Early medieval England is well-known for its assortment of royal saints; figures who, though drawn from nearly five centuries of pre-Conquest Christianity, are often best known from eleventh-century hagiography. Common among these narratives is the figure of the “wicked queen”–a woman whose exercise of political power provides the impetus for t…[Read more]

This article offers ten reasons, why historians should blog.

In this article, we argue that scholarly blogs are appropriate modern platforms for open access publishing and a dynamic alternative to online journals. We use the blog ‘Mittelalter. Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Rezeptionsgeschichte’ that has become a major player in the field of medieval studies as an example for a successful scholarly blog,…[Read more]

Synopsis of those monasteries that were dissoluted during secularization, from which manuscripts came into possession of the former Court Library of the landgraves of Hessen-Darmstadt (now: University and State Library Darmstadt).

The Vercelli Map, one of the largest maps to survive from the Middle Ages, has not received the attention it merits (Plate IV). This is likely the result of its very poor state of preservation, which has been a constant theme in what little has been published on it.’ There are several studies that make brief mention of the map, and a few studies…[Read more]

In Order to understand what a “global Middle Ages” might be, we need to define “global” in and in relation to the “Middle Ages.” To do so, I turn to medieval (Christian) maps. Their construction of the world-the most, maybe all, others-was founded on inclusion and exclusion. In seeking to construct a global Middle Ages, the authors in this volume…[Read more]

The Oulipo has claimed that foreign member, Italo Calvino, was a key proponent of the clinamen, a purposeful deviation from the strict constraints in which the group specializes. However, upon closer inspection, Calvino’s Oulipian production during his Paris period does not seem to advance a formalized definition of this tool of constrained w…[Read more]

Manuscript culture in Icelandic immigrant communities in North America is examined through the case study of an immigrant-scribe, Albert Jóhannesson (1847–1921), who left Iceland as an adult in 1884 and eventually settled in the community of Hecla Island, Manitoba, Canada. Albert Jóhannesson is one of the last known individuals in the Ice…[Read more]

From Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of Friendship” to Jacques Derrida’s rearticulation of the former in The Politics of Friendship, scholars both early modern and modern have sought ways to address the fluid co-mixture of bodies from which the discourse of friendship can and does emerge. More recently still, new materialist thinkers of ontolog…[Read more]

A reading of Shakespeare and Deleuze on the subject of Anthropocene air. Keywords: endurance, climate change, fossil capitalism, carbon ghosts, Hamlet.

This essay examines how the rhetoric of animalization in Shakespeare’s Othello compels us to think early modern categories of race in connection with early modern discourses of “human” versus “animal.” Beginning with Shakespeare’s representation of Iago, I suggest that it is the potential for sameness conditioned by Iago’s counterfactua…[Read more]

Traditionally read as a poem about laboring subjects who gain power through abstract and abstracting forms of bodily discipline, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) more compellingly foregrounds the erotics of the Garden as a space where humans and nonhumans intra-act materially and sexually. Following Christopher Hill, who long ago pointed t…[Read more]

Turning to Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1596) and The History of the World (1614), I reframe such biopolitical factors as Ralegh’s “dissability” around a concept that has less to do with human world-making and more to do with the “states of exception” (Giorgio Agamben) under which inhuman agencies come to matter for world history (of…[Read more]

Though the verbal icon has a long and robust multisensory history extending beyond Milton, my goal here is to challenge ableist readings of Milton’s poetry by linking his poetic ekphrasis to the politics and aesthetics of disability.

This essay offers a critique of the vitalist turn in queer and ecological theory, here represented by the work of Karen Barad. Whereas Barad advances an image of life geared towards meaningful connection with others, human and nonhuman, Deleuze advances an a-signifying ontology of self-dismissal. The point of this essay isn’t to separate their t…[Read more]

Review article on five recent books relating to late Latin poetry

An article that contrasts the role of gift giving in Old English poems like Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

Ritual-magical divination in manuscript Hs. 3227a of the Germanische Nationalmuseum Nuremberg