Abstract: This essay juxtaposes Catherine of Aragon's self-created reputation during the height of her influence as queen consort (1509–1525) with her representation in literary works written over fifty years after her death. I consider how Thomas Deloney's Jack of Newbury, John Fletcher and William Shakespeare's King Henry VIII, and Richard Johnson's "The Story of Ill May-Day" preserve Catherine's

Abstract: The state-sanctioned murder of thousands of French Protestants in August 1572 had a profound impact on Elizabethan England's political and religious imagination. The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre was commemorated in prayers, pamphlets, poetry, and drama throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet Christopher Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris (1593) is routinely read as the exemplary

Abstract: This article examines the wells found in 1.7, 1.11, and 2.1–2 of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and reads them alongside the long and syncretic history of holy well ritual practices in England. The essay borrows Jonathan Gil Harris's notion of "polychronic objects" to argue that holy wells, which were used by pagans, Catholics, and Protestants on the British Isles, are multivalent symbols

Abstract: In the first half of the twentieth century, five scholars working in four different languages ascribed the anonymous 1592 tragedy Arden of Faversham to Thomas Kyd. Since 1963, however, attribution studies of Arden have been dominated by the influence of MacDonald P. Jackson, who has repeatedly rejected Kyd while attributing sections of the play to William Shakespeare. Thanks to Jackson, the

Abstract: A remarkable fact about William Shakespeare's The Tempest is that characters do not always see or hear the same thing. But while this estrangement of knowledge thins out the boundaries between character and environment to recognizably great dramatic effect, the aporetic energies underlying that estrangement are not yet fully understood. This article explores their significance by examining

Abstract: This article explores the authorship of knowledge in the late seventeenth century, with a focus on Dr. Edward Browne's (1644–1708) contributions to the Royal Society and travel literature. An analysis of the manuscript sources and ensuing printed accounts of Browne's 1668–1669 European travels gives rise to three key conclusions: firstly, that correspondence sent to the Society's secretary

Abstract: Elizabeth Singer Rowe's unusual exploration of the relationship between love, death, and the immortality of the soul in the Friendship in Death duology (1728–32) is generally deemed a pivotal contribution to the elevation of novel writing and reading in the English Protestant Enlightenment. Scholars tend to ascribe Rowe's unusual exploration only to her innovative appropriation of an extremely

Abstract: The rarely discussed Middle English poem “Alas, quid eligam ignoro” might be read as an estates satire, but it takes the form of a complaint. Two young men (a clerk and a layman) describe their seeming paralysis in the face of an impossible choice. In contrast to the usual strategy of estates satire, the poem does not view the moral failures of the professions from some kind of objective

Abstract: Stephen Hawes’s fusion of chivalric romance and personification allegory has long been recognized as his chief claim to originality in English literary history. The generic fusions of his work, however, have often led him to be viewed merely as a distant precursor to Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene rather than as an innovative poet in his own right. This article resituates Hawes’s poetic originality

Abstract: Scholars have spent considerable time grappling with the erratic sequence of events that comprise Redcrosse’s regeneration or spiritual rebirth in book 1 of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. While they have recognized the ecumenical dynamics of the knight’s spiritual progression, they have not accounted for the way in which his rebirth includes pitfalls and setbacks that disrupt its order

Abstract: The title of Michael Drayton’s Ideas Mirrour (1594) has often been seen as encapsulating a Petrarchan and Neoplatonic poetics adopted by most Elizabethan sonneteers and countered or subverted by the most canonical poets. This essay suggests that such an interpretation misrepresents the complexity of Elizabethan sonnet sequences in general and of Drayton’s in particular, reassessing Drayton’s

Abstract: This article offers a rereading of Fulke Greville’s A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, arguing that Greville’s text, resisting a motif in earlier commemoration literature of Sidney’s life that painted him as militaristic, violent, and bold, displays instead a Sidney who is devoted to irenic counsel, caution, and an emphasis on peacekeeping. Building on recent studies of Greville’s life and

