The Renaissance Body (820V4A)
Autumn Semester 2015
Tutor: Dr Margaret Healy, Room B 233
e-mail: m.j.healy@sussex.ac.uk
Office hours are available for discussion of term paper and anything else associated
with the module.
In early modern England the body was a major intellectual preoccupation and a focal
metaphor informing and shaping cultural structures and artefacts. This period, too,
like the cusp of the twenty-first century, had a very distinctive conception of the
person as a construct or artifice, as the product of social intervention and cultural
organization. Engaging with interpretative models from the fascinating
interdisciplinary field of cultural theory of the body, this course explores the
aesthetics of embodiment through a range of literary and visual texts, unravelling the
dense significance of the corporeal imagination of the Renaissance. Key themes
include: the ideal body; body borders, the supernatural and society; gendered voices,
sex and agency; the medical imagination; diabolic inversions (the witch’s body);
heroic and monstrous masculinities; transvestitism; mystical monarchy; diseased
bodies; revolutionary corporealities; body, soul and mind; consuming bodies and
eating communities; the fabricated body; rape and pornography.
This course is examined by a 5000 word term paper. Guidance about writing this
essay will be given in the course seminars and in a final week tutorial; you should also
discuss your topic with the course tutor in her office hours. There will also be a term
paper writing workshop (in which you can ask any pressing questions) in the autumn
term. The term paper must be professionally referenced and presented throughout,
preferably using the MLA style guide. To avoid plagiarism charges, all citations and
ideas that are not your own must be attributed to their sources. It should include a full
bibliography.
Please note: many of the texts on this course can be found in electronic form at
the EEBO (Early English Books On-Line) and other electronic library sites such
as LION and LUMINARIUM. The Norton Anthology—English Renaissance Drama,
ed., Bevington—contains The Tragedy of Mariam; The Roaring Girl; Edward II; The Maids
Tragedy, (and much more). Some difficult to secure secondary works will be available in
the resource file outside the English social space (B274).
Please purchase or ensure you obtain: Richard Sennet, Flesh and Stone: the Body
and the City in Western Civilization (1994; Penguin, 2002). This has recently gone
out of print but is available in second-hand editions.
Colin Burrow, ed., The Complete Sonnets and Poems (OUP paperback, 2002)
Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays, eds, Corbin and Sedge (1986; Manchester, 1998).
Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess (in Oxford World’s Classics collected
Middleton and separate Revels edition, ed., Howard-Hill.)
Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters, ed, Donald Frame
(Everyman Library Classics) Amazon currently have this at £13.50—an enormous
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bargain! This is the best cheap edition because it contains Montaigne’s remarkable Travel
Journal.
Wycherley’s The Country Wife (available in New Mermaid edition)
Shakespeare, Complete Works, Oxford or Norton compact editions are good or you
can purchase separate editions of the plays below.
Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl (available in New Mermaid edition but also
in Norton Anthology of Renaissance drama)
Thomas Dekker, The Honest Whore, Part 1, 1604 (available in a Globe edition via
Amazon and both parts are readily available on-line: Lion)
Please ensure that you bring a hard copy of the essential texts to the seminar so
that you can discuss them.
Suggestions for vacation and introductory reading:
Essential Preliminary Reading: Richard Sennet, Flesh and Stone: the Body and
the City in Western Civilization (1994; Penguin, 2002). This has recently gone out of
print but is available in second-hand editions. A photocopy of the key chapters of this
book will be available from me. E-mail me with your address if you would like me
to send you a copy over the summer. There are multiple copies of this book in the
Sussex library. A new interdisciplinary study with lots of images is also a helpful way
in to the body theme of the course: eds. Linda Kalof and William Bynum, A Cultural
History of the Human Body in the Renaissance (Oxford: Berg, 2010)
Significant Literary Studies:
Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: dissection and the human body in
Renaissance culture (Routledge, 1995)
Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: physiology and
inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert and Milton (Cambridge University
Press, 1999)
Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: drama and the disciplines of shame in
early modern England (Cornell University Press, 1993)
David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, eds, The Body in Parts: fantasies of corporeality in
early modern Europe (Routledge, 1997)
Katharine A.Craik and Tanya Pollard, Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing
Literature in Early Modern England (CUP, 2013).
