Table Of ContentNewberry Essays
in Medieval
and Early Modern Studies
Volume 7
Edited by Carla Zecher and Karen Christianson
Newberry Essays
in Medieval
and Early Modern Studies
Volume 7
Selected Proceedings of the
Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies
2013 Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference
Edited by Carla Zecher and Karen Christianson
Contributing Editors:
Michelle L. Beer, Megan Gregory, Geoffrey A. Johns, William M. Storm,
Christopher Van Den Berge, and Melanie Zefferino
Chicago, Illinois
Newberry Essays in Medieval
and Early Modern Studies
Volume 7
Selected Proceedings of the
Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies
2013 Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference
EDITORS
Carla Zecher
The Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies
Karen Christianson
The Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Michelle L. Beer William M. Storm
Department of History Department of English
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Marquette University
Megan Gregory Christopher Van Den Berge
Department of English Department of History
Illinois State University University of Illinois at Chicago
Geoffrey A. Johns Melanie Zefferino
Department of English Departments of Theatre Studies and History of Art
Michigan State University University of Warwick
2013 by the Newberry Library. All rights to the publication Newberry Essays in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Volume
7, reserved. Copyright in individual articles remains with the authors. For information, please address the Newberry
Center for Renaissance Studies, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, Illinois 60610, or e-mail renaissance@ newberry.org.
Publication URL: http://www.newberry.org/sites/default/files/2013Proceedings.pdf
Newberry Essays in Medieval and Early Modern Studies 7
Table of Contents
Introduction, by Carla Zecher ............................................................................................................................................ 3
Land, Sea, and Stars
The Transmutation of Corpse to Landscape in Laȝamon’s Brut, by Erin Kissick .......................................... 5
Saints in the Seascape: Interconnection, Competition, and
Cultural Reproduction at Medieval Ecclesiastical Communities
in Northwestern Connemara, by Ryan Lash ............................................................................................................ 17
“These Divine Animals”: Physicality of the Stars in Platonic and
Aristotelian Thought, by Stephen Case ......................................................................................................................... 35
Women, Cross-Dressing, and Masculinity
Kissing Cousins: Incest and Sex Change in Tristan de Nanteuil, by Karen Adams ........................................ 41
Womb Rhetoric: Volumnia, Tamora, and Elizabeth I in a
Trajectory of Martial Maternity, by Lauren J. Rogener .............................................................................................. 55
From Libertine to Femme Fatale: The Fallen Woman in
Thomas Southerne’s Sir Anthony Love, by Kirsten Mendoza .................................................................................. 65
News, Law, and Politics
Joseph Mead and the “Battle of the Starlings,” by Kirsty Rolfe ........................................................................ 77
Diplomatic Dress: Fashion and the Politics of Display
in the Late Stuart Courts, by Emilie M. Brinkman ..................................................................................................... 87
Projectors and Polders: Patenting Trends in England and the
Dutch Republic during the 1690s, by Steven Schrum ............................................................................................... 95
An Island Home: Jamaican Local Leaders in the
English Imperial World, by John A. Coakley ............................................................................................................... 107
Expressions of Devotion
Harmonizing the Auditor Within: Thomas Ford’s Musical Setting
of John Donne’s “Lamentations of Jeremy,” by Anna Lewton-Brain .............................................................. 119
“None fitter to do the husband’s work”: Women, Domesticity, and the
Household in the Transatlantic Quaker Movement, by Naomi Pullin ........................................................... 133
1
Introduction
2
Newberry Essays in Medieval and Early Modern Studies 7
Introduction
By Carla Zecher
A
lthough this online publication of selected conference proceedings is number seven in a series,
the history of the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies annual graduate student
conference goes back much further. Fran Dolan (then a graduate student at the University of
Chicago, now on the faculty of the University of California, Davis) established the conference in the
1980s, to provide a venue in which graduate students could present scholarly papers to an audience
of their peers, before venturing into the more intimidating arena of major national and international
conferences. When Megan Moore (then Assistant Director of the Newberry Center for Renaissance
Studies, now Assistant Professor of French at the University of Missouri) inaugurated the series of
online proceedings in 2007, the conference had been held regularly for more than twenty years. Like
Fran, Megan sought to create a unique opportunity for graduate students: an online forum in which
they could make the preliminary results of their research widely available, while still retaining the
right to use their work in future publications, whether digital or printed. Subsequent Center for
Renaissance Studies staff members—Karen Christianson (the current Associate Director of the
Center), and Laura Aydelotte (former Interim Assistant Director, who recently completed her PhD
at the University of Chicago)—have ensured the continuation of the online proceedings.
