Alfonso de Toledo (15th century) was, indeed, a curious guy. But he was doing something with his curiosity. He was researching and translating. He was focusing on particular themes and institutions, and giving a legal and juridical reading of them –he, as he confesses, has very little theology to forget, so even theological inventions are, for h…[Read more]

ENGLISH ABSTRACT Due to their special properties, relational adjectives (in particular when serving as classifying modifiers) have been the subject of detailed investigations in many languages, including Russian, French, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch and German, but they are not mentioned in Danish reference grammars. The main goal of this article is to…[Read more]

Review for The Seventeenth Century of Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro, _The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Changed the World_ and Marco Barducci, _Hugo Grotius and the Century of Revolution, 1613-1718_

In 1526, royal refiner and natural historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478-1557) praised the singular quality of the “muchos tesoros de oro labrado / en poder delos indios q̄ se hā cōquistado” (lxv, v). By 1535, however, he had to define what, exactly, he meant by gold: “No hablo aquí en el oro que se ha habido por rescates, o en la guerra, ni…[Read more]

Prints an unpublished Spanish letter signed by Elizabeth I and addressed to Maria of Austria

A course (MA level) I taught at the University of Pittsburgh in 2001, the research for which culminated in my book Freedom Readers (Notre Dame 2011).

A course (MA level) I taught at the University of Pittsburgh in 2001, the research for which culminated in my book Freedom Readers (Notre Dame 2011).

This paper links the medieval and early modern production of parchment and paper with modern electronics manufacturing, in order to examine some of the occluded ecological and political dimensions of archival study.

In this article, I argue that Margaret Cavendish uses ‘Sociable Letters’ and the female friendship within its pages to intervene in early modern epistolary traditions and negotiate alternatives for conventional markers of intimacy between correspondents. Grounding the argument in current scholarly debates on familiar letter conventions, I…[Read more]

Bound by market pressures, twenty-first century academia finds itself fettered by the demands of “student success” that a capitalist knowledge economy places on its participants. Humanities scholars are, as Jonathan Dollimore noted in his 2014 SAA address, pressed with their back against the wall, “in a marketplace pretty indifferent to what…[Read more]

This article analyzes the politics of anachronism in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale. It argues that the Wife of Bath counters the Man of Law’s descending model of sovereignty and regulation of feminine agency with a powerful heroine who wields ascending sovereignty. The Old Wife lives in her Arthurian present and its English future simul…[Read more]

Late medieval culture tends to value pain highly and positively. Accordingly, much medievalist scholarship links pain with fear and emphasizes their usefulness in the period’s philosophy, literature, visual art, and drama. Yet, key moments in The York Play of the Crucifixion, The Second Shepherds’ Play, and The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge tro…[Read more]

Rezension

Situates the composition of Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas—from manuscript notes, source material, and pilot essays to its publication as an 84-page pamphlet—within the intellectual tendencies of the Reconstruction-era American social science movement to reveal Whitman’s text as an important case study in the nascent discipline. In his pro…[Read more]

The transfer of Saracen arms into Frankish ownership is a leitmotif of
many chansons de geste, but one whose significance for translatio imperii has yet to be
elucidated. In this essay, I focus on the Chanson d’Aspremont, a twelfth-century epic
set in Calabria that narrates the pre-history of Durendal, Roland’s sword of Song of
Roland fam…[Read more]

Reads William of Rubruck’s mission to Asia as an instance of premodern ethnographic representation and the shape of the precolonial European ethnographic gaze upon Asia.