Perry N. Harrison, “British Seafaring, Narrative Empathy, Religious Instruction in the Middle English Patience”

Throughout Patience, the Pearl Poet’s Middle English retelling of the book of Jonah, the poet consistently expands upon passages and images that feature sailors, the act of sailing, and the seascape. This article argues that the poet foregrounds maritime words and imagery in order to cause the audience to sympathize with poem’s pagan sailors, who are figured using language that would have been familiar to the audience. By using this empathy-building technique, the poet better directs the audience to the poem’s religious messages. 

Nicholas Devlin, “'[T]igris orba…catulis': George Buchanan, Mary Queen of Scots, and the Politics of Medea”

This essay will take up two of the critical issues presented by George Buchanan’s Baptistes (1577): that of its relationship to Buchanan’s more famous political theory, and that of its possible allegorical relationship to contemporary politics. I will argue that figural language in Baptistes that echoes the Medeas of Euripides and Seneca—language that been largely neglected by previous scholarship—clarifies both of these issues. Buchanan’s active reception of Euripides has been better studied in his second drama, Jephthes (1554), but by tracing the figural echoes of Medea in Baptistes and by placing them within the broader networks of Buchanan’s political writings and early modern polemics against Mary Queen of Scots, it becomes clear that the published version of Baptistes operates partially as an dramatic restructuring of tropes that also appear in Buchanan’s critique of Mary, and that would also diffuse widely in political discourse. Classical reception and political intervention, here, are mutually constitutive: the Euripidean tragic is used by Buchanan to perform political, religious, and pedagogical functions, but also to dialogically and theatrically refine political rhetoric that he and others used to devastating practical effect in the years surrounding Mary’s deposal.

By examining classical reception through Buchanan’s intertextual knot of of drama, political theory, and political polemic, we can expand the question of classical reception in Elizabethan drama to address the networks of classical reception(s); or, to the myriad ways, unbounded by form, in which humanist engagement with literary antiquity shaped the trajectory not only of Elizabethan drama, but also the shape and tenor of political life.

Gina Filo, “Nature’s 'Negromancy': Gender, Desire, and Ambivalent Racialization in Seventeenth-Century Lyric”

Despite the recent surge of interest in racial discourse in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, representations of race in early modern lyric poetry have gone largely unstudied. This critical neglect is all the more surprising given that early modern poetic fascination with beauty, aesthetics, color, gender, and exoticism make it a particularly rich site for negotiating the changing meanings of racial difference in the period. In “‘Nature’s Negromancy,’” I examine four poems from the seventeenth-century poetry miscellany Parnassus Biceps, showing how they theorize blackness in a variety of fascinating yet often mutually contradictory ways. These poems, by Walton Poole, Abraham Wright, Henry King, and Henry Reynolds, position a gendered blackness as diametrically opposed to yet mutually constitutive of whiteness; as intrinsic and natural yet plastic and prosthetic; as symbolic of virtue yet also of witchcraft and sexual availability; and as a source of both agency and bondage. In short, the incoherencies of the significations of Black bodies, and particularly Black female bodies within and across these poems crucially mirror the incoherencies, changes, and tensions in early modern English constructions of racial difference.

Hamish John Wood, “'What signifies asking them girls?': Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778) and Captain Mirvan’s Simian Pedagogies”

By interrogating the figure of the simian within Frances Burney’s 1778 epistolary novel, Evelina, her interests in the ossification of gendered and patriotic identities might be made clear. Close attention to the unpleasant figure of Captain Mirvan complicates reading Burney’s novel as solely a fiction of a girl’s “entrance to the world,” instead confirming an omnidirectional interest in gender. Mirvan’s violent attitudes towards women shape what Joanne Cutting-Gray describes as the novel’s “world of duplicity and evil” and introduce the metaphor of the monkey as a potent symbol of Britain’s expanding marine world (1990). This paper nuances understandings of the fixity of identity in the text by highlighting Mirvan’s own temporal, and geographical, displacements. By arguing for Mirvan’s profane crassness as the obverse of the out-of-place Evelina, this paper contributes to understandings of gendered identity in the eighteenth-century novel’s reckoning with a pluralization of identities reflecting Britain’s eighteenth-century worlds.

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