Folger Institute 2016-17 long-term fellows

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Derek Dunne, Lecturer, Languages and Literatures, University of Fribourg Rogues’ Licence: The Counterfeiting of Authority in Early Modern Literature Philip A. Knachel Fellow

This project re-assesses the impact that licencing has had on the composition of early modern literature. Without a licence from a noble patron, players were subject to the Act for the Punishment of Rogues, Vagabonds and Sturdy Beggars. Yet this document is also open to forgery and counterfeiting, as detailed in the so-called cony-catching pamphlets; for example the ‘freshwater mariner’ is famed for ‘run[ning] about the country with a counterfeit licence, feigning either shipwreck or spoil by pirates’ (Greene, The Groundwork of Cony-Catching). Therefore the document designed to control an itinerant population actually becomes the means of criminality, due to the potential duplicity of hand-written documents. Despite the turn towards cultural materialism in early modern studies, the material traces of licencing have yet to be studied in depth. This becomes even more surprising due to the metaphorical richness of ‘licence’ which early modern authors frequently made use of, as when Sir Toby Belch calls on Sir Andrew Aguecheek to ‘taunt him with the licence of ink’ (Twelfth Night, 3.2.42). Therefore this study examines how authors worked through the layers of anxiety and ambivalence created by a document with which they would have been intimately familiar. Forged documents of authority are a staple in the plots of early modern drama, from Hamlet to Bartholomew Fair, drawing attention to the period’s dual understanding of the ‘counterfeit’. In excavating the realities of counterfeit licences alongside their literary manifestations, I reveal the power of the licence for counterfeiters of all stripes, Shakespeare included.


Jessica Goethals, Assistant Professor, Italian, University of Alabama Margherita Costa and the Audacity of Italian Literature and Spectacle Matilda D. Mascioli Fellow

Margherita Costa won acclaim across the courts of seventeenth-century Rome, Florence, Turin, Paris, and possibly Brunswick-Lüneburg as an opera singer and prolific poet and dramatist. Boasting an impressive array of fourteen publications across literary and theatrical genres (from historical writing to burlesque comedy, from amorous letters to equestrian ballet) as well as a stylistic versatility ranging from the lofty and elegiac to the grotesque and satirical, Costa attracted the protection of courtly patrons and the admiration of men of letters. Despite these successes, however, she has gone almost entirely ignored by modern scholarship due to long‐enduring misconceptions about women’s writing in Counter-Reformation Italy, enduring prejudices against Costa as a courtesan and therefore as an unacceptable member of the literary tradition, and a general disdain for the Baroque as an era of “bad taste.” My project aims to dislodge just such sentiments. The Folger Library possesses one of the largest collections of Costa’s publications in the world, as well as numerous manuscripts and rare books connected directly to the singer‐poet and her circles. My monograph will touch on her life, publications, influences, and Intellectual-cultural relationships across Italy and France.


Megan Heffernan, Assistant Professor, English, DePaul University Willing Minds: Gathered Writing, Material Epistemology, and the Early Modern Poetic Imagination Mowat Mellon Research Fellow

This project recovers the formal dimensions of handpress-era books by tracing the development of the poetry collection in early modern England. Gathered poetry draws attention to the rift between poets’ imaginative work and the books that contain their writing. Particularly in volumes from the sixteenth century, lyric abundance and variety trumped textual coherence. Known to us as “miscellanies,” these editions are now so familiar that, as Gérard Genette remarks, they “proclaim their nature only because in any case it jumps out at us the minute we glance at a page of text.” But that flash of recognition was not yet conventional in the handpress era, when professional and amateur compilers more freely mingled lyrics from diverse authors— at times with little explanation for unwieldy juxtapositions of theme, occasion, and style. Books that now strain expectations of design and organization record a series of experiments with the formal, poetic affordances of collected writing, as well the process through which modern readers have forgotten this early history. Identifying an active poetic practice in commercial habits of arranging lyrics, Willing Minds argues that gathered poetry reflects a creative struggle with the contingencies of textual production. Legible as capacious assemblages, yet irreducible to material objects, poetry collections urge us to reconsider early modern writing as a process of compilation that drew non authorial features into the most elemental workings of poetic form.


Carmen Nocentelli, Associate Professor, English Language and Literature, University of New Mexico Black Legends and the Invention of Europe NEH Fellow

Black Legends and the Invention of Europe argues that xenophobic invective and jingoistic propaganda played a crucial role in the construction of “Europe.” Taking as its point of departure the Black Legend of Spain’s ethnic dubiousness and ethical iniquity—i.e., the legend of Spain’s un-Europeaness—the books shows how the Black Legend’s claims formed an integral part of a larger transnational discourse that developed steadily from the late fifteenth century through the early eighteenth. Fifteenth-century works indicting the Turks for their ethnic dubiousness and ethical depravity already anticipate the central topoi of the Spanish Black Legend. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century invectives against Portuguese, Dutch, and French in turn recycle figures and motifs of the legend. This conscious, pointed, and continued recycling suggests that throughout the early modern period Black Legend discourse was a key tool to bound and ascribe Europeanness. For this reason, Black Legend discourse constitutes an excellent vantage point to explore the conditions, forms, and limits within which “Europe” became (and still remains) an active idea.


Joseph Ortiz, Associate Professor, English, University of Texas at El Paso Against Translation: The Form of Renaissance Epic ACLS Burkhardt Fellow

This project explores a history of skepticism about translation in the Renaissance, by tracing the representation of translation in Renaissance epic. Focusing on works from Virgil to Milton, it analyzes passages that figure translation in material terms, and argues that these passages evince a counter-strain of Renaissance humanist thought. Traditional humanist theory sees linguistic and philological study as tools that enable communication between the past and present, yet many epic writers recorded a bleaker view in which true translation is an illusion or simply impossible. The project traces this unexamined strain of intellectual thought about translation through individual chapters on Virgil, Ariosto, Spenser, Marlowe, Harington, Villagrá, Milton, and Behn.


Debapriya Sarkar, Assistant Professor, English, Hendrix College Possible Knowledge: Forms of Literary and Scientific Thought in Early Modern England NEH Fellow

Speculative habits of thought—from hypothesis and conjecture to prophecy and prediction—were at the core of Renaissance poetics, fascinating writers from Spenser, Bacon, and Shakespeare to Milton and Cavendish. I call these ways of thinking “possible knowledge,” and I use them to show how literary writing helped to re-imagine the landscape of epistemic uncertainty at the time of the Scientific Revolution. It is a scholarly commonplace that scientific probability was an Enlightenment-era phenomenon. Possible Knowledge, however, uncovers a prehistory of scientific probability that had a deeply literary life, one that was sparked by the imaginative allure of possibility—what Philip Sidney terms the “may be and should be”—in early modern poetics. Revealing the importance of these creative modes to innovations in scientific thought, I show how the imaginative techniques that characterize major genres of literary writing (such as utopia, romance, tragedy, and epic poetry) undergirded natural inquiry. Literary techniques modeled new ways of exploring relations that were foundational to Renaissance accounts of physical and metaphysical reality: between words and things, for instance, or between form and matter, or even between self and world. Engaging with scholarship in analytic philosophy and the history of science, Possible Knowledge ultimately offers a defense of poiesis as a vibrant philosophical endeavor: at a moment when astronomers and natural philosophers were grappling with new accounts of the cosmos, literary writing was generating the forms of thinking vital to the early modern exchange of ideas about natural and imaginary worlds.