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Renascence

Volume 71, Issue 3, Summer 2019

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Displaying: 1-4 of 4 documents


1. Renascence: Volume > 71 > Issue: 3
Teresa Hanckock-Parmer

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This article examines the discourse of enclosure utilized by Maria de San Jose (1656-1719, Puebla), Jeronima Nava y Saavedra (1669-1727, Bogota), and Francisca Josefa de Castillo (1671-1742, Tunja, Colombia) in their spiritual autobiographies. Despite dissimilar personal vocation narratives, these Hispanic nuns embraced enclosure as a tool of continuing spiritual advancement, both before and after actual profession of monastic vows. They portrayed the cloister simultaneously as connubial bedchamber and isolated hermitage, thus ascribing Baroque religious meaning to ancient anchoritic models through intersecting discourses of desert solitude, redemptive suffering, Eucharistic devotion, and nuptial mysticism. To attain ideal enclosure for self and others, these nuns advocated for reform in New World convents, which often reproduced worldly hierarchies, conflicts, and values. Enclosure, more than a symbolic vow or ecclesiastical mandate, constituted a formative practice that fostered correct action and attitude in nuns’ lives; these women conscientiously sought a cloistered life through which they cultivated holiness and created new spiritual meaning.

2. Renascence: Volume > 71 > Issue: 3
Terry W. Thompson

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Charles Dickens, considered by many the poet laureate for the poor and downtrodden of his time, had a great fondness for "religious and moral themes." As a result, "one does not have to read very far in either the major or minor works of Dickens to learn lessons contained in both the New and Old Testaments." Among his favorite biblical allusions are examples of the many hard "lessons" visited upon the rich and the powerful by a just God. One of the author's most resonating Old Testament references is to the "great feast" of King Belshazzar, the sixth century B.C. ruler of Babylon who loved gold and silver more than people, more than life itself. Allusions, subtle and otherwise, to this self-destructive tyrant appear—with telling effect—in several of Dickens's best-known novels, from A Christmas Carol to A Tale of Two Cities.

3. Renascence: Volume > 71 > Issue: 3
Ahmet Süner

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This paper looks at the thematic and rhetorical variations of a fundamental fear that frequently surfaces in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: the fear of illegitimate birth, which may also be understood as the fear of non-contractual sexuality. Sycorax is the prominent supernatural figure that the play deploys to depict unpredictable, indeterminate and horrible acts of creation unsanctioned by society. The paper shows how the fear of illegitimate birth not only shapes entire characters such as Sycorax and Caliban, but also infiltrates the language and figures that prevail in Prospero’s orchestrations of the marriage plot, his betrothal masque and his deployment of Greco-Roman mythologies (Hymen, Venus and Cupid). This fear is also connected with the play’s other fears and desires evoked in Gonzalo’s anarchist utopia and in the play’s preoccupations with the issue of legitimate government. The focus on the fear of illegitimate birth and non-contractual sexuality connects the different plot elements and rhetorical devices used in the play in a novel way, providing a plausible explanation for Prospero’s burst at Caliban in the masque scene and foregrounding (and hence doing justice to) the long-neglected figure of Sycorax.

4. Renascence: Volume > 71 > Issue: 3

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