Abstract: This essay traces the varying implications of the word-concept conversion from the early Reformation to its use in John Donne’s poems and sermons, in a sermon by Lancelot Andrewes, and in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Conversion is by definition a turning, usually a turning to or toward something, although also a turning back or even around, like a top. Historically, the English word derives

Abstract: Daniel Defoe’s Jure Divino is a generic oddity, a twelve-book poem in heroic couplets devoted to dense political theorizing, labeled by its author a “Satyr.” Accounts of Jure Divino suggest a work of would-be great heroic poetry communicating straightforward mainstream Whig ideology—but we have not fully understood the radical nature of the statement Defoe makes about resistance and the limits

Abstract: John Keats’s Lamia was shaped by interrelated anxieties that troubled the poet throughout 1819. These anxieties centered on the cultural power of women readers but ramified to include Lord Byron as well. Borrowing the story of Lamia from Robert Burton but also presenting his serpent-heroine as a metonymy for the western canon, Keats uses his poem to lament the parodic feminization of canonical

Abstract:This essay demonstrates how two middle English Oedipus narratives—the South English Legendary’s “Life of Judas” and the opening section of John Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes—invoke the “ages of man” topos differently in order to dramatize why an individual deviates from normative development. The “Life of Judas” alludes to the topos to speculate about character psychology and pathological development

Abstract:Bacon’s “idols” of the mind are frequently cited, but discussion of the idols tends to focus on the metaphorical terms “tribe,” “cave,” “marketplace,” and “theater.” Less consideration has been given to his use of the term “idol.” To understand his doctrine of idols requires that we contextualize Bacon’s work within the history of early modern religious reform: just as Luther had argued for

Abstract:In The Faerie Queene Edmund Spenser establishes the form of the poetic proem for subsequent English literature. Taking models from Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and the lyric addresses to muses and patrons in European epic, he transforms these prefatory lyrics in a constantly changing evolution. As he reconceives it, the form centers on an address in which the poet appeals to a figure of

Abstract:In this essay I demonstrate that the Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, a chronicle of the Third Crusade completed in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, blames the sins of the Latin settlers of Outremer for Saladin’s conquest of most of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. I argue that the work locates the origin of these sins among neighboring peoples such as Muslim Arabs and

Abstract:Chaucer’s story of Arveragus and Dorigen is filled with illusions. Through the machinations of an illusionist, a tregetour, Aurelius secures by false means his right to sleep with Dorigen. But the illusion that begins the story is that of dual sovereignty and freedom in the marriage of Dorigen and Arveragus. Because they violate a longstanding code of separating courtly love from marriage

Abstract:During the English Revolution, Westminster divines Cornelius Burges and Stephen Marshall resurrected the practice of preaching in Parliament in an attempt to articulate, without repair to kingship or Catholicism, what it meant to be free, godly, and English. Though scholars have acknowledged Areopagitica’s debt to the nation-forming biblical rhetoric of these sermons, in this study I argue

Abstract:George Herbert’s “The Forerunners” has not been given sufficient attention as a text remarkably invested in The Temple’s poetic project of approaching God through the spatial categories of stillness and motion. The thematic keystone of “The Forerunners” lies in the poem’s refrain phrase “Thou art still my God,” particularly in the word still, which Herbert inserts into a famous scriptural

Abstract:The prevalent linguistic patterns in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, present a rhetoric of suffocation which combines frequent tropes of strangulation and moments where meaning gets progressively closed off. This rhetoric coincides with a series of episodes throughout both plays in which characters find their speech limited or throttled in various ways. These habits of speech and action

Abstract:John Dryden’s Religio Laici (1682) was situated at the center of debates over religious toleration in Restoration England. With this poem and its preface, Dryden took up the question of how to represent—how to give poetic voice to—forbearance in a world of contentious religious belief. His answer was to orchestrate the distinctive styles of Restoration spirituality—deist and dissenter, papist

