... then, For they are cunning crafty men.1 So begins the English ballad The Mothers Kindness, Conquer d by her Daughters Vindication of Valiant and Renowned Seamen (ca. 1676 96), in which a Mother and her daughter June debate sailors suitability for marriage. Sailors, Mother declares, are cunning, crafty...

... . . . wonderfully peopled with infinite numbers.”7 Coryate Vitkus / Adventuring Heroes  77 and Lithgow recorded their own experience in published narratives, but there were many others — English merchants, sailors, and travelers — who shared the wonder and awe...

... translation of the Romance of the Rose, “Though we mermaids call them here / In English, as is our usage / Men call them sirens in France Following ancient tradition, medieval mermaids were temptresses, especially dangerous to sailors and other trav- elers. They also acquired, by way of biblical...

... of More’s invented names, both personal and place names, record the indignant reaction of an English reader to the institutions of the Utopians in the southern hemisphere. I offer as examples the place name Utopia, and the proper names Hythlodaeus (Knower of Nonsense), the Polylerites (Talkers...

... is a witch: “It hath latelye been found,” the pamphlet claims, “that the Devill dooth . . . marke [witches] with a privie marke, . . . and generally so long as the marke is not seene to those which search them, so long the parties that hath the marke will never confesse any thing” (12–13). 16 In English...

... is not, in my view, to be found in the Chester play of Abraham and Isaac or in any Middle English play on the topic. The sex- ual subtext enters Canticle II not from the Chester text but from Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor, which supplied Crozier and E. M. Forster with the text for Britten’s great...

...- ing older forms of English drama. More recently, Clifford Davidson and Stephen Greenblatt have read the craftsmen- actors of Dream in the con- text of the “traditional plays” the boy Shakespeare might have witnessed in Coventry. Louis Montrose argues that the mechanicals not only recall...

... to have lamented that he was losing more ter- ritory to his well-paid astronomers than to his enemies.62 And as late as the 1760s, when leaders from the British colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania commissioned two now famous English astronomers, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, to survey...

... that postcolonial theory itself has been based on models drawn chiefly from the French and English imperial experience and its aftermath, we may also find ourselves reinforcing hegemonies already present in The Middle Ages, in which French and English medieval cultures serve as exem...

... Kinoshita and Jacobs / Ports of Call  165 Critics working in Branca’s wake, on the other hand, tend to minimize Boc- caccio’s engagement with this larger Mediterranean world.9 In the English translation of this passage appearing in Boccaccio: The Man and his Works, for example, the portions italicized...

... 1600s, more than half of their 1,500 or so captives were English or Irish, taken from captured ships or right off British shores: for decades thereafter the English commonly called any corsair from any- where in Barbary a “Sallyman.”20 This sort of exogamous slaving was also the rule...

... by Adam’s creation before Eve. In the words of the English anatomist Helkiah Crooke, “the Excellency of Man” was distinguished by the fact that he “was made upright and looking toward heaven.”4 The very act of standing, then, could convey gendered meaning, and the upright pos- ture of young pissing...

... as late medieval English religious culture in terms of these questions — in terms, that is, of changing definitions and valuations of enough which follow from Reformation debate and polemic. I focus on the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40:1, Winter 2010 DOI...

...Oren Falk © by Duke University Press 2000 The Son of Orfeo: Kingship and Compromise in a Middle English Romance Oren Falk...

... discrete acts of self- interested speech, the designs of which were to issue semipermanent declarations of or about dissent, declarations that utterly lacked the socially curative properties of the scaffold s purgations. I. M. W. Harvey and John Watts have argued that this period in English history saw...

..., and the smooth progress of social power. Quickly after its first, sixteenth-­century appearances in English, queer came to mean “forged or counterfeit” with regard to money. I like espe- cially its connection with flight, and liberty, as witnessed in Awdelay’s oft-­ reprinted Fraternitye of Vacabondes...

... on to show how the framework of “plays as play” informs both the structure and logic of the only extended medieval English discussion of the popular theater, the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, a single discourse likely compiled from two separate discussions written probably around 1400 in the vicinity...

... of the world through the constancy and steadiness of their actions.10 This disapproval of sartorial mixture was a commonplace of sixteenth- century satirists and costume book writers, for example, John Lyly, in his Euphues, The Anatomie of Wit (1579): The attire [the English] use...

...- iers and discoursing Machiavellists may have been high-­born and learned, but they were not immune from the base inclinations of craftsmen and trad- ers. In the words of the English lawyer John Stubbs, “Machiavellian logic” was simply absurd and lacked reason.16 The link between artisanal...