Bradley, Beatrice Boyd. Sweat and the Embodiment of Waste in Early Modern England. The University of Chicago. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2020. 28023952.

This dissertation identifies a conceptual shift in the valuation of excrement in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature. In the late sixteenth century, sweat—an umbrella term in early modern England that could refer to a range of substances from tears to amniotic fluid to perspiration—transitions from a nondescript waste product associated with filth and toil to a rarefied, erotically-charged ornament. Prior to 1590, of the 3377 uses of the word “sweat” on Early English Books Online (EEBO), only twenty are in reference to human women and none are in an explicitly erotic context. All this changes at the turn of the century. Mobilizing this transition, the authors in my project (Tasso, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, and Milton) highlight the relationship between excrement and human identity, and they struggle with sweat’s ethical implications: the fluid is repeatedly invoked in theological debates, with “the sweat of the brow” understood as the primary evidence of embodied postlapsarian life. Following multiple outbreaks of the plague known as the Sweating Sickness, early modern authors turn attention not only to the moral status of sensible perspiration but also the inherent intimacy of illness. The aestheticization of sweat functions in part to elide the realities of living and laboring in a body by insisting that the body in crisis can have erotic appeal. I argue that sweat’s prominence as a life source in the period—authors again and again assert the substance’s value and its close relationship to the subject producing it—revises the status of the fluid from a by-product to a product and suggests new paradigms of embodiment that are inclusive of human biological materials. Sweat no longer appears as waste to be thrown off and discarded as the body labors to produce something of value; instead, the substance is coded as itself valuable and even a source of pleasure, the desired endpoint to a body in a state of exertion.

The four chapters in this project build an intellectual history of sweat in the early modern world. My selected texts employ the sweating body as a means to explore the boundaries of the self, and they situate the fluid’s production as an interpretative problem. The first two chapters—which focus on Tasso, Spenser, and Shakespeare—understand perspiration as evidence of an event and a corresponding affective reaction, whereas the final two chapters explore how excrement in general and sweat in particular facilitates intersubjective entanglement in Donne and Milton.

Carlson, Andrew Michael. Forms of Imperfection in the English Renaissance. Rutgers The State University of New Jersey, School of Graduate Studies. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2020. 28149284.

This dissertation argues that the problem of perfection was central to English literary culture in the wake of sixteenth-century humanism. For English humanists such as Roger Ascham, the great authors of classical antiquity were supposed to offer perfect examples of literary excellence. But these models often survived only in fragmentary form—half a speech, an unfinished treatise, a few lines of poetry, or a work altogether lost. As English writers looked to the examples that humanism supplied to invent an English vernacular eloquence, the broken corpus of antiquity proved a sticking point. Acts of cultural imitation large and small were suspended between the fragment in hand and the ideal on its horizon. As poet Samuel Daniel complained, those who hoped to reform English writing on the model of antiquity were “told that here is the perfect art of versifying, which in conclusion is yet confessed to be unperfect.” My project illuminates the historical particulars and formal contours of this dilemma through the story of the Greek painter Apelles, whose “imperfite worke,” poet John Harington alleges, was “so full of the perfection of his art, that no man durst euer take vpon him to end it.” In successive chapters (and a brief coda), I trace echoes of this story across the work and early reception histories of John Lyly, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and Francis Bacon. I find that the classical visual arts supplied English writers of the period with a vocabulary for reimagining the utility of poetry when humanism’s claims to perfection began to fade into irrelevance.

Eggers, McKenzie M. Objects of Affection: Intimate Exchanges in Marlowe, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Wroth. The Pennsylvania State University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2020. 28767622.

