​This chapter explores some legal and literary ramifications of “accident” in British law and society from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century. This period saw changes in common law and legislation relating to accidents, including the emergence of negligence as a distinct tort and statutory provisions for employer liabi…[Read more]

George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale (published 1595) was performed by the Queen’s Men in the 1580s. Initially, the play has been dismissed by several critics as a vulgar and cheap entertainment without much value. Yet, the metadramatic techniques employed in the play sheds light to how humour could be effectively triggered in the respective per…[Read more]

From Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of Friendship” to Jacques Derrida’s rearticulation of the former in The Politics of Friendship, scholars both early modern and modern have sought ways to address the fluid co-mixture of bodies from which the discourse of friendship can and does emerge. More recently still, new materialist thinkers of ontolog…[Read more]

A reading of Shakespeare and Deleuze on the subject of Anthropocene air. Keywords: endurance, climate change, fossil capitalism, carbon ghosts, Hamlet.

Can we imagine a Blue Humanities that takes the non-relation as a starting point for ecological thought? I believe we can. Following Shakespeare and Deleuze, this essay engages in a thought experiment that, if it is not too absurd, might, like the ship of fools of medieval times, unmoor the Blue Humanities from its current safe harbor by putting…[Read more]

This essay examines how the rhetoric of animalization in Shakespeare’s Othello compels us to think early modern categories of race in connection with early modern discourses of “human” versus “animal.” Beginning with Shakespeare’s representation of Iago, I suggest that it is the potential for sameness conditioned by Iago’s counterfactua…[Read more]

This is a pedagogical edition of the medieval Castilian texts with modern Spanish introduction, notes, and bibliography by Ana Gómez Bravo, of a series of excerpts of late fifteenth-century texts related to the cultural practices (perceived and actual) of judeo-conversos, or Jews who have converted to Christianity. It includes an introduction…[Read more]

This is a pedagogical edition of the medieval Castilian texts with English introduction, translation, notes, and bibliography by Ana Gómez Bravo, of a series of excerpts of late fifteenth-century texts related to the cultural practices (perceived and actual) of judeo-conversos, or Jews who have converted to Christianity. It includes an…[Read more]

This is a pedagogical edition of a selection of Las excelencias de los hebreos (Amsterdam 1679), in .doc format with Spanish introduction and notes, with the original text in Spanish. Las excelencias de los hebreos (Amsterdam 1679) is a treatise describing the positive characteristics (excelencias) of the Jewish people and a containing a…[Read more]

Traditionally read as a poem about laboring subjects who gain power through abstract and abstracting forms of bodily discipline, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) more compellingly foregrounds the erotics of the Garden as a space where humans and nonhumans intra-act materially and sexually. Following Christopher Hill, who long ago pointed t…[Read more]

Turning to Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1596) and The History of the World (1614), I reframe such biopolitical factors as Ralegh’s “dissability” around a concept that has less to do with human world-making and more to do with the “states of exception” (Giorgio Agamben) under which inhuman agencies come to matter for world history (of…[Read more]

Though the verbal icon has a long and robust multisensory history extending beyond Milton, my goal here is to challenge ableist readings of Milton’s poetry by linking his poetic ekphrasis to the politics and aesthetics of disability.

Juan Latino was a professor of Latin at the University of Granada and is considered Europe’s first Black poet. This poem appeared in a 1572 book by Juan Latino celebrating Spain’s victory in the Battle of Lepanto (1571). This is a pedagogical unit that includes the original Latin text accompanied by a Spanish translation, with an English…[Read more]

Juan Latino was a professor of Latin at the University of Granada and is considered Europe’s first Black poet. This poem appeared in a 1572 book by Juan Latino celebrating Spain’s victory in the Battle of Lepanto (1571). This is a pedagogical unit that includes the original Latin text accompanied by an English translation, with an English…[Read more]

Pedagogical edition/translation of María de Zayas y Sotomayor’s story “La fuerza del amor” (“The Power of Love”) from her collection ‘Novelas amorosas y ejemplares’ (‘Amorous and Exemplary Novels’) (Zaragoza, 1637). Contains short introduction in Spanish, Spanish edition of Zayas’ text, notes, and short bibliography.

Pedagogical edition/translation of María de Zayas y Sotomayor’s story “The Power of Love” from her collection ‘Amorous and Exemplary Novels’ (Zaragoza, 1637). Contains short introduction in English, English translation of Zayas’ text, notes, and short bibliography.

The matter of Troilus and Criseyde had been dealt in both England and Scotland in similar yet different ways from the late 14th to the early 17th century. In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1385), the conflict between worldly and heavenly love is depicted in a controversial way. Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid (ca. 1480) seems to give a Sco…[Read more]