Reading power and ambiguity in the supernatural women of Middle English romance

This thesis explores the different models of supernatural femininity in the Middle English romance genre, specifically analysing the representations of magical women as sites of ambiguity, moral flexibility, and power. Using a range of Middle English romance texts that foreground supernaturally powerful female characters, the thesis examines the conventions and contradictions inherent in the romance genre’s representations of magical women, and seeks to connect those representations to specific contemporary cultural anxieties about women and power in late medieval English society. I use the terms ‘supernatural woman’ and ‘magical woman’ as labels to designate the female characters in medieval romance whose extraordinary magical abilities or identities render them powerful in potentially subversive ways, and my work explores the impact such labels have on the perceived morality of these characters. Each chapter focuses on a different type of ‘supernatural woman,’ exploring romance’s treatment of that character-type, and the distinct social context informing that particular representation. The first chapter explores romance’s treatment of magical healing women in the Middle English Tristan-tradition, which I read alongside the social history of female medical practitioners in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The second chapter connects the magical Saracen princesses in texts such as Bevis of Hampton to contemporary anxieties about queenship, foreignness, and exoticism. The third chapter explores the sexual and economic authority of the ‘fairy mistress’ characters of Sir Launfal and Partonope of Blois, which I relate to the power and economic status of women in late medieval England. The fourth chapter then deals with representations of maternity and monstrosity, connecting the Middle English Melusine texts to the medical, and specifically gynaecological treatises of the period. Finally, the thesis concludes with an overview of the way Morgan le Fay’s character in the Morte Darthur encompasses the authority and ambiguity of all of the previously discussed stereotypes of magical femininity, shaping our understanding of the role of magical women in medieval literature. In all these cases, the labels ‘magical’ and ‘supernatural’ complicate the morality of these female characters and their position relative to late medieval social and gender norms. In addition, my methodology uses the romance genre’s intertextual, folkloric nature to read these texts as interwoven and – as such – possessing greater complexity and potential than their brief, formulaic, plot-driven narratives might suggest. I argue that familiarity with the conventions of the form would have permitted a more subversive reading of these texts’ representations of supernaturally powerful women. In particular, the thesis contends that the conservative elements of these texts – for example, the restoration of patriarchal hegemony and the containment or displacement of disruptive femininity omnipresent in their conclusions – are subverted and destabilised when the texts are read as existing in conversation with one another, and as inhabiting a shared, folkloric narrative space

Feeling Exclusion

Feeling Exclusion: Religious Conflict, Exile and Emotions in Early Modern Europe investigates the emotional experience of exclusion at the heart of the religious life of persecuted and exiled individuals and communities in early modern Europe. Between the late fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries an unprecedented number of people in Europe were forced to flee their native lands and live in a state of physical or internal exile as a result of religious conflict and upheaval. Drawing on new insights from history of emotions methodologies, Feeling Exclusion explores the complex relationships between communities in exile, the homelands from which they fled or were exiled, and those from whom they sought physical or psychological assistance. It examines the various coping strategies religious refugees developed to deal with their marginalization and exclusion, and investigates the strategies deployed in various media to generate feelings of exclusion through models of social difference, that questioned the loyalty, values, and trust of "others". Accessibly written, divided into three thematic parts, and enhanced by a variety of illustrations,Feeling Exclusion is perfect for students and researchers of early modern emotions and religion

Fictional Practices of Spirituality I: Interactive Media

"Fictional Practices of Spirituality" provides critical insight into the implementation of belief, mysticism, religion, and spirituality into worlds of fiction, be it interactive or non-interactive. This first volume focuses on interactive, virtual worlds - may that be the digital realms of video games and VR applications or the imaginary spaces of life action role-playing and soul-searching practices. It features analyses of spirituality as gameplay facilitator, sacred spaces and architecture in video game geography, religion in video games and spiritual acts and their dramaturgic function in video games, tabletop, or LARP, among other topics. The contributors offer a first-time ever comprehensive overview of play-rites as spiritual incentives and playful spirituality in various medial incarnations