“Objects of Affection”; explores how the people of early modern England imagined, believed, hoped, and feared the material objects they exchanged with those closest to them would strengthen, sever, or otherwise shape their intimate ties to one another. More specifically, this project considers what fictional representations of object-centred intimacy in Renaissance literature reveal about early modern authors’ and audiences’ attitudes toward and understandings of the objects that performed critical functions in their intimate lives. This dissertation investigates its central topic through the lens of literature because the fiction of a period uniquely illuminates how its authors and audiences perceive the world around them and what their greatest desires and anxieties about that world are. To highlight the significance of objects in early modern fictions of love, friendship, familial relations, and sexual desire, “Objects of Affection”; brings together two fields that have rarely been in conversation in early modern literary scholarship: intimacy theory and materialism. By employing literary and historical analysis and intimacy and materialist theory, this dissertation demonstrates that Renaissance intimacy is linked not only to interior thoughts and desires (as it typically has been) but to the material objects that exist in the external world. In reevaluating our understandings of early modern intimacy, my analysis adds to the relatively sparse work on intimacy in the field of Renaissance literary criticism as well. Whereas scholarship on the family, courtship, marriage, sexuality, and friendship abounds, less has been done to theorize early modern intimacy itself. Ultimately, “Objects of Affection”; offers a more comprehensive picture of Renaissance England’s intimate landscape than currently exists and suggests another lens—that of materiality—through which to (re)consider interpersonal closeness in early modern England.

Kim, Stephen Kern. Racial Fictions in Early Modern England. Cornell University. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2020. 28022090.

My dissertation, Racial Fictions in Early Modern England, asks how race, co-constituted with gender and sexuality, animates early modern English texts. It is only in the past decade that scholarship on race in early modern literary studies has become an urgent topic of conversation, and much of the work has been limited to so called “race texts,” in which characters of color appear. I argue that race is a more capacious analytic for early modern literary studies. I theorize race in early modern England as the developing process of categorizing, including, excluding, and hierarchizing people based upon historically contingent features that become essentialized through these acts of categorizing and hierarchizing. Examining race more as a process rather than a stable category or relationship opens three important avenues of inquiry. First, it brings to light the ways in which race undergirds concepts that are central to early modern texts, such as chastity for Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene or universality for John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The hyper-visibility of these concepts often occludes if not erases the processes and preconditions of their own formations, race being one of them. Making them visible requires finding where they hide: within the language and rhetorical figures in literary texts. Second, examining race as process allows more flexibility to accommodate and explore the ways in which race forms and is formed by other facets of identity, such as gender and sexuality. Third, this conception of race as process allows scholars to track race in contexts in which it is not as easily apparent, such as the early modern period when systems of white supremacy are not as coalesced into a set of identifiable oppressive strategies and institutions. I make these arguments by reading four canonical early modern texts, three of which are not as strongly associated with race in current scholarship (William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Christopher Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander,” and John Milton’s Paradise Lost). Ultimately, Racial Fictions asserts that race is a crucial analytic lens for reading all early modern English literary texts.

Mix Barrington, Julia Portia. Multitudinous Seas: Representations of the Ocean in Early Modern English Drama. Boston University. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2020. 22621584.

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.

Moran, Benjamin Adam. The Earthen Mirror: Spenser, Soil, and the Natures of Interpretation. The Ohio State University. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2020. 28287763.

This dissertation considers references to soil in the work of Renaissance English poet Edmund Spenser, arguing that Spenser uses soil in his work to reflect upon issues of interpretation, representation, and allegory. Examining The Shepheardes Calender, A View of the State of Ireland, and Book I of The Faerie Queene, I argue that soil in Spenser’s work is neither simply a metaphor nor simply a reference to the real world environment of Renaissance England. Rather, it embodies a complex and shifting signification that reflects the broad range of influences on Spenser’s life: humanist training, the English efforts to colonize Ireland, and the overlapping discourses of Protestantism and English nationalism. Because these varying and at times contradictory discourses all used references to and metaphors of soil, soil, I argue, became for Spenser a useful way of exploring how meaning is assigned, navigated, and understood, especially in instances where there are conflicting influences upon the creation of meaning. I argue that soil’s ability to call attention to the processes of meaning-making and interpretation have important implications for a range of Spenserian topics, not least of them being the nature of allegory. But I also argue that Spenser’s use of soil has implications more broadly for how the nonhuman world of the Renaissance is understood. Ultimately, I argue that Spenser—and, by extension, the Renaissance more broadly—requires a different way of thinking about the environment than is commonplace in ecocriticism and contemporary culture today, a way that is alert to the Renaissance’s mutually constitution of the “literary” and the “real.”

Sharpe, William Franklin. Spenser’s Burning Light: The Soul’s Transformations in The Faerie Queene The University of Alabama. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2020. 28023733.

