Since the publication of Alan Bray’s Homosexuality in Renaissance England three decades ago, much of the research about eroticism in early modern England has revolved around the question of whether some form of sexual identity existed in the earlier era. This paper seeks to explore — and perhaps transform — the critical discussion about this issue by expanding our focus to include not only individuals with homosexual desires, but also those with a penchant for sexual flagellation. There is a remarkably rich discourse about “flogging cullies,” including a medical treatise entitled The Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs (1639), over twenty court cases featuring individuals who like to be “whipped into their lechery,” several accounts of “flogging bawdy houses,” and numerous pornographic depictions. What do these representations tell us about the construction of sexual identity in the earlier period? And how do they transform — or complicate — the scholarly discourse about this issue?

—Will Fisher, The Graduate Center, CUNY

The theorisation of the will is as abundant within Renaissance England’s theology and philosophy as it is in the imaginative literature of the period. Yet, even with the key role that this concept plays in the period’s epistemologies there seems to be little space in recent academic criticism for the function and merit of the will in Renaissance culture. My paper seeks to address this critical gap by demonstrating the profundity and abundance of the conceptualisation of the will by focusing on the English morality tradition. This paper demonstrates how the didactic purview of Francis Merbury’s interlude The Marriage of Wit and Science (1570) is concerned with an interrogation and conceptualisation of the will. Focusing on the polysemic manifestation and dubious operation of the will within this interlude provides an intriguing critical focus by which we may reassess how the human subject is being conceptualised within the English Renaissance.

—Douglas Clark, University of Strathclyde

This paper explores the role of forgetting in the formation and transformation of identity on the early modern stage. Normally, we associate identity with memory and forgetfulness with a threat to or loss of identity. But as we shall see, self-forgetfulness can also be a mode of experiencing and producing a sense of selfhood. Focusing on the figure of Falstaff from Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, I will discuss the productive potential of such self-forgetfulness in the play as well as for the play; these are the two dimensions of politics and poetics that my title refers to. Falstaff’s signature self-forgetfulness enables him to distance himself from the demands of duty, honour, and the law by continually re-inventing himself: rejecting all attempts at interpellating him into a fixed identity by reminding him of his by social position and his past conduct, Falstaff develops a resistant subjectivity and agency that hinges on forgetting instead. I will then investigate the historiographical and cultural process that produced the figure of Falstaff: in a series of “shameless transformation[s]” (1.1.44) from Lollard rebel to proto-Protestant martyr to Puritan parody, I will argue, this figure emerges from a complex interplay of remembering and forgetting that the play enacts and exploits.

—Dr Isabel Karreman, LMU Munich

This paper will examine selected texts by the late seventeenth-century writer John Dunton, who relates to the transformational element of subjectivity in a number of instances. Firstly, he worked as a publisher of books and periodicals that took the pulse of the contemporary London scene and provided a means for him to exploit the latest information and trends as opportunities for writing, remuneration, and non-too subtle forms of self-publication. Secondly, he is perhaps best known today for his Voyage round the World (1691), a whimsical examination of his youthful adventures in an experimental and oddly hybrid literary form that reads as part autobiography part proto-novel, in which he expresses his personal and literary prodigality by means of the transformational test case of his apprenticeship and his periodic resistances to it. Finally, he published The Life and Errors, an exercise in life-writing that presents a contrasting picture of a mature, reflective, penitent Dunton lamenting the kind of prodigality expressed in the Voyage and offering a set of revised rules for a life to be imaginatively lived over again. Dunton’s writings show up different, sometimes competing, versions of the self, and serve as a reminder that expressions of identity are context-led. This paper, then, gives a sense of the inconsistent, opportunistic, frequently contentious and flamboyant aspects of Dunton’s self-presentation at the cross-roads of various personal and professional, as well as cultural and literary, changes.

—Dr Melanie Ord, UWE

The literary essay is a form of writing associated with modernity, and one of the main reasons for this is the importance to the essay of the self; or, more particularly, the presentation of the self through the use of an intimate, personal voice. The Essayes of Sir William Cornwallis (c.1579-1614) published  in 1600-01, are the first examples in English of what we now know as the ‘familiar’ essay: written in a personal, discursive, chatty tone. I will suggest that Cornwallis’s Essayes are the results of complex interactions between different strands of sixteenth-century humanistic educational practices of reading and writing, and argue that the ‘personal’ and ‘familiar’ tone of the Essayes is not a proto-modern attempt realistically to create a representation of the mind thinking as an end in itself, but rather, that Cornwallis’s use of the personal voice is shaped by ethically inflected rhetorical theories of affect and imitation.