Elizabeth Harvey (ed), Sensible flesh: on touch in early modern culture (2002)
Eve Sedgwick, Between Men
Cultural Theory, General Introductory Suggestions:
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger and Natural Symbols.
Bryan S. Turner, Ch. 17 ‘An Outline of a General Sociology of the Body’ (this has a
really useful bibliography at the end), The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory.
Don Welton, ed., Body and Flesh, A Philosophical Reader (Blackwell, 1998).
Linda Kalof and William Bynum, A Cultural History of the Human Body in the
Renaissance (Oxford: Berg, 2010). An interdisciplinary collection of essays.
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Andrew J. Strathern, Introduction, Body Thoughts (a cogent synopsis of theories of
embodiment from an anthropologist’s perspective)
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By and/ or Philosophy in the
Flesh ; Mark Johnson, Introduction, The Body in the Mind (cognitive philosophy/
linguistics on the relations among body, mind, metaphor and cognition)
Margaret Healy, Ch. 1, ‘The Humoral-Paracelsan Body’, Fictions of Disease in Early
Modern England (about early modern medical models of the body)
John O’Neill, Five Bodies: the human shape of modern society (on anthropomorphism
and cosmologies)
Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality (1984).
Conboy, Medina, Stanbury, Writing on the body: female embodiment and feminist theory
(1997)
Weeks 1 and 2:
Introduction: Ideal Form, Aesthetics and the Strange Bodies in
Shakespeare’s Sonnets
These seminars will introduce some of the key themes of the course: ideal form; the
humoral body; the alchemical body; the body politic; the sexed body, desire and
androgyny; gender constructs; the senses; Renaissance metaphysics and creativity.
Essential reading:
Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609). I recommend purchasing Colin Burrow, ed., The
Complete Sonnets and Poems (OUP paperback, 2002) which also contains The Rape
of Lucrece.
Richard Sennet, Flesh and Stone: the Body and the City in Western Civilization
(1994; Penguin, 2002)
And, for week 2, Plato, Symposium (Penguin edition is good), and/or the Renaissance
version of it by Marsilio Ficino which is fascinating on same sex desire (see below).
Samuel Daniel, A Defence of Ryme, 1603 (extract photocopy in class)
Further reading:
Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, ed., Sears Jayne
(Spring Publications, Dallas Texas, 1985).
Mary Rogers, ‘Beauty and Concepts of the Ideal’ in Kalof and Bynum, eds, A
Cultural History of the Human Body in the Renaissance (Berg, 2010)
Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. 1949 (London:
Academy Editions, 1973).
Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts
(University of Chicago, 2002).
Margaret Healy, ‘Poetic Making and Moving the Soul’, in Katharine A.Craik and
Tanya Pollard, Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern
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England (CUP, 2013). Kenneth Borris, ed., Same-Sex Desire in the English
Renaissance: A Sourcebook of Textx, 1470-1650 (Routledge, 2004).
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire (New York, 1985).
Jonathan Goldberg, Queering the Renaissance (Durham, 1994).
Bruce Smith, Homosexual Desire in Renaissance England (Chicago, 1991)
Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford,
California, 1992).
Elizabeth D. Harvey, ed., Sensible Flesh: on touch in early modern culture
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
Katharine Craik, Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2007).
Michael Schoenfeldt, ed., A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Blackwell, 2007).
Margaret Healy, Shakespeare, Alchemy and the Creative Imagination: the Sonnets
and A Lover’s Complaint (Cambridge: CUP, 2011)
Spiller, Michael. The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction. London.
Routledge. 1992.
James Schiffer, Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays (New York: Garland, 1989),
especially Michael Schoenfeldt, ‘The Matter of Inwardness’.
Kim F.Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and gender in Early Modern
England (Cornell university, 1995), especially, ‘Fair Texts/ Dark Ladies’.
