Snapshot

Associate Professor Kate Narveson--an MPhil in history from London’s Warburg Institute and a PhD from the U of Chicago in Renaissance lit--also walks to work, but another of her joys is knitting sweaters of her own design.  A scholar who has published on seventeenth-century devotional poets such as Donne and Herbert, she's at work on a book manuscript, deciphering Renaissance handwriting to explore the way lay men and women used their biblical literacy to pen scriptural devotions that offered a new form of self-definition.  A classical violinist who has taken up fiddling at local folk dances, Kate’s recent marriage to a local solar electric specialist has added to the department’s voltage.

Thoughts on teaching

“Reading  maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.”

That claim by Francis Bacon, published in 1597, sums up the three activities at the heart of studying English. Reading fills our minds with new possibilities, but those possibilities remain a jumble until we try to express them to someone else. 

“Conference” in Bacon’s time could mean conferring or discussion, and discussion helps us sort out what we’ve read so it’s more ready to hand. “Conference” could also mean “bringing together for comparison,” and by bringing together a range of works over a semester, features are heightened through contrast or ring with fuller resonance. 

Finally, in discussion we may try out any number of claims that are in fact inconsistent with each other. So we write in order to explore significance, to see what the scattered details add up to exactly.

“what are you reading?” “words, words, words.”

That’s Polonius and Hamlet, my favorite literalist. The words we read in medieval and Renaissance lit courses offer us the stories that people told in England for “sentence” (moral insight) and “solace” (pleasure), to use Chaucer’s terms. (We still read for the same things, though Chaucer took delight in showing how complicated the relationship between the two is.) 

We talk about the way people and cultures make meaning through stories--meaning about gender, authority, true love, salvation, indigestion, self-reflection, nature, and so on. Since there’s quite a gulf between medieval or renaissance culture and our world, our first step is to talk about the kind of meaning that the texts are trying to make in their own terms. Then we can talk about how the stories challenge our assumptions. Like a foreign culture, fascinating in its strangeness and yet somehow still compelling and human, medieval and renaissance literature can stretch our brains in ways that literature closer to home might not.  Bon voyage!

Research Interests

My field of specialization is Elizabethan and early Stuart literature, and I have teaching expertise in medieval literature and Milton as well. I’ve published articles on poets like John Donne and George Herbert, on the trope of poetic immortality, and on conceptions of the body in devotional writing, among other topics. 

All of these studies have grown out of a fascination with the ways that senses of identity were shaped by reading devotional texts and attempting to apply their teachings. Devotional works mapped out how to act and they served as a lens through which people examined and explained their inner lives. 

Ultimately, I’d like to focus my research into two book-length studies. One looks at the results in England of the Reformation call for lay people to read Scripture. I’m studying how the clergy attempted to direct (and limit) lay reading, and how lay people, both men and women, transferred the skills and reading methods they were taught to their own writing projects, sometimes to the dismay of the clergy.

The “reading and writing culture” that I’m studying is one of the first in western history in which ordinary people, not professional writers or scholars, gained the necessary literacy to embrace writing as a way to explore and record their ideas. At the heart of the study is a 900-page manuscript by an Elizabethan gentlewoman. It’s never been published, and I’ve been working, along with student research assistants, to transcribe the manuscript and analyze her writing practices.

I’ve also started work on a book about how identity and emotion were understood in religious discourse, with special attention to where physiology and religion, body and soul, intersect. Scientific knowledge of the human body was changing dramatically during the seventeenth century, and poets sought new ways to talk about embodied experience.

I came to Luther after teaching for six years Mount St. Mary’s College in Maryland, and one of the draws was that here at Luther I get to teach both medieval and Renaissance literature, with a Shakespeare course every semester (and they’re paying me, too!). I’ve also been able to expand my interest in drama, leading a theater course to NYC in January 2003, and I get to continue working with first-year students, whose intellectual blossoming always delights and gratifies me, through my participation in Paideia I.

Writing Sample:

Here’s the opening of an article I published in Studies in Philology,  called “Flesh, Excrement, Humors, Nothing:  The Body in Early Stuart Devotional Discourse”:

Martin Luther celebrated the pleasures of the body as part of the goodness of creation. He also insisted that for salvation, what matters is the faith of the heart, not the works of the hand. These apparently contradictory attitudes toward the body have coexisted, often uneasily, in Protestantism ever since. For English Calvinism, though, the attitude that is probably most often taken as standard is captured by the emblem accompanying Francis Quarles’s poem “Behold thy darling” (V.8), in which a tiny robed figure is caged inside a skeleton, the soul the prisoner of the flesh. Recently, Debora Shuger has offered an alternative picture, seeing in George Herbert’s “Temple” habits of thought in which the body consists of the “persona” in an etymological sense, the exterior mask or facade that one displays by virtue of status, occupation, and familial relations, while the little man inside Quarles’s skeleton disappears, leaving an absence which Shuger calls the “pneumatic self,” an emptiness longing to be filled by God’s spirit. Yet another version of early modern religious attitudes toward the body, again drawing on Herbert, has been presented by Michael Schoenfeldt. Working from basically Foucauldian premises, he discovers a body that tends to engross the little man inside. Or, to put it in Schoenfeldt’s terms, the body constitutes the experience of subjectivity; Schoenfeldt remains agnostic about whether there is in fact anything in that cage of flesh.

It is, however—as Katharine Eisaman Maus has demonstrated—important to insist that early modern believers had a well-developed sense of interiority.  And that insistence does not mean that we cannot recognize that identity extends further, encompassing the sense of selves as bodies and actors.  When George Herbert insists, for instance, that he and his brethren must “show holy” by “dipping and seasoning all our words and sentences in our hearts before they come into our mouths,” we sense that he writes from an conception of outward and inward that traces the lines of connection differently than we do as post-Romantics and post-Freudians. One can, apparently, fashion or “season” sincere outward expression—there can be a direct line from the heart to the mouth. I will argue not only that we should question the assumption that body is necessarily opposed to soul in religious discourse but also that the alternatives presented by Shuger and Schoenfeldt—the emptying of the skeleton—fail to recognize that religious conceptions of the body involved a variety of occasionally cross-fertilizing discourses. In what follows, I examine four major modes of discussing corporeality, and I too use Herbert as a test case .