The extent of Spenser’s Neoplatonic influence has long been the subject of debate, and even proponents of a more fully Neoplatonist Spenser have often hesitated to read The Faerie Queene in the full light of this tradition. While the general consensus has acknowledged the deep and abiding influence of Neoplatonism in The Fowre Hymnes, published late in the poet’s career, Spenser uses some of these doctrines and paradigms as early as The Shepheardes Calender. A survey of the shorter poems reveals certain constants in Spenser’s representation of the soul: its immortality, preexistence of the body, and tri-partite structure, and the doctrine of transmigration, which represents spiritual progress through a series of transformations. These characteristics resurface in The Faerie Queene, where they provide an indispensable guide for Spenser’s plan to “fashion” the soul of his reader. While some would object that these Neoplatonic borrowings contradict the poet’s overt Protestantism, especially regarding the doctrine of original sin and the implications of humanity’s fallen nature, Spenser resolves these conflicts through the apophatic teachings of Christian mysticism in the last half of Book I. Spenser’s paradigm of the soul’s progress begins with Holinesse, by which the soul examines its fallen nature in the presence of the divine, before turning to confront worldly and cosmic evil as embodied in the dragon of Book I’s climax. The book’s other evil figures—Archimago, Duessa, and the “Sans Brothers”—reflect the soul’s failure to resolve its own disharmonies in the absence of grace, culminating in Redcrosse’s hellish imprisonment in Orgoglio’s dungeon. Arthur enters the narrative as both a vehicle of divine grace and an adumbration of Redcrosse’s unrealized potential. Redcrosse then enacts the soul’s reorientation towards grace in the House of Holinesse. The subsequent books present the soul’s further development in a series of virtues that project the internal harmonies of the sanctified and sufficiently-fashioned individual into human relationships, through which they can begin to reshape the world of fallen nature in such a way that prefigures the eventual reintegration of the soul, and possibly the entire universe, back into the divine presence.

Rinkevich, Matthew J. Signs that Save: Sacramental Matter and Agency in English Literature 1590–1660. University of Delaware. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2020. 28023641.

This dissertation, Signs That Save: Sacramental Matter and Agency in English Literature 1590–1660, explores the imaginative interplay between literature and material cultures of religion in Reformation-era England. Viewing that topic through a critical lens informed by new materialist theory, historical theology, and contemporary phenomenology, it analyzes textual representations of matter alongside material objects—baptismal water, communion bread, relics, holy statues, and the like—active within early modern religious economies. In doing so, Signs That Save argues that the English Reformation, especially conflicts over the sacraments and liturgical ritual during it, should be read as a story of negotiating networks of human and nonhuman actors, and it considers the ways in which literary texts from the period provide insights into the Reformation as such. This project emphasizes that sacred matter was often experienced as active and agential by the humans who encountered it, and it analyzes sacred matter’s acts of saving, transforming, gathering, and remaining in religious and literary texts.

The literary works of special interest to this project are Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, the lyric poetry and sermons of John Donne, and the manuscript poetry of Hester Pulter. Interpreting these works, Signs That Save contributes to scholarly conversations about Reformation-era English history and early modern sacramental poetics and theater. It does so by unpacking some of the ways in which early modern religion was expressed through affective and aesthetic modalities. It also decenters the interpretive subject in order to broadcast more fully the agentive effects of the early modern sacramental sign. Additionally, this project offers insights into transhistorical issues like the Anthropocene and object-oriented ontology by highlighting early modern sacred matter as an actant within this larger context of material culture. Finally, by tracing human-nonhuman assemblages and broadening definitions of the social, Signs That Save recognizes and advocates for community-making as a potentially powerful encounter of recognition, response, and obligation.

UK dissertations 2017-2021

[A previous census omitted UK dissertation abstracts from 2017 onwards.]

