Serendipities

In an essay in the Academic Commons, Tatjana Chorney argues that there are many similarities between the way hypertext structures our reading practices, and the way in which early modern readers interacted with the things they read. Unlike a printed text that can only be passively read, hypertext shapes an active and appropriative reader who interacts with the text, and is involved in knowledge construction. This manner of active reading is as least as old as the early modern period, she writes: “The Renaissance reader was accustomed to applying “alien” texts to new purposes in a method of appropriative reading.”

Tatjana Chorney looks at the way in which early modern readers copied fragments out of poems to keep for themselves, sometimes giving them different titles. Reading was a creative and re-creative engagement with a “living” text. She concludes that the four things that our internet reading practice has in common with early modern reading are: non-linearity; a protean sense of text and its functions; affinity with oral models of communication, and a changing concept of authorship. Chorney also refers to the machine that featured here before - the reading wheel:

The experience of reading texts in hypertext, the best known example of which is the World Wide Web, is very similar to the experience of reading with the help of a “reading wheel.” It encourages reading not for “linear narrative” but for points of interest, empowering readers to shape and control the reading process by selecting and reading only those parts of texts that are memorable or relevant to them.

Chorney makes the comparison between these two practices of reading, both informed by different techniques, in order to learn something about pedagogy. Historical awareness of early modern reading habits, she argues, will increase our ability to relate to students whose reading and learning habits are shaped by the new medium of hypertext.

Her characterization of the reader of a printed text as passive, as well as this reference to the learning habits of students reminded me of a more active involvement with the printed text that I encountered during my year at Birmingham University. Students there engaged with library books in a way that I had never encountered in the Netherlands. Whenever I went to the University Library to read a set text for a course, say, Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations, there would be a proliferation of pencilled notes in the margins of the library book. Not just little squiggles to mark an interesting passage, as you might find in a Dutch library book. No, entire discussions were going on in the margins. A reader had commented on Greenblatt’s argument, another reader had reacted to those comments again, and then… You get the idea: an abundant para-text was growing in the margins. And I loved it, because on the whole they were quite clever discussions of the text. This kind of active reading, I would say, goes back even further than the early modern period, witness the medieval manuscript of the first testament below, with comments in different inks in at least three different hands (click on the image for the larger picture). In the case of the manuscript, however, the different hands are from different periods. Because the library books are - in a sense - in the public domain, the comments could truly react to each other in a short space of time. You could say these scribbles in the margins are a way of academic community-building. It would be interesting - if this is a widespread practice - to compare Birmingham para-texts with those at Oxford or Cambridge.

I am sure that Peacay must have mentioned this site at BibliOdyssey, but I only just discovered this online exhibition at the U.S. National Library of Medicine: Dream Anatomy. The site contains an introduction to anatomical science and art, with information on printing techniques, the cultural-historical context of the works, as well pieces on individual authors of anatomical works. It also has a wealth of beautiful images. I am always fascinated by the interaction between the medical discourse and the conventions of art in early modern anatomical images. The dissected bodies are often placed on a pedestal, and figure in aesthetically pleasing surroundings, often with crumbling ruins of ancient buildings in the background. The female figure in the middle even coyly holds up her skin for the viewer, in a posture that reminds of nude paintings. The image on the left features a classical building with an astronomer peering out on a parapet. Here, the National Library of Medicine provides a pragmatic explanation for the fascinating surroundings of the woman: To cut costs, Charles Estienne took some of his illustrations from non-anatomical books, replacing a section of the woodblock with an insert that depicted the body’s interior… I am unsure whether the term “body” applies, though, because the other thing about these images is that these bodies are all very much alive, and sometimes even engaged in their own dissection - the man on the right is still holding the knife with which he flayed his own skin.

See also Historical anatomies on the web, a digital project designed to give online access to high quality images from important anatomical atlases in the National Library’s collection.

• “Violently Shakespeare” is the title of this year’s Ohio Shakespeare Conference. More information here from mid April.
• This year’s Annual Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group Symposium, organised by Brett D. Hirsh, is called “World as Stage / Stage as World,” and seeks to investigate the relationship between the world and the theatre — and how one informs or transforms the other — in medieval and early modern Europe. Keynote speakers are Graham Bradshaw and Heather Dubrow.
• Two calls for papers caught my eye in the internet-publishing field: an MLA session on “Wikis, Authority and the Public Sphere” and a session by one of the authorities in the commercial sphere: “EEBO and early modern studies.”

It’s been so quiet here this week that the Blogosphere Ecosystem has taken Kafkaesque measures and has metamorphosed me into a “lowly insect,” I notice. Time for a book review!

I have been reading Disease, Diagnosis and Cure on the Early Modern Stage, edited by Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson (Ashgate 2004). The central premise of this collection of essays is that early modern theatre and medicine are mutually constitutive: the theatre appropriates medical discourses in its representations of subjectivity, but medical discourse also draws on the rhetoric of theatre.

