Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy creates a subtle apologia for the “middling sort” by challenging the socially constructed predicates of aristocratic privilege. A scrivener’s son, Kyd undertsood oeconomia, or household management, as both the means for material advancement among the “middling sort” and a potential threat to aristocratic insular…[Read more]

Examines Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and the epistemological challenges of differentiating twins in light of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, specifically his theories of substance and individuation.

Examines Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and the epistemological challenges of differentiating twins in light of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, specifically his theories of substance and individuation.

This paper explores how Bucharest’s cinema-going public perceived the Nazi influence on Hollywood in the 1930s. The aim is to identify how Nazi propaganda was disseminated and consumed in interwar Bucharest and its similarities to the idea of glamour, relevant both to fashion and cinema. Considering the links between Goebbels’ propaganda mac…[Read more]

Shortly after publishing the first edition of his Essays in 1597, Francis Bacon drafted De sapientia veterum, a series of unpublished essays designed to re-read classical mythology as indicative of political and scientific truths. An early, if partial, expression of Bacon’s project to facilitate mastery over the natural order, De sapientia has c…[Read more]

This essay examines English Renaissance chess manuals in order to understand why chess, a game that encourages subterfuge and stratagem, was nonetheless figured as the paradigmatic example of a virtuous pastime. Particular attention is given to da Odenara Damiano’s The Pleasaunt and Wittie Playe of the Cheasts (1564), Arthur Saul’s The Famous Gam…[Read more]

The Longleat Manuscript, the earliest known illustration of a Shakespearean play, contains three main components: a passage from the beginning of Titus Andronicus where Tamora pleads for her son’s life, lines from Aaron’s final confession, and a hand-drawn image that, apparently, corresponds with neither passage fully. Amid other mysteries, the…[Read more]

This article explores how public health was transformed in Egypt soon after its occupation by Great Britain in 1882. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Egyptian state had invested substantially in health to boost the nation’s economic and military strength, and, especially after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, to address E…[Read more]

A goal for language learners is to function in plural languages according to their own needs and purposes. A bilingual perspective starts from that attainable goal. Learners in Japan tend to idealize L2 mastery or becoming bilingual, so it becomes other people’s business. Monolingual teachers tell students by their example, “go where I have not…[Read more]

While working on my recent novel, “The Bard & The Barman: An Account of Shakespeare’s Lost Years,” I endeavored to write a sequel to Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost” which left the characters frozen in time. No one is going to confuse my work with the Bard’s, but I welcome any feedback on this play, written in contemporary lingo, rather than…[Read more]

While working on my recent novel, “The Bard & The Barman: An Account of Shakespeare’s Lost Years,” I endeavored to write a sequel to Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost” which left the characters frozen in time. No one is going to confuse my work with the Bard’s, but I welcome any feedback on this play, written in contemporary lingo, rather than…[Read more]

Wer kennt heute nicht die kriminalistischen Fingerabdruckmethoden aus Krimi und Nachrichten? Vor 160 Jahren wurde einer ihrer Pioniere in Dalmatien geboren: Ivan Vučetić. Für die Methode bedurfte es zweier Werkzeuge: einer Klassifizierung von Fingerabdrücken und eines praktikablen Suchverfahrens. Die Erfinder beider Werkzeuge stammten aus dem Kai…[Read more]

This article examines Mary Magdalene’s biblical identity and poetic representation in selected sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish texts. An alternative reading or “re-visioning” (Adrienne Rich’s term) of the narratives that tell her story reclaims her figure from masculinist characterizations of Mary Magdalene that have made an enduring…[Read more]

In this book chapter, Dr. Davis examines the depiction of a dissimulated desire for material improvement (mejora) as it is expressed in the epic poetry of imperial Spain, particularly in Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana. She shows that within the aristocratic context of the times, the desire for personal betterment or “mejora” is always contingent…[Read more]

The nautical motif of the ex-voto (votive offering) is a lyric genre that reflects poetically the possible experience of a shipwreck survivor. Paradoxically, many of the poets who evoke the perils of sea travel never left Spain or, at most, sailed only the waters of the Mediterranean. Their writing of the sea remained consistently codified in…[Read more]

The biographical trajectory of the Franco-Flemish composer Josquin des Prez can be described as exciting and his musical contribution as transcendent in an era of sublime creativity that coincided with the artistic and intellectual rediscovery of the values of classical Greco-Latin antiquity. A contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo,…[Read more]

In his response to the Dauphin, his threats before Harfleur’s walls, and his St. Crispin’s Day oration, Henry V deploys what we might call proleptic histories of the present as a means of rhetorical persuasion. Henry invites his audiences, that is, to imagine themselves in the future, understanding the present as part of their own history. Hen…[Read more]

In his response to the Dauphin, his threats before Harfleur’s walls, and his St. Crispin’s Day oration, Henry V deploys what we might call proleptic histories of the present as a means of rhetorical persuasion. Henry invites his audiences, that is, to imagine themselves in the future, understanding the present as part of their own history. Hen…[Read more]

In this early article, written in the wake of the publication of Alessandro Martinengo’s _La astrología en la obra de Quevedo_ (Madrid: Alhambra, 1983), Dr. Davis focuses on the astrological tropes in a Quevedo sonnet on the nativity of Christ to see whether this poetic text can shed additional light on the poet’s documented penchant for…[Read more]

Professor Davis’s early article on appropriations of the Indies by Spanish poets who remained in Spain invites us to contemplate a body of poetry that plays the idea of American treasures against the value of true, spiritual riches.