Ruth Gilbert, Early Modern Hermaphrodites (Palgrave, 2002)
Mark Turner, Ch. 4 ‘The Body of Our Thought’, Reading Minds: the study of English
in the age of cognitive science (about embodiment and aesthetic pleasure)
Hillman, David and Mazzio, Carla, eds. The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality
in Early Modern Europe. London: Routledge. 1997.
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud.
Cambridge: Mass. Harvard University Press. 1990.
Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: bodies, plagues and
politics (Palgrave, 2001), esp. Ch. 1, “The Humoral Paracelsan Body”.
Sawday, Jonathan. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in
Renaissance Culture. London. Routledge. 1995.
Michael Holmes, Early Modern Metaphysical Literature: nature, custom and strange
desires (Palgrave, 2001).
David Hillman, Shakespeare’s Entrails (Palgrave, 2008)
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3. Diabolical Inversions: dark ladies and witches
Essential Reading:
Dekker, Ford and Rowley, The Witch of Edmonton, Middleton, The Witch; Marston,
The Tragedy of Sophonisba, all 3 are in Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays, eds, Corbin
and Sedge (1986; Manchester, 1998).
Shakespeare’s Sonnets 127Further Reading:
Shakespeare, Macbeth
Brome and Heywood, The Late Lancashire Witches (1634). Available electronically
on Lion.
Ben Jonson, The Masque of Queens (1609).
John Lyly, Mother Bombie (printed 1594). Bombie is an intriguing ‘cunning’ or wise
woman or white witch.
Macbeth
Stuart Clark, Thinking With Demons, especially Chs. 1-5. (this is a really good study
now available in OUP paperback)
Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols, Ch’s 7 and 8 on witch cosmologies.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Columbia UP: 1982)
Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil
Margaret Healy,’Menstruation, Medicine and Myth in Cross-cultural Contexts’ in
National Healths: gender, sexuality and health in a cross-cultural context eds,
Worton and Wilson Tagoe (UCL Press, 2004).
Andrew Shail and Gillian Howie, eds., Menstruation: A Cultural History (Basinstoke:
Palgrave, 2005).
Bakhtin, Introduction, Rabelais and his World (on the grotesque body and carnival
inversions)
Stephen Clucas, ‘The Body in Medieval and Renaissance Magic’ in The Body in Late
Medieval and Early Modern Culture
Gareth Roberts, ‘The Bodies of Demons’ in The Body in Late Renaissance and Early
Modern Culture.
Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History (Routledge, 1996).
M.E. Wiesner, Ch. 7, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (C.U.P., 1993)
Janet Adelman, ‘Born of Woman: Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth’,
Cannibals, Witches and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance, ed., M. Garber, 1987.
Also in Adelman, Suffocating Mothers.
Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic (CUP, 1998).
Kathleen McLuskie, ‘Women and Cultural Production: The Case of Witchcraft’,
Renaissance Dramatists (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989).
Peter Stallybrass, ‘Macbeth and Witchcraft’, Focus on Macbeth, ed., John Russell
Brown.
D.E. Underdown, ‘The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal
Authority in Early Modern England’, Order and Disorder in Early Modern England,
eds., Fletcher and Stevenson (C.U.P., 1985) pp. 116-136.
Brian Easlea, Witch Hunting, Magic and the New Philosophy (Harvester, 1980).
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Weidenfeld, 1971).
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4. Bodies Politic: Mystical Monarchy and Tyranny
Essential reading:
Shakespeare, Richard II
Shakespeare, Henry V
Ben Jonson, The Golden Age Restored, in Court Masques, ed, David Lindley Court
Masques (Oxford Worlds Classics, 1995), but I will provide you with a photo-copy.
Images of Elizabeth, James, Charles, Cromwell (studied in the seminar)
Sir Thomas Elyot, The Book Named the Governor (1531), extract provided in
seminar.
Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince (1516), extract provided in seminar.
Further reading:
Beaumont and Fletcher, The Maid’s Tragedy
Marlowe, Edward II
Charles I, Eikon Basilke, Buchanan, De Jure.
