A search for the source of the whirlpool of artifice : an exploration of Giulio Camillo's 'idea', through the lens of his writings and contemporaries

Giulio Camillo (1480-1544) was a poet, a scientist and an image-maker. He saw the birth of printing in his home-town of Venice, the fruit of the Renaissance in Rome, Paris and Padua and he witnessed the seeds of the Reformation. Renowned throughout Europe, he was acquainted with, amongst others, Erasmus, Titian, King Francis 1st and Pope Julius II. Three months before he died, Camillo dictated the text of his most important and secret, work to his agent, Girolamo Muzio. Muzio's transcription of L'idea del Theatro was eventually published in Florence in 1550. Camillo's secret, revealed in L'idea, is about man's relationship to the heavens. Camillo envisaged a living, tangible network of relationships that holds the cosmos in being. Heavenly influences, in the form of 'celestial streams', rain down on the earth. Man is as much a part of the earth as he is made up of the stars. Rocks and stones, earth, flowers and trees are alive and sentient of their holy origin. The very skin and hair of man is receptive to the flows of heavenly love. But this is not all that is contained in L'idea del Theatro. For Camillo believed that it is the sun, and not the earth, which has pride of place in the universe. He knew that the sun is the centre. Camillo dictated L'idea del Theatro a matter of months after Copernicus's Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres. Unlike Copernicus, however, Camillo did not use mathematics to prove his theories. Instead, Giulio Camillo's conception of the universe is made of a vast array of images. The pantheon - or Theatre - of the earth and heavens is described, by Camillo, in terms of the visual sign. Arising out of a dialogue with contemporary conceptual art, the aim of this work is to look at the connection between language and the art of science in the sixteenth century that was able to produce such a man as Giulio Camillo. His ideas are explored through the lens of some of his contemporaries. His letters through Erasmus; his imagery through Francesco Colonna; and his science through Copernicus. Using Camillo's images as a guide, a Virtual Reality Model of the Theatre forms the final part of the work

Catholic and Protestant martyrdom in Tudor England

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From 'aequivocatio' to the 'Jesuitical equivocation' : changing concepts of ambiguity in early modern England

This thesis is an exploration of ambiguity in rhetoric, dialectic, religio-political writing and literature in Early Modern England. It examines the ways in which the attitudes to ambiguity were formed in Early Modern England, with a focus on the development of ideas about the so-called ‘Jesuitical equivocation’ or ‘mental reservation’, a special case of ambiguity. In late sixteenth century England, hiding Catholic priests sought a way of defending Catholics from what they perceived as unjust persecution. They believed to have found a solution in the doctrine of equivocation, according to which it is justifiable to deceive one’s questioner by giving replies that the examiner is likely to misunderstand because they are phrased ambiguously, or because the speaker qualifies his/her words by a restriction only spoken within themselves, specifying what he means only to his own conscience and God. The thesis first explores the ways in which ambiguity occurred in sixteenth century education (by looking at Aristotle, Cicero, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Quintilian, Servius, Melanchthon and John Case) to argue that the doctrine of mental reservation is grounded in the Classical and Renaissance rhetorical and dialectical tradition. In my second chapter I examine how the doctrine evolved from its first statement in 1584 by Doctor Navarrus, through the Casuistical tradition to Henry Garnet’s infamous A treatise of equivocation. The third chapter is devoted to the controversy between the Protestant Thomas Morton and the Catholic Robert Persons, who debate whether equivocation is a justifiable evasion, or a simple lie. The second part attempts to demonstrate that the obvious mistrust in ambiguity, usually seen as the effect of the trial of the Gunpowder Plotters and the ensuing anti- Jesuit propaganda, is in fact rooted more deeply in Renaissance culture. The fourth chapter explores Sidney’s Arcadia, and the ways in which prophecies, the princes’ disguises, and misunderstood speeches become indicators of the limitations of human understanding. The fifth chapter on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night concentrates on how conveying or concealing a message and understanding or misunderstanding the speaker’s intention can be seen as acts of exercising power. Finally, a reading of Macbeth explores the ethics of deception, by looking at the instances of deceit that result from ambiguous language, employed by and against Macbeth. To demonstrate the parallels between religio-political discourse and literature, the thesis looks at common assumptions about how meaning is produced, conveyed, understood, misunderstood, or allowed to be misunderstood

