Global studies enable us to examine deceivingly harmonious images of Shakespeare. This chapter focuses on the modern period and introduces readers to a number of key concepts in Shakespeare and global studies, namely censorship and redaction, genre, gender, race, and politics of reception. Performing Shakespeare not only creates channels between…[Read more]

Jean de la Taille’s “Saül le furieux” (1562) has been described as “the most dramatic play produced by the French Renaissance,” and the author’s preface to the play in the printed edition of 1572, “De l’Art de la Tragedie,” as “certainly the best theoretical essay on the theatre written in France before the classical period.” These estimates by…[Read more]

This article deals with representations of Christian-Islamic confluence in the medieval Portuguese genealogical compilation known as Livro de Linhagens do Conde D. Pedro (Count Pedro’s Book of Lineages), assembled in the mid-fourteenth century by Count Pedro of Barcelos. Several narratives dealing with the non-military interaction of Christians a…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: La película histórica de Andrzej Wajda sobre la matanza de Katyn da una imagen tremenda de los totalitarismos del siglo XX, de los horrores políticos y morales de las dictaduras comunistas en la URSS y en Polonia. Retrata memorablemente las circunstancias que llevan a la gente bien a doblegar su voluntad y su conciencia, o bi…[Read more]

The book is dedicated to the presence of Greek history in the works of Cyprian Norwid. According to the poet, the Greek origins contributed to the creation of mechanisms that make it possible to diagnose the spiritual condition of the contemporary times through analyzing its relation to the Greek myth of the “Golden Age”. Ideologization of the way…[Read more]

Preliminary data set of measures from Michiel Coignet’s “reigle platte” and comparison of the weights of substances with data in Kepler’s table of specific gravities in MesseKunst Archimedis. Michiel Coignet, Usus duodecim diuisionum geometricarum, Brussels, KBR, II 769, folio 40r. Data associated with a forthcoming article in Early Science and…[Read more]

The article contains an analysis of the genealogy of 19th-century Polish research in the field of literary history. My inquiry contains a comparison between literary research in Germany and in Poland. From this point of view, literary history was an important factor in the process of building a modern nation. Furthermore, literary historians also…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: Notas, debates y comentarios con ocasión del congreso The “Holocaust Metaphor” (La ́Metáfora del Holocausto ́), en la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Zaragoza (a finales de mayo de 2013). _________________________________________________________________________

English abstract: Notes, debates and comm…[Read more]

This chapter, “Owning Chinese Shakespeares,” pursues the critical concept of localization and critiques the fidelity-derived discourse about cultural ownership. How were Chinese Shakespeares used as a kind of staged utopia of modernity?

Underlying this study are three related lines of inquiry united by what might be called locality criticism, t…[Read more]

While World War II was still raging in Europe and the Pacific, the onset of the Greek Civil War in December 1944 marked the beginning of the Cold War. For the people of Greece, the civil war would continue the devastation that the Italian, German, and Bulgarian occupations had initiated. The civil war’s catastrophic cleavages in Greek society are…[Read more]

Thanks to Karl Marx’s references in his political treatises, Shakespeare held a significant place in a number of communist and other left-authoritarian countries, including China and the USSR. And although there were themes in Shakespeare that turned out to be inconvenient for communist ideology, other Shakespearean plays were put into service. I…[Read more]

In the year 1397 in the parish of Tuttington (Norfolk), a woman whose name is lost to history, frantic to rid herself of the evil spirit that possessed her, turned to suicide. She attempted first to hang herself, but her husband discovered her while life remained in her body, cut down the rope, and comforted her. A few weeks later she tried once…[Read more]

An examination of three cases of judicial separation from the late medieval court of York.

Since the publication of Philippe Aries’ Centuries of Childhood in the early 1960’s, historians of the family have been intrigued by the prospect of a history of change in familial sentiment. 1 Aries’ study of attitudes about children from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, based primarily on art and material evidence, demonstrates…[Read more]

This paper asks us to rethink the boundaries between consent and coercion in medieval England. From gentle persuasion to threats and abuse, coercion was a part of the courtship process. Although late medieval society expected parents to play an active, even heavy-handed, role in matchmaking, the English church recognized the possibility that…[Read more]

When Isabelle, widow of Richard Vergeons, commissioned the writing of a bill of complaint to Chancery at the end of the fifteenth century, she was clearly at the end of her tether. Six months before the writing of the petition, the wife of Thomas Hyll, a wire monger of London, approached the petitioner’s husband, begging for ‘‘secour and saufg…[Read more]

According to medieval common law, assault against a pregnant woman causing miscarriage after the fi rst trimester was homicide. Some scholars have argued, however, that in practice English jurors refused to acknowledge assaults of this nature as homicide. The underlying argument is that because abortion by assault is a crime against women, male…[Read more]