Bull, Steve J. The Use and Development of the Faerie Sign in Romance From the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period. University of Bristol, 2020

Within medieval and early modern romance, faeries frequently take on the appearance and customs of medieval courtly society, but they are also something distinctly other, existing on the fringes of the known world and unbeholden to either human or divine law. Faeries were ambiguous creatures whose appearance and function often defied categorisation. The absence of social or moral restrictions made them dangerous (although potentially rewarding) characters to be around, and so their incorporation into romance served to cultivate a sense of uncertainty amongst its audiences. However, there is also an extent to which faeries in romance conform to certain patterns, both in terms of the conventions that are used to identify them, and their purpose in relation to the shared construction of meaning within a text. The repeated themes and motifs that are used throughout romance to identify faerie characters and otherworldly settings are referred to throughout this thesis using the collective term the faerie sign. By identifying faeries in this way, the aim of this thesis is to focus on a broader range of examples than has been covered in previous studies on faeries in romance. By exploring different iterations of the faerie sign across selected medieval and early modern texts, my aim is to analyse how different authors engage intertextually with its conventions to propagate different meanings and agendas. Through the use of recognisable themes and motifs, the authors of these texts invited audiences to question the nature of the ambiguous otherworldly characters that populate romance (and other genres) and to examine their role in either upholding or challenging the personal, political, and religious values that these stories explored. The broad range of texts that are presented in this thesis will demonstrate how these faerie conventions took shape, and how they have been adapted and subverted from the Middle Ages to the early modern period.

Richards, Abigail. “Tis consent that makes a perfect slave”: Circean Poetry and Christian liberty in Early Modern English Literature. Durham University, 2019.

This thesis examines representations of Circe in early modern English literature, from her appearances in Jacobean and Stuart English masques, including Browne’s Inner Temple Masque (1615), Townshend’s Tempe Restored (1632) and Milton’s Maske at Ludlow Castle (1634), through to the epic poetry of Spenser and Milton; The Faerie Queene (1590) and Paradise Lost (1674). In these texts, I argue, Circe is a vector for the writers’ interrogation of the prevailing, allegorically inflected relationship between poetry and Reformed moral philosophy that emerges in contemporary literature. In the Christian age, Circe is most frequently depicted as a clarissima meretrix or renowned prostitute who captivates men with her beauty and siren-like song, and tempts them to drink her pharmakon kakon (“evil drug”). Thereafter her victims are transformed into beasts, a state which appropriately reflects their capitulation to base desire and appetite. The works that I examine are noteworthy for their departure from this tradition, and for their sensitivity to an essential ambivalence at the heart of Circean mythology: the Homeric Circe uses her voice to seduce but also to prophesy and instruct. As I show, in Spenser and Milton’s works, Circean indeterminacy is brought to bear upon questions of law, hermeneutics, and spiritual and moral discernment. In Milton in particular, Circe is invoked to support a belief in the necessity of trial and choice for spiritual and moral growth, and for the very possibility of Christian liberty. This view has profound epistemological and theological implications and culminates, I argue, in Milton’s daring portrait of the Circean chaos of Paradise Lost.

Humphries, William. “A strange, though native coast”: Imperial and Mercantile Reactions to Coastal Arrival in Early Modern Literature. University of Oxford, 2019.

This thesis explores imperial and mercantile reactions to moments of coastal arrival in early modern English literature. It demonstrates the various ways in which authors presented arrival on shorelines in order to consider political, ethical, and literary issues. Coastal arrival is shown to have become particularly significant during the period, owing to England’s complicated sense of itself as an island nation with uncertain colonial aspirations. However, the thesis also reveals the connectedness between such novel representations of arrival shores and earlier classical models of literary coastal arrival. Chapter One examines competing visions of New World colonialism in the writings of Richard Hakluyt. Chapter Two traces the evolving political and ethical treatment of the shoreline in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Chapter Three considers allusion to and adaptation of the classical story of Aeneas’ arrival on the shores of Carthage in early modern drama. Finally, Chapter Four charts the ways in which the aspirations of seventeenth-century merchant-adventurers arriving on the shores of America were satirised on London’s stage and page. Much as the shoreline is a liminal meeting point between land and sea, so too the literature of the period explores the complex blurring of binaries that takes place at moments of coastal arrival.

Osorio Whewell, Esther. In Summaries and Diagrams: Teaching Prayer and Poetry in Lancelot Andrewes and Edmund Spenser. University of Cambridge, 2019.