William Harvey, The Circulation of the Blood and other Writings (Everyman, 1963)
Dedication extract.
Lipsius, Sixe Bookes of Politickes (describes the ideal humanist ruler/ military leader
in the 1590s).
Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)
Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons, esp. Chs. 40 and 41, ‘Mystical Politics’ and
‘Marvellous Monarchy’.
Mary Douglas, ‘Powers and Dangers’ in Purity and Danger.
Ernst H.Kantorowicz, The Kings Two Bodies: a study in medieval political theology
(Princeton University Press, 1957).
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire (New York, 1985).
Margaret Healy, Writers and their Work: Richard II (Plymouth: Northcote House,
1998)
Michael Lambek, ‘Body and mind in mind, body and mind in body: some
anthropological interventions in a long conversation’, Bodies and Persons (CUP,
1998)
Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, especially Ch.3, ‘Bodily practices’.
Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of
Memory (2000), esp. Introduction.
Stephen Orgel, 'Making Greatness Familiar’, Pageantry in the Shakespearean
Theatre, ed D. Bergeron (Univ. of Georgia, 1981).
M. Bristol, Carnival and Theatre (1985).
Catherine Belsey, ‘Making histories then and now’ in Barker, Hulme and Iverson,
The Uses of History (1991)
Jonathan Dollimore, Introduction, Political Shakespeare (Manchester, 1985).
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Stephen Greenblatt, Introduction, The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance.
Catherine Belsey, ‘Icons of Divinity: Portraits of Elizabeth I’, in Renaissance Bodies.
Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘“Eliza Queene of shepheardes” and the pastoral of power’ in
the journal, English Literary Renaissance, 10 (1980).
--’Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: the politics of Elizabethan pastoral form’ in the
journal English Literary History, 50 (1983).
Roy Strong, Gloriana: the Portraits of Elizabeth I (2003) and The Cult of Elizabeth
(Thames and Hudson, 1977).
L.Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender and Representation (2006),
esp. Part II
J.M.Walker ,ed., Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations (1998)
Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: (1995).
Leah Sinanoglou Marcus, ‘City Metal and Country Metal: The Occasion of Ben
Jonson’s Golden Age Restored’, in David M. Bergeron, Pageantry in the
Shakespearean Theatre (Univ. of Georgia, 1985).
5. The Body Politic, Rape and Violent Masculinities.
William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus (1592)
Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece (1593)
Further Reading:
Jocelyn Catty, Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England: unbridled
speech (1999; Palgrave, 2011)
Leonard Tennenhouse, ‘Playing and Power’ in Staging the Renaissance.
Carol Chillington Rutter, ‘Looking Like a Child; or Titus: the comedy’, in
Shakespeare Survey 56 (2003).
Catherine Belling, ‘Infectious Rape, Therapeutic revenge: Bloodletting and the Health
of Rome’s Body’ in S.Moss and K.Peterson, Disease, Diagnosis and Cure on the
Early Modern Stage (Ashgate 2004).
Tina Mohler, ‘What is thy Body but a swallowing Grave? Desire underground in
Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Quarterly 57 no 1 (Spring, 2006) pp.23-42.
Deborah Willis, ‘the Gnawing vulture’: revenge, trauma theory, and Titus
Andronicus, Shakespeare Quarterly 53, no 1 (Spring, 2002) 21-52
Jennifer Vaught, Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature
(Ashgate, 2008).
Andrew Hadfield, ‘Shakespeare and republicanism: history and cultural materialism’,
Textual Practice 17, no 3 (Winter 2003) 461-83)
View Julie Taymor’s brilliant film, Titus.
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966), especially Ch. 7 ‘External Boundaries’
thinking about social dangers at the margins.
Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: CUP,
1996).
Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage
(London: Longman, 1999).