Collective Trauma in Early Modern English Revenge Tragedy

The dissertation investigates early modern English revenge tragedy against the backdrop of the complicacies of the English reformation. The discussion is built on two basic theoretical pillars: on cultural memory studies, and the theory of collective trauma. These two approaches are informed by a third, historical angle, which is the revision of the English reformation. The fundamental cultural turn that the incessantly fluctuating tides of the English reformation brought about is described by an increasing number of scholars as traumatic. It is argued that the impact of the English reformation amounts to the magnitude of a collective trauma. Thus, the investigation scrutinizes the life of a community, as opposed to the personal, psychological approach of trauma. In keeping with the collective trauma framework, the object of scrutiny is representation, and not repression. The representation of different trauma narratives take place in the conflicted arena of culture, where the hegemonic state-narratives of trauma vie for dominance in opposition to the censored, silenced, but regularly (re)surfacing trauma-narratives. The Reformed calendar or the desolate ruins of the Catholic past are witnesses to this cultural-collective trauma. But the most important witness of all is revenge tragedy, with its uncanny revenants, mad revengers, and maimed bodies. The main contents of this collective trauma are the thanatological crisis and the sacrificial crisis. The sacrificial crisis is manifest in the Eucharist Controversies, and the ambivalence around the martyrs’ scaffold. These tenets of religious trauma are mapped onto five early modern revenge tragedies in the analytical part of the dissertation: Thomas Kyd The Spanish Tragedy, William Shakespeare Titus Andronicus, John Marston Antonio’s Revenge, Thomas Middleton The Maiden’s Tragedy, John Webster The Duchess of Malfi

Multitudinous seas: representations of the ocean in early modern English drama

This dissertation argues that early modern English writers represent the sea and tides as offering multiple, often contradictory spaces of risk and possibility. On page and stage, the ocean appears threatening and protective, liberating and confining, barren and fecund. Merchant vessels set sail to return with precious cargo, or to sink; royal children cast adrift either perish, or return unlooked-for; pirate crews elect a captain who may lead them to freedom, or to the gibbet; sea-storms divide families for the rest of their lives, or until a miraculous reunion; coastlines fortify island nations, or leave them vulnerable to attacking fleets. The sea furnishes an objective correlative for tempestuous grief, bottomless love, utter confusion, and myriad other states. As plot element and metaphorical vehicle, the literary sea opens multiple possibilities. The first chapter argues that in history plays by Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Greene, the trope of England as an island fortified by the sea emphasizes not threatened British insularity, but rather hospitality, fortunate invasions, and continuity between Britain’s tidal rivers and its surrounding seas. The second chapter traces the security and vulnerability of maritime travelers from classical and medieval texts by Ovid, Virgil, Petrarch, Gower, and Chaucer to early modern romances by Greene, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Sidney through three key images: the storm-tossed ship, the rudderless boat, and the symmetrical shipwreck. The third chapter considers pirates in plays by Heywood and Rowley, Dekker, Daborne, and Shakespeare as representations of oceanic risk and contradiction. The fourth chapter analyzes gendered depictions of mythical sea creatures and deities in works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Dekker, Marlowe, and Lyly, arguing that while these authors use sea imagery to complicate traditional representations of gender, when they ascribe gendered qualities to the embodied sea, it is within the bounds of traditional gender roles. The final chapter discusses riches from the sea in texts by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Munday, and Spenser, demonstrating that before maritime wealth can be circulated economically or socially, it must undergo a land-change—a process of re-integration that frequently demands reversing the effects of sea-change

Comedy and the supernatural on the English stage between 1589 and 1621 : a study of the relevance for early modern audiences of comic representations of magic, fairies and witchcraft

