William Muggins, an impoverished but highly literate weaver-poet, lived and wrote in London at the turn of the seventeenth century, when few of his contemporaries could even read. A Weaver-Poet and the Plague’s microhistorical approach uses Muggins’s life and writing, in which he articulates a radical vision of a commonwealth founded on labor and…[Read more]

This essay argues that Thomas Tusser’s popular book of georgic verse, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, offered a counter to developments in courtly poetry under Elizabeth I. Critics have long disparaged Tusser’s poetry as naïvely rustic, but Tusser was not an uneducated peasant who happened to pick up enough literacy to pen a book of poem…[Read more]

This is a gut-reaction response to the recent article “The value of mass-digitised cultural heritage content in creative contexts” by Melissa Terras, et al, published in Big Data and Society on April 6, 2021, doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211006165. My main argument is that exploiting labor and appropriating cultural heritage are int…[Read more]

“Tanner weaves a compelling scholarly narrative, spellbinding in its encyclopedic circumference….her text provides comprehensive historical and ideological context to comprehend the paintings as they would have been understood by their highly educated sixteenth-century patron and Renaissance humanist viewers.” Renaissance Quarterly, Volume…[Read more]

Performing Shakespeare in modern times is an act of mediation between characters and actors, creating channels between geocultural spaces and time periods. The multiplicity of the plural term global Shakespeares helps us push back against deceivingly harmonious images of Shakespeare’s ubiquitous presence. Adaptations accrue nuanced meanings as t…[Read more]

*Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne Marriage, Separation, and Legal Controversies,* Edited by Cristina León Alfar and Emily G. Sherwood, Routledge 2021, The Early Modern Englishwoman, 1500-1750: Contemporary Editions. “Reading Mistress Elizabeth Bourne tells the story of Mistress Bourne’s petition for divorce, its resolution, and her ongoing di…[Read more]

The publication of my book, Sublime Truth and the Senses: Titian’s Poesie for King Philip II of Spain, ( Harvey Miller: 2019), with a new reading of the heightened meaning of ecstatic imagery for the Hapsburg court, coincides with the exhibition of Titian’s magnificent mythological paintings that are reassembled for the first time since 1704 a…[Read more]