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6. Gender, voice, agency and sexuality, 1
Essential Reading:
Elizabeth Carey, The Tragedy of Mariam (Broadview edition or in Renaissance
Drama by Women: texts and documents , eds., Cerasano and Wynne-Davies,
Routledge, 1996 and now in many general anthologies including the Norton
Renaissance Drama)
Mary Sidney, The Tragedy of Antonie. (in Renaissance Drama by Women and on
line as a Renascence edition, http://www.luminarium.org/renascenceeditions/montaigne/)
and on the library electronic resource, Lion (if you’re familiar with Shakespeare’s
Antony and Cleopatra, how does it compare in its characterisations?)
Lady Jane Lumley, The Tragedie of Iphegeneia in Three Renaissance Tragedies by
Renaissance Women, ed., Diane Purkiss (Penguin, 1998). Now out of print but it
should still be in the library. Available on the Lion library electronic resource as Jane
Lumley, Iphigenia at Aulis (1555).
Further Reading:
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990),
esp. Ch. 4 ‘Representing Sex’.
Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in
Early Modern England (New York: Cornell University Press, 1993) ;and ‘The
Unbearable Coldness of Being: Women’s Imperfection and the Humoral Economy’,
English Literary Renaissance 28, 416-40.
Will Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture
(CUP, 2006).
Jocelyn Catty, Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England: unbridled
speech (1999; Palgrave, 2011)
Janet Adelman ‘Making Defect Perfection: Shakespeare and the One-Sex Model’ in
Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance stage, eds., Viviana Comensoli and
Anne Russell (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999)
Kate Aughterson, Renaissance Woman: constructions of femininity in England, Ch. 2,
Physiology (extracts from medical and conduct books).
James Grantham Turner, Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe
Butler and Bordo essays in Body and Flesh: a philosophical reader, ed, Donn Welton.
Conboy, Medina, Stanbury (eds) Writing on the Body: female embodiment and
feminist theory (Columbia U. Press, 1997)
Ruth Holliday and John Hassard, eds, Contested Bodies.
Rosalyn Diprose, The Bodies of Women: ethics, embodiment and sexual difference
(Routledge, 1994).
Danielle Clarke, The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing (Longman, 2001).
R. D’Monte and N.Pohl, Female Communities: 1600-1800 (Macmillan, 2000).
Alison Findlay, A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama (Blackwell, 1999).
Paul Salzman, Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing (OUP, 2006)
Anne Haselkorn and Betty Travitsky, The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print (Univ.
of Mass. Press, 1991).
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Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds, Women, ‘Race’, and Writing in the Early
Modern Period (Routledge, 1994).
Barbara Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Harvard University Press,
1987).
Louise Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers (Indiana University Press, 1994).
For useful surveys of women’s writing and criticism see ELR (English Literary
Renaissance 14 (3), 1984, pp.409-25 and pp.426-39; and ELR 24 (1), 1994, pp.229-42
and pp.243-74. Also an update in ELR 30 (3), 2000.
Catherine Belsey, ‘Cleopatra’s Seduction’ in Alternative Shakespeares vol. 2., ed.,
Terence Hawkes (Routledge, 1996).
Kenneth Parker, Antony and Cleopatra (Writers and their Work, Northcote House,
2000).
John Drakakis, ed., New Casebooks: Antony and Cleopatra (Palgrave, 1994) –a very
good essay selection.
Margaret W. Ferguson, ‘The Spectre of Resistance’, in Staging the Renaissance, eds,
Stallybrass
Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in Early Modern England (Yale
University Press, 1996).
7. Reading week
8. ‘Spying on the self’: inwardness, illness and machine bodies
Essential Reading:
Michel de Montaigne, Essays (especially ‘To the Reader’ ; ‘Of practice’; ‘Of idleness’; ‘Of
imagination’ ; ‘Of the cannibals’ ; ‘Of experience’)and the Travel Journal (key sections are
in pdf form on study direct). Please purchase:
The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters, ed, Donald Frame (Everyman Library
Classics) Amazon currently have this at £13.50—an enormous bargain! This is the best cheap
edition because it contains Montaigne’s remarkable Travel Journal
The essays as translated by John Florio and published in 1603 (the edition Shakespeare read!)
can be found on-line as a Renascence edition (http//www./luminarium.org/renascenceeditions/montaigne/
Further Reading:
Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637) and The Meditations (Penguin classics, 1968).
