a b s t r ac t
Alessandro de’ Medici’s life and its representation reveal important beliefs about family, politics,
and genealogy during the Italian Renaissance. Duke Alessandro’s government marked the end of
the Florentine Republic and the beginning of hereditary rule. Many scholars interpret Alessandro’s
assassination as a fitting end to…[Read more]

Literary scholars have traditionally understood landscapes, whether natural or manmade, as metaphors for humanity instead of concrete settings for people’s actions. This book accepts the natural world as such by investigating how Anglo-Saxons interacted with and conceived of their lived environments. Examining Old English poems such as Beowulf and…[Read more]

Historians, literary scholars, and international lawyers interested in the early modern period have all grappled with the problem of anachronism, yet mostly independently of one another. This essay uses the question of war crime in Shakespeare’s Henry V to argue that early modernists interested in international law need not reject synchronic h…[Read more]

«On the Death of Isabel of Borbón» is perhaps the best written testimony of Queen Isabel’s love for the arts and letters. This poem, in all likelihood penned by Philip IV to honor Isabel’s life, is composed of eight decimas and the last verse of each is also the title of a Spanish Golden Age comedia. Although the special delight that Isabel found…[Read more]

In his prologue to the late fourteenth-century romance, the Destruction of Troy, John
Clerk of Whalley negotiates between his roles as translator, historian and alliterative
poet to introduce his account of the fall of Troy for medieval English readers.
Professing to tell the true story of Britain’s ancient ancestors, he invokes the f…[Read more]

Using REED London as a case study of how we, as pre-modern performance and theatre historians, are using digital methods to aggregate its materials, access and analyze a remarkably broad array of archival documents, and amplify their importance to a broader spectrum of humanities scholars and potential collaborators than we cannot have been able…[Read more]

Quantity matters in the meter of Beowulf and other early English poems. It matters in the form of a metrical principle known as resolution. Metrical resolution served alliterative poets as a way of counting; it can serve modern scholars as evidence for the cultural meanings of verse craft. This paper therefore has two sections: How it Works and…[Read more]

A how-to lesson on working with Early English Books Online and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, focusing both on the basics of searching and navigating interfaces and on thinking about remediation on how EEBO and ECCO represent material texts. Presented originally at Edinburgh’s “Beyond the Black Box” series in May 2017.

This article examines how the Brothers Grimm are fictionalized in German and Anglo-American media. While some representations revere and romanticize the iconic brothers for preserving the fairy-tale tradition, other depictions challenge the conventional understanding of their work and cultural contribution. In these demythologizing depictions, the…[Read more]

Fairy tales are often described in proprietary terms. Because the myth of their origin among the anonymous folk is so strong, the general tendency in both popular and scholarly discourse is to conceive of fairy tales as either the common property of all humanity or the treasures of specific cultures, nations, or ethnic groups. Since the…[Read more]

Scholarship on the Sleeping Beauty tale has gone largely unappreciated. Underlying the story’s obvious themes and motifs—birth, death/sleep, rebirth—and complicating its gender dynamic is a preoccupation with orality and telling that gives the story a significant self-reflective dimension. This article examines how the tale reflects on story…[Read more]

Through the comparative study of non-Anglophone translations of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, we can achieve the progressive goals of Emily Apter’s “translational transnationalism” and Edward Said’s “cosmopolitan humanism.” Both translation and humanism were intrinsic to Chaucer’s initial composition of the Tales, and in turn, both shap…[Read more]

Through the comparative study of non-Anglophone translations of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, we can achieve the progressive goals of Emily Apter’s “translational transnationalism” and Edward Said’s “cosmopolitan humanism.” Both translation and humanism were intrinsic to Chaucer’s initial composition of the Tales, and in turn, both shap…[Read more]

Explores how children of war and adults reflecting on their violent wartime childhoods have had recourse to the space of fairy tales to interpret their traumatic physical environments and their emotional lives within them. To that end, the article (1) considers the nature of time and space in the classic fairy tale; (2) establishes how the…[Read more]

The Grimms’ tale of “Brier Rose” (KHM 50) has self-reflexive characteristics of the Romantic literary fairy tale. In thematizing memory and alluding to the imagery used in the preface to the Grimm brothers’ collection of fairy tales, Wilhelm Grimm’s version of the story self-consciously reflects on its own origins and exhibits a self-awareness…[Read more]

This article focuses initially on a new strand of empirical research that deliberately utilizes folktales and fairy tales to make broader claims for the scientific method and to advocate for the application of evolutionary science to literature in general. After critiquing this work for is its unquestioning reliance on the problematic…[Read more]

A study of the use of proverbs in the film The Company of Wolves (dir. Neil Jordan; screenplay by Jordan and Angela Carter), based on Angela Carter’s adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood tales in her book The Bloody Chamber.

Round Table on Diversity and Teaching Medieval Studies sponsored by Graduate Student Council. Session title: “Tearing Down Walls, Building Bridges:
Medieval Diversity and Cross-Cultural Encounters in Syllabus Design and Teaching.” This paper is about two courses that illustrate the principle “Diversity in Every Course Title” and several…[Read more]

Round Table on Diversity and Teaching Medieval Studies sponsored by Graduate Student Council. Session title: “Tearing Down Walls, Building Bridges:
Medieval Diversity and Cross-Cultural Encounters in Syllabus Design and Teaching.” This paper is about two courses that illustrate the principle “Diversity in Every Course Title” and several…[Read more]