Abstract:This essay surveys William Shakespeare’s Richard III in terms of the early modern construction of the north-south divide. Both modern and early modern historians view King Richard III as “England’s first and only northerner king,” and during his short-lived reign the north enjoyed a time of “colonialist dominion over the South.” In Richard III, Shakespeare engages directly with this form of

Abstract:One of the central questions about the design of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis is the purpose of his inclusion of a history of idolatry and a commentary on virginity in a book on avarice. This article attempts to resolve this critical debate by demonstrating that these “digressions” are not only appropriate but also essential to Gower’s expansion of the sin and the dangers it poses to medieval

Abstract:Early modern husbands seldom wrote about their wives; Anthony Walker’s decision to base his tribute to his wife Elizabeth on her manuscripts is even more unusual. His memories of a virtuous wife and her depiction of their marriage, their family, and herself complement each other with a distinctive immediacy. Secular details vividly paint a human portrait that serves a spiritual end. Theirs

Abstract:Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Statesman’s Manual distinguishes between symbol and allegory, and the distinction reveals what is at stake in Mansfield Park. Austen alludes to the country house tradition that empowers Edmund Burke’s counterrevolutionary rhetoric, but the persistence of allegory in the novel produces anti-Burkean insights. Mansfield Park also challenges Paul de Man’s famous reading

Abstract:This essay juxtaposes vicious pranks in François Rabelais’s Pantagruel (1532) and William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1601) in order to describe a form of comic violence that functions as a knowledge claim about its target. In each case, the event of injury conveys an eager insistence on the truth of some taken-for-granted assertion about the injured party. I discuss the role of comic atmosphere

Abstract:Shakespeare’s sonnets lay claim to a quality of liveliness as both an effect of reading and an intrinsic feature of the verse that parallels the physical life of the human body. In this essay, I will argue that the term character provides one way to conceptualize both the sonnets’ internal aspirations to immortality and the ways in which successive generations of readers participate in perpetuating

Abstract:Utopia has often been defined as an imaginary, this-worldly, rational ideal distinct from older, mythic, prepolitical forms of social ideality such as Paradise or the Golden Age. Milton’s Paradise Lost complicates this opposition and departs from exegetical tradition, introducing temporality, materiality, and social organization into the Genesis story. The chaotic vitality of nature in Milton’s

Abstract:John Donne engages the subject of natural theology in his “secular” poetry as well as his Anniversaries, Essayes in Divinity, sermons, and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, but this subject has received little critical attention. This essay places Donne in his early seventeenth-century context regarding natural theology before tracing his treatment of natural theology through his writings

Abstract:In the Anniversaries (1612), a trio of elegiac poems in honor of the fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Drury, John Donne inverts the usual priorities of Renaissance historiography—“what Caesar did, yea, and what Cic’ro said”—by commemorating a young girl who did and said nothing in particular before her premature death. Early modern historians took for granted that time is linear, that effects can

Abstract:This essay argues that late medieval religious drama belies the claim—articulated most influentially by Nicholas Watson—that fifteenth-century imaginative literature in England was dull and sterile, suffocated by the restrictions imposed by Archbishop Thomas Arundel’s Constitutions of 1407–9. Although the Constitutions were significant, they hardly affected all the writers of religious texts

Abstract:It has long been claimed that John Milton aligns Eve with Virgil’s Dido in order to oppose the Aeneid’s misogyny and to champion the merits of eros. This essay argues, by contrast, that Paradise Lost’s imitations of Aeneid 4 reflect the new, sympathetic interpretation of Dido’s tragedy that emerges in sixteenth-century scholarship on the Aeneid. Influenced by the recovery of Attic drama and

Abstract:HM 1341 is listed in the Huntington’s catalogue as an eighteenth-century manuscript of Arden of Faversham; the rest of the manuscript’s varied contents have been left unidentified or misidentified, and the volume as a whole has been misunderstood by scholars focused solely on the Elizabethan drama. It is safe to say that the manuscript has never been properly described. HM 1341 is functionally

