Rhetorical Delivery for Renaissance English: Voice, Gesture, Emotion, and the Sixteenth-Century Vernacular Turn

2015 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 1265-1296 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Wesley
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Emotional Contagion ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
Physical Defects ◽  
Rhetorical Delivery

AbstractIn the sixteenth century, perceptions of the English language changed from one of barbaric inadequacy to that of rare eloquence. Accounts for this shift tend to focus on literary or textual production, but this essay shows how these very linguistic concerns were motivated by the nonlinguistic practices appropriate to Latin rhetorical delivery(pronuntiatio et actio). The emotional contagion, legitimization of the inarticulate, cultural contextualization, and overcoming of natural physical defects that all stand at the heart of delivery here situate vernacular uplift at the corporeal level. The essay ends with an illustrative reading of William Shakespeare’sTitus Andronicus.

Vocal colour in English sixteenth~century polyphony

1979 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 19-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Wulstan
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Adult Male ◽  
English Language ◽  
Women's Voices ◽  
Tone Production ◽  
Vocal Quality

Genetical factors cannot be excluded from the forces which determine vocal colour. There is no reason to suppose, therefore, that English singing should resemble that of any other nation in all respects. The facility for falsetto singing (by adult male, boys' and women's voices), the paucity of ‘true’ tenor voices and the ‘duller’ tone production all may be cited as characteristic of English singing, and might have a genetical basis. Vocal quality would also be affected by the time at which boys' voices changed, and if Latin were superseded by the somewhat duller English language.

Morbid Jealousy: Some Clinical and Social Aspects of a Psychiatric Symptom

1961 ◽  
Vol 107 (449) ◽  
pp. 687-753 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Shepherd
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Psychiatric Symptom ◽  
English Language ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Green Is ◽  
French Word

Jealousy is more than a psychiatric symptom. Its language is universal: the conduct and feelings of the jealous man and woman have repeatedly drawn the attention of the great observers of human nature, the moralists and the philosophers as well as the poets and the novelists. They have, on the whole, described the reaction more successfully than they have defined it. Even the most celebrated definitions—Descartes' “kind of fear related to a desire to preserve a possession” or Spinoza's “mixture of hate and love”, for example— merely illustrate the complexity of a term whose many nuances of meaning can be detected in its roots. The English adjective “jealous” and the noun “jealousy” are derived respectively from the French “jaloux” and “jalousie”, both taken from the old Provençal “gilos”; “gilos” in turn may be traced back to the vulgar Latin adjective “zelosus” which comes from the late Latin “zelus” and so indirectly from the Greek ζηλoς. In its transmission the word has thus been debased. It has ceased to denote “zeal” or “ardour”; the “noble passion” which stood opposed to “envy” for the Greeks has acquired a pejorative quality. In modern German the distinction is preserved verbally, “Eifersucht” having been formed from the original “Eifer” (zeal) and the suffix “-sucht”, which is cognate with “siech”, meaning “sickly”. Amorous jealousy claims associations of its own. During the seventeenth century the French word “jalousie” acquired the meaning of “blind” or “shutter”; in this sense it entered the English language as a noun in the early nineteenth century; the transmutation is thought to have signified a jocular reference to the suspicious husband or lover who could watch unobserved behind the jalousie; the Italian word “gelosia” is used in this way as early as the middle of the sixteenth century. In the Scandinavian languages separate words designate amorous jealousy. (1) The Swedish “svartsjuk”, literally “black sick”, is taken from an old expression which identified jealousy with the wearing of black socks; the Danish “skinsyg”, “afraid of getting skin (a rebuff)”, harks back to an old link of jealousy with skin which may in turn have been connected with hose or socks. (2) The origin of the colours which are traditionally employed to depict jealousy, especially black, yellow and green, is obscure.

Poetry in the Oxford English Dictionary: A Quantitative Profile

2020 ◽  
pp. 57-80
Author(s):  
David-Antoine Williams
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Oxford English Dictionary ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
Background Data

This chapter analyses the background data of various editions of the Oxford English Dictionary in order to give a quantitative profile of the contribution of English poetry to the composition of the OED. In so doing, I attempt to disentangle as best as possible the three forces that shaped this relationship: the development of the English language, English textual production and its culture(s), and the practice of Oxford’s lexicographers.

Neighbor Hob and neighbor Lob

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-59
Author(s):  
Lindsey Marie Simon-Jones
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
English Language ◽  
Negative Reinforcement ◽  
History Of

Drawing on scholars like Paula Blank, Janette Dillon and Tim Machan, this article argues that, in the Tudor university and court plays of Shakespeare’s youth, the stigmatization of non-standard, dialect speakers demonstrates a cultural renegotiation of the contemporary linguistic climate. By defining the English language and the English people not against a foreign Other, but rather against the domestic, servile, and dialect-speaking Other, sixteenth-century playwrights demonstrated the threat of non-standard speaking and advocated the standardization of language through education while effecting cultural change through negative reinforcement. Keywords: Tudor drama; interludes; history of English language; dialect; university grammarians

scholarly journals Rethinking the ““Spectacle of the Scaffold””: Juridical Epistemologies and English Revenge Tragedy

