Browsing by Subject "Renaissance"
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Item “Bless Us All, ‘Tis A Mad World”: Mad Tom O’ Bedlam, Music, And The Politic Of Noise In Seventeenth-Century London(2022-03) Nelson, JosephMusic and noise often operated as divergent sonic experiences for those living in seventeenth-century London. The degree to which people thought of music as noise often depended on the stylistic conventions of heavily class-inscribed music such as courtly dances. Music for rural dances, including folk/traditional music, was far more often associated with disorderly characters such as beggars and vagabonds. However, music and noise operated on a spectrum of sonic experiences that often ran parallel to notions of social and political disorder. This dissertation explores the connections between music, sound, and the politics of noise through a study of Poor Tom o’ Bedlam, or Mad Tom, and the sonic environment of Bethlem Hospital. This includes a history of Tom from the sixteenth-century rogue pamphlets and William Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606) to Restoration broadside ballads and eighteenth-century political pamphlets. Through analysis and close reading of music, images, and texts associated with Mad Tom, it becomes clear that the circular associations of madness, noise, and disorder in his songs run parallel to wider attitudes toward the poor, street culture, and class in London. Finally, these associations survived well into the eighteenth century and still impact how people think of madness, noise, and politics today.Item The Forest and Social change in Early Modern English literature, 1590–1700.(2009-05) Weixel, Elizabeth MarieThe Forest and Social Change in Early Modern English Literature, 1590-1700 , recasts the green world of the early modern forest in a historical framework and in a literature of landscape that shaped conceptions of social power in England. I argue that Renaissance poets employ forest imagery and settings in ways that register a slow decline of land-based aristocratic influence and accompanying social markers. At a time of struggle between the Crown and the nobility, growing influence of the middle ranks, and evolving economic and political ideas, literary depictions of forests build upon the unrest associated with historical forests to suggest new social arrangements. The dissertation traces this convergence of landscape, literature, and social rank in forest law and forestry manuals, stage comedy, romance epic, brief biblical epic, and country house poetry. Chapter 1 examines forest law and an arboricultural treatise and demonstrates that their silent omission of aristocratic interests reveals a shift in thought about social power and influence tied to the English landscape. Chapter 2 examines dukes in the woods of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It and argues that forests harbor authority that transcends the social structure and is accessible to characters outside circles of power and privilege. Chapter 3 shows how the intertextual depiction of two failed forest squires in Book VI of Spenser's The Faerie Queene reflects doubt about the long-term efficacy of aristocratic social dominance and the promise it offers for personal and social advancement. Chapter 4 places the banquet temptation of Milton's Paradise Regained in the context of country house poetry by Lanyer, Jonson, and Marvell, and it traces how the poem subjugates the social hierarchy to an ideal of spiritual humility by blending religious dissent with the rumblings of social discontent latent in historical and literary forests.Item The Northern Renaissance Artistic Movement and Humoralism(2015) Hinkel, Heather; Matthews, Steve