The metropolis of popery: Writing of Rome in the English Renaissance.

摘要

This dissertation analyzes cultural receptions and literary representations of Renaissance Rome by exploring how diverse Tudor texts contributed to an "imaginative topography" of Roman monuments, personalities, rituals, and legends. Typically critics and historians have identified the city in monologic terms---Rome for early modern English writers is assumed to be Catholic and Antichristian. However, a thorough ambivalence characterizes these writers' attitudes, in part because of Rome's own complex ethos and partially for circumstantial reasons. English descriptions of Rome inevitably reflect their authors and their desired personas; thus this study reveals the complexities of confessional and literary identity in Italianate English texts. More broadly, the deteriorating relationship between Tudor monarchs and the Renaissance papacy increasingly made Rome a politically sensitive, poetically charged setting in mid-to late-sixteenth-century texts.;Chapter One features William Thomas and Thomas Hoby, two "Italianate" travelers whose surprisingly secular accounts of Rome reflect civic humanist aspirations. Despite critics' traditional pairing of these authors, I argue that key differences in age, social circumstance, and Protestant commitment explain why their senses of Rome (and its uses) in fact differ considerably.;Chapters Two and Three treat more polarized Elizabethan versions of Rome written after the founding of the English College there. My reading of Gregory Martin's Roma Sancta, a Counter-Reformation panegyric in English, identifies its many generic identities: guidebook and catechism for seminarians; urban polemic; and textual surrogate for English Catholics deprived of Roman ceremonies. Engaging in "confessional espionage," Anthony Munday and John Nichols wrote exposes of the new college. Their works substantiate conspiracies and confirm Rome's vice, superstition, and tyranny, but not without risks: Nichols is ruined by his Roman writings, while Munday begins to comprehend the possibilities of his setting for the writing of drama and fiction.;Chapter Four illustrates how "Roman knowledge" can reorient more canonical works, in this case Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. The play appropriates Rome's supernatural and infernal associations to condemn Faustus in a uniquely ironic mode. Concerned with the staging of the Vatican episode, my reading reveals how travel conventions and religious controversies not only heighten the play's spectacle, but also remark upon Faustus' character and damnation.