This thesis is concerned with intersections between poetry and prayer, in printed texts attributed to Edmund Spenser and Lancelot Andrewes. It takes as a starting point the pervasiveness of Ramism at Pembroke College Cambridge during these two writers’ overlapping years spent there as undergraduates, proposing that Ramist ideologies of the short and efficient, the organised, the hierarchical, the one-size-fits-all diagrammatic text, offer new ways of understanding the pedagogical aspirations—and the formal mechanisms—of Andrewes’s literary homiletics and Spenser’s religious allegories. I will be preoccupied above all by poetic economies of page space and prayer time: in representations of large in small, or the extraordinary in the ordinary, and the anxieties and humilities involved in such inadequate accommodated ‘insteads’. Chapter one examines printed English versions of Andrewes’s Preces Privatae, reading its mise-en-page as reminiscent of Ramist logic books, and beginning to establish an early modern context of instrumental ‘diagrammatic reading’ by taking a particular interest in the work of curly braces as a ‘didactic technology’ which both performs and instructs prayer on the printed page. Chapter two considers Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes as devotional poems. Read diagrammatically, by their complicated poetic hierarchies and chronologies these self-sacred parodies enact a thinking-through of the theological cruxes of the Incarnation and its meditative contemplation in the broken gift-cycle of prayerful thanksgiving. Chapter three uses grammatical anaphors and abridgements in Andrewes’s Passion sermons and the Pattern of Catechistical Doctrine to derive a theory of accommodated reading based on metaphorical sizes and imaginary dimensions. My final chapter reads the ballad-stanza ‘Arguments’ with which Spenser prolepsises and summarises every Canto in The Faerie Queene as recognisably generic paratexts with analogies in the Geneva Bible, Thomas Speght’s 1598 collected Chaucer, printed plays, and the Sternhold-Hopkins psalter. Short, simple, and economical, the four-line Arguments seem at first a very different poetical space from the Spenserian stanza—but on closer reading, they demand an investment in the dimensions of printed language and the spaces and syntax of its storytelling which fits persuasively with the wider poetics of The Faerie Queene and with its narrative structures.

Moitra, Angana. A Spirit of Another Sort: The Evolution and Transformation of the Fairy King from Medieval Romance to Early Modern Prose, Poetry, and Drama. University of Kent and Freie Universitaet Berlin, 2019.

This thesis attempts to chart the changing face of the Fairy King between the Middle Ages and the early modern period from a mysterious, sinister, partially diabolical figure of inscrutable motivations to the renowned paterfamilias of illustrious dynastic families. The thesis has been organised into four chapters which are prefaced and concluded by an Introduction and a Conclusion respectively. The Introduction to the thesis sets out the rationale for undertaking the study and offers a detailed explanation of the theoretical apparatus used to support the overall argument. Building upon Yuri Lotman’s theory of culture as a ‘semiosphere’ and Niklas Luhmann’s neo-Darwinian reformulation of evolution within social systems, this chapter situates the literary metamorphosis of the Fairy King from a pagan god to a creative tool of political legitimation within the wider complex of cultural change, religious reorientation, and socio-economic restructuring. Chapter 1 traces the provenance of the fairies to the pagan gods of classical Greece and Rome within the specific context of the myth of Orpheus. Focusing particularly on the reformulations of the Orpheus myth, first at the hands of the Augustan poets Virgil (in Book IV of the Georgics) and Ovid (in Book X of the Metamorphoses) and later by Boethius (in the Consolation of Philosophy) in post-Christian Italy, this chapter explores how the representation of the chthonic god of the Underworld transformed over time. Chapter 2 shifts the focus from continental Europe to the British Isles, examining how treatments of analogous fairy figures in early and late medieval insular literature were influenced by currents of development in indigenous mythography. The chapter argues that the mythological corpora of the classical Graeco-Roman and the Celtic worlds were not really discrete and isolated cultural blocs but participants in a dynamic tradition of cross-cultural interaction mediated by factors both economic (the context of trade) as well as political (Roman imperial ambitions and military conquest). Having explored these interconnections, the chapter proceeds to an analysis of the figure of Midir in the medieval Irish saga Tochmarc Étaíne and the Pygmy King in the tale of Herla in Walter Map’s De nugis curialium. The first two chapters also trace the revisionary changes worked upon pantheons of pagan deities in the wake of the radical religious transition from paganism to Christianity and establish the foundations for the subsequent recuperation of such heathen figures into indigenous traditions of folk belief in the supernatural, particularly to the class of the fairies, liminal beings who constituted a unique conceptual subset of the ambiguous supernatural. The processes by which such recuperation took place are investigated in Chapter 3 through a detailed discussion of the fourteenth-century Middle English romance Sir Orfeo. The chapter concludes with a brief exploration of two alternative developments of the Fairy King in late medieval poetry, focusing on the figure of Pluto in both Geoffrey Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale and Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice, explicitly identified as a fairy in the former while occupying a more nebulous ontological niche in the latter. Chapter 4 begins with a survey of the nature of fairy ‘belief’ in England in the sixteenth century before moving to a consideration of how dynastic houses, building upon matrices of associations drawn between fairy founders and genealogy in the Middle Ages (especially the cycle of legends centred on the figures of Mélusine in France and Arthur in the British Isles) exploited fairylore for political purposes. Subsequently, the chapter traces the emergence of the Fairy King in sixteenth-century England under the prototypical name of ‘Oberon,’ first in John Bourchier’s English translation of the medieval French chanson de geste of Huon of Burdeux and then in Robert Greene’s play The Scottish Historie of James the Fourth. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the part played by Oberon in Book II of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene which, together with Bourchier’s prose translation and Greene’s play, constitute the most significant pre-Shakespearean developments of the figure of the Fairy King-as-Oberon. The Conclusion brings the thesis to a close by offering a brief account of the post-Spensarian trajectories of evolution of the Fairy King figure and highlights the possible avenues still available for further academic exploration. Taken together, the thesis constitutes a unique academic achievement, not only in view of the chronological, geographical, and generic scope of the texts surveyed but also in view of its interdisciplinary nature, melding together a variety of different and distinct theoretical approaches with an examination of contexts that span multiple semantic and ontological fields (literary, cultural, political, historical, socioeconomic, and religious).