Abstract:This essay argues for the inclusion of Othello within the set of revenge tragedies. Othello consistently deploys revenge tragedy tropes not by coincidence but as a result of the play’s often overlooked genre conventions. Literary criticism has undertaken continued redefinition of the genre of Othello over several generations. In following Douglas Bruster’s call for examination of the representation

Abstract:Most criticism of John Barclay’s Argenis (1621)—often cited as the most influential romance of the seventeenth century—focuses on the romance’s topical allusions and political arguments; certainly, the neoclassical romance’s political dialogues and use of allegory invite such readings. However, focus on the romance as a roman à clef has neglected the romance’s formal innovations. Bringing

Abstract:This essay analyzes the pastoral landscapes in Sidney’s revised Arcadia to determine how Sidney’s investments in England’s early attempts at colonialism changed his perceptions of what made an environment “ideal.” Examining the text through an ecocolonial lens, it argues that—like the idealized descriptions of abundant Virginian nature in early colonial promotions—the landscapes in book 1

Abstract:This article examines early modern English translations of Augustine’s Confessions through the lens of gendered reading practices, arguing that early modern readers associated English translations of the Confessions with women’s “closet” reading. In the 1620s and 30s, a time period when many aristocratic English women were converting to Catholicism, devotional texts proved strategic as means

Abstract:Early modern character lists, frequently overlooked but vital paratexts, have a manifest ability to shape readers' understandings of the plot and characters. This article traces their origins from performance-oriented guides in Tudor interludes, through the para-textual scarcity of playbooks associated with the emergence of professional theaters in the 1580s and 1590s, to their reinvention

Abstract:The first publication of the prolific and unorthodox early modern writer Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) versifies the atomist underpinnings of the cosmos in imitation of Lucretius's great first-century BCE atomist poem, De rerum natura. However, soon after the publication of the 1653 Poems and Fancies, Cavendish claimed to have "Wave[d] the opinion of Atoms." Following her cue, critics have

Abstract:This article shows that William Shakespeare's late tragicomic romances model metatheatrical devices speaking to and for an increasingly heterogeneous and cosmopolitan audience. Contrasting efficacious theatrical artifice with oratory, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest appropriate rhetoric's cultural authority for commercial theater. These tragicomic romances advance a fantasy about the efficacy

Abstract:This article introduces "chopology"—a homiletic method that breaks down biblical texts into component linguistic units—as a hermeneutic by which to understand the scripturalism of John Donne's religious poetry. It first explores how this controversial reading method operated in the sermons of Donne's homiletic predecessors; then it examines Donne's own way of breaking down scriptural texts

Abstract:William Hazlitt has had the flattering misfortune of being celebrated as one of the greatest essayists in England, his literary heritage limited to the British Isles. Further, the genre of his fame has sometimes led critics to view his writings as Turner did the coastal seas—impressionistic and occasionally glittering with illumination. However, I argue that Hazlitt is an important heir of

Abstract:Speakers and singers in Philip Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia are constantly losing control of their own voices: poems and songs are interrupted by sobs and sighs, and words, as volatile physical sounds, manage to escape the confines of their intended acoustic environment, becoming subject to overhearing and repetition. Recent scholarship on the voice in early modern literature

Abstract:This essay contextualizes Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist in relation to the social controversy generated by London’s rich runaways in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Reading the surviving playtext as a record of a site-specific performance at London’s Blackfriars playhouse in November 1610, I argue that the notable presence of the Blackfriars’ stage-sitters is a crucial dimension

Abstract:Drawing on the dynamics among manuscript texts and textual criticism, this essay addresses everyday medieval English (as opposed to literary English), both as a definable variety and as a theoretical construct in historical linguistics. It focuses in particular on the material effects that written texts and printed editions have on how we perceive Old and Middle English in general, as well

