“Artifice in Edifice: Edmund Spenser’s Architectural Reading of Ormond Castle”

Kevin O'Sullivan, Associate Professor | English

Abstract:

When Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond, expanded his family’s Anglo-Norman castle in the 1560s, he installed overtly Tudor imagery, including numerous portraits of Elizabeth and Edward VI, into its decorative interior plasterwork. Ormond Castle thus became legible to its visitors as an embodiment of the earl’s heritage as a member of the Old English nobility whose family converted to the new Protestant faith and fostered close connections to the Tudor monarchy. This paper explores how Edmund Spenser read the poetic possibilities of this iconography and appropriated them to problematize the earl’s visual assertion of English Protestant identity in his sonnet to Ormond. This work is part of an ongoing project to reinterpret the dedicatory sonnets to the 1590 Faerie Queene where this poem first appeared.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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"Situating Tradition Aesthetically: Toward a Hermeneutic Theory of Aesthetic Value"

Haley Burke, Ph.D. Candidate | Philosophy

Abstract:
The following paper makes the case for a hermeneutic theory of aesthetic value. The author offers a critical stance on Nick Riggle’s recent work on the communitarian theory of aesthetic value. The communitarian theory is beneficial in that it accounts for what makes aesthetic value good; it is a social good. Riggle’s account, which is Schillerian in essence, is limited for its relinquishment of the object and for its pragmatic notion of sociality. With reference to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s critique of Friedrich Schiller’s aesthetic theory, the author to shows that the communitarian view falls prey to the same weaknesses. In response, the hermeneutic theory of aesthetic value offers a corrective to the communitarian view that anchors aesthetic value in the historical and epistemic import of aesthetic objects and provides a strong theory of normativity. The author demonstrates this in her concluding section focused on the aesthetic transformation present in travel writing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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