Rao, Namratha. Spenser’s Poetics of Corporeality and its Influence on Milton. University of Oxford, 2019.

This thesis is concerned with the relationship between rhetoric, reading and fallen bodies—both natural and imagined—within Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and the influence of Spenser’s practice on his greatest ‘poetical son’, John Milton. It begins and ends with allegory, from the ‘continued allegory, or darke conceit’ through which Spenser examines the fallen world to Milton’s account of the genesis of allegory through the experience of the Fall. A longstanding critical tradition tends to perpetuate the assumption that allegory is a form with an inherently authoritarian bias, dictating the renunciation of the literal, or bodily. This thesis demonstrates how Spenser’s view of the fallen corporeal self, in which the material is as wholly valent as the spiritual, necessitates his adoption of a mode of allegory that does not always privilege, or clearly offer, an abstraction over an image. Affirming with Augustine that both allegorical thinking and the related condition of mortality and embodiment inexorably define fallen life, Spenser delivers a ‘body poetic’ that finds value in such experience, rather than struggling to elude it. His poetry, I argue, meditates upon how a state of congenital corruption might be turned to restorative effect. The amorous quest, which requires the development of an interpretive temper founded in love, rather than reason alone, becomes Spenser’s troubled response. Milton, it might be objected, was no allegorist and his hermeneutical anti-allegorism—with particular regard to interpreting Scripture—has been recently traced in detail. While acknowledging both these formal differences and related conceptual differences in Milton’s attitude to the body, to sex and to reason, this thesis seeks to explain why he nevertheless chose Spenser as a poetical pedagogue above his other predecessors. I argue that the mode of engaging directly with our embodiment, and our situation in the corporeal world that Spenserian allegory demands, is crucial to Milton’s continuing project that seeks to ‘repair the ruines of our first parents’. Spenserian influence is apparent everywhere in his canon from the construction and critique of ideal forms of virtue in A Maske, to wedded love and labour in Eden, and perhaps most crucially, in his adoption of a poetics that figures mutability and materiality as both a challenge to human perfectibility, and the central expression of Providence in the world. In contrast to those who broadly oppose the two poets’ manner of teaching, to those who claim that Milton’s relationship to Spenser might be summarised in his decision not to write an allegorical epic and to those who claim that Milton was a covert allegorist, I argue for an important affinity between the way in which Spenser represents (through narrative), and Milton describes, the relation of the physical to the metaphysical. My thesis shows how a technique of figuration in Spenser, a peculiarly literal form of allegory, might be seen to become a systematic cosmology for Milton: literary materiality into a monist materialism that excludes the dualism of matter and spirit. Through sustained close readings, I demonstrate how the allegorical procedures of The Faerie Queene are adapted and enlarged in Paradise Lost as accommodated vision. To summarize, this thesis illuminates a new facet of a powerful, but highly elusive relationship in English literary history.

