In the sixteenth century, a period of proliferating transatlantic travel and exploration, and, latterly, religious civil wars in France, the ship is freighted with political and religious, as well as poetic, significance; symbolism that reaches its height when ships – both real and symbolic – are threatened with disaster. The Direful Spectacle argues that, in the French Renaissance, shipwreck functions not only as an emblem or motif within writing, but as a part, or the whole, of a narrative, in which the dynamics of spectatorship and of co-operation are of constant concern. The possibility of ethical distance from shipwreck – imagined through the Lucretian suave mari magno commonplace – is constantly undermined, not least through a sustained focus on the corporeal. This book examines the ways in which the ship and the body are made analogous in Renaissance shipwreck writing; bodies are described and allegorized in nautical terms, and, conversely, ships themselves become animalized and humanized. Secondly, many texts anticipate that the descriptionof shipwreck will have an affect not only on its victims, but on those too of spectators, listeners, and readers. This insistence on the physicality of shipwreck is also reflected in the dynamic of bricolage that informs the production of shipwreck texts in the Renaissance. The dramatic potential of both the disaster and the process of rebuilding is exploited throughout the century, culminating in a shipwreck tragedy. By the late Renaissance, shipwreck is not only the end, but often forms the beginning of a story.

At the end of the fifteenth century, the time of the first encounters between Old World and New, a new disease emerged in Europe. Its origins contested, syphilis spread rapidly through the Continent in the first half of the sixteenth century, and later went on to furnish a fitting metaphor for France's civil conflicts. This book draws together writing from a range of genres and across the decades, situating canonical literary texts among their medical and polemic contemporaries as it traces the interrelation of physical and metaphorical infection. The central image is that of a body politic ravaged by diseaseattributed by parties on either side of the religious divide to some form of "unnatural," immoral behavior in their adversaries. In early descriptions, syphilis was identified as other in its origin: the Italian physician Fracastoro termed it morbus gallicus (the French malady), while others identified Spain or Naples as the source of the new epidemic. In the context of the Wars of Religion, the impugned other was to be found closer to home. Cannibalism also proves to be a constant association, whether in the New World, where the Tupi observed by Thevet and L ery were identified as both practitioners of ceremonial anthropophagy and bearers of "la grosse v erole," or in Italy, where the "controversial surgeon" Fioravanti blamed the

This chapter examines the dynamics of shipwreck as played out in Renaissance travel writing. Through a reading of the work of Jean de Léry and the lesser-known Jean-Arnaud Bruneau de Rivedoux, it shows how in eyewitness or recently passed-on first-hand accounts of shipwreck, very real events were marked and shaped by the conventions established earlier in the century by allegorical, fictional and polemic shipwreck texts. But the extreme conditions of (actual) shipwreck place great strain on these otherwise persistent tropes, and both Léry’s and Bruneau’s Histoires generate new incarnations of once-familiar figures. Léry, for example, offers both a conventional narration of the storm at sea modelled on Psalm 107 and Erasmus’s ‘Naufragium’, and, later, several rearranged versions that point to the limitations of proverbial, classical, and biblical commonplace in such extraordinary circumstances. These texts, both written by Reformists intent on foregrounding their empirical approach, present the most forceful vindications of sea travel of all the texts studied here. While they describe vividly and often distressingly the suffering endured by seafarers and the victims of shipwreck, they also emphasise the value of such experience, and its power to affect even those who are spectators to it from dry land.

From the midst of France’s civil wars, and in their aftermath, the constellation of shipwreck, its victims, and its spectators is re-imagined in theatrical terms. Famously employed by Agrippa d’Aubigné in his Tragiques to disabuse complacent speculators of their illusion of distance from the disaster of civil catastrophe, the dramatic potential of earlier shipwreck texts is more fully realised in theatrical and meta-theatrical terms, as explored in this Conclusion. But whereas the shipwreck of Shakespeare’s Tempest demonstrates the power of compassion to produce embodied affect in its spectator, conversely a French tragedy that dramatizes a real-life tale of Portuguese shipwreck explores the troubling possibility of the spectacle failing to touch its intended audience. Drawing together the study’s thematic strands of corporality and narrative with this theatrical aspect, and pointing to questions of compassion and ethical responsibility that hold new weight in the light of Europe’s twenty-first-century refugee crisis, the Conclusion points to the new narrative position of shipwreck in the early decades of the seventeenth century: it lies at the beginning of the story, and begs the question of how readers, spectators, and their communities will respond.

<p>Scholarly accounts of sexuality in the ancient world have placed much emphasis on the normative dichotomy of activity and passivity. In the case of female homoeroticism, scholars have focussed largely on the figure of the so-called tribas, a masculinised, aggressively penetrative female who takes the active role in sexual relations with women. My thesis seeks to set out a wider conceptualisation of female homoeroticism that encompasses erotic sensuality between conventionally feminine women. The first chapter surveys previous scholarship on ancient sexuality and gender and on female homoeroticism in particular, examining the difficulties in terminology and methodology inherent in such a project. The second chapter turns to the Callisto episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, beginning with the kiss between the huntress Callisto and Jupiter, who is disguised as Callisto’s patron goddess Diana. The Callisto episode contains hints of previous intimacy between Callisto and Diana, and the kiss scene can be read as an erotic interaction between the two, both of whom are portrayed as conventionally feminine rather than tribadic. The third chapter examines several Greek intertexts for the Callisto episode: Callimachus’ hymns to Athena and Artemis, and the story of Leucippus as narrated by Parthenius and Pausanias. These narratives exhibit a similar dynamic to the Callisto episode, in that they eroticise the relationships both between Diana and her companions and amongst those companions. An educated reader of Ovid’s Metamorphoses would plausibly have had these Greek texts in mind, and would thus have been more likely to read the relationship between Diana and Callisto as homoerotic. Finally, the fourth chapter approaches Statius’ Achilleid from the perspective of female homoeroticism, a move without precedent in past scholarship. The relationship between Deidameia and the cross-dressed Achilles engages intertextually with the Callisto episode, presenting another exclusively female-homosocial environment in which homoerotic desires can flourish.</p>