In this essay Queen Margaret’s curses in Richard III become part of a feminist ethics on the early modern stage. As a parrhesiast, in Foucault’s terms, Margaret speaks truth to power and claims a right of citizenship. That Margaret elicits universal revulsion from the other characters while also holding a unique, though not untroubled, pos…[Read more]

This dissertation ‘Inns and Innkeeping in North Hertfordshire: 1660-1815’ addresses the lack of a localised study on this building type and supplements the wider body of work that has been undertaken, on inn form, function and innkeeping lifestyles in other regions of England during the long eighteenth century.

Young Michelangelo Buonarroti’s experience was deeply marked by his cult of Antiquity, reverberated in the creation of artworks such as the Sleeping Cupid and the Bacchus and shared with Raffaele Riario and Jacopo Galli, his patrons during his first stay in Rome (1496-1501). The cardinal-camerlengo Raffaele Riario was an important promoter of t…[Read more]

The peculiar iconography of the winged horse surmounted by several puttos, as appears in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili sixth woodcut, turns out to be unprecedented and enigmatic at a glance and it’s the result of the depth and complexity of the author’s concepts. Considering the iconographic details of the sculptural group as well as the text sca…[Read more]

This essay explores glass engravings by Dutch authors Anna Roemers Visscher, Maria Tesselschade
Roemers Visscher, and Anna Maria van Schurman. I place these engravings in their rich contemporary
contexts, comparing them to other art forms that were the product of female pastime. Like
embroidery, emblems, and alba amicorum, engraved glasses…[Read more]

“Democratizing the American University” argues for a more democratic approach to academic appointments within the US academy.

Shakespeare’s representations of history often have replaced history itself in the popular imagination: Julius Caesar, Margaret of Anjou, Henry V, Richard III — popular recollections of their lives and deaths are intimately linked with Shakespeare’s accounts of their stories, despite the playwright’s deviations from historical facts. In order t…[Read more]

Gendered night, or the nocturnal brightness of the early modern English stage
In French, critics speak of the night using feminine terms, but the term is grammatically neutral in English. Despite this neutrality, night may be gendered. In Romeo and Juliet, virgins hide their shame from their lovers by hiding in the dark. If night is consecrated…[Read more]