Hart, Stuart Anthony. Soteriology in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. University of Birmingham, 2018.

The thesis demonstrates the extent to which the sixteenth-century allegorical epic poem, The Faerie Queene, engages with early modern theories of salvation. Much has been written about Spenser’s consideration of theological ideas in Book I and this has prompted scholars to speculate about the poet’s own doctrinal inclinations. However, little has been written about the ways in which the remaining books in the poem also explore Christian ideas of atonement, grace and damnation. This study advances Spenserian scholarship by stressing the soteriological dimension of books II, III, IV and VI. It considers how the poem’s doctrinal ambiguity would have meant that Spenser’s readers would have been able to interpret the poem in terms of the different schools of thought on the conditionality, or otherwise, of election and reprobation. As the thesis suggests, these particular books were alive to the doctrinal disagreements of the period, and explore the complex theological positions and divisions that existed at the time. By shedding light on the religious tenor of these remaining books, the study has implications for our sense of how the poem would have prompted sixteenth century readers to reflect on the means of their own salvation.

Buckingham, Sophie. A Poetics of Exile: The Reception of Ovid’s Tristia in Tudor England. University of East Anglia, 2018.

Using a combination of manuscript and printed sources, this thesis examines the ways in which Ovid’s Tristia was read and received in sixteenth-century England. This study challenges the presupposition that readers have perpetuated since the early twentieth century - that Ovid was a lascivious or scandalous poet, spreading works full of lust - and forwards the case for Ovid the family man, loving husband, defender of poetry and immortal fame. Its opening chapter gives the reader a thorough grounding in the reception history of the Tristia - how it was read and used in the medieval and early-modern period in both France and England, in its manuscript and printed forms. It proves that this text was much-appropriated for its moral standpoint well into the seventeenth century. Chapter two provides vignettes of three writers key to England’s continued engagement with the Tristia - John Skelton, Geoffrey Whitney and Ben Jonson - illustrating the work’s wide appeal to poets, emblem-book compilers and playwrights in the sixteenth century. The ways in which envoy and the ‘Go Little Book’ conceit emerge in English Renaissance literature begins to be traced here. Chapter 3 on Thomas Wyatt subreads the Petrarchan angle from which the Tristia was approached, forwarding the case for a repurposing of the exilic work in his amatory verses. Thomas Churchyard’s influence on the canon presents itself in chapter 4, as, significantly, the first translator of a three-book Tristia in 1572. Here the copy used is reidentified and Churchyard’s own imitative practice of translation examined. Finally, the work culminates with a chapter on Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti, Epithalamion, Colin Clouts Come Home Againe and the Shepheardes Calender, the ways in which they re-use the Tristian envoy, and how they approach monumentalising the poet through myth-making in a conscious attempt to confer immortal fame.

Farrell, Craig. “Bound up in one small poesie”: Material Intertextuality and the Early Modern Poetic Collection (1557-1601). University of York, 2017.

This thesis explores the essentially composite nature of early modern printed books, and how the material configurations of individual volumes were used for a variety of literary ends. It contends that modern scholarship on early modern printed poetry has focused on individual texts, and has largely overlooked the tendency of books in this period to gather more than one major text in a single volume. This thesis aims to recover the creative design exercised by the poets, editors, and publishers who selected and arranged multiple works in one book. It argues that texts presented in a shared material context present readers with the opportunity to read between the poems (thematically, formally, narratively, etc.), and describes this phenomenon as ‘material intertextuality’. By reading early modern collections of poetry in this way, it proposes specific new readings of a number of canonical authors – George Gascoigne, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Samuel Daniel – as well as providing a methodology for reading other writers in this period. Reading the text within the context of the book has a number of ramifications for the study of early modern literature more generally, including recovering an early modern structural and organisational imagination, challenging canonical boundaries (by attending to the multiple authorship of many texts), revitalising the study of ‘minor’ works by major literary figures, and informing editorial practice in modern editions of these texts.

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