In July Dr Harry Newman will be presenting papers at two major conferences. Abstracts Below:
Reading Conference in Early Modern Studies (9-11 July 2013) – Paper Proposal
‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’: Poetry and the Seal of Metaphor in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
How did Shakespeare and his contemporaries conceptualise the rhetorical figure of ‘translation’ or metaphor? I address this question by focusing on an aspect of the metaphorical language in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Critics such as Raphael Lyne have argued that Shakespeare’s comedy not only employs metaphor but investigates its role in the relationship between language and the mind. Bottom’s ‘translation’ transforms him into the ass with whom he shares an analogical affinity, and Theseus’s reference to how the poet’s imagination ‘bodies forth / The forms of things unknown’ can be interpreted as a metaphor for metaphor.
Dream’s engagement with the phenomenology of metaphor is nuanced by what I call the play’s ‘language of impression’, and in particular its images of the highly impressionable substance that was often associated with femininity, wax. Theseus’ declaration in the opening scene that Hermia is ‘but as a form in wax’ that has been ‘imprinted’ by her father produces an enduring image through which the play engages with themes of love, sexuality and generation. I argue that the sealing analogy functions not only as a simile for biological reproduction, but also as a figuration of several interrelated experiences of body and mind that were traditionally linked to sealing metaphorically. The recurring image of imprinted wax—a rhetorical as well as a sigillographic ‘figure’—even contributes to the play’s interrogation into the nature and effect of metaphors themselves.
Early Modern Paratexts conference, University of Bristol (26 July 2013)
‘[M]y intentions herein are honest and iust’: Prefacing Printed Gynaecological and Obstetrical Texts in Early Modern England
The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw an enormous proliferation of printed vernacular texts that discussed and illustrated the female reproductive organs. The production and circulation of these gynaecological and obstetrical texts, which included midwifery manuals such as Thomas Raynalde’s The Birth of Mankind (1545) as well as sections within large anatomical works like Helkiah Crooke’s Mikrokosmographia (1615), inflamed moral outrage, even within the medical establishment. Many people went so far as to denounce the publications as pornography. If there was a ‘stigma of print’ in this period, the disgrace associated with printing books that examined what Crooke calls women’s ‘obscoene parts’ was all the more acute.
This paper examines the ways in which the prefatory materials to these works negotiated and even exploited the anxieties attendant upon publishing women’s ‘secrets’ in early modern England. I consider how prefatory writers – not just authors but also translators and publishers – justified the publications to ‘legitimate readers’ (modest women and medical professionals) and admonished the intrusiveness of ‘illegitimate readers’ (laymen). In doing so, I illustrate that these writers employed rhetorical strategies which, while explicitly establishing the publications’ legitimacy, fetishized the books in order to make them more attractive to consumers driven by prurient curiosity. In particular, I focus on their use of metaphors that analogise the printing of gynaecological and obstetrical texts for public consumption with prostitution and child-birth, tropes deployed to express or deny feelings of embarrassment and even shame. Through such rhetoric, I argue, the prefatory writers constructed the books as erotic objects and thereby capitalised on their market potential.