The volume traces the early modern theatrical representations of what it calls the “perilous and shifting” conjunctions of nature, disease, the patient, the practitioner’s art, and performance. It is made up of three parts, the first of which focuses on “performance and the practitioner.” Kaara Peterson’s essay in this section focuses on issues of performance in exorcisms. She analyzes the competing claims of medicine and religion in representations of exorcisms of possessed women, and explores how notions of performance interreact with these discourses.

In the section on race, nationhood and discourses of medicine, Carol Thomas Neely argues that humoral theory in the early seventeenth century is still the dominant conceptual system in medicine (although it is a fluid and contradictory discourse that easily appropriates other discourses). Moreover, like Mary Floyd-Wilson in Reading the Early Modern Passions, she demonstrates that humoral theory provided the resources to begin to conceptualize ethnic, national and racial differences. Where Floyd-Wilson looked at “English mettle” - notions of courage and spirit - in Shakespeare’s Henry V, Neely looks at representations of lovesickness in early modern drama. Because humoral theory, climatological theory, as well as lovesickness are driven by notions of temperature, this allows plays to project extremes of lovesickness away from English bodies, and onto Mediterranean ones. Neely shows how humoral and climatological theories intersect in plays by Shakespeare, and in Middleton’s The Changeling, and identifies four strategies for representing Mediterranean bodies. In the same section, Catherine Belling in a fascinating article examines how the trope of bloodletting, a practice that in Galenic medicine stabilizes a distempered humoral economy, in the drama functions to legitimize violent revenge.

In book’s final section on conflicting discourses, two of the essays focus on the conflict between Galenic and the Swiss physician Paracelcus’ medicine. Lynette Hunter views Romeo and Juliette as a play in which the contesting models of these two medical discourses are contrasted in representations of melancholy, while Stephanie Moss discusses the interrelations between Paracelsan and Galenic medical discourses in Othello. Paracelsan medicine is more empirical than Galenic, and offered a radically new concept of disease, in which illness is not caused by an internal imbalance, but by an exterior influence. Moss argues that Othello’s shift in identity from an assimilated warrior to a black outsider can be traced in a shift from Paracelsan to a Galenic representations of the body in the play.

Possibly because the book originated at a meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, Disease, Diagnosis and Cure does not read like a unified whole in the way that Reading the Early Modern Passions with its thematic and almost programmatic introduction, does manage to. It is, however, a thought-provoking collection of essays that allow the reader to glean new insights into early modern ideas on the workings of the body. Take this quotation from the work of the seventeenth-century French author André du Laurens in Neely’s essay on lovesickness, for example, which describes the subtle as well as the more martial operations of love at first sight.

[Love enters through the eyes, and] maketh a way for it selfe smoothly to glaunce along through the conducting guides, and passing without any perseverance in this sort through the veines unto the lives, doth suddenly imprint a burning desire to obtaine the thing, which is or seemeth worthie to bee beloved, setteth concupiscence on fire, and beginneth by this desire all the strife and contention: but fearing her selfe too weake to incounter with reason, the principal part of the minde, she posteth in haste to the heart, to surprise and winne the same: whereof when she is once sure, as of the strongest hold, she afterward assaileth and setteth upon reason.

Other reviews of Disease, Diagnosis and Cure:

• Samuel Glen Wong in Renaissance Quarterly 58:2 (2005)
• Raymond A. Anselment in Journal of British Studies 44:3 (2005)
• Not all contributions are mentioned in this review, here is a complete table of contents

The first online symposium on the Old Bailey Session Papers is up at the Head Beeb. Tim Lovell-Smith, Chris A. Williams, Jonathan Edelstein, Penny Richard, Russ Fagalie, Nathalie Bennett, and Sharon Howard all used the newly-available online database of the Old Bailey to research subjects such as an unexpected nineteenth-century Polynesian community in London, the evolution of concepts of policing, grand juries, the treatment of “idiots” in criminal proceedings, Irish aristocrats in exile, woman burglars, and a cultural history of early modern arson cases. This first online symposium demonstrates that (in Jonathan’s words) “online primary source collections, and particularly searchable ones, enable a different kind of research.” Go see!

The very first volume of the online journal The Literary Magazine contains an intriguing piece on Milton, terrorism and revenge.

Like the call for papers for the Shakespeare Yearbook on “Shakespeare after 9/11,” Neil Forsyth’s article looks at early modern literature from the perspective of our current political context. It is an intelligent and broad-ranging article that pivots on the central crux of the Yearbook’s call for papers: “the more we historicize Milton, place him firmly in his time and place, the less his concerns will be easily seen as ours.”

Forsyth’s article reacts to an earlier piece in the TLS (6 September 2002) in which John Carey compared Samson in Milton’s Samson Agonistes to a terrorist bomber moved by religious conviction to destroy the lives of others. Reactions to Carey’s piece were divided: people were either abhorred at the idea that Milton would have supported terrorism, or were thrilled about Milton’s relevance to contemporary politics.

