... 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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

... 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...

...–and affected the welfare of individuals in every social class. Disease is, in fact, a singularly useful subject for examining the interdependence of these social sectors as well as their competing interests, and for interrogating the divide between hegemonic and popular cultures. The essays in this special...

...Derek Pearsall This essay takes up Nicholas Watson's important and influential article, “Visions of Inclusion: Universal Salvation and Vernacular Theology in Pre-Reformation England,” and argues that, for William Langland at least, the promise of universal salvation is at best ambiguous. The essay...

...Thomas A. Hamill This essay examines the ways in which cockfighting in early modern England operates as an allegorical mode, as a trope for conscribing social relations and phenomena as distinct as male subject-formation and the realization of eschatological truth. Focusing on two distinct...

...Elizabeth Currie This essay explores the practicalities of making and buying clothing in early modern Florence. Drawing on the household accounts of families associated with the Medici court, together with a range of other archival sources, the essay uncovers complex patterns of interaction between...

...Rachael Deagman This essay shows that the C-text of William Langland's Piers Plowman articulates difficulties with the process of learning to forgive, a process that for medieval Christians requires mutuality and participation in the sacrament of penance. Tracing the terms forgeue and forgeueness...