This article argues that Mary Wroth, through her lyric sequence’s first song, defines poetic immortality as necessarily multimodal in the broadest sense, equally reliant on its literary intertexts and its material forms. The essay draws attention to the poem’s engagement with material writing practices, memorial customs, and literary connections, culminating with the self-penned epitaph Wroth’s speaker uses to close the poem. In so doing, this essay positions Wroth’s work, often read as self-consciously disengaged from her literary coterie, in a broad conversation about poetry’s capacity to endure as an object of imitation and affiliation.
"Refraining Songs" reappraises the role of the songs in Sidney's Astrophil and Stella as they reveal Sidney's own theoretical views on narrative in lyric and strengthen the case for the 1598 ordering of the poems. These formally diverse lyrics interspersed among the sonnets both narrate the more important events of Astrophil and Stella's affair while also acting as interruptions or extended articulations of Astrophil's overburdened emotional state. This essay reconciles these divergent capacities of the songs, arguing that Sidney uses the songs to create an opposition between narrative and lyric in order to explore narrative's effects upon poetic sequence. Complicated by shifts within and juxtapositions of poetic form in the sequence, narrative itself becomes a lyric refrain as events are written and rewritten, creating a recursive narrativity that Sidney exploits for innovative possibilities of genre.
This essay investigates how different leavening agents were used in early
modern English devotional, culinary, and medicinal contexts. Baking
bread leavened through various means in the modern kitchen offers insight
into the historical processes that made leaven and its physical effects so
telling for medical practitioners, home cooks, and devotional writers of
the time. In discovering a complex and contradictory history of leaven in
early modern life, this essay argues that the baker and believer must rely
on their own physical and faithful experiences to employ the right leaven
the right way for bread or belief. The domestic practice of using leaven
becomes a method of spiritual knowing which early modern practitioners
could express across their culture’s most central spaces.
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