—Sophie Butler, New College, University of Oxford

This paper will explore changing scholarly approaches towards the authorial identity of Robert Greene.  The principal purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the figure of “Greene the author” is not a fixed entity; it is a construct of critical response.  Greene’s authorial identity is the product of a series of narratives, some generated by Greene himself as part of his strategy of self-presentation, and others imposed upon him after his death.   When we attempt to reconstruct the figure of Robert Greene, all we find are a series of guises: the debauchee, the insecure hack, the embittered critic, the literary drudge and the envious rival of Shakespeare. More often than not, the only occasion on which critics come into contact with Greene is by way of his association with Shakespeare.  If Greene is remembered at all, it is as a long forgotten Elizabethan hack writer, who once wrote a pamphlet in which he called Shakespeare an ‘upstart crow’ in a fit of professional spite.  This insult, which was most likely the work of Henry Chettle, has come to function as an allegory of authorial identity.  In Derridean terms, Greene is supplementary to Shakespeare; he is a prop – a supplement – to Shakespeare’s identity and simultaneously a threat to that identity. This paper will trace changing responses to the authorial identity of Robert Greene, from early modern depictions (Gabriel Harvey, Cuthbert Burbie and John Dickenson) to modern fictional accounts (Virginia Woolf and Anthony Burgess), and from early criticism (A.B. Grosart, J. Churton Collins and John Clark Jordan) to recent literary-historical reassessments (Kirk Melnikoff and Edward Gieskes)

—Dr Jenny Sager, Jesus College, University of Oxford

[Abstract to come.]

—Professor Bernhard Klein, University of Kent

The Custom of the Country (c.1619), by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, is a play dominated by transformation.  Through the figure of Rutillio, the sub-plot exposes the physical effects of excessive sexual activity.  Enslaved in a male brothel, the insatiable lust of female city customers and sexual disease corrode his male form.  The threat to English male physicality is distanced by the play’s foreign setting and Rutillio’s ultimate recovery.  Despite this deflection of anxiety, the play’s exposure of male frailty is powerful and draws upon contemporary fears of national effeminacy.  The tangible effects of Rutillio’s sexual overindulgence emphasise the real consequences of heterosexual excess for English men.  Does the play offer a didactic lesson or is it a humorous purging of male anxiety presented on stage?  Examining the contribution of scholars, such as Moulton, the paper will reflect upon our twenty-first century interpretation of the early modern male identity.

—Lynsey Blandford, Independent scholar

To enjoy social privilege is to risk the loss of that privilege; the threat of that loss brings to the forefront the coerciveness of precaution. Similarly, to reduce the consideration of a person or a character to their marital status—she has a husband or she lacks a husband—leaves the person at a greater risk of being undone by that same category and neglects the dynamic social relations that may prove equally or more central to every day life. Elizabeth Bourne’s marriage to Anthony Bourne placed her in such a precarious position: her identity as a wife provided her with an assumed cultural advantage, but in reality it trapped her in a relationship that caused emotional trauma and threatened her and her children’s economic well-being. Rather than suffer the continued precarity of life as the wife of Anthony Bourne, Elizabeth petitioned the Privy Council in 1582 to request a divorce a mensa et thoro. In the petition she constructs a narrative that reflects a history of adultery, abandonment, and attempted violence. She underlines the need to separate herself and what remains of her estate from her husband. In requesting a legal separation, Elizabeth asserts her right to an identity and life separate from her husband, thereby troubling the imagined ideal of the category of wife; and she defines Anthony as an unfit and intolerable companion, thereby calling into question the infallible position of husband within the early modern household.

—Emily Sherwood, The Graduate Center, CUNY

In his anti-prelatical tracts of 1641-2 Milton had charged the established church with hypocrisy evident primarily in their ceremonial image, and in particular, their liturgical clothing. My intention in this paper is to highlight ways Milton’s writings against the formal ceremonies of the church exhibit an anxiety about performance and the role of its witnesses similar to the anxiety expressed by anti-theatrical writers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.  Anti-theatrical writers and Milton accused plays and the church respectively of hypocritical behaviour that transformed the audience or congregation from active participants to inert witnesses. Dress formed a significant part of the discourse employed against duplicity. My argument is that by looking at the performance of hypocrisy as revealed by antitheatricalists and Milton and by paying attention to the models of selfhood such performance made available, we can begin to think of audiences not as witnesses but as performers too.