The conference itself has grown from a small annual event to quite a large one, as more
institutions have joined the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies consortium, but a team of
advanced graduate students still serves as the program committee each year, to vet submissions for
presentation at the conference. The program committee members also chair the conference sessions,
select papers for the online proceedings, and edit them. The papers included in this year’s
proceedings address topics ranging chronologically from the Anglo-Normans to the late Stuart
courts, geographically from France to northwest Ireland to Jamaica, and thematically from gender
studies to legal history to religious history. The authors and editors of the papers represent a cross-
section of the fifty institutions that currently belong to the Newberry Center for Renaissance
Studies, including universities located in Texas, Pennsylvania, the Midwest, Canada, and the United
Kingdom.
Carla Zecher is Director of the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies and Newberry Curator of Music.
3
Introduction
4
Newberry Essays in Medieval and Early Modern Studies 7
The Transmutation of Corpse to Landscape
in Laȝamon’s Brut
By Erin Kissick
L
aȝamon’s Brut is one of several twelfth-century and thirteenth-century retellings of Geoffrey of
Monmouth’s Latin history of Britain, De gestis Britonum/Historia Regum Brittaniae.1 Geoffrey’s text
is the oldest extant source not only for many of the legends of King Arthur and Merlin, but also the
stories of other famous Briton kings such as Leir, who conquered the area now known as England
as well as the surrounding nations, even extending their influence as far as Rome. The history begins
with the settlement of Britain by Brutus, the father of the Britons and a descendant of Aeneas, the
mythical Trojan founder of Rome, and ends with the conquest of the island by the Angles. Written
by one of the later Norman colonizers, Geoffrey’s text creates a narrative exploring the complexities
of colonizing a nation of former colonizers.2 Laȝamon’s text continues this exploration in the
vernacular, using the shared landscape to shape a closer relationship between the Anglo-Norman
audience and their Briton predecessors by giving their names and stories to the countryside.3
Kings and heroes rise swiftly and fall even faster, buried and absorbed into the land they once
ruled, their names and stories permanently inscribed on the landscape. Their corpses, the “boundary
that encroaches upon everything,” become part of the reshaping of boundaries in the colonized
England.4 This is a history created by Geoffrey and his successors for, rather than by, the Britons.
Therefore, while the corpses shape Briton history within the text, this process is directed by
1 Sir Frederic Madden, K.H., ed. and trans., Laȝamon’s Brut, or Chronicle of Britain. (London: Society of Antiquaries of
London, 1847; republished New York: AMS Press, 1970). All translated quotes are from Sir Frederic Madden’s 1847
translation of Laȝamon’s Brut, because it remains the most useful for scholarly purposes. The translation is careful and
accurate, although some of the punctuation is problematic, and the edition itself also contains parallel transcriptions of
the two primary manuscript versions—Cotton Caligula A.ix and Cotton Otho C. xiii. Because Otho is missing a number
of fragments in key places, the quotations I have chosen are from the Caligula version, and the endnotes contain
Madden’s diplomatic transcriptions from that same manuscript. Many of the line breaks in the translation are
approximate, given the nature of translation.
2 Michelle R. Warren, History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain, 1100-1300, Medieval Cultures Vol. 22
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 25.
3 While I term Laȝamon’s audience as a group “Anglo-Norman,” in reality the Anglo-Saxons themselves had been
colonized by the Normans, and the term Anglo-Norman obscures an entire level of colonial complexity that had to be
omitted from this discussion, which focuses exclusively on the relationship between the relative newcomers (the Anglo-
Saxons and -Normans) and those they displaced (the Britons, later known as the Welsh).
4 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudier. (New York: Columbia University Press,
1982), 4.
5
The Transmutation of Corpse to Landscape in Laȝamon’s Brut
Laȝamon to reshape the landscape outside the text with room for the Anglo-Norman colonizers.
This process of shaping the geographic and chronological boundaries that divide and bind the
colonized Britons of the text and colonizing Anglo-Norman audience is inherently violent, and this
violence is reflected in the history the text creates for the Britons.5 As an account of the conflicts
between the original residents of the landscape, often Briton versus Briton, Laȝamon’s text is strewn
with corpses. These corpses are not merely collateral damage in a tale of conquest and colonization,
but are key elements in Laȝamon’s construction of his audience’s landscape.
