...Jason Crawford Early modern English literary culture was thick with tales of divine judgment. Texts ranging from true-crime pamphlets to Thomas Beard's vast collection The Theatre of God's Judgements (1597) promised to disclose God's work in history, and they found signs of that work in stories...

... and anticlericalism, skepticism and exegetical option. Mortal souls in early modern England: Lucretian doctrine? Thomas Beard opens chapter 23 of his Theatre of Gods Iudgements (1597) by warning his readers that the chapter will be concerned with “Epicures and cursed Atheists, that deny the providence...

... of writing about vice, especially in popular tales of divine retribution that draw on conventions of both tragedy and comedy. He takes a close look at the shaping of narratives of come-uppance in a range of texts from true-crime pamphlets to Thomas Beard's Theatre of God's Judgements . Crawford pursues...

...Douglas Biow Beards, both real and fake, acquire a special status in Giordano Bruno's Candelaio as symbolically charged objects that reveal not only much about the characters and their functions within the play, but also much about social norms and expectations regarding the performance of male...

..., is unshaven, sporting precisely a fifteen-day-old beard. Henry appears, that is, both as a kind of body double 44  Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 40.1 / 2010 and mirror for Walter: his body exhibits the consequences of Walter’s own particular circumstances and so also reflects back...

..., que sino grant dapño jamás nunca la traemos; ansí que en esto fablamos una grant pieça. (221) [That day I said good-­bye to him and I went to take a nap, and at the petition of the Castilians, I shaved my beard, which I was wearing quite long. And on another...

... every other image. It was turned to the right so far that the right eye could barely be seen. The nose was very long and straight; he had arched eye- brows, and eyes most simple and unassuming; hair long, falling below the shoulders; a beard untrimmed and curved...

... ages in the title from the viewer’s left to right, and holding steaming bever- ages. The standing Mesoamerican figure on the right wears only feathers —  a headpiece, skirt, and ankle bracelets. An Asian drinker seated in the mid- dle wears a conical hat, a thin cascade of moustache and beard...

.... The cannibal feast taking place in the background and the Spaniard who is being readied for the grill (his hair and beard make clear he’s a Spaniard) create a link between Spanish eating and cannibal eating. In this single illustration, De Bry represents what Whitehead identifies as the “two key...

.... . . . It was not the constellations that made me a physician: God made me. . . . my shoebuckles are more learned than your Galen and Avicenna, and my beard has more experience than all your high colleges.18 As Paracelsus’s words reveal, he sought deliberately to overturn the learning of the “high colleges...

... when he describes the face in stanza 24 as having a “wandering vine” or beard and being “[e]nchaced with a wanton yuie twine” or moustache (II.ix.24.4, 5). This ambiguity of gen- der, omission of sexual organs, and anxiety about movement in relation to the borders of the body connect...

... have believed that such rustics, and most inferior ones at that, would dare . . . to enter the chamber of the king and of his mother with their filthy sticks; and, undeterred by any of the soldiers, to stroke and lay their uncouth and sordid hands on the beards of several most noble knights...

... . . . Not deckt in robes, nor garnished with gold, But some unshod, yea some ful thinly clothde, And yet they seme, so heavenly for to see, As if their eyes, were al of Diamonds, Their face of Rubies, Saphires, and Iacincts, Their comly beards, and heare of silver wiers. (72...

... had advocated just such a systematic progression for playwrights, decrying a species of “youngster” that assumed the name of poet and “taske[d] such Artists as have tooke Degree / Before he was a Fresh-man.” Heywood wanted “punies” to wait “Untill their Beards [are] growne, their wits more staid...

... desire.6 However, while much of the extant scholarship on medieval mascu- linities does analyze how certain generic male bodily attributes like beards are encoded with social significance in chivalric discourse, it is only recently that volumes like Sherry Lindquist’s The Meanings of Nudity...

... seduction for both Stubbes and Bassanio, must remain tied firmly to the earth. 86  Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 43.1 / 2013 Similarly, Bassanio argues, cowards “whose hearts are all as false / As stairs of sand” likewise wear “false” hair when they boast “beards...

...,” –  Peter can be identified by his tonsure and by the keys he holds in his left hand. Paul can be identified, despite the crudeness of the rendering of this figure, by his receding hair- line and by his relatively pointed beard. While these two apostles commonly appear together flanking...

.... The narrative paints a lively spec- tacle of the pale, snowy-­bearded pilgrims and the king who leaps out of his royal carriage to gather them in his arms and kiss them “bothe fot and hond / Before the lordes of his lond, / And yaf hem of his good therto” (I.2053  –  55). The people are generally aghast...

... Neptune himself, gray-bearded, blue-robed, trident in hand, aloft in his “chariot” of a shallop: “Most powerful of Gods, beneath the vaulting sky,” as he introduced himself [Neptune c’est mon nom, Neptune l’un des Dieux / Qui a plus de pouvoir souz la voute des cieux] (R 17; G 3:473).11 Neptune...

..., and are born with a scorched appearance, with curly beard and hair . . . their juice is called away into the upper portions of the body by the nature of heat.”23 Dark skin is a permanent and collective biological fact, an ancient climatological reconfiguring of the body which...