UCLA Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies | Comitatus Abstracts, Vol. 36

Editorial Board: David Bennett (Near Eastern Languages and Cultures), Rebecca Blustein (Comparative Literature), Meg Lamont (English), Fred Liers (Comparative Literature), Francesca Marx (Comparative Literature), Anne Myers (English), Thomas O'Donnell (English), Leyla Ozgur (Near Eastern Languages and Cultures), Phoebe Robinson (History), Lisa Tom (Art History), and Jennie Wehmeier (Art History)

Managing Editor: Blair Sullivan (CMRS)

“Evergreens of Reason”: The Function and Treatment of Nature in the Qasīdehs of Nāser-e Khosrow / Daniel Rafinejad. This article argues that imagery of the natural world is Nāser-e Khosrow’s “technical language” for writing poetry. Nature’s function is to give him a poetic means with which to express all the major concerns of his other work with the intensity of emotion in poetry. Indeed, its use in Naser’s qasīdehs (odes) is threefold: first, nature permits Nāser both to manipulate and to uphold the structural and contextual requirements of the qasīdeh form. Second, nature is the basis for the Nāser’s allegories for instruction in his philosophy and “the true faith.” Finally, it is through nature that Nāser sets out his biography and achieves his personal, sentimental objective in composing poetry. Nature pervades the reflexive recognition in Naser’s poetry, as he struggles to unify in verse the pains of exile, his highly individuated code of beliefs, and a language that is both uniquely Iranian and uniquely his own. He demonstrates that the existence and the function of the soul, of his soul, are explicable and reflected through the paradigms and processes of the natural world.

“Min herte is growen into ston”: Ethics and Activity in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis / Hilary E. Fox. The role of ethics in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis has been the subject of much scholarly attention. This essay seeks to elucidate Gower’s reception not only of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (which had been translated into Latin by Robert Grosseteste and adapted by John Trevisa) but of the moralizations on Ovidian texts, and to analyze how these traditions influence the goals of the Confessio. Specifically, it discusses how Genius employs the tale of Medusa to mirror the paralysis, impaired will, and confused desire of Amans, and uses it to argue for an ethical agenda that is practical, rather than theoretical in nature. The tale itself is sourced in the moralizing commentaries on the Metamorphoses and the exempla of thirteenth-century sermons, but it turns these sources to an Aristotelian practical ethic to emphasize the importance of productive, directed action and the role of individual agency in that action.

Imagining England in Richard Morison’s Pamphlets against the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536) / Stewart Mottram. This article contests the assumptions of the social historians Foucault, Anderson, Gellner, and Habermas, all of whom date the origins of nationhood in Western Europe to the eighteenth century, and argue that nationhood superseded empire at this time. It explores how England is imagined as both empire and nation in Richard Morison’s pamphlets against the northern rebellions of 1536—the Lamentation and Remedy for Sedition. The article approaches Morison’s pamphlets as Royal Supremacy propaganda, and argues that within them, Morison turned to the character mother England as a means to ventriloquize his support for the empire defined in the 1533 Appeals Act—an empire compact of Church and state, and independent from the Apostolic See. The article reads the Remedy in relation to writings by Tyndale and Coverdale. It concludes that in this pamphlet, Morison makes Bible-reading the cornerstone for his construction of English national identity—an identity based on obedience to scriptural passages that command our obedience to kings.

The Economy of Legal Images and Legal Texts in Sixteenth- Century Law Books: The Case of Praxis crimins presequendi / Daniel Hershenzon. This article examines Praxis criminis presequendi, a legal manual published in Paris in 1542, which is paradigmatic of a new kind of illustrated legal book that appeared in sixteenth-century Europe. One of the main features characterizing these legal books are woodcuts that do not merely decorate the text, but also illustrate and comment on it, thereby creating two competing and complementing reading paths—one visual, one textual. By applying the reoccurring visual theme of the documenting court scribe and the documents he produces, this kind of book establishes a complex economy of textual and visual modes of representation. Praxis criminis presequendi’s images assert the superiority of the text they illustrate by manifesting their inability to represent its contents; at the same time, however, the images subvert textual authority by revealing the contexts that were meant to stay hidden. Moving between historical analysis, legal discourse, and a close reading of text-image relationships, this article argues for the instability of the textual mode of representation in the legal domain.

Titian’s Rape of Europa: The Posture of the Pose / Cynthia Roe. Between 1552–1562, Titian painted the poesie, a series of eroticized mythologies commissioned by Philip II of Spain. Titian’s depiction of the Rape of Europa (1559–1562), drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, was a radical departure from classical, medieval, and Renaissance interpretations of the myth. Europa’s awkward and highly sexualized pose on the back of the bull-god deviated wildly from pictorial conventions and was an iconographic anomaly within the visual tradition. This essay examines Europa’s suggestive posture within the context of sixteenth- century social politics and the issues surrounding proper female deportment. It argues that Europa was the antithesis of the feminine ideal and challenged the cultural constraints of female sexuality and definitions of feminine beauty in the Renaissance. Ultimately, the author asserts that Titian wantonly mocked theoretical conventions of decorum for the sake of erotic expression and for the private pleasure of Europa’s intended male viewer, Philip II of Spain.

Negotiating Renaissance Harmony: The First Spanish Translation of Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore / Damian Bacich. What forces drove three different translators to publish Spanish versions of Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore in the sixteenth century? This study examines the first Spanish translation, published in Venice in 1568; it argues that the translation served the purpose of re-claiming the Jewish and Spanish identities of the author at a time when both had been almost forgotten by dedicating the work to King Philip II of Spain and by adding margin notes together with an appendix penned by a Jewish scholar from Salonika. This evocation of Leone Ebreo’s origins can be seen both as an message of encouragement to Spanish-speaking Diaspora communities, and as an appeal to the Spanish king to remember and reconsider the situation of the Sephardic exiles, which many did not yet consider definitive.

Images of Time and Eternity in the Religious Poetry of Henry Vaughan / Clark Hutton. While the representations of time and eternity in Henry Vaughan’s religious poetry have been examined by earlier critics, those examinations limit and neglect the role of mystical transcendence in Vaughan that allows the experience of eternity in this earthly life rather than the next life. By employing St. Augustine of Hippo’s discussion of time and eternity as a point of departure, this paper seeks a fuller understanding and appreciation of the transcendent experience of eternity Vaughan’s poetry. Augustine’s understanding of time and its relationship to the memory reveals that several of Vaughan’s poems attempt to transcend time, often through the use of memory, in order to achieve a mystical experience of eternity. These poems catalogue and explore the various means by which and conditions under which a temporal creature might have such an experience, and they document the ecstatic periods that occasionally characterize the spiritual life, while acknowledging the fleeting nature of such periods.