The landscape forms a stable matrix into which Laȝamon can write these corpses, and thus their
stories, for future readers of the land. As Christopher Cannon notes, “the land’s stability through
time comes to be its most important characteristic, as if its principal use and interest to people was
its capacity to remain unchanged through continuous waves of human happening.”6 In fact, Cannon
suggests that the real hero of the text is the island itself rather than the Britons who rule it and
whose actions dominate the story. After all, by the time Laȝamon is writing, even the Angles who
evicted the Britons from the landscape have themselves been pushed out of power by the Normans,
and his Anglo-Norman audience could claim no direct descent from the heroes of the narrative. Yet
the landscape Laȝamon shapes in his text is still a familiar one to his audience, and it is through the
names dotting this familiar landscape and the bodies that Laȝamon creates in the text to accompany
those names that the Britons are made present to the Anglo-Norman audience.
Many medieval English texts treated the English landscape as a neatly enclosed and easily-defined
space, a sort of new Garden of Eden functioning as an idealized “point of origin” that “binds
together Christian resonance and privilege, ideals of cultivation and pleasure, and colonialist
fantasies of a national identity and unity created and endorsed by the island’s bounds.”7 Certainly the
landscape does function as the primary ground for English identity in many of these texts. Yet as
Catherine Clarke points out, Laȝamon’s text does not describe an idealistic garden space, but instead
the negotiation of the multiple warring identities that have been built upon it.8 The focus on the
landscape and the violence that has filled it with corpses recognizes the hybridity of the island and
its history, instead of presupposing edenic unity, with gestures towards making a clearer space for
the Anglo-Normans within the hubbub.
After all, Laȝamon himself is something of a hybrid figure, situated on the Severn River between
England and Wales, and revealing mixed feelings toward the Normans as conquerors. He acknow-
ledges, and even celebrates, the natural shifts of language through his recognition of the diverse ways
names are given and his use of the vernacular to construct his text. Yet he also scolds the Anglo-
Normans for their appropriation of the British landscape and obliteration of the British identity of
the island by changing many Briton place names, as discussed below. This ambivalence toward the
linguistic changes made over the years is especially clear when he tells his chosen version of the
5 Warren, History, 1.
6 Christopher Cannon. The Grounds of English Literature. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 50.
7 Catherine Clarke, Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700-1400. (New York: D.S. Brewer, 2006), 7, 1.
8 Clarke, Landscapes, 132.
6
Newberry Essays in Medieval and Early Modern Studies 7
naming of London, supposedly first named Trinovant, then renamed Kaerlud by the Briton King
Lud. As the city is conquered and populated by different cultural groups, the name changes from
Lundin to Lundene to Lundres. Laȝamon grieves that
thus has this burgh fared,
since it was first reared;
thus has this island
passed from hand to hand,
so that all the burghs
that Brutus wrought,
and their good names,
that in Brutus day stood,
are greatly destroyed,
through change of the people!9
The names of these locations are associated with the identity of the people, and the loss of the name
is not just the name but the character of the people. In fact, the change of name from Kaerlud to
Lundres disturbs Laȝamon enough that he returns to it about five thousand lines later, passing even
stronger judgment on this change. King Lud had named the city after himself, Laȝamon explains, so
that “afterwards many a man,/when the king were dead,/should judge of his works.”10 The name is
inextricably bound with Lud’s identity, intended to preserve his story even after his death. Once
again Laȝamon recounts the series of changes in the name, from the “foreign folk” who called it
Lundin, to the Saxons who called it Lundene, concluding when “came Normans/with their evil
crafts,/and named it Lundres;/this people they destroyed.”11 The loss of name and the story of the
national figure attached to it is associated not only with loss of national identity, but also with
craftiness and destruction.
They are “foreign people,/that this land hath conquered,” not only through military force but
through erasure of the original identities incorporated in the landscape, when
after their will
put down the old names
of the good burghs
and changed their names,
so that there is no burgh
here in this Britain,
9 2061-67: “Þuſ iſ þaſ burh i-uaren/ſedðen heo æreſt wes areræad/þus is þis eit-lond/i-gon from honde to hond/þet alle
þa burhȝes/þe Brutuſ iwrohte/& heora noma gode/þa on Bruts dæi ſtode/beoð ſwiðe afelled/þurh warſ of þon folke.”
10 7104-07: “Þat he duden al for þon/þat ſscudðen ſculden moni mon/þennen þe king weoren dæd/ demen of hiſ
weorken.”
11 7115-18: “Seoððen come(n) Normanſ/mid heore nið crafte(n)/and nemneden heo Lundres/ þeoſ leodeſ heo
amærden.”
7
