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]

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]

For poets like Sir Philip Sidney, the numerous incongruities found in Elizabethan drama fly in the face of Aristotelian theory. London audiences in 1580-1600 would have been hard pressed to recognize the time and place of the action represented on stage from one scene to the next. By comparing Greek theory and Elizabethan practice, this paper…[Read more]

What might strike some as Arden of Faversham’s faulty construction may perhaps be ascribed to the fact that Arden’s murderers, as well as the play’s audience, had to learn how to “temper poison” (i.229). Poison is not simply a means to commit murder, its use also requires great dexterity, one which must be interpreted within a historical and metat…[Read more]

Examines evangelical encounters with the arts as: consumer and performer in the ‘neutral’ sphere of the home; as users of the arts in public worship; as evangelists; and as moralists and reformers of the pursuits of others. It deals mainly with music, literature, the visual arts and drama, and its examples are drawn chiefly from Britain and the…[Read more]

Kinds of unity, modes of union—why bother? Does Leibniz ever focus on “union”, anyway? It is not before 1713 that Leibniz gets rid of certain metaphysical concerns which, although secondary for him, were present to his mind since the time of his 1708 answer to Tournemine, who had bespoken a “real union” between the soul and the body (GP VI, 595-9…[Read more]

The genealogy of board games in Britain is also an expression of its imperial past. Built on colonialist and orientalist tropes that reinforce a hierarchy of race, their legacy is still discernible in the worlds created for the games played today.

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An updated version of my Portolan piece from 2018.

This study of Leibniz’s philosophical views on mathematics starts from the rank he assigned to them in the encyclopedia of knowledge. Mathematics, in many Leibnitian writings, is proposed to other disciplines as an example to follow: they are an essential component of the new, at the same time encyclopaedic and demonstrative knowledge he is…[Read more]

Leibniz was undoubtedly a many-sided man, and a polymathic mind, if ever there was one. The concept of analysis is notoriously, for its part, a polycephalous monster, and nearly all its meanings are spread through Leibniz’s works, in juridical, scientific, mathematical, or philosophical contexts, under different conditions and with different p…[Read more]

The very recent past has seen an upswing of scholarly interest not so much in the Internet and Web themselves but in the terms in which they have been discussed and understood. This article examines a remarkable effusion of writing in the 1990s that addressed the spiritual and ethical implications of “cyberspace”. Christian critics reacted in dif…[Read more]

In Castile, where the purity of blood supposedly did not allow the merchants access to the privileged, we found an extremely powerful and rich group, the Cargadores a Indias. This group was made up of international merchants, almost all from humble origins, in many cases converso, who rose socially in a vertiginous way. For this, they were…[Read more]

On 16 November 1436, Enea Silvio Piccolomini delivered the oration Audivi to the fathers of the Council of Basel, concerning the venue for the Union Council between the Latin Church and the Greek Church. He argued for the City of Pavia in the territory of the Duke of Milan. The oration reflected the tensions between conciliarism and the Papacy,…[Read more]

The foreword (here in pre-print version) introduces the scope of this special issue, that is, a re-interpretation of the development of 18th-century German philosophy. We aim in particular at identifying naturalistic and ‘scientific’ tendencies, which evolved alongside the well-studied mainstream currents. In our view, this long-overshadowed man…[Read more]

A plea for more generous modes of reading each other’s scholarship in order to arrive at a University that values productive dissensus within a framework of shared endeavor and solidarity. The essay also argues for new relational modes in which personal, professional and other identities would be rejected in favor of cruising each other’s thought and work.

An overview of the “state of the field” of critical post/humanist studies that also argues for the important intervention of premodern studies into contemporary post/humanist studies, and which serves as the Introduction (with chapter summaries) to “Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism,” eds. Myra Seaman and Eileen A. Joy (Ohio State…[Read more]

André de la Vigne (1470?-1526?) in the manuscript of his “Mystère de Saint Martin,” performed in the town of Seurre in October 1496, also included a “moralité” and a “farce.” Although they are positioned at the conclusion of the “mystère,” these short plays were undoubtedly integral to the larger performance. At the same time they are via…[Read more]

Did it all begin with Tschirnhaus? This paper (here in pre-print version) discusses the exemplary role that Tschirnhaus could play in the reconstruction of an empirically oriented, scientific, somewhat radical and variously unorthodox current in 18th-century German philosophy, starting from 18th-century characterizations of his intellectual image.