There are really two camps in critical interpretations of Samson Agonistes, Forsyth writes. On the one hand there are the traditionalists, who argue that Milton saw Samson as a religious hero whose violence against the Philistines was directed by the hand of God. Revisionists on the other hand emphasize the ambivalence inherent in the poetic work, or argue that Milton was not the kind of man to approve of violence. Forsyth argues that it does not matter whether Milton endorsed Samson’s deed. By dealing with revenge at its deepest levels, Milton’s work “gives us tools to think with.”

Because political events change the ways in which we read, it has become possible to conceive of Samson as a suicide bomber, in the wake of the New York, Washington, Madrid or London atrocities. [...] Perhaps the parallel seems different to some of us now than it did in 2002 when John Carey first made his case. But the case would never have been worth making if Milton’s poems were not worth reading. What I have tried to show here is why it should be so. The bombs may affect our reading, but the poems may also change or enlarge our feelings about the bombers, once we allow for the parallel. I’m not sure about that. Perhaps it is too soon to say. Certainly the parallel will change how we read the emotion of revenge.

Forsyth in his inspiring analysis thus recognizes that our political context influences our reading of Milton and that, conversely, Milton’s work can also change the way we think about revenge. My only problem with the article is that in order to draw the diachronic parallel, Forsyth has to see revenge itself as a universal human emotion. He implies that revenge “is where we all come from,” and argues that our reading about Samson’s revenge might inspire sympathy with current-day revengers. But as the contributors to Reading the Early Modern Passions (which contains a fascinating contribution on Milton’s Eikonoklastes by John Staines, as well as a reading of the passions in Paradise Lost by Michael Schoenfeldt) have convincingly shown, emotions are historically specific, and are discursively produced, among others by literature itself. Our thinking about revenge, the concept of honour in which the need for retaliation is based, the rhetoric we use (”we’ll smoke ’em out of their holes,” for example), are produced by highly localized cultural discourses.

I particularly enjoy historically contextualized readings of early modern literature that analyse the ways in which literature produces and circulates such constructions. I’m currently reading Diane Purkiss’ wonderful Literature, Gender and Politics during the English Civil War. Purkiss looks at the “political imaginary” of the English Civil War: “the space in which the men and women of the age thought about the events which took place around them, and determined what was and was not possible, what was not thinkable.” The contradictions inherent in the images and rhetoric of the political imaginary in her view explain what revisionist historians of the Civil War period have called irrational political decisions of individual actors in the years before the wars.

Purkiss, too, analyses Samson Agonistes, but reads it in the political context of its time; more specifically, in the context of gendered representations of King Charles I. She shows how the perceived effeminacy of the King in anti-royalist discourse is the chief pretext for rebellion and regicide, since an effeminate ruler is not only unfit to govern, but also threatens to dissolve the masculine identities of his subjects. Her reading of the way in which the literary text functions in the discursive dynamics of its time explains the ways in which revenge is culturally constructed. She demonstrates how the parliamentarians’ revenge on their king was informed by a historically specific discursive dynamics of masculinity and femininity, in which an effeminate king was contrasted to a virile parliament. Purkiss’ reading of Milton, too, could teach us something about the present, but in a different way from Forsyth’s. Purkiss alerts us to the ways in which discursive gender constructs can work to legitimate revenge, both in the past and in the present.

After yesterday’s Syrian appropriation of Shakespeare, here is news that The Shakespeare Yearbook is going to devote an issue to “Shakespeare after 9/11″, and will sponsor a special session on the subject at this year’s MLA meeting.

In the wake of the New Historicism, much critical work on Shakespeare and his contemporaries has been faulted for its failure to develop and deploy an active sense of historical self-consciousness. Such a failure can be traced to a number of significant tendencies in historicist methodology: the privileging of synchronic analysis over diachronic or recursive) approaches; the conviction that truth emerges as an immanent entity within culture, one that can be teased out by the patient critic; and (more fundamentally) the lack of interest in how meaning functions across time — what is often pejoratively labeled trans-historicist. Not surprisingly, little has been done to think through what it means to read and teach the literary production of Shakespeare and his contemporaries after 9/11.

I am not sure I agree with this characterization of the New Historicism, but I certainly think that Cultural Materialism is ignored in this overview of recent developments in Shakespeare criticism. Critics like Terence Hawkes, Catherine Belsey, or Graham Holderness, to name but a few, certainly explore literary texts in contemporary power relations. The study of appropriations of Shakespeare, as in the new online journal Borrowers and Lenders, similarly considers the ways in which Shakespeare functions in other, and later, cultures. On the differences between New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, I can heartily recommend John Brannigan’s New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). But on with the call for papers:

Shakespeare Yearbook hopes to fill this critical gap by seeking out and publishing scholarly essays that take seriously what and how early modern English literature means in a post-9/11 world - a world where strangers can be terrorists, where a heavy coat can be the signifier for a suicide attack or a briefcase can be a dirty bomb, where the workplace, the daily commute, the shopping center, or even the theatre, can be transformed in an instant into a site of mass suffering and death. The journal welcomes scholarship that treats issues of religion, violence, empire, and race in works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, especially in light of post-9/11 readings, stagings, and films of such works.