With thirty-seven named locations, the Digby Mary Magdalene is rightfully considered to require the most elaborate staging of the Middle English dramatic corpus. In this article, I re-examine the manuscript to find evidence of how the various locations in the play can be grouped into what I term staging complexes. Beginning with the division of…[Read more]

The extracodical stanzas of John Lydgate’s Testament and “Quis Dabit Meo Capiti Fontem Lacrimarum” in the Clopton chantry chapel of the Great Church of Holy Trinity, Long Melford, not only are two intriguing witnesses differing in presentation and language from the manuscript copies but also can be considered as part of a rhetorical program where…[Read more]

Paper given for the LLC Middle English Forum’s roundtable on “Campus Chaucer. ” See also separately uploaded PowerPoint slides (not strictly necessary; the bold in the text, however, refers to a change of slide). Contains many informational links. Accompanying PowerPoint: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6BW3B

Paper given for the LLC Middle English Forum’s roundtable on “Campus Chaucer. ” See also separately uploaded PowerPoint slides (not strictly necessary; the bold in the text, however, refers to a change of slide). Contains many informational links. Accompanying PowerPoint: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6BW3B

PowerPoint to accompany paper (http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6GP71) given in #s280 at the 2017 MLA Convention.

PowerPoint to accompany paper (http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6GP71) given in #s280 at the 2017 MLA Convention.

This essay explores insistently practical medieval texts—works whose explicit goal is to assist their readers to make something in the world beyond the page (a book, a culinary dish, an ointment, an object) and asks if they can be said to have a poetics. Drawing on Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of practice as well as Gérard Gene…[Read more]

This essay explores insistently practical medieval texts—works whose explicit goal is to assist their readers to make something in the world beyond the page (a book, a culinary dish, an ointment, an object) and asks if they can be said to have a poetics. Drawing on Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of practice as well as Gérard Gene…[Read more]

‘The Selfish Giant’ by Oscar Wilde has a history rooted in Christianity. There are ample journals, books, and even some occasional movies that demonstrate Wilde’s work as a Christian allegory. In a Christian analysis, the giant is seen as either St. Christopher or an unknown man whereas the child who cries is the Christ child. A Christian readi…[Read more]

In this paper we present a statistical method for inferring historical social networks from biographical documents as well as the scholarly aims for doing so. Existing scholarship on historical social networks is scattered across an unmanageable number of disparate books and articles. A researcher interested in how persons were connected to one…[Read more]

This paper describes approaches I use to teach Shakespeare’s The Tempest using intertextuality in the undergraduate introductory literature course.

An overview of Zhang Jiucheng’s 張九成 (1092-1159) thought on mind-cultivation and Zhu Xi’s 朱熹 critique of Zhang and other Buddho-Confucians of the early Southern Song dynasty (1126-1279).

In THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, a cozening knight and a jealous husband assume without question the availability of female bodies to adulterous liaisons, revealing their confidence in the cultural narrative of female inconstancy. Falstaff attempts to write a story in which he is the recipient of the wives’ sexual and economic favors. Ford, like T…[Read more]

Shakespeare’s MACBETH interrogates the tyranny of absolute monarchical practices and divorces them from naturalized gender constructions by placing Lady Macbeth at the center of the play’s violence. I argue that she provides a parodic inversion of the ideal wife and and puts pressure on masculinist and violent structures of relations that depend…[Read more]