Browsing by Author "Campana, Joseph A."

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    A Sovereign Menagerie: Political Theology, Charismatic Authority, and the Animal Turn in Early Modern Drama
    (2020-10-26) Ellis-Etchison, John Weslee; Campana, Joseph A.
    This dissertation contends that in order to properly understand how core political notions like sovereignty, authority, and agency were construed in early modern England, we must examine critically the deployment of nonhuman life in popular texts of the period. Engaging a body of recent work that posits the theater of Shakespeare’s time as uniquely evocative of pressing contemporaneous issues, I analyze plays by Shakespeare and his peers to illustrate the political significance of early modern animal tropes. My reading of these plays draws from scholarship in animal studies as well as a broad range of genres from early modern print culture, including natural histories, political philosophies, theological texts, conduct books and manuals, and even cheap print joke books. In one way or another, these texts situate nonhuman life as a vital co-contributor to human political experience. Renaissance drama consistently stages dilemmas of sovereignty within different contexts. I argue that representations of sovereign figures—which I extend to include rulers and tyrants as well as citizens and criminals—and depictions of dilemmas of sovereignty—including the establishment and maintaining of charisma or legitimacy—must be understood with respect to depictions of nonhuman life. In chapters that explore how early modern thinkers define the categories of “animal,” “monster,” “beast,” and “vermin,” I examine the ways these operational taxonomies of nonhuman life inform and are informed by socio-political and economic rites and rituals. Specifically, I analyze depictions of the etiquette of the royal hunt, metaphors of butchery, theories of commodification, and modes of dissimulation to prove that nonhuman identities are central to the legitimacy, authority, and most importantly charisma of different figures of sovereignty in the works of William Shakespeare, John Webster, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Middleton. In sum, my project expounds upon those ways that early modern animal studies has considered the political lives of nonhumans, by explicitly interrogating what sovereignty looks like in relation to these different existential categories. Moreover, through my insistence that sovereignty is available to diverse forms of hierarchized life, this dissertation also deconstructs common understandings of how sovereignty functions at different scales and in different contexts to re-imagine a pliable theory of sovereignty that is attentive to the intricacies of class, gender, and species difference, while remaining attuned to the implications of establishing an expansive, intersectional definition of political community.
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    The Metamorphosis of Monsters: Christian Identity in Medieval England and the Life of St Margaret
    (2015-03-26) Heyes, Michael Edward; Fanger, Claire; Kripal, Jeffrey J.; Campana, Joseph A.; Clements, Niki K.
    This dissertation examines several late medieval Lives of St. Margaret written in England to show that the monsters of the Life offer both a synchronic and diachronic perspective on the construction of Christian sexual identity in both professional religious and lay communities in medieval England. St. Margaret was one of the most popular saints in medieval England, and monsters play a key role in her martyrdom. Throughout her narrative, Margaret is accosted by a demonic prefect, hungry dragon, and loquacious black demon. Having defeated each monster in turn, she is taken to the place of her martyrdom where she prays for supernatural boons for her adherents. As a virgin martyr, Margaret’s resistance to these monstrous aggressors (and the suffering which she undergoes as a result) is the most important aspect of her story: not only does it represent Margaret’s raison d’être, but also the source of the virtus that benefits her cult. Previous scholarship has focused on Margaret’s resistance to Olibrius as a means to understand her impact on the identities of her virginal or maternal adherents, and on Margaret’s speech and deeds as important socio-cultural data which can be used to inform the context of Margaret’s medieval readers. This dissertation also treats each version in question as a source for information on Margaret’s medieval audience, but rather than concentrating upon Margaret’s speech and actions as previous research has, this dissertation instead focuses on the monsters that populate Margaret’s Life. This focus allows a new evaluation of Margaret’s simultaneous appeal to virgins and mothers through the polysemous figure of the dragon, the didactic elements of the black demon’s speech, the competing claims of religious identity in the figure of Olibrius, and the importance and content of the prayers at the end of Margaret’s Life for her maternal adherents. Equally important is that the diachronic focus of the dissertation reveals that while Margaret herself seems to change little over time – showing a slow metamorphosis from demonic adversary to maternal advocatrix – the monsters are more volatile, changing character as needed to create a narrative that constantly exists in the reader’s present.