Scientific diagrams could and did appear in more unexpected places. This essay discusses such an example: the diagrams that the thirteenth- to fourteenth-century scholar George-Gregory Chioniades added to a manuscript of John of Damascus’s Fountain of Knowledge as part of his commentary on the text. I argue that the diagrams were a very important,…[Read more]

This chapter gives an overview of several different projects grounded in digital media approaches or digital humanities methodologies that I assign my students while we are reading Dostoevsky’s novels. In particular, Crime and Punishment is rich for this kind of approach. Projects include a digital mapping project using software like S…[Read more]

This chapter argues that the concept of the gothic corpse can be productively used to analyze Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1869) through the deployment of two specific imagined corpses in the novel: “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb” by Hans Holbein the Younger and the murderer’s victim buried under the floorboards of Rogozhin’s house. The…[Read more]

This is the introduction to the volume, Dostoevsky at 200: The Novel in Modernity, published in 2021 by University of Toronto Press. Marking the bicentenary of Dostoevsky’s birth, Dostoevsky at 200: The Novel in Modernity takes the writer’s art – specifically the tension between experience and formal representation – as its central theme. While m…[Read more]

Ann Radcliffe’s novels were extremely popular in early nineteenth-century Russia. Publication of her work in Russian translation propelled the so-called gothic wave of 1800-10. Yet, many of the works Radcliffe was known for in Russia were not written by her; rather, they were works by others that were attributed to Radcliffe. This article t…[Read more]

In classical manuals of Persian science of eloquence (balāgha), poetry translation (tarjama) is classified as a figure of speech along with other rhetorical devices, such as metaphor (istiʾāra), simile (tashbīh), and paronomasia (jinās). In this working paper, I have translated sections related to the rhetorical device tarjama from Tarjuman al-b…[Read more]

The famous middle Byzantine alchemical manuscript Marcianus graecus 299 contains annotations from the late Byzantine period, most prominently in its opening quire. This article examines a text on the very first page of the manuscript, a text written in a late Byzantine Greek script, but in a language other than Greek. A number of words in this…[Read more]

In this book I argue that the political and legal debates regarding chivalry in 15th century Castile unveil the potentialities of chivalry as a social-class building artifact that was used by plebeians to access nobility, by monarchs to reinvent the leading political classes, and by nobility to curb the power of bourgeoisie. I study the tradition…[Read more]