According to medieval common law, assault against a pregnant woman causing miscarriage after the fi rst trimester was homicide. Some scholars have argued, however, that in practice English jurors refused to acknowledge assaults of this nature as homicide. The underlying argument is that because abortion by assault is a crime against women, male…[Read more]

Sunday, January 23, 1390 was a day that Ralph Peioun of Wotton (Lincs.) and his wife most likely never forgot. On this day, their one-year-old son, Richard, presumably curious and headstrong like most young toddlers his age, made an unfortunate choice of playthings when he picked up a pair of shears and wounded himself in the throat, a fatal…[Read more]

When confronted with cases of self-killing, medieval jurors had to contend with a vast array of often conflicting concerns, from religious and folkloric condemnations of the act of suicide, to fears for the welfare of the family of the dead, and to coping with royal confiscations of a felon’s goods. All of these factors had a profound impact on t…[Read more]

The use of the term “community” in historical studies continues to present problems for many medievalists. Myriad studies have emphasized the inadequacy of the term when describing medieval society. Microstudies of manors and villages, especially in the English context, by historians Barbara A. Hanawalt, J. Ambrose Raftis, and Sherri Olson (am…[Read more]

The history of homicidal insanity in the courts of law of medieval England.

Given the hurdles one faced in trying to stay healthy in later medieval England, it should come as no surprise that the medieval English placed a premium on competent medicine. As Carole Rawcliffe has argued, “medieval life was beset by constant threats to health arising from poor diet (at both ends of the social spectrum), low levels of h…[Read more]

With regard to English common law, medieval women were able to participate in the curial process in only a limited way. This is not true of women as defendants: women could be sued for almost any civil or criminal plaint, but their privileges as plaintiffs were broadly curtailed by marital status and cultural expectation. The legal fiction of…[Read more]

In the year 1304, Matilda Bonamy of Guernsey, a young woman from one of the Anglo-Norman island’smost established and affluent families, found herself in a predicament familiar to many of today’s youth. A liaison with Jordan Clouet, also from a family of long provenance in Guernsey if not as comfortable, had left her pregnant. To Matilda the sol…[Read more]

Review of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel, by David Kurnick

How might literary and cultural spheres intersect with the Anthropocene, the epoch — however defined — of humanity’s detectable influence at geological scale? What forms, genres, objects, and methodological lenses might prove most fertile in mediating between the concept’s abstraction and its concrete entailments for literary and cultural hi…[Read more]

This essay considers the use of “serial thinking”—an approach to representation and cognition that emphasizes repetition, enumeration, and aggregation—in the work of Thomas Hardy. Examining his first novel, Desperate Remedies (1871), it connects Hardy’s approaches to serial thinking with the discourse of Victorian logic (especially the work of J…[Read more]

This essay reads Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry for its “ecological perception”: a perceptual modality involving the dynamic interaction between human bodies and environmental givens or potentialities. Linking Hopkins’s syncretic ideas about perception to the psychologist J. J. Gibson’s account of our sensitivity to environmental “affordan…[Read more]

John Ruskin’s cloud aesthetics develop a coherent, if figurative, inquiry into the nature of human liberty. His changing accounts of cloud formations across Modern Painters gradually place more emphasis on liberty within a framework of restraint and self-government. Attending to the shifting and equivocal senses of liberty in Ruskin’s aes…[Read more]

This essay analyzes contemporary politics of truth across overlapping contexts: the predicament of whistleblowers, the proliferation of digital disinformation, the extractive imperatives of data economies, and the impossibility of exposing the truth when exposé becomes itself a game. The essay reads the recent cultural and political interest in…[Read more]

Departing in some measure from critical views that invoke similar contextual materials, this essay argues for a reevaluation of Hopkins’s debt to scientific thinking in his poetry and poetics. Hovering between competing conceptions of nature’s structure and purpose—evolutionary theory, energy physics, natural theology—Hopkins develops a poetics…[Read more]

This essay considers the significance of rumor in the work of Thomas Hardy, anchoring its claims in a reading of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). I argue that rumor conditions the narrative movement of this novel through its linked operations in social space and bodily sensation. First, I examine the relationship between the movements of…[Read more]

Ruskin and Mayhew together disclose a Victorian ecological discourse attuned to the divergent spaces, varying rhythms, and dispersed networks that compose the urban environment.