... an implicit imperative. It is from here that the poem's demand for spiritual renewal comes. Copyright © 2018 by Duke University Press 2018 Middle English dialogue and debate literature pastoral care conversion strategy Piers Plowman Dives and Pauper ...

...Danila Sokolov This essay undertakes a cross-cultural interpretation of Giles Fletcher the Elder’s diplomatic mission to Muscovy (1588–89). It brings Fletcher’s official report on his embassy to the court of Emperor Fyodor in conversation with its Russian counterpart, in addition to placing...

..., and blind viciousness in the Proposal creates unbearable strains for a reader committed to a posi- tivist reading. As soon, of course, as we admit an unspoken, ironic strategy, that strain is transformed into relief of sorts. With what justification do we assert that the author “means the opposite...

... of later periods, whether medieval or early modern. To bring the early medieval period into contemporary theoretical conversations about empire, submissions will need to identify in this evidence sites of resistance to the current shape of the conversation. It is particularly striking, for exam- ple...

... as Margery's own search for a capable scribe. Here, I argue that Kempe's narrative and didactic strategies are not only evidence of her engagement with a local dramatic tradition, but proof of its prevalence during her lifetime. I accordingly read the text of Kempe's Book against the Macro plays...

... microhistorians who are taking microhistorical practices into new frontiers. A major roundtable discussion features an open-ended conversation about archives, the many ways to read a document, the scaling of historical perspective, the possibilities of story-telling, and the nature and limits of historical...

... the “East” and the “West,” Islam and Christianity, the “medieval” and the “modern.”3 Each of these strategies is offered as historical truth and as the more effective way of connecting our own cosmopolitan but divided world with premodern histories and cultures. Both sets of critics agree...

... by the gender ill prepared to face it. Saxony, the home of the Ottonian ruling house and Hrotsvit’s family, maintains a special status in the history of Christianity due to the ruthless violence of Charlemagne’s expansionist politics, including forced conversions that began a mere century and a half...

... attempts to enter the church with the others, she is repulsed by a mysterious force emanating from an icon of the Virgin Mary. This is the moment of her conversion, and a voice instructs her to cross over the Jordan. When Zosimas meets her, Mary has been in the desert, alone, for forty-seven years...

... escaping another definition of annihilation (decay to nothing- ness). This essay, then, reconsiders Ramie Targoff’s claim that annihilation is “inconceivable” in Donne’s writing by asserting that we might envision annihilation itself as a strategy for Donne in certain instances.4 The ques- tion...

... suspicion, and thy chaunged opinion, shal iudge of me more rightfull sentence.” This launches a set of exculpatory strategies not at all uncommon in prefaces and dedications: the work was never meant for publication, the source material was corrupted already by the errors of printers, Seneca is too good...

... his readers, we must read the Devotions as a sustained intertextual conversation with book XI of Augustine’s Confessions.9 Here Augustine contemplates time’s troubling ontological status: if only the present — itself empty and fleeting, always a mere wisp of a moment replaced by another...

.... Both bodies and the language used by patients to describe their health are offered up for diagnosis and understanding. It is therefore a social process: texts, like bodies and minds, can be interpreted in different ways; there are always conversations to be had, counterinterpretations...

... work reveals that Castiglione differentiated in some measure between professional roles and goals in the Cortegiano even as he recognized their shared concerns and strategies of comportment. Courtiers working at the court of their prince at home in Italy did one thing, while courtiers working...

... and is now commonly known as the Andanças é viajes de Pero Tafur por diversas partes del mundo avidos (“Wanderings and Travels Undertaken by Pero Tafur in Diverse Parts of the World The Andanças is one of the most fascinating of medieval travel accounts, complete with shipwrecks, forced conversions...

... her. I contend that in portraying the devil as an incompetent seducer, chapter 59 creatively adapts doubt-dispelling strategies from the vitae of saints like Bridget of Sweden and Marie d'Oignies, which depict the women outwitting considerably more adept demonic foes in order to claim the ability...

...) Helmut Puff University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Michigan In this essay, I will disclose rhetorical strategies used to negotiate “female sodomy” in a legal document from the pre-Reformation German...

... into dialogue with their early modern counterparts. This special issue focuses the conversation at an especially rich point, that of Shakespearean theater. These essays explore “premodern Shakespeare”: how Shakespeare's drama addresses and expresses the cultural revolution of the relatively recent past, and how...

... a potentially grave diplomatic incident was averted; it also shows how the protagonists’ competing ideas about the nature of the boundaries between Venetian and Ottoman societies, and, indeed, about conversion, subjecthood, and female piety, were ultimately commensurated. The ongoing, and at times mundane, ways...

..., conversion, and conquest— both the poem and its female protagonist have generated a wealth of critical interest.10 Critical responses to Elene have taken primarily one of two forms, neither of which is unique to the poem; rather each is so familiar as to be broadly representative of a major strain...