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]

The critical tradition positions Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser among the pioneers of the nationalistic
movement in Early Modern England. From a historical point of view, this has been the result of the promotion of
Britishness by 19th and 20th century literary critics through their construction of national poets in the literary
canon.…[Read more]

In the Late Elizabethan Period, factionalism complicated the notion of, especially, male friendship. The scarcity of
financial resources of the royal patronage, the arbitrary distribution of favours, and bottom-up pressures of patronees
further problematized a healthy relationship among patrons and patronees and among friends. The horizontal…[Read more]

How does a woman become a whore? What are the discursive dynamics making a woman a whore? And, more importantly, what are the discursive mechanics of unmaking? In Women and Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal, Cristina León Alfar pursues these questions to tease out familiar cultural stories about female se…[Read more]