'The dangerous division of men's minds': Attention and distraction in late-Elizabethan romances and their readers

在早期的现代欧洲，人们普遍担心走神和注意力不集中。人文主义教育者为头脑不集中的学生而烦恼，而宗教思想家则痴迷于消除他们虔诚生活中的干扰。在伊丽莎白时代晚期的英格兰，流行的浪漫故事成为人们特别关注的注意力分散的目标。蒂凡尼·沃斯展示了教育界和教职机构如何将浪漫风格与天主教、放荡和诱人的女性气质联系在一起。然而，很少有人讨论分心恐惧症，这种恐惧症是反浪漫言论的特征。浪漫阅读被指责会导致不正当的精神错乱、沉浸在幻想中，以及对更有价值的材料的松懈关注。相反，正如格拉夫顿和怡和所指出的，认真的人文主义阅读需要“全神贯注”。言情小说也因心不在焉的主人公和离题的叙事线索而受到诋毁。我的研究调查了反浪漫话语是如何与早期现代思想联系在一起的，这些思想关于注意力集中和分心的精神状态的心身本质和伦理价位，以及浪漫是如何开玩笑地利用这些思想的。我认为，斯宾塞、西德尼、弗罗斯和阿里奥斯托的浪漫故事(通过哈灵顿)在注意力的缺失中找到了一种浪漫的、颠覆性的潜力。娜塔莉·菲利普斯(Natalie Phillips)(《分心》，2016)和帕特里夏·斯派克(Patricia Spack，《无聊》，1995)研究了18世纪后期的分心历史。然而，除了加里·库查尔关于赫伯特的作品和拉斐尔·莱恩关于莎士比亚的作品外，16世纪的分心之处仍然没有被发掘。将早期的现代分散注意力置于教育、宗教、政治甚至医学背景的网络中，我的目标是将阅读的历史--以及浪漫在其中的地位--与心智的历史进行相互启发的对话。

Anxieties about mind-wandering and attention failure were pervasive in early modern Europe. Humanist pedagogues fretted over scatter- brained students, and religious thinkers obsessed over the elimination of disturbances from their devotional regimens. In late Elizabethan England, popular romance narratives became the target of particular concern about distraction. Tiffany Werth has shown how the pedagogical and clerical establishments associated the romance genre with Catholicity, dissipation, and seductive femininity. However, there has been little discussion of the phobia of distraction which characterised anti-romance discourse. Romance reading was accused of inducing devious mental straying, absorbed reverie, and lax attention to worthier materials. Conversely, as Grafton and Jardine note, serious humanist reading required "strenuous attentiveness." Romances were also maligned for being intrinsically distracted, with their absent-minded protagonists and digressive narrative strands. My research investigates how anti-romance discourse was bound up with early modern ideas about the psychosomatic nature and ethical valences of attentive and distracted states of mind, and how romances playfully engaged those ideas. I suggest that romances by Spenser, Sidney, Wroth, and Ariosto (via Harington) find a ludic, subversive potential in failures of attention. The later, 18th-century history of distraction has been investigated by Natalie Phillips (Distraction, 2016) and Patricia Spacks (Boredom, 1995). However, excepting the work of Gary Kuchar on Herbert and Raphael Lyne on Shakespeare, 16th- century distraction remains unexplored. Situating early modern distraction within a nexus of pedagogical, religious, political, and even medical contexts, I aim to bring the history of reading-and romance's position therein-into mutually illuminative dialogue with the history of mind.