—Naya Tsentourou, University of Manchester

http://opencuny.org/transformingidentities/2012/10/06/will-of-wit-or-wills-wit/

This paper is concerned with using mirrors to examine the markers of identity and the ways in which the self can be formed. The early modern period made regular use of the multiple meanings that the word ‘mirror’ connoted. The mirror, it is argued, ‘makes an early appearance in the vocabulary of the theologian’ where ‘it gives rise to a moral…discourse that charts out the capacity for self-examination’ and ‘develops the dialectic of essence and appearance’. The mirror’s involvement in any process of self-knowledge during this period is certainly contested, and creating links between selfhood and the mirror or its reflection should be approached with caution.  This paper will examine the complexities of the relation of the looking-glass to apparent expressions of ‘self’, such as the self-portrait, and will position these within a cultural and religious context. My argument centres on the distinction between external and internal notions of ‘self’, making a link between these and the extramission and intromission theories of vision. Beginning with the stories of Narcissus and Medusa, I will then discuss Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait and Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriageand I will suggest that the interplay of internal and external, often featuring the use of a mirror, is cleverly manipulated to display aspects of self, or self-exploration.  The images of these artists each, in some way, work to illustrate my central argument in which I propose to connect the distinction between internal and external, to the extramission and intromission theories of vision.

—Dr Faye Tudor, Independent scholar

Few architectural gems of the Renaissance have survived the wars, uprisings and conscious destruction by the many invaders from East and West that ravaged Poland. It is no wonder that the historical evidence for the existence of the first theatre in Poland presented by Jerzy Limon in his Gentlemen of a Company published in 1985 was met with interest and support and led to the creation of Theatrum Gedanense Foundation and the meticulous archaeological excavation from1997 to 2004. Limon  recognises the complexity of the problem presented by the issues concerning theatre reconstructions and according to him ‘architecture, both old and new, private, municipal and industrial, provides the key code to the city’s identity. Buildings become signs of narratives, signs of the past, the present and the future’. It is crucial that Limon sees the Gdansk Theatre Shakespeare project as a contribution to the city’s identity. A glance at the project’s aims gives us a proper insight into how carefully Theatrum Gedanense Foundation crafts its project identity. They intend ‘to build the Gdansk Shakespeare Theatre on the historic site of the original building, which was built in the early 17th century. That playhouse was a remarkable example of the city’s culture in the period when it flourished, and a culture that the reconstructed theatre will both commemorate and revive’. Thus the project looks into the past which is manifested by nostalgia for the lost identity of the Golden Age of the city and expresses the desire to recapture the culture that was lost. Nevertheless, the Gdansk Shakespeare Theatre will not become an early modern replica but state-of-the-art modern centre for Shakespeare in performance and education. I will explore the reasons behind this transformation.

—Alexsandra Sakowska, King’s College London

1660 was a year of crisis for the Puritan colonies in New England. The Restoration represented a political threat; leading members of the founding generation were dying; and a doctrinal crisis was brewing over the criteria for accepting the next generation for baptism.
In addition, the colonies came under spiritual attack. The arrival of Quakers in Massachusetts from 1656 represented a new type of challenge, because rather than criticising New England Puritanism for its religious radicalism, they denigrated it as conservative and reactionary. Furthermore, they did so using the same rhetoric and arguments that Puritan radicals had previously directed against the English religious establishment. I will argue that as a result, they were treated as a serious threat to the dominant colonial powers, because they usurped and rewrote the narratives that the colonists had constructed about their own spiritual history as a people, and did so at a time when their image of themselves was already under threat.

—Dr Alison Stanley, King’s College London

We often assume that religious conversion through baptism involved the transformation of an individual from one state to another. This paper examines the structure, contexts and language of a number of ‘stranger’ baptisms in early modern England to demonstrate that  this process was rarely (if ever) characterised in such terms. The problems the Anglican church appears to have had with ‘transformation’ in baptism stem, I suggest, from the prominence of a Calvinist-influenced conception of religious and cultural difference. The paper concludes with a close examination of the circumstance of the baptising of a ‘Turk’ (initially named Chinano, then William) in London in 1586, considering the unique structure created for this specific occasion, and arguing that the occasion depends upon Chinano’s articulation of the reasons for his conversion before the community of believers to which he seeks access. This articulation depends, in turn, on repeated reference to Biblical paradigms that deny any transformation – or indeed any conversion at all – and suggest instead a process of ‘conversation’ and rediscovery.

—Dr Matthew Dimmock, University of Sussex