Drama and the Politics of Professionalism in England c.1600-1640

The project was conceived as a cultural-studies contribution to the debate around the "causes of the English Civil War". The "silences of conciliation" emphasized by "revisionist" historians concealed an unwillingness to entertain a theory of sovereignty, despite Tudor administrative centralization. Understanding this unwillingness helps explain how conciliation could be a preface to civil war. The answer lies partly in the way professional constituencies divided up the action of government. This did not prevent dissension, because these competing claims upon power perpetuated precisely those divisions which concepts of sovereignty were designed to overcome. Reading controversy from within the idioms of these professions reveals divergent constitutional theories, articulated at a remove from mainstream political discussion or institutions, which sound orthodox, but constantly threaten to open divisions in the public sphere. The introductory section sets the historiographical and literary-historical contexts for the period, with particular emphasis on the professional status of the theatre, and its impact in the political sphere. Section One describes how professional disputes between common lawyers, civilians, and the episcopacy impacted on constitutional questions, before exploring how far theological disputes concerning "Arminianism" can be reinterpreted as debates over the socio-political role of the clerical profession. It concludes by showing how Cymbeline and King John and Matilda deal with similar issues while removing them from their original professional contexts into a theatrical one. Section Two focuses on the monarchy. Examining Baconian science as well as "Arminian" and "Puritan" theology, it argues that vague divine right theories opened up spaces for claims of professional interpretative supremacy within apparently "absolutist" rhetorics. These themes are drawn together in a reading of The Royal Slave. In Section Three the contrasting aesthetics of the Shakespeare-Jonson rivalry are translated into a contrasting politics through readings of Jonson's critical works and Poetaster, and Shakespeare's Tempest. The Section concludes with a reading of The Roman Actor, an exemplary apologia for the political role of an independent, professionalized theatre

Lost Books

Questions of survival and loss bedevil the study of early printed books. Many early publications are not particularly rare, but many have disappeared altogether. Here leading specialists in the field explore different strategies for recovering this lost world of print. ; Readership: Scholars of early modern history, literature and religion, students of bibliography, book history. Advanced level undergraduates and postgraduate students with interest in these fields, members of the antiquarian book trade

Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Menippean satire, humanist and english

What kind of book is the Anatomy of Melancholy? Scholars and critics, even those who read the Anatomy "as literature", do not agree upon this fundamental question. In his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye designated the book a Menippean satire, but his lead has not been profitably followed. An investigation into the history and poetics of Menippean satire in antiquity and the Renaissance supplies a literary context in which Burton's Anatomy may be situated. Various satires by Lucian, Seneca, and Horace, together with the apocryphal Hippocratic epistles, provided Burton with the models of character and plot in terms of which he framed his seriocomic fiction. In addition, the Renaissance recovery and imitation of Lucian and other classical Menippean authors, by Erasmus and More, among others, entailed the development of themes (for example, folly and utopia) and rhetorical techniques (parody and the rhetorical paradox) which were of further importance to Burton. The Renaissance medical book and the Ramist technical treatise, with which the Anatomy is often placed, furnished Burton with discursive forms which he appropriated to his own purposes. Those purposes are the subject of his "satyricall preface", which offers a metafictional commentary on the treatise it precedes. The preface sets forth a series of oppositions at the same time as it collapses the conventional distinctions between them; the antic and the physician, the self and its masks, melancholy and laughter, reader and writer, quotation and originality, sobriety and fantasticality, cause and cure, come together at the limits of human sanity. The treatise proper dramatizes the interplay of these and other looking-glass pairs throughout its exhaustive survey of human life and knowledge. At least one English author has grasped the seriocomic nature of Burton's book: Laurence Sterne, himself a student and writer of Menippean satire, whose borrowings from the Anatomy in Tristram Shandy demonstrate an appreciation of Burtonis literary strategies

Lost Books

Questions of survival and loss bedevil the study of early printed books. Many early publications are not particularly rare, but many have disappeared altogether. Here leading specialists in the field explore different strategies for recovering this lost world of print. ; Readership: Scholars of early modern history, literature and religion, students of bibliography, book history. Advanced level undergraduates and postgraduate students with interest in these fields, members of the antiquarian book trade