Patricia Fumerton

Renaissance Culture and the Everyday

It was not unusual during the Renaissance for cooks to torture animals before slaughtering them in order to render the meat more tender, for women to use needlepoint to cover up their misconduct and prove their obedience, and for people to cover the walls of their own homes with graffiti.Items and activities as familiar as mirrors, books, horses, everyday speech, money, laundry baskets, graffiti, embroidery, and food preparation look decidedly less familiar when seen through the eyes of Renaissance men and women. In Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, such scholars as Judith Brown, Frances Dolan, Richard Helgerson, Debora Shuger, Don Wayne, and Stephanie Jed illuminate the sometimes surprising issues at stake in just such common matters of everyday life during the Renaissance in England and on the Continent.Organized around the categories of materiality, women, and transgression -- and constantly crossing these categories -- the book promotes and challenges readers thinking of the everyday. While not ignoring the aristocratic, it foregrounds the common person, the marginal, and the domestic even as it presents the unusual details of their existence. What results is an expansive, variegated, and sometimes even contradictory vision in which the strange becomes not alien but a defining mark of everyday life.

Secret Arts: Elizabethan Miniatures and Sonnets

HAVING RESOLVED to open a good part of her inward mind to Sir James Melville, ambassador from Mary Queen of Scots, and professing a great desire to see her good sister (which desired meeting could not be so hastily brought to pass), Queen Elizabeth led Melville into the heart of her labyrinthine state apartments at Whitehall and unveiled to him her collection of miniatures. Melvilles account of the 1564 incident merits quoting in full. She took me to her bed-chamber, he recalls,

Making Vagrancy (In)Visible: The Economics of Disguise in Early Modern Rogue Pamphlets

A the stories of Nicholas Blount alias Nicholas Jennings, introduced in Thomas Harman’s A Caveat or Warening for Common Cursetors Vulgarely Called Vagabones (1566; 1567–68, two editions; and 1573), William C. Carroll remarks that “In the various accounts, Genings plays many roles; foremost is the Counterfeit Crank [one who feigns epilepsy] . . . but he is also an Upright Man [high in Harman’s hierarchy of vagabonds], a Mariner or Whipjack, a hat-maker, a serving man, a rogue, an artificer, a parody of himself [in picture], and finally ‘a moniment’ in Bridewell.” This multiply-roled vagrant captured the imaginations of Harman’s audience (leading to textual and visual embellishments of his story in subsequent editions) as well as of modern cultural critics of Harman’s work, including Stephen Greenblatt, Elizabeth Hanson, and (most fully) Carroll. All of these critics, together with scholars of rogue pamphlets in general, focus on the roles vagrants such as Jennings are said to play and inevitably turn to a discussion of some theatrical work, the favorite being King Lear (in Greenblatt, Carroll, and Linda Woodbridge’s recent book). This is not a naive move. Although the unquestioning conflation of the history of vagrants with the literature of roguery characterized early writers about rogue pamphlets, later critics have attempted to separate out fact from fiction. Nevertheless, they characteristically adopt a sequential pattern of analysis that itself suggests convergence: that is, they typically trace a narrative line that leads, as if necessarily, from historical vagrants to

Subdiscourse: Jonson Speaking Low

omplaining against arduous training under his tutors in Latin, the boy-king, James VI of Scotland, grumbled: “Thay gar me speik latin ar I could speik Scotis.”* “Scotis” originally meant ,” the language of social dominance in Scotland until the Middle Ages. In the course of the Middle Ages, however, Gaelic lost dominance, retired to the Highlands, and came to be known as “Yrisch” or “Ersch.” The term “Scotis” had found a new voice. By the late fifteenth century, it meant “Inglis,” a language of the Lowlands that I shall risk calling a dialect of English.* It is this dialect to which James referred and evidently felt was his native or natural tongue. Most of his early works were in Scots, of which the most famous is his manuscript Basilikon Doron ( I 598). But Scots itself was soon to lose dominance. Although the first edition of the Basilikon Doron was published in Scotland ( I s99), James there rendered his Scots more like Southern English, eliminating much of his Scots spelling, grammar, and vocabulary. And, in the second edition of the work, published in London on his accession to the English throne in 1603, he purified the

Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament

A brilliant postmodern critique of Renaissance subjectivity, Cultural Aesthetics explores the simultaneous formation and fragmentation of aristocratic selfhood in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Patricia Fumerton situates the self within its sumptuous array of trivial arts-including the court literatures of chivalric romance, sonnet, and masque and the arts of architecture, miniature painting, stage design, and cuisine. Her integration of historicist and aesthetic perspectives makes this a provocative contribution to the vigorous field of Renaissance cultural studies.