This chapter illuminates a different sense in which Gentili’s work was influenced by humanist sensibilities. Differentiating between legal humanism (the mos Gallicus) on one hand and rhetorical humanism on the other, it argues that Gentili did not subscribe to the rigid historical approach to legal sources as practised by the French humanist…[Read more]

This paper will be presented at the upcoming South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) conference Nov.3-6 in Jacksonville, FL. The research is a part of my thesis project that will be completed in spring 2017.

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]

My paper concerns two radically distinct portrayals of genital injury. The first examples, drawn from legal and doctrinal narrative, describe the cultural norm of meaningful castration. The other, which provides my paper with its title, is from Peter of Cornwall’s Book of Revelations. This set of one is an analogous injury that may mean nothing: n…[Read more]

C. S. Lewis’s fourth Narnian chronicle is considered as detective fiction, illustrating principles for solving a murder mystery, especially alertness to the difference between appearance and reality. The human protagonists nearly fail through carelessness, overconfidence, and forgetfulness, combined with the deceit and magic of a shape-shifting v…[Read more]

This course examines the literary, cultural, and material life of written correspondence from the poetic epistle to the snarky tweet. And while we will read and analyze epistolary literature (both fiction and nonfiction) such as Ovid’s Heroides, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and
Alice Walker’s A Color Purple, we focus our efforts on “real” letters o…[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]

In this brief paper, I first introduce Gwendolyn Brook’s “The Anniad,” a 43-stanza ballad at the center of her 1949 Pulitzer-prize winning collection, Annie Allen. Next, I make a case that “The Anniad” is informed by a medievalism combining Brooks’ girlhood reading and the physical environment of Bronzeville, her Chicago neighborhood. Finally, I…[Read more]

This essay argues that Edmund Spenser’s “The Ruines of Time” is, alongside its role as elegy and complaint, a cosmographic work that engages in what I call “spiritual mapping”—a cartographic process that combines anti-worldly discourse with a trans-historical representation of space. By considering Spenser’s poem alongside William Camden’s Brit…[Read more]

Abstract: This article poses a challenge to contemporary historicist tendency to silence significant semantic threads within Hamlet, attempts to restore our critical interest in the age-old problem of delay of the protagonist, and thus distinguish the text in itself from its historicised version. In doing so, my over-all argument proposes an…[Read more]

Būqālah refers both to a ceramic pitcher as well as to poems ritually embedded in the traditional, favorite, divinatory pastime associated with women city dwellers of specific Algerian towns such as Blida,Cherchell, Tlemcen, Constantine, and Algiers. This essay considers the shift from orality to a written archive of French and Algerian c…[Read more]

A consideration of classical and medieval oyster lore, a study of oysters as the “minimal animal.” Hand-corrected proof for Steve Mentz, ed. OCEANIC NEW YORK (Punctum 2015) – https://punctumbooks.com/titles/oceanic-new-york/

Although “fabulous” animals tend to be thought of as, say, unicorns, for early modern and medieval natural history, as well as the developed attention to gender and reproduction in twenty-first century science, the “fabulous” animal might be the one next door, like, say, squirrels.