Maureen Quilligan

Subject and object in Renaissance culture

Introduction Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass Part I. Priority of Objects: 1. The ideology of superfluous things: King Lear as period piece Margreta de Grazia 2. Rude mechanicals Patricia Parker 3. Spensers domestic domain: poetry property and the Early Modern subject Louis A. Montrose Part II. Materialisations: 4. Gendering the Crown Stephen Orgel 5. The unauthored 1539 volume in which is printed the Hecatomphile, The Flowers of French Poetry and Other Soothing Things Nancy J. Vickers 6. Dematerialisations: textile and textual properties in Ovid, Sandys, and Spenser Ann Rosalind Jones Part III. Appropriations: 7. Freedom service and the trade in slaves: the problem of labour in Paradise Lost Maureen Quilligan 8. Feathers and flies: Aphra Behn and the seventeenth-century trade in exotica Margaret W. Ferguson 9. Unlearning the Aztec Cantares (Preliminaries to a postcolonial history) Gary Tomlinson Part IV. Fetishisms: 10. Worn worlds: clothes and identity on the Renaissance stage Peter Stallybrass 11. The Countess of Pembrokes literal translation Jonathan Goldberg 12. Remnants of the sacred in early modern England Stephen Greenblatt Part V. Objections: 13. The insincerity of women Marjorie Garber 14. Desire is death Jonathan Dollimore Index.

Theodor De Bry's Voyages to the New and Old Worlds

Illustrated by more than six hundred plates and comprising twentyseven volumes published over a span of nearly half a century by Theodor de Bry and his two sons, the Collectiones peregrinatiorum in Indiam orientalem et Indiam occidentalem (1590 – 1634) is a collection of European travels to the rest of the world that has offered a goldmine to scholars seeking visual material for the study of Europe’s attitudes toward foreign others. Only quite recently, however, has any study been devoted to the compilations’ complicated history as a book in and of itself. Michiel van Groesen’s 2008 volume, The Representations of the Overseas World in the De Bry Collection of Voyages, 1590 – 1634, is the first in English to undertake a discussion of the entire collection, focusing not only on the betterknown representations of travel to the Americas, but also on the voyages to the worlds of Africa, India, and the Far East.1 Usually De Bry’s work has been used to illustrate various specific points in individual scholar’s arguments about European understandings of the Native American other. In 1981, for example, Bernadette Bucher wrote a provocative structuralist argument about gender and cannibalism, Icon and Conquest: A Structural Analysis of the Illustrations of de Bry’s Great Voyages.” 2 One thinks of a number of studies which appeared around the quincentennial of Columbus’s “discovery” of America in 1992, such as Anthony Pagden’s The Fall of Natural Man (1982) or Stephen Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions (1991), both of which feature plates from De Bry’s America series for their covers. In editing this volume, I may well be making up for my own borrowing of De Bry plates for an essay on Edmund Spenser’s understanding of New World slavery.3 Unlike such appropriations of specific plates from the De Bry collection, this specialtopic issue of JMEMS explores two fundamental questions about the impact of the entire collection, which was divided into a series on voyages to the West, commonly refered to as America or India Occidentalis, and a series on voyages to the East commonly refered to as India Orientalis.4

On the Renaissance Epic: Spenser and Slavery

It is not often remembered, but the Renaissance was a time for the renascence of slavery in the economics of many western European powers (if not actually in northern Europe itself ). Not often thought of as sharing with antiquity this particular aspect of economic organization, the Renaissance is more usually regarded as a time of the birth of the free and autonomous individual. Yet, if we push some of Fredric Jameson’s arguments about genre to their logical conclusions, we might better understand how the Renaissance was rightly named for a rebirth of some classical forms and that indeed the resurgence of the genre of the epic in the Renaissance speaks to the resurgence of slavery, by which European powers were building their new Atlantic empires. Given Jameson’s understanding of genre, we may be enabled to see how, in two strangely parallel scenes, The Faerie Queenemay be aiming to do the work that epic poems usually do, to wit, mediating the contradictions (i.e., the internally irrational elements) of a slave economy, particularly as slavery was just becoming an element in the overseas economy of Renaissance England’s growing imperial interests. By inspecting these

Recent Studies in the English Renaissance

An assessment of recent scholarly work treating the literature of the English Renaissance and some general observations on the state of the profession. A full bibliography and price list of the works received by SEL for consideration follows.