Abstract:This article examines how the "erected wit" and "infected will" of Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie transfigured the classical concept of akrasia—weakness of will, or acting against one's better judgment—for reformed ends, and how this infection of the will (synonymous, for reformers, with the heart) plays out in Sidney's love poetry. Paul's Epistle to the Romans and Ovid's Medea were juxtaposed

Abstract:This essay argues that the form Geoffrey Chaucer devises for the Canterbury Tales rests on a recursive and iterative corrective process based on grammatical emendation that was tied, by a long-standing analogy, to moral reform. The Tale of Melibee makes this process most explicit and suggests both the ambitions and the dangers of this artistic and moral project. On the one hand, it is in the

Abstract:A hitherto unknown collection of manuscript letters from Peter Augustin Daniel (1827–1917) to his widowed mother in Australia throws new light on George Meredith’s early life and first marriage to Mary Ellen Nicolls, the eldest daughter of Thomas Love Peacock. As an East India Company clerk, Daniel had known both of the Merediths before their marriage, when all three were collaborators on

Abstract:The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his three daughters, anonymously published in 1605, has twice been ascribed to Thomas Kyd: by William Wells (1939) and by Paul Rubow (1948), but without acceptance. Their evidence consisted of the many close parallels in phraseology it shares with Kyd’s accepted canon. This essay seeks to confirm that attribution, using two independent approaches

Abstract:This article investigates John Ford’s use of mixed temporality to stage succession in Perkin Warbeck. Although Perkin aspires to be planted in his “own inheritance” and ascend to the throne, Ford’s play first entertains and then dismisses the aspirations of this pretender. I argue that Ford’s pretender plot is equally about the past and the future. The play represents both history as it unfolded

Abstract:Abraham Fraunce has long been recognized as an important participant in the literary culture of the 1580s and 1590s, an early reader and acquaintance of Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and other Elizabethan writers. His own works span a wide range of humanist disciplines and genres, including neo-Latin drama, English quantitative poetry, mythography, emblems, logic, rhetoric, and legal theory

Abstract:As a magistrate who dealt with the problem of crime in Europe's largest metropolis, Henry Fielding was keenly aware that violence and its destructive effects pervaded life in eighteenth-century Britain, and that much of this violence originated from conflicts centered on male honor. This essay explores the link between public violence and honor-based notions of masculinity and argues that

Abstract:This essay argues that William Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre constitutes a genealogical journey outside the periphery of the West. While scholars tend to under-value the play’s geographic specificity, interpreting Pericles in the context of Western Christian culture, I discuss the play’s commitment to representing an authentic Eastern geography and what that commitment very well implies

Abstract:While the conventional category of “shape poem” describes only a few of George Herbert’s devotional poems, a bibliographic survey of Herbert’s poetic opus reveals a menagerie of hinted shapes that participate in Reformation debates surrounding church beauty. The visual imperfections of two poems in particular, “The Flower” and “The Collar,” tentatively embody the spiritual and material ambivalence

Abstract:This article considers the phenomenon of Greek loan words appearing in Germanic languages—specifically the word martyr in Old English—tracking its appearances first in Classical Greek literature then through the New Testament as a crucial theological concept that underwent a drastic semantic evolution from “witness” to “someone who dies for his or her faith.” After scanning medieval sources

Abstract:This second part of a two-part essay continues to place the chivalric romance, both as a print and performance genre, more firmly in the context of Renaissance England's contemporaneous gunpowder revolution. Where part I (see vol. 114.3 [2017]) focused on the romance tradition's overarching attempts in the sixteenth century to evade gunpowder technology, part II attends to the ways in which

Abstract:Sometime in the late 1450s the Platonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino wrote a "little commentary" on Lucretius's De rerum natura—a commentary he said he eventually burned as Plato once burned his own juvenilia. Scholars have read this text as an expression of a "religious crisis," and they have described the event of its destruction as a critical turn both in Ficino's thought and in Renaissance