What kinds of relevance to wider beliefs and practices did the comic representation of magic, fairies and witchcraft have for an early modem audience? This study will approach this main question through the consideration of two subsidiary questions. What is the cultural context for a series of comic, or partly comic, representations of the supernatural first performed between circa 1588 and 1621? What theatrical (and broader) strategies of performance informed the staging of the texts considered and what bearing would those strategies have had on the relevance of the subjectmatter for their original audience?The premise that form and context are interconnected and historically specific will be central to the approach taken in this study. As one influential modern account of the early modem English stage has proposed: ‘history cannot simply be set against literary texts as either stable antithesis or stable background, and the protective isolation of those texts gives way to a sense of their interaction with other texts and hence of the permeability of their boundaries.’(Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’, 1988)An appreciation of the `permeability' of the boundaries between early modern texts informs this study. This principle is particularly important in the study of comic representation, where a modem reader faces particular challenges when interpreting the function of comedy for early modem audiences. An improved understanding of comic representation is gained through a close consideration of the relationship between form and context in a range of texts concerned with the supernatural, followed by a consideration of the ways in which those texts might be related. For example, the function of the supernatural as a vehicle for the expression of hidden desires in a wide range of early modern texts provides a significant context for the understanding of the comic representation of the supernatural on the early modern stage. Moreover, recognition of the `permeability' of the boundaries between texts necessitates the reassessment of a simple notion of fictional and non-fictional texts about the supernatural in this period. Through the consideration of such issues, particular kinds of insight will be provided into the wider relevance that comic representation of the supernatural on the early modem stage might have held for its audience.In embracing this approach, this study must avoid a narrow understanding of the `text'. The primary status of theatre as a medium for representation through performance needs to be appreciated. Although this study is specifically concerned with comic representation, the comic must be understood in the context of early modem theatre, more generally, as a performance medium. Chapter One will survey a series of approaches before arriving at a working model for the English theatre of the period which will be broad in its consideration of the functions of the comic and sympathetic regarding its status as performance. This study will also be inclusive throughout in its choice of texts. Comic material in plays generically signified as tragedy or tragicomedy will be considered where it helps to elucidate the argument of the thesis. The intention is to pursue relevant connections wherever possible, and to shadow the flexible, organic approach to genre demonstrated by much English drama of the period. Through such an approach, the meaning for audiences of comic representations will be shown to be ultimately underpinned by early modem notions regarding the nature of theatricality itself.The diversity and stratification of views regarding the supernatural in early modem England, alongside the theatre the other significant cultural context for this study, will be considered in Chapter Two. The earliest impetus for this study came, in part, from a recognition that the particular historical interests of an older school of historians, in particular Frances Yates, continued to exercise a significant influence over published literary criticism of plays concerned with magic into the 1980s. This study aims in part to further the work of those who have sought to relate the drama to a range of more recent modem studies of early modem thought regarding the supernatural.The organisation of the remainder of the study will be thematic. A detailed study in Chapter Three of two influential works from early in the period of study, Doctor Faustus and Friar Bacon, will be followed in Chapter Four by a study of patterns of representation in a series of plays concerned with magic that span the period of this study. Chapter Five will offer a reading of The Tempest in the context of the emerging themes of this study. Chapters Six and Seven will expand further the scope of the study by developing the provisional conclusions of the early chapters in a consideration of the comic representation of fairies and tragicomic representation of witchcraft on the early modern English stage. Chapter Eight will explore the relationship between Ben Jonson's comic portrayal of the supernatural and other texts considered by this study.Some questions related to the subject of this study cannot be fully developed within a work of this length. These include the relationship between comic stage representation and the representation of the supernatural in other genres in the theatre and literature of period, the comic representation of devils beyond their stage association with magicians and witchcraft, and the comic stage representation of magic and witchcraft after 1621. Where possible, attention is given to these issues, in particular where it helps to elucidate the central concerns of the study

Stage(d) hands in early modern drama and culture

This thesis offers the first full phenomenological study of the staging of hands in early modern drama and culture by analysis of selected canonical and non-canonical plays (1550-1650) in dialogue with significant non-dramatic intertexts. Reading plays by Shakespeare, Webster, Middleton, Rowley, Tomkis, Marlowe, Heywood, Brome, Jonson and Dekker, I argue the hand constructs subjectivity, materially and psychologically, in the natural, built and social landscapes represented on stage and experienced in the early modern world. This argument is supported through broad-ranging interdisciplinary analysis shaped by first-hand experience following an injury to my right hand. The introduction situates the hand within anthropological, materialist and phenomenological critical approaches to argue its functions as an ‘extroceptive’ tool. I explore Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the body as a natural instrument of expression, which registers and defines the individual’s spatial being-in-the-world. I position the hand as a self-defining agent as understood by: Nancy’s work on thinking the body ‘anew’; Derrida’s analysis of the hand as ‘maker’; the history of technicity and exteriorisation in the works of Stiegler and Leroi-Gourhan alongside medical practices surrounding my own contemporary experience. Chapter One analyses the active hand, conventionally gendered masculine, as a symbol of human mind and spirit materialised with reference to ‘intentionality’. I argue the staged hand, a cognitive symbol that constitutes the body schema, is the most pivotal body part on the early modern stage, cultivating and developing the subject’s expressive and symbolic relationship with the world. Bulwer’s Chirologia and Chironomia (1644) informs this chapter to demonstrate tactual perception to be the centre of early modern corporeality and hapticity to be indispensable to sensory experience. Chapter Two considers the feminine hand as an object staged by boys and passed between men alongside Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeity, to suggest that the feminine hand is situated within a paradox. Both passive and objectified, it is a powerful source of autonomy, command and agency, as embodied by Elizabeth I. I argue that the potential for agency turns the active helping hand into an instrument of disorder and empowerment which creates a space for independent desires and actions. Chapter Three considers the body without the hand and the hand without the body using Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the body schema with respect to phantom limb syndrome and anosognosia alongside my own experience at Wessex Rehabilitation Centre. I argue the phantom limb phenomenon is a recurrent transhistorical feature in early modern drama and culture and represents cultural anxieties of fragmentation, loss and disruption