Representing ruins in English Renaissance literature: Empire, identity and the legacy of the English Reformation, c.1530-c.1660

遗址--腐朽的建筑、城市和文化的物质遗迹--至少自罗马帝国垮台以来，一直是西欧艺术和文学中反复出现的主题，在现代早期，罗马遗址激发了法国、意大利和低地国家的诗歌和绘画的涌现。然而，英国在这一时期的废墟经历非常独特，与其说是罗马废墟，不如说是罗马天主教的废墟，这些废墟是在15世纪30年代英国宗教改革期间被镇压的650座修道院的废墟。修道院的解散是英国文学中代表废墟的决定性事件，其重要性反映在后来作品的标题中，如奥斯汀的《诺桑觉寺》(1798-19年)和华兹华斯的《丁丁修道院》(1798年)。然而，尽管废墟被广泛认为是哥特式和浪漫主义文学中的一个重要主题，但它们对我们理解英国文艺复兴时期文学的意义在很大程度上被忽视了。斯宾塞和莎士比亚对作品中的废墟有一些批判性的认识，但还没有一本书那么长的研究来研究它们在早期现代文学中的意义。这个项目对这个未被探索的话题进行了深入的评估，调查了在15世纪30年代修道院解体后的漫长的一个世纪里，废墟是如何以及为什么出现在英国文艺复兴时期的文学中的。虽然它承认法国和意大利代表罗马遗址的模式对英国文学的影响，但它也证明了英国新教改革的独特经历及其对英国文学代表罗马遗址的影响。批评人士认为，英国文艺复兴时期的文学遗址反映了这一时期的古董兴趣。但废墟不仅仅是一扇通往过去的窗户；它们也是一面镜子，反映了现在的未来命运，它们的脆弱性提醒人们文明的衰落和衰落。正是作为对早期现代帝国努力的虚荣心的评论，法国文艺复兴诗人约阿希姆·杜贝莱在16世纪中期阅读了罗马过去的废墟，在这个项目中，我追溯了这种视角在新教英格兰的特定背景下的翻译，以及它自己在早期现代时期作为帝国的自我形象。在废墟中，这个项目读到了英国文艺复兴时期写作中的一股激进的暗流，质疑和批评它似乎支持的帝国的构建。该项目将这种处理废墟的方法与目前有关都铎王朝和斯图亚特王朝时期英国国家形成机制的批评性辩论进行了对话，驳斥了最近的一系列批评，这些批评认为英国文艺复兴时期的文学在很大程度上支持了英国对不列颠和爱尔兰的帝国野心。它的发现将对我们了解和理解英国文学和英国身份做出重大贡献，它的重点是遗址，揭示了早期现代文学中对英国帝国意识形态的抵抗。该项目将设在赫尔大学，那里的安德鲁·马维尔中心为中世纪和早期现代时期的跨学科研究提供了一个既定的框架，关于马维尔的大量档案资源也存放在赫尔历史中心。马维尔是一位诗人和政治家，与赫尔有着终身的联系，他与赫尔和约克郡中世纪修道院废墟的关系是该项目的关键焦点。除了专著《毁灭的文艺复兴文献：斯宾塞到马维尔》外，该项目的发现还将通过一篇关于马维尔的期刊文章、会议论文和学术会议，以及与赫尔历史中心和领先的马维尔专家奈杰尔·史密斯教授(普林斯顿)合作制作的学校会议、公开讲座和‘马维尔与中世纪赫尔’公开展览来传播。

Ruins - the material remains of decayed buildings, cities, and cultures - have been a recurrent theme in the art and literature of Western Europe since at least the fall of the Roman Empire, and in the early modern period Roman ruins inspired an outpouring of poems and paintings across France, Italy, and the Low Countries. Britain's experience of ruins in this period was highly distinctive, however, defined less by Roman ruins than by the Roman Catholic ruins of the 650 abbeys suppressed during the English Reformation in the 1530s. The Dissolution of the Monasteries was the defining event for representations of ruins in English literature, its significance reflected in the titles of later works like Austen's 'Northanger Abbey' (1798-9) and Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey' (1798). Yet while ruins are widely acknowledged as an important motif in Gothic and Romantic literatures, their significance for our understanding of English Renaissance literature has been largely overlooked. There has been some critical recognition of ruins in writing by Spenser and Shakespeare, but no book-length study charting their significance in literature across the early modern period. This project offers an in-depth assessment of this underexplored topic, investigating how and why ruins were represented in English Renaissance literature within the long century following the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s. While it acknowledges the influence on English literature of French and Italian models for representing Roman ruins, it also argues for the distinctiveness of England's experience of the protestant Reformation and its impact on English literary representations of ruins. Critics have argued that ruins in English Renaissance literature reflect the antiquarian interests of this period. But ruins were more than a window onto the past; they were also a mirror reflecting the future fate of the present, their fragility a reminder of the decline and fall of civilisations. It is as a comment on the vanity of early modern imperial endeavour that the French Renaissance poet Joachim Du Bellay read the ruins of Rome's past in the mid-sixteenth century, and in this project I trace the translation of this perspective to the particular context of protestant England and its own self-image as an empire in the early modern period. In ruins, the project reads a radical undercurrent in English Renaissance writing that questions and critiques the constructs of empire it appears to support. The project brings this approach to ruins into dialogue with current critical debates about the mechanics of British state-formation under the Tudors and Stuarts, arguing against a stream of recent criticism that sees English Renaissance literature as largely supportive of England's imperial ambitions over Britain and Ireland. Its findings will make a significant contribution to our knowledge and understanding of both English literature and English identity, its focus on ruins revealing sites of resistance in literature to England's imperial ideology in the early modern period. The project will be based at the University of Hull, where the Andrew Marvell Centre offers an established framework for interdisciplinary research in the medieval and early modern periods, and where significant archival resources on Marvell are housed at the Hull History Centre. Marvell is a poet and politician with lifelong connections to Hull, and his relationship to the medieval monastic ruins of Hull and Yorkshire is a key focus for the project. Alongside the monograph 'Renaissance literatures of ruin: Spenser to Marvell', the project's findings will be disseminated through a journal article, conference paper and academic conference on Marvell, and through a school session, public lecture and the public exhibition 'Marvell and medieval Hull', produced in partnership with the Hull History Centre, and in collaboration with the leading Marvell expert, Professor Nigel Smith (Princeton).