Modern Philology

This article takes as its point of departure what Bataille calls the “nauseating banality” that flowers are both symbolic of everlasting love and comically short-lived. The comparison of women to flowers in early modern lyric, already by the sixteenth century veering into the territory of cliché, often explicitly thematized—rather than trying to gloss over—the proximity of flowering to withering, a proximity highlighted by the French equivalents of those words, fleuri and flétri. In both Petrarchan and carpe diem traditions, female figures were both essential and essentially expendable. Even the most conventional love poems failed to stay on this side of garbage, as wispy images of women became disfigured into decaying organic material in the space of a single sonnet. Focusing on poems by Pierre de Ronsard and Robert Herrick, I show how these very different poets were engaged in the same misogynist cultural project, a project that takes as a premise that the smooth transition of women from vibrant matter to rotting trash is remarkable in its unremarkableness. These poets, I argue, approached the woman-flower trope with a desire and disdain comparable to their sentiments for the women their poems represented. Viewing women as neither invitingly immediate nor ethereally inaccessible, treating their bodies as dead weight or garbage rather than as property of any value, these poets used the timeless ephemerality of both women and cliché to negotiate their own ambivalence to poetry and immortality.

Divination shapes the central political concerns of Julius Caesar in ways that scholars have not appreciated while drawing on some of the epistemological dissonance of early modern natural philosophy. Divination also contributes to a typological structure in which the fall of Julius Caesar gives rise to the Roman Empire under Octavius “Augustus” Caesar, whose peaceful rule in turn establishes the conditions in which Christianity emerges. In subjecting signs of divination to theatrical representation—to embodied movement, dialogue, and musical performance—Shakespeare transforms the cognitive dissonance of early modern natural philosophy, especially in efforts to discern the Book of Nature, into aesthetic signs that can be received and interpreted by playgoers. Shakespeare’s tragedy attempts to realize the inexpressible through performance while depending on an ambiguous system of signs in which human action and thought remain both unfathomable and unknown.

How does literature bestow associations on a place, and why do readers believe they can derive value from visiting a place with literature in mind? These journeys are not made simply to preserve literary memory, readers need only reopen their book for that, so what is the effect of these attempts to tie the literary to the historical place? And how does this manifest itself in the accounts visitors write about their experience? I look for answers to these questions through a specific example: the abbey of Vallombrosa, which features in a much-admired simile in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674). The abbey’s growing popularity with literary tourists in the eighteenth century was supported by two historical factors: the growth of travel to Italy, first in the Grand Tour then in mass tourism after Waterloo; and the increasingly author-centered appreciations of Milton’s epic. In the first part I establish how and why the abbey became a site of literary pilgrimage, and in the second I examine authors’ reactions to visiting Vallombrosa in the decades before and after the continental wars; the authors considered include William Beckford, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The third part considers the response of William Wordsworth, who tried to go to Vallombrosa once, failed, wrote a poem in his disappointment, and then visited seventeen years later. The poetry and prose published by visitors to Vallombrosa display a varied but consistent sense that literary memory and physical fact cannot easily coalesce: something must be effaced.

This essay complements recent studies of Milton’s ontology by exploring the ways, hitherto ignored, in which the mind exceeds its role as a mere partaker of the poem’s “one first matter all” ontology by autonomously transforming the motion it finds in the world into inner succession. In Paradise Lost the mind’s self-conscious act of transformation is situated in the present moment, the now, and is the poem’s condition for regeneration. Milton’s representation of regenerative motion is modeled on Aristotle’s theory of change, in which change is an aspect of time, or rather its matter. The mind organizes motion in succession by dividing it into moments of presentness, or nows. In Milton’s representation motion is similarly the matter of time, which is divided into nows. Yet unlike Aristotle, for Milton the perception of motion depends on the individual’s moral stature. In Paradise Lost, it is only the unfallen mind that is capable of grasping motion and transforming it into internal change. The fallen mind loses its capacity to use the now as the connecting medium of transformation and, as a result, fails to constitute a concept of inner motion. Contingent on free will, the now remains a potential of future transformation of objective into subjective succession. After postlapsarian Adam has repented, he regains his capacity to organize motion in succession through the now and begins his journey back to God. Satan, who chooses not to repent, remains forever captured within his distorted structure of Milton’s Aristotelian form.

In a note in a recent fascicle of Mnemosyne, Neil Bernstein examines a series, perhaps what might even be called a system, of similes related to the image of light reflected on water. In this article, I explore the rich reception history of the specific version of the simile that runs from Apollonius to Vergil to Silius, from Medea in Argonautica 3.755–60 to Aeneas in Aeneid 8.18–25 to Hannibal in Punica 7.141–45, on into Renaissance vernacular epic, and further, back into Latin translations of those same epics. Along the way, I underscore how authors from Homer to Camões (and beyond), in both prose and poetry, develop the imagery of “light on the water” in order to trope their engagement with and contribution to a complex, dynamic tradition of multidirectional metaliterary gestures.

In 1451, Eneas Sylvius Piccolomini claimed that heralds were first created and their rights established by Dionysus during his sojourn in India. The story was widely copied, printed, translated, and adapted well into the sixteenth century. While its original intent is uncertain, one early reader, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, used the story to ridicule heraldic claims to ancient authority. This is also true of James Sandford’s translation of Agrippa’s text, but a manuscript excerpt of the translation, which survives in London, British Library, Harley MS 2076, changes the tone of the story. The unique context of “The Originall of Herawldes” not only presents Piccolomini’s text as a simple statement of heraldic rights and privileges, but the Harley text demonstrates that Sandford’s work circulated in manuscript, perhaps before it was available in print.

With the aid of Jacqueline Cox, keeper of Cambridge’s University Archives, I have discovered a letter of George Herbert, dated April 24, 1620, to James Tabor, registrary of the University of Cambridge. The letter exists in a file of the vice chancellor’s court records of 1616–20, the bulk of which are dated 1619–20. In this period, the vice chancellor presided over the university court and heard cases affecting scholars and “privileged persons.” One common request to the vice chancellor’s court was to grant the title of “privileged person” to “scholar’s servants” of gentlemen, of heads of colleges, and of other dignitaries of the university (Herbert having become orator on January 21, 1620). The granting of the title of “privileged person” to a scholar’s servant gave the petitioner the right to retain the servant at Cambridge. George Herbert’s letter of April 24, 1620, is a request to University Registrary James Tabor to admit “Ed. Parrat” as a scholar’s servant. This letter provides new light on Herbert’s seriousness in undertaking the oratorship in 1620. The letter and entries in the Act Book’s “Register of Admissions to Privilege” show that Herbert maintained scholar’s servants throughout his time as orator, including late in 1626. The documents invite further consideration of his career at Cambridge, as well investigation of the lives of servants there.