In a time when the anxiety about Elizabeth I’s heir to the throne was ripe, and illegal to discuss, Shakespeare focuses on the issue of succession in King John, and shows the parallels to his own age, while using Hubert as a metaphor for the difficult position of Shakespeare’s contemporary citizens of England as they anticipate the naming of…[Read more]

This special issue of the Italianist collects ten essays that consider the multiple manifestations of realism and idealism in Italy from the Trecento to the present day. Notions of the ‘real Italy’ (and of ‘Italian realism’) remain fundamental for scholars working in various disciplines, while the exploration of the ideal Italies constru…[Read more]

This special issue of the Italianist collects ten essays that consider the multiple manifestations of realism and idealism in Italy from the Trecento to the present day. Notions of the ‘real Italy’ (and of ‘Italian realism’) remain fundamental for scholars working in various disciplines, while the exploration of the ideal Italies constru…[Read more]

(Ver 2.1.) To be printed in Queens on Stage. Female Sovereignty, Power, and Sexuality in Early Modern English Theatre ed. Bianca Del Villano e Tommaso Continisio (Rome: Aracne). – comments welcome!

I review Quaintance’s study of homosocial culture in Renaissance Venice. I analyze the issues of gender, sexual violence, and humor discussed in the book.

As the first biography in English of Alessandro de’ Medici, this important book raises questions about how historical narratives are constructed and how race has evolved into a critical, if contested, category.

Factsheet for “Elizabeth I’s Italian Letters” (Palgrave US, 2017)

The late Elizabethan Period was marked by socio-economic discontent. Amid this,
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599) featured a prominent debate: whether or not
tyrannicide could solve problems. Around 1599, Essex formulated a like-minded
political revolution only to dismiss it until 1601. Yet, as providentialist and
republican debates failed t…[Read more]

This essay argues that humanist reading practices, methods of analysis, and aesthetics transformed traditional morality drama in the 1560s and 1570s in a way that accounts for the form’s resurgence. The essay looks closely at Ulpian Fulwell’s “Like Will to Like” (1568), William Wager’s “The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art” (1569) and…[Read more]

A two-page abstract of the book.

The article focuses on the adaptation strategies used by Lope de Vega in his play El Gran Duque de Moscovia y emperador perseguido (1617). This tragedy, built on material acquired from travelogues, represents the first depiction of the Russian Time of Troubles in fiction. In it, one can follow Lope de Vega’s shift from preserving the factual d…[Read more]

In this essay I argue that the portrait of Arruntius as a passive Stoic is injudicious, and then I develop a new reading of Jonson’s depiction of Arruntius based on the textual evidence from both the quarto and folio editions of the play. The essay proceeds in three sections. In the first section, I question the commonly held view regarding A…[Read more]

In the late sixteenth century, the common law experienced a phenomenal growth, both in the number of practitioners and jurisdictional power. A comparison of popular and professional literature on legal administration or judicature reveals the complex and ambivalent cultural response to the “rise” of the common law. Despite the usual praise for the…[Read more]

A survey of the foundational disciplines of literate culture in the British isles, from the failure of the Roman imperial project in the fifth century to Henry VIII’s promulgation of uniform Latin grammars in 1540-42.

Grammar and rhetoric were the disciplines charged with teaching correct and effective use of language in antiquity. In the M…[Read more]

As in other early language traditions, premodern English poetry was written out with very light punctuation. The sparsity of manuscript punctuation appears especially problematic in the period before 1200, when poetry in English lacked visual linebreaks. The difficulties of parsing this poetry are substantial. Modern editors of Old English verse…[Read more]