2005 ◽  
Vol 89 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
LORNA HUTSON
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Jury Trial ◽  
Renaissance Drama ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
English Renaissance Drama ◽  
Lay Participation ◽  
Political Differences

ABSTRACT Michel Foucault's analysis of penal torture as part of a regime of truth production continues to be routinely applied to the interpretation of English Renaissance drama. This paper argues that such an application misleadingly overlooks the lay participation that was characteristic of English criminal justice. It goes on to explore the implications of the epistemological differences between continental inquisitorial models of trial and the jury trial as it developed in sixteenth-century England, arguing that rhetorical and political differences between these two models are dramatized in the unfolding action of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.

scholarly journals Sixteenth-Century Italian, French, Spanish and English Language Learning Material. A Bibliographical Study

Sederi ◽  
2013 ◽  
pp. 139-158
Author(s):  
Rocío G. Sumillera
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
English Language ◽  
Foreign Language Learning ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Learning Material ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
Selection Of

This bibliographical study offers a list of the first printed language manuals in Western Europe expressly designed to teach a particular foreign language to speakers of a particular tongue. Hence, the study lists references to sixteenth-century grammars, dictionaries and language handbooks with the possible linguistic combinations of Italian, French, Spanish and English, the first three being the most popular modern languages in sixteenth-century Western Europe and hence the most representative ones offering an insight into the foreign language learning map of the time. The bibliographical study is preceded by an introduction to the manner in which foreign tongues were taught and learned in the early modern period, and is completed by a selection of references to secondary sources that have been researched on each linguistic combination.

Manners and Mustard: Ideas of Political Decline in Sixteenth-Century Scotland

1995 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 242-263
Author(s):  
David Allan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
National Culture ◽  
English Language ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
The Self ◽  
Moral Outrage ◽  
The People

With an acidity wholly typical of the Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Samuel Johnson was to observe that “oats,” which “in England is commonly given to horses … in Scotland supports the people.” It has not unnaturally been the assumption of posterity that most eighteenth-century Scotsmen, by then the self-confident inhabitants of a newly civilised and enlightened community, would have been suitably offended by what has since become a notorious imputation of national plainness and pauperism. Yet there are, I want to suggest, substantial grounds for doubting this apparently straightforward conclusion. The meagreness of the early-modern Scottish diet had in fact always been a matter for the most determined moral pride. The elderly Jacobite, Mackintosh of Borlum, for example, had as recently as the 1720s responded to the increasing sophistication of the post-Union table with open disdain: “Formerly I had been served with two or three substantial dishes of beef, mutton, and fowl, garnished with their own wholesome gravy,” the suspicious old laird complained, but “I am now served up little expensive ashets with English pickles, Indian mangoes, and anchovy sauces.” Robert Monro of Opisdale, too, writing nearly a century before, in the 1630s, had described with palpable moral outrage the flagrant indiscipline and consequent military weakness of those Scottish soldiers in the armies of Gustavus Adolphus whose “stomackes could not digest a Gammon of Bacon or cold Beefe without mustard, so farre [they] were out of use.” And in Sir Walter Scott's Waverley (1814), surely the most influential examination of the national culture ever composed, it is also obvious that that patriotic pedant, the Baron of Bradwardine, offering hospitality to his young visitor at Tully-Veolan, the seat of ancient Scottish virtue, finds himself by no means embarrassed at being unable to “rival the luxuries of [his] English table.”

scholarly journals « Moy Traductrice » : le façonnement de la figure auctoriale dans le paratexte des traductions de Marie de Gournay

2013 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 119-134
Author(s):  
Jean-Philippe Beaulieu
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
Interpretive Frame ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Marie Le Jars de Gournay’s prolific textual production has attracted increasing scholarly attention in the last few years. One of the still relatively understudied parts of her oeuvre comprises the five translations from Latin that occupy 274 out of the 995 pages of her 1641 Advis. As Montaigne’s “fille d’alliance”, she seems to be mainly known for her French versions of the Latin quotations in the Essais; however, her own translations from Ovid’s Elegies or Virgil’s Aeneid have been largely overlooked, as well as the liminary writings—some of which prove quite substantial, as her De la façon d’escrire de Messieurs l’eminentissime Cardinal du Perron et Bertaut—where Gournay offers her remarks on the art of translation. In this essay, I wish to focus on these paratextual writings to examine the self-defining strategies employed by Marie de Gournay in order to legitimize her translation activities. Faced with the obstacles caused by “the little credit given to [her] sex”, as well as the specific challenges posed by her sources, Gournay interestingly presents her work as composed in “such an unscholarly season” (“une saison si peu studieuse”), that is at a time when the humanist ideals of the sixteenth century were no longer valued. This article seeks to attend to the ethos constructed through the dedications and other liminary pieces in the second book of the Advis, and to examine how Gournay’s discursive ethos serves to anticipate and guide the reception of her translations. In this context, paratexts should be viewed, not as mere accessories, but rather as an essential discursive framework for the interpretation of Gournay’s translations—it is actually quite clear from the arrangement of the volume that the liminary material was designed as a tight interpretive frame for the translated texts. This study will eventually allow us to determine the place of translation within the range of authorial practices embraced by Marie de Gournay.

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