Abstract

This dissertation focuses on frames and glass to examine the relationship between figurative and technical invention in the early modern period. Frames, mirrors, and windows have been pervasive and enduring metaphors for texts from antiquity to modernity; as such, these metaphors seem universally to emphasize the mimetic function of representation, dividing reality from the text that represents it. Identifying those metaphors with an aesthetic strategy that has naturalized not only the work of art, but historical periods as well, I argue that sixteenth-century poetry defined its relation to matter and craft in terms of an older form of framing or tempering. My aim is not to chart the survival of medieval forms into the Renaissance, but to situate texts among the technical arts of the sixteenth century. In particular, the relationship of figurative language to material innovations in glassmaking demonstrates how the social and intellectual concerns of poetic invention were inflected by craft and technology. ;Unlike its modern counterpart, sixteenth-century framing did not enforce divisions of art from craft, thought from matter, subject from object, but palpably evoked a thing in its making. Chapter one charts the etymology of the word frame alongside material changes in picture frames, demonstrating that older uses of frame are structural rather than encasing and linguistic rather than visual. Locating frame within a network of related words---fashion, mould, and temper---chapter two describes the materialist poetics of framing in sixteenth-century poetic theory and in Spenser. Chapter three documents the impact of technical innovations in glass on discursive craft in Bacon's scientific writing, Gascoigne's Steel Glass, and Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie. Chapter four argues that conceits of glass in Shakespeare's Sonnets reveal poetic invention to be a technical and social process, rather than a prototype of aesthetics. The coda examines three prose texts by Lyly, Nashe, and Montaigne where the figure of the empty frame reproduces social and material hierarchies of service, craft, and praise even as it reveals a new form of proprietary authorship taking shape