Title: The dramatization of the alphabet in the Renaissance
Description: The Dramatization of the Alphabet in the Renaissance argues that artistic experimentation with the alphabet had a sweeping impact on the intellectual and social history of the early modern period. I claim that the linking of letters and typography with bodies produces a new kind of literacy in audiences, which in turn expands narrative possibilities. This activity leaves virtually no artistic space untouched, including ideas themselves. Animated by the advent of letterpress printing, the question "What is an alphabet?" directs the currents of Renaissance thought and its visual expression. A comparative approach exposes a pan-European dialogue on the nature of letters among a widely eclectic group of Renaissance sources: Shakespearean drama; a French typography tract; German self-portraiture, Italian and German figured alphabets; various rebuses. Adding the unique contrastive perspective of a different alphabet, I also examine the Eastern Slavic traditions of Cyrillic alphabet acrostic poetry, reading primers, alphabet origin stories, and political alphabet reform. All of the works powerfully reveal the letter engaged with the human in relationships of equality to produce what I term the dramatization of the alphabet.

This study offers a new methodology for reading early modern texts and imaginative space which intensifies relationships among the graphic, phonological, lexemic, and thematic. It broadens the understanding of major canonical works---Shakespearean drama and Albrecht Dürer's Self-Portrait of 1500, for example---as well as of lesser known pieces through careful attention to the syntactic and semantic roles of their letters, and by demonstrating how these diverse works, brought together for the first time, attest to the rise of a specifically alphabetical early modern subject. In foregrounding the often unacknowledged importance of alphabetic issues and references, I suggest fresh realms of inquiry into alphabet phenomena within Renaissance studies that are also applicable to subsequent eras. The crucial contributions of the alphabet to all of intellectual and social history begin to take definition through an appraisal of diverse letter-related phenomena within the various genres of imaginative, political, and educational literature, and among the fine arts. With this interdisciplinary and comparative project, I seek ultimately to articulate a philosophy of the alphabet.