Jonathan Sawday, Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the
Machine (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007).
Healy, Margaret, ‘Journeying with the “stone”: Montaigne’s Healing Travel Journal’,
Literature and Medicine, 24:2, (Fall, 2005).
Starobinski, J, Montaigne in Motion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985)
Bakewell, Sarah, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at
an Answer (London: Chatto & Windus, 2010)
See on-line entry in Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy,
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/montaigne/
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Boutcher, Warren, ‘Humanism and Literature in Late Tudor England: Translation, the
continental book and the case of Montaigne’s Essais’, in Reassessing Tudor Humanism, ed.
Jonathan Woolfson (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002), 243-68
Brody, Jules, ‘Montaigne: Philosophy, Philology, Literature’, Philosophy and
Literature, 22.1 (1998), 83-107
Ellrodt, Robert, ‘Self-Consciousness in Montaigne and Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Survey 28
(1975), 37-50
Merleau-Ponty, M., ‘Reading Montaigne’, in Signs, translated by Richard McCleary
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 198-210
9. Gender, voice, agency and sexuality, 2
Essential Reading:
Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl (available in New Mermaid edition but also
in Norton Anthology of Renaissance drama)
Thomas Dekker, The Honest Whore, Part 1, 1604 (and its sequel Part 2 if you have
time!) (available in a Globe edition via Amazon and both parts are readily available
on-line: Lion)
Further reading:
The ‘Hic Mulier’ and ‘Haec-Vir’ pamphlets (these are in the library in pamphlet form;
extracts are also printed in K. Henderson ed. Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of
the Controversy about Women 1540-1640; see also Woodbridge.)
Ben Jonson, Epicoene.
Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: Gender and Performance in Shakespeare’s England
(C.U.P., 1996).
Mark Breitenberg, ‘Inscriptions of difference: cross-dressing, androgyny and the
anatomical imperative’ in Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
CUP,1996).
Kenneth Borris, ed., Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance: a sourcebook of
texts, 1470-1650 (London: Routledge, 2004).
Will Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture
(CUP, 2006).
Ruth Gilbert, Early Modern Hermaphrodites: sex and other stories (Palgrave, 2002)
Jean Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England, especially
Chaps. 4 and 5.
Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters, Chs. 1 and 5.
R.M. Dekker and L.C. Van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Tranvestism in Early
Modern Europe (London, 1989).
Phyllis Rackin, ‘Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the
English Renaissance stage’, PMLA 102 (1987) 29-41.
Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women on Top: Symbolic Sexual Inversion and Political
Disorder in Early Modern Europe’, in Barbara Babcock, The Reversible World:
Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, or in Davis’s own book, Society and Culture in
Early Modern France.
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Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Early Modern: Cross Dressing in Early Modern England’,
Sexual Dissidence.
Marjorie Garber, ‘The Logic of the Transvestite’ in Kastan and Stallybrass, eds.,
Staging the Renaissance.
Tracey Sedinger, ‘“If Sight and Shape be True”: The Epistemology of Crossdressing
on the London Stage’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 48:1, 1997.
Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800.
Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (CUP,
2000). This is interesting on clothing, gender constructions and the stage.
Kathleen McLuskie, Dekker and Heywood (The Macmillan Press, 1994)
See Chapter 5 discussion of The Honest Whore plays in Margaret Healy, Fictions of
Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics (Palgrave, 2001)
Laura J. McGough, Gender, Sexuality and Syphilis in Early Modern Venice: the
Disease that came to stay (Palgrave, 2011)
10. Disease, Pollution and Power Relations
Essential reading:
Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess (in Oxford World’s Classics collected
Middleton and separate Revels edition, ed., Howard-Hill.)
William Shakespeare, Pericles (c.1608)
Erasmus, ‘The Young Man and the Harlot’ (photocopy provided-a short but
influential colloquy or dialogue)
Also, if you have time:
Thomas Dekker, The Whore of Babylon (1608) copies in resource file
Further reading:
Dekker, The Honest Whore I, II.
