All participants NM as of 9 May

This panel complements the other CLCS Renaissance and Early Modern session by focusing on the formal literary, gendered, and theoretical dimensions of insurrection, tyranny, and resistance. By looking at formal and theoretical aspects of literary texts and their circulation, these papers ignite larger conversations about the ways that political resistance to tyranny manifests in and transforms the world. Given the domestic terrorism of 6 January and the wildly varied responses to it, a more nuanced and historical understanding of the dynamics of insurrection, tyranny, and resistance seems vital. Drawing on the insights of literary scholarship, this panel engages important recent topics of criticism, from queer strategies of resistance to theories of sovereignty, to reimagine what equitable political structures might be. The panel will have a traditional structure of four fifteen-minute papers, leaving fifteen minutes for discussion at the end. Sonia Velazquez, “Appreciated but Not Understood”: The Poetic Politics of Lament in Cervantes and Ovid” Reading Miguel de Cervantes’ last novel, The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, this paper argues that inarticulate lamentation is a force of resistance and should not be assimilated to silence, as scholars often do. In Antiquity, as Nicole Loraux has shown, lament was the vanquished’s permissible last resort and a dangerous excess of emotion. I draw on Loraux and on Leah Whittington’s recent examination of suppliants but foreground the power of the paralinguistic—of sounds that are, as Hélène Merlin-Kajman puts it, still “on this side of language.” Not only do Feliciana de la Voz, her story, her poem and her song occupy a central place in the novel, but they embody a particularly rich version of voice, encompassing the sublime sound of her song, the words of her poem, and the abject sound of her gemidos (moaning). Her lament articulates the insufficiency of justice in this world. Juan Pedro Lamata, “Lieutenant Cutpurse: ‘a very dangerous type and problematic for good government’” This essay considers the literary and historical “lives” of two infamous early modern cross-dressing masterless women: Mary Frith (c. 1584—1659) aka ‘Moll Cutpurse’ and Catalina/Antonio Erauso (1585 or 1592—1650), who passed most of her life as a man in Spain’s American colonies, known in print and on stage as ‘la monja alférez,’ or, ‘the lieutenant nun.’ As violent, royalist, economically active and public female figures, Frith and Erauso embody contradiction. Women operating as men in male-dominated occupations; conspicuous lawbreakers who proved their undisputed loyalty to their respective kings; historical figures who exceeded the bounds of fiction; unruly, rebellious, masterless women who themselves served to master unruly rebel terrains—these socio-political actors test the limits of long-established political structures and cultural forms. Within different generic and discursive frameworks—plays, legal documents, autobiographies—Frith and Erauso illuminate the shifting ways land, labor, and property challenged long-established political structures. Sachini K. Seneviratne,, “Tyranny and Resistance in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure” As Thomas Smith writes in his 1583 De Republica Anglorum, one may be a tyrant ‘by his entrie and getting of the gouernement’ or ‘a tyrant by administration’. Measure for Measure multiplies the guises such tyranny takes. This paper builds on critics’ reading of marriage as punishment in Measure for Measure to show marriage as a complex legal resistance to tyranny while also helping the Duke exert sexual, perhaps even tyrannical, coercion. The paper will read the tyranny of the characters in the light of that outlined by contemporary writers such as Smith, drawing on Ciceronian notions of balance in punishment in On Duties. The paper will thus explore how the concept of marriage in the play, and how characters arrive at it, become the nexus of the tension between tyranny and resistance. Katie Adkison, “Tyranny, Sovereignty, and the End/s of War in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine” All sovereignty is tyrannous, or so thought Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe uses the Otherness of his Scythian warlord Tamburlaine to dramatize theorists’ distinctions, but he does so only to collapse the various political logics and ideologies in which Jean Bodin, Thomas Smith, and George Buchanan are invested. He interrogates these thinkers’ theories of power to suggest that any political distinction between sovereignty and tyranny operates in service of the status quo and ought to be questioned from the first. Placing Marlowe’s critique of early modern political theory in conversation with Jean-Luc Nancy’s argument that war is not the means of sovereign power but is its very ends, I conclude by reading Marlowe’s critique of the sovereignty/tyranny distinction as a gesture toward a political otherwise akin to what Nancy calls “being singular plural.”