David and his Psalms were at the center of many poetical and political early modern controversies: from what to say or do in church or tavern, to who should run the country. Writings by Thomas Sternhold, Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, King James VI/I, John Milton, and the ghostwri…
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During the early modern period, New World exploration and colonization created a labor crisis that was eventually solved by the European superpowers through chattel slavery. In England during the late-sixteenth century, moralists celebrated the humanist ethics guiding the nation…
This study considers the development of the modern construction of identity as it is enunciated in a specific literary genre. The sonnet, a literary form developed as a vernacular poetry yet meant for private enjoyment, synthesizes cultural and personal identification in a way t…
On close examination of a number of early modern Turk and Moor plays written between 1586 and 1642 female characters are: cast in the shadow of Elizabeth, the rose of England, or wither in comparison; portrayed as temptresses who act as catalysts in the conversion and corruption…
This dissertation aims at establishing the interplay between disease and empire in the historical example of the early modern Ottoman Empire of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It also aspires to reconstruct a historical narrative of plague outbreaks in the Ottoman lands b…
This study analyses the overland commerce of Hindustan (i.e., northern India) into Central Asia and Iran between 1526 and 1707. In approaching Mughal history from the standpoint of its trade's moral economy, this study addresses the attributes of power in Mughal India; the inter…
My aim in this dissertation is to use the Ottoman discourse of the circle of justice as a wedge in an otherwise crippling debate that presumes a post sixteenth-century decline in the ability of the Ottoman empire to control and direct state affairs. While most scholars in the fi…
This dissertation examines space and gender in three medieval and early modern Mediterranean texts: the illustrated, anonymous, thirteenth-century Arabic manuscript from Seville, Bayad wa Riyad , the anonymous thirteenth-century Old French Romance Aucassin et Nicolette , and Fer…
The belief in fundamental distinctions based on sex/gender has been a longstanding basis for inequality through history and literature. Though many notable instances have appeared over time, the seventeenth century stands out as a pivotal yet paradoxical period for the discourse…
This dissertation theorizes a new understanding of “imitation,” the central objective and operation early modern writers prescribed for fiction, better known in the period as “poesy.” Reading poems, plays, and fictional prose from canonical authors, John Donne, William Shakespea…
John Locke’s analysis of the person, developed across all of his major works and even through his notebooks, is as fascinating as it has been influential. I offer an interpretation of the Lockean person that is novel in the contemporary literature. One benefit of my interpretati…
As advised in household recipe books and publicly published prescription books, this paper will delve deep into the realm of domestic remedies particularly those recipes that assist in fertility. These manuscripts include remedies to provoke menstruation, balance the humors of t…
With early modern increases in travel, slavery practices, and colonial efforts, the English experienced increased collisions with other cultures that forced them to determine their own space and identity in the world. One form of cultural contact that was particularly definition…
This dissertation examines beliefs and practices related to second sight in Scotland, with a particular focus on the period from c. 1600 to c. 1800. An influential strain of historiography has asserted that this period was characterized by “disenchantment,” a process of increasi…
This project argues that there is an inherent trans* potentiality in the comedies of William Shakespeare and John Lyly; despite the seeming reinforcement of hegemonic gender norms in the finales of their respective canons, actual staging practices by contemporary theatres sugges…
When the Albertine Dukes of Saxony gained the Electoral privilege in the second half of the sixteenth century, they ascended to a higher echelon of European princes. Elector August (r. 1553-1586) marked this new status by commissioning a monumental tomb in Freiberg Cathedral in …
Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest were brought to life on the early modern stage within two decades of each other. Over the course of those twenty years, England saw a number of political and social changes. The transition from the reign …
Noting the all-too-recent interest of disability scholars in early modern literature, this dissertation seeks to establish a way forward for the study of disability in a period-appropriate way. Through its juxtaposition of disabled authors’ Paul Scarron and Miguel de Cervantes’ …
The prevailing scholarly consensus holds that national ideas are exclusively modern phenomena which had no role in a pre-modern age of dynastic monarchy. And yet, during the Wars of Louis XIV (1667-1714), French and German political pamphleteers regularly mobilized national rhet…