Shakespeare, Measure for Measure,
----Venus and Adonis
Jennifer Vaught, Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early
Modern England (Ashgate, 2010).
Laura J. McGough, Gender, Sexuality and Syphilis in Early Modern Venice: the
Disease that came to stay (Palgrave, 2011)
Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England
---‘Anxious and Fatal Contacts: taming the contagious touch’ (on Venus and Adonis,
in Sensible Flesh, ed., Elizabeth D. Harvey
---‘Pericles and the Pox’ in Shakespeare’s Late Plays, eds, Richards and Knowles
(Edinburgh University Press, 1999).
Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger and Natural Symbols
Sander Gilman, Disease and Representation: images of illness from madness to Aids
(Cornell university Press, 1988)
Liz Herbert McAvoy & Teresa Walters, Consuming Narratives: gender and
monstrous appetite in the middle ages and the renaissance
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Margaret Healy, ‘The Pocky body’ and ‘The Glutted Unvented Body’ in Fictions of
Disease in Early Modern England (2001).
Mary Floyd-Wilson, Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England
(Palgrave, 2007)
11. Lewd, grotesque bodies and political pornography
Essential reading:
Anon. Craftie Cromwell ; and New-Market Fayre or Mrs Parliament’s New Figaryes,
1649. (copy supplied)
Selections from the Earl of Rochester (copy supplied)
Wycherley’s The Country Wife (available in New Mermaid edition)
Eve Sedgwick, chapter 3, ‘The Country Wife: Anatomies of Male Homosocial
Desire’ in Between Men, pp. 49-66. The entire chapter is free in google books.
Further reading:
Andrew Marvell, ‘ Last Instructions to a Painter’
Henry Neville, The Isle of Pines (a strange but significant prose tract available on
EEBO, LION and in an Oxford Worlds Classic edition of 3 utopias)
Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, esp. ch.2 ‘The
Grotesque Body…’
Francois Rabelais, Gargantua et Pantagruel (1534-51, Penguin)
James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: sexuality,
politics and literary culture (Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. chapters 5 and
6.
Paula Findlen, ‘Humanism, Politics and Pornography’ in The Invention of
Pornography, ed., Lynn Hunt (New York: Zone Books, 1993).
and, in the same volume, Rachel Weil, ‘Sometimes a Scepter is Only a Scepter’.
Ian F. Moulton, Before Pornography: erotic writing in early modern England (OUP,
2000).
Sarah Toulalan, Imagining Sex: Pornography and Bodies in Seventeenth -Century
England (OUP, 2007)
Jonathan Brody Kramnick, ‘Rochester and the History of Sexuality’, ELH, 69:2
(2002).
M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his world (1968)
S.Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival: text, context, metatext (1994)
Sue Wiseman, ‘Adam, the Father of all flesh’, Porno-Political Rhetoric and Political
Theory in and After the English Civil War’ in James Holston, ed., Pamphlet Wars:
Prose in the English Revolution (London: Frank Cass, 1992), pp. 134-57. Copy in
resource file.
Fisher, Nicholas, ed, That Second Bottle: Essays on Rochester (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2000)
Hammond, Paul, Figuring Sex Between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2002)
Love, Harold, ed., Restoration Literature: Critical Approaches (London: Methuen,
1972)
Thormählen, Marianne, Rochester: The Poems in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993)
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Treglown, Jeremy, ed., Spirit of Wit (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982)
Jonathan Brody Kramnick, ‘Rochester and the History of Sexuality’, ELH, 69:2
(2002).
James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: sexuality,
politics and literary culture (Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. chapters 5 and
6.
Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in
England 1680-1714 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).
Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, esp. ch.2 ‘The
Grotesque Body…’
Francois Rabelais, Gargantua et Pantagruel (1534-51, Penguin)
M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his world (1968)
S.Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival: text, context, metatext (1994)
12. Tutorials on Term Papers
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