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 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 essay investigates why Thomas Hobbes translated Thucydides, published as Eight Bookes of the Peloponesian Warres, and why Hobbes chose it to be published in 1628. It argues that Hobbes’s translation should be seen not just as a precursor to his later treatises but as part of broader attempt on the part of English humanists in the mid-1620s…[Read more]

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]

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]

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]

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 paper describes approaches I use to teach Shakespeare’s The Tempest using intertextuality in the undergraduate introductory literature course.

Critics have long used the heuristic device of opposing John Milton and Thomas Hobbes, but this essay explores surprising affinities between the two. After observing that Milton and other Restoration dissenters often agreed with Hobbes on questions of ecclesiastic jurisdiction and toleration nearly as much as they disagreed with what seemed at…[Read more]

Critics have long used the heuristic device of opposing John Milton and Thomas Hobbes, but this essay explores surprising affinities between the two. After observing that Milton and other Restoration dissenters often agreed with Hobbes on questions of ecclesiastic jurisdiction and toleration nearly as much as they disagreed with what seemed at…[Read more]

In THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, a cozening knight and a jealous husband assume without question the availability of female bodies to adulterous liaisons, revealing their confidence in the cultural narrative of female inconstancy. Falstaff attempts to write a story in which he is the recipient of the wives’ sexual and economic favors. Ford, like T…[Read more]

In THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, a cozening knight and a jealous husband assume without question the availability of female bodies to adulterous liaisons, revealing their confidence in the cultural narrative of female inconstancy. Falstaff attempts to write a story in which he is the recipient of the wives’ sexual and economic favors. Ford, like T…[Read more]