The Female Grotesque Amid the Carnival of Renaissance Drama

Abstract This dissertation discusses the female grotesque within carnivalesque societies as portrayed in some Renaissance drama. The ideal female interacts with the grotesque virago, whore, witch, and scold to deform the milieu producing her and to demonstrate the similarity between the two types. After defining carnival, the grotesque, and the ideal, the study compares each type within comedies and tragedies and reveals that women become transgressors due to patriarchal degradation. To diminish the female's effects, comedy tries to contain her within social expectations, whereas tragedy suggests the impossibility of correcting human behavior and ends in bloodshed. As a result of the female grotesque's actions and her degenerate environment, language reduces to the billingsgate of carnival, as it focuses on the lower bodily stratum. For order to return, society and the female grotesque must undergo the processes of reformation and/or purgation; however, carnival lurks offstage, waiting to return

Mustang Daily, March 12, 2010

Student newspaper of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA.https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/studentnewspaper/8208/thumbnail.jp

The BG News September 4, 1998

The BGSU campus student newspaper September 4, 1998. Volume 82 - Issue 9https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/bg-news/7357/thumbnail.jp

The BG News September 4, 1998

The BGSU campus student newspaper September 4, 1998. Volume 82 - Issue 9https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/bg-news/7357/thumbnail.jp

'Frantick Hacket': prophecy, sorcery, insanity, and the Elizabethan puritan movement

© 1998 Cambridge University PressThis essay reconsiders the career of the most famous of Elizabethan false prophets, William Hacket, the illiterate pseudo-messiah who, together with two gentleman disciples, plotted a civil and ecclesiastical coup, and was executed for treason in July 1591. It explores the significance of autonomous lay activity on the fringes of the mainstream puritan movement, demonstrating links between the dissident trio and key clerical figures who later prudently disowned them. Closer inspection of Hacket's exploits sheds fresh light on the relationship between experimental Calvinist piety and the religious and magical culture of the unlettered rural laity – a relationship still widely presented as bitterly adversarial. Relocated in the context of contemporary attitudes to prophecy and insanity, the episode illuminates the eclecticism of early modern belief and the manner in which medical and theological explanations for bizarre behaviour comfortably coexisted and mingled. Variously labelled a witch, visionary, and raving lunatic, Hacket's case reveals the extent to which such roles, diagnoses, and stereotypes are socially, culturally, and politically shaped and conditioned. In exploiting the incident to discredit Presbyterian activism within the Church of England, leading conformist polemicists anticipated the main thrust of the campaign against religious ‘enthusiasm’ mounted by Anglican elites in the Interregnum, Restoration, and early Enlightenment