband (collected volume) that compiles epithalamia celebrating the wedding of Elizabeth Stuart with two translations, William Vaughan's "The newfound politicke" and Robert Ashley's "Almansor." By highlighting the varied uses of Muslim exemplarity and alterity within one compilation, this article reveals the effects of recontextualization invited by the process of book building in the larger context of the Thirty Years' War. This Sammelband study argues that translation, repurposing, and the material processes of compilation unsettle narratives of religious difference used by European writers to make sense of political conflict in the early seventeenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the sixteenth century, perceptions of the English language changed from one of barbaric inadequacy to that of rare eloquence. Accounts for this shift tend to focus on literary or textual production, but this essay shows how these very linguistic concerns were motivated by the nonlinguistic practices appropriate to Latin rhetorical delivery (pronuntiatio et actio). The emotional contagion, legitimization of the inarticulate, cultural contextualization, and overcoming of natural physical defects that all stand at the heart of delivery here situate vernacular uplift at the corporeal level. The essay ends with an illustrative reading of William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The savagery of the native Irish and, in particular, their predilection for severing heads, is repeatedly asserted, not only in the texts of conquest, but in representations of the "Wild Irish" on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. This essay tests this literary commonplace against the historical record of the early modern conquest of Ireland. Far from being merely the aberrant practice of the barbarous Gaels, beheading—and a form of judicial headhunting—became a cornerstone of the conquerors' policy of martial law. As atrocity was redefined as justice, so, in the hands of writers such as Spenser, Churchyard, and Derricke, was it aestheticized. But even as such writers wove inventive beheadings into their texts, Irish poets were elegizing the severed heads of patrons killed by the English. The poetry of beheading became a site of cultural confrontation and of unexpected assertions of humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]