The peculiar iconography of the winged horse surmounted by several puttos, as appears in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili sixth woodcut, turns out to be unprecedented and enigmatic at a glance and it’s the result of the depth and complexity of the author’s concepts.
Considering the iconographic details of the sculptural group as well as the text sca…[Read more]

Overlooking Lago di Orta in the foothills of the Northern Italian Alps, the Renaissance-era Sacro Monte di Orta (a UNESCO World Heritage site) is spectacle and hagiography, theme park and treatise. Sacro Monte di Orta is a sacred mountain complex that extolls the life of St. Francis of Assisi through fresco, statuary, and built environment.…[Read more]

Going to the theater was one of the most distinctive-as well as conspicuous-cultural activities to take place regularly in early modern european cities. Precisely because so many people from all walks of life partook of this highly visible pastime, public theaters became spaces wherein social and cultural boundaries between spectators were easily…[Read more]

This article explores the change in dynamics between matter and style in Shakespeare’s way of depicting distress on the early modern stage. During his early years as a dramatist, Shakespeare wrote plays filled with violence and death, but language did not lose its composure at the sight of blood and destruction; it kept on marching to the beat o…[Read more]

One of the major differences between the otherwise very similar commercial theatrical cultures of early modern Spain and England was that, whereas in England female roles were performed by young, cross-dressed boys, in Spain female performers were prominent in their industry. indeed, actresses in Spain played an active role in the creative process…[Read more]

An introduction to a new edition of James Rorty’s classic 1934 book Our Master’s Voice. The book presents a coherent and original theory of advertising. Its main tenet holds that the ad business can only be understood within the totality of the country’s economy and culture. The alternative—to treat the business of publicity as a “ca…[Read more]

Mary Stuart’s Bouncing Head
Execution scenes reveal the links between the spectacular and the punitive (Michel Foucault), but they are difficult to stage, even more so when the topic is the decapitation of Mary Stuart, whose execution divided Catholics and Protestants, forcing playwrights to adopt several mediation strategies. Taking plays by J…[Read more]

Jean de la Taille’s “Saül le furieux” (1562) has been described as “the most dramatic play produced by the French Renaissance,” and the author’s preface to the play in the printed edition of 1572, “De l’Art de la Tragedie,” as “certainly the best theoretical essay on the theatre written in France before the classical period.” These estimates by…[Read more]

Tsao, Hung-ping 曹恆平 and Mou, Yong Ning 牟永寧 (2020). EAST WEST HEAR SAY. In: “Evolutionary Progress in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM)”, Wang, Lawrence K. 王抗曝 and Tsao, Hung-ping 曹恆平 (editors). Volume 2, Number 10, October 2020; 60 pages. Lenox Institute Press, Newtonville, NY, 12128-0405, USA. No. STEAM-VOL2-NUM…[Read more]

Introduction to The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism

This co-authored essay reflects on the process of co-translation as a form of co-authorship, drawing on examples taken from Persian poetry and the history of Russian-English literary translation.

THE ZUBER PATRIARCHY
Spring: Jean Zuber, fl.1790-1835; Summer: Jean Zuber-Karth, fl. 1836-1853; Autumn: Ivan (Jean) Zuber, fl. 1854-1907

This is the first of a multi-part series telling how the Zuber family made wallpaper over a 117-year period (1790-1907). It is closely based on the thesis “From the Workshop to the Wall” by Dr. Bernard Jac…[Read more]

As the Pāṇḍava brothers move through the forest in the third book of the Mahābhārata, they hear stories of fantastic transformations and journeys: a band of gods all masked as the same prince, dice that become thieving birds, a sage turned into a hunted deer, a woman who traverses Yama’s realm. These tales recast and elucidate the condit…[Read more]

Wang, Nai-Yi (2020). The principle of febrile and infllammatory diseases. In: “Evolutionary Progress in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM)”, Wang, Lawrence K. and Tsao, Hung-ping (editors). Volume 2, Number 8, August 2020; 206 pages. Lenox Institute Press, PO Box 405, Newtonville, NY, 12128-0405, USA. No.…[Read more]

Metadata and the Margins: Queering the Knowledge Infrastructures of Digitisation and Humanities Databases

This presentation formed part of the Global Renderings in the Queer Digital Humanities for DH2020v

Tsao, Hung-ping (2020). The Color Purple of Taiwan Politics. In: “Evolutionary Progress in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM)”, Wang, Lawrence K. and Tsao, Hung-ping (editors). Volume 2, Number 10, October 2020; 285 pages. Lenox Institute Press, Newtonville, NY, 12128-0405, USA. No. STEAM-VOL2-NUM10-OCT2020; ISBN…[Read more]

Early seventeenth century lute improvisation — a phrase that by its mere utterance may cause debates full of uncertainties, fears and fantasies. What is proper improvisa-tion? How did they do it 360 years ago? In this article I seek to revive a systematic prac-tice of teaching ornamentation and improvisation from the Renaissance scholars — i.e…[Read more]

Informed Play presents a conceptual understanding of tone production based on extensive historical research on primary sources, modern literature and handbook reviews, physical and psychological perspectives as well as on technology. As the first volume in English to discuss and contextualise the topic of tone production on Early Modern lute…[Read more]

En su edición del Romancero del Cid de 1871, un compendio de todos los romances del Cid disponibles en versiones impresas de los siglos XVI y XVII, Carolina Michaëlis incluyó un apéndice para demostrar la vitalidad de la tradición cidiana en pleno siglo XIX. Michaëlis escribe: “Para muestra del género de romances populares que aun hoy dia en A…[Read more]