...James Simpson This essay is a rebuttal to Debora Shuger’s 2008 essay, “The Reformation of Penance,” in which she takes aim at revisionist Reformation scholarship, and in particular at James Simpson’s Reform and Cultural Revolution , published in 2002, as exemplary of the error of the revisionists...

...Lloyd Edward Kermode This essay introduces and assesses the importance of philosophical, geographical, and anthropological understandings of “space” and “place” for literary and dramatic scholars. In the process, it asks its own questions about the political use and control of space, and how we...

...David Aers This essay argues that Calvinist versions of God and human redemption cannot be adequately grasped without studying the medieval traditions from which they emerged. Beginning with a close reading of Calvin's extremely violent understanding of the atonement, the essay moves through...

... was probably the single most important influence on European thinking about the Americas at the dawn of the seventeenth century. This special issue explores two fundamental questions about the collection as a very influential whole. First, the essays look at how the volumes on the voyages to the West have...

...Walter Mignolo Theodor De Bry and his family's volumes of the America series, as well as their entire collection of narratives and engravings depicting the newly “discovered” worlds of East and West, illustrate only half of the story: the world as seen by European eyes. This essay focuses on Guaman...

...David Aers This essay argues that William Langland’s great poem Piers Plowman poses serious questions both to the tradition of the virtues that Langland inherited and to the possibility of their authentic embodiment in the contemporary Church Langland knew. Moving from Thomas Aquinas to Thomas...

...Donovan Sherman This essay reads Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice as a manifestation of early modern England’s anxiety over the soul. As something both essential and unrepresentable, the soul existed in the popular imagination as potentially monstrous or divine, distanced from both the body...

...Sharon T. Strocchia This essay examines suicidal behaviors in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholic convents in light of the new attitudes toward voluntary death emerging across Europe between 1500 and 1700. Focusing on Italy, which housed the greatest number of enclosed religious women...

...Juliet Fleming The essays gathered in this special issue of JMEMS describe processes of cutting, dismantling, and reassembling printed books in the early modern period. This focus on “collage” techniques in bookmaking should displace the commonsense understanding of the book as an undisturbed whole...

...Jenny C. Mann This essay documents the mutual interactions of philosophy and poesis in early modern theories of knowledge. It does so by following the trajectory of the wax image, or simulacrum, from Greek philosophy to Roman rhetoric and onwards to early modern philosophy and poetry. Ovid’s fable...

...Thomas Pfau This essay takes up a variety of issues arising from within the narrative offered in Brad S. Gregory's The Unintended Reformation . This book has been widely perceived to be informed by a Catholic metaphysic, even as Gregory continues to disavow that framework, or declares...

...Sara Petrosillo This essay examines representations of the womb across late medieval and early modern performance. The N-Town Mary plays and the Elizabethan tragedy Gorboduc are separated by less than a century but are rarely examined in light of one another. Using microhistorical methods...

...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...

... English lyric about three fourteenth-century catastrophes: a revolt, a plague, and an earthquake. The six essays that follow approach the dynamics of catastrophic form in their own ways while sharing a set of assumptions about how catastrophe invites formal experimentation. Form, these essays agree, can...

...Sara Ritchey According to long-standing scholarly opinion, the twelfth century discovered nature. This essay argues that earthly nature was not discovered in the twelfth century. The twelfth-century authors of the philosophia mundi or the sculptors who fashioned the acanthus capitals at Rheims...

.... In this special issue of JMEMS , essays explore the ways in which monastic foundations are complexly imbricated in their local communities as well as in far-reaching political, economic, and textual systems. One of the aims of this issue is thus to use the topic of monasticism to rethink a variety of boundaries...

...Nicky Hallett The representation of time in early modern spiritual self-writing has received little critical attention. This essay seeks to redress that neglect. It focuses on the conception of time in the writings of Carmelite nuns, considering English women’s formulations alongside those...

...Emma Katherine Atwood This essay responds to queer approaches to Edward II and instead explores the way Marlowe tests the limits of imaginative space by presenting challenging and untenable spaces with which his audience must engage. For example, when Edward II is asked to imagine Killingworth...

...Ashley Denham Busse This essay explores the early modern stage convention of the discovery space and use of other curtained and costumed spaces to argue that such conventions performed and materialized the experience of abjection, those terrifying reminders of man’s material origins and his destiny...