...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...

...Heather Hirschfeld This essay explores the penitential structure of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice in the context of the Reformation reorientation of human agency in matters of atonement. It suggests that the Protestant attack on the Roman sacrament of penance resulted, for both sides...

...Christina M. Fitzgerald The Croxton Play of the Sacrament paradoxically enacts anxieties about the propriety of Passion drama. Framing the play's central action—the Jews' testing of the Communion wafer in a parody of the Passion—with the story of a Christian merchant who enables or even sponsors...

...” — is the ideal site to explore this jettisoning of materiality, maternal origin, and all reminders of death and decay. In particular, the essay examines moments of the abject’s revelation in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy , contending that the discovery space is one way...

... century, the period that witnessed artisans’ greatest influence, their identity was largely relational, defining itself from and against those who shared overlapping interests: merchants, waged laborers, and women. In addition, the premodern period saw important shifts in the epistemological status...

... counter the policy goals of traditional diplomats. Diplomats mattered in premodern state relations. But so did merchants and missionaries, writers, actors, and other artists. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 50:3, September 2020 DOI 10.1215/10829636-8626508 © 2020 by Duke University Press...

... on how merchants, diplomats, humanists, artists, mendicants, pilgrims, itinerant artisans, and laborers viewed their world and moved within it. Duke University Press 2009 This content is made freely available by the publisher. It may not be redistributed or altered. All rights reserved...

... as silk merchants and as agents purchasing goods on behalf of others. Buying clothing was also a strongly gendered pursuit, shaped by contemporary views of women's domestic roles. Despite the influence exercised by consumers, members of the clothing trade played a significant part in promoting change...

...John Jeffries Martin This special issue investigates some of the ways in which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — the three major religions of the medieval and early modern Mediterranean — intersected one another. Focusing variously on travelers, runaways, merchants, missionaries, and warriors...

.... Soon after the acute food shortages of the 1590s, the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, an order was issued on December 4, 1600 to the London merchants Richard Staper, Thomas Alabaster, and Richard Wright, led by Captain James Lancaster, directing that they “shall conferre together touching suche lres...

... commercial matrix that linked Europe to the rest of the world, but by the 1570s, with the domestic scene stabilizing under the rule of Elizabeth I, English merchants were able to reassert themselves in new ways in the Atlantic, in the Mediterranean, and beyond. In large measure, it was a series...

... of Smyrna, and a Cypriot merchant — the strange power of her beauty driving each to murder or other acts of malfeasance in order to possess her. Eventually, in Famagusta, she is recognized by one of her father’s former retainers, who returns her to the sultan and supplies her with a cover story...

... Heywood sides with a small-producing plowman and a humanist philosopher against a knight and a merchant. Late Tudor “aristo-capitalism” integrated an imperial and capitalist aristoc- racy with its non-noble functionaries and the laborers they aimed to exploit more systematically, leaving little...

... opportunities — but also faced considerable dangers. II Around 1570, the lands along the mouth of the Pasig River on the island of Luzon were inhabited by several thousand people — mostly Tagalogs and recently arrived Muslim merchants and missionaries — living in small vil- lages that were loosely...

..., the Benedictine tradition.5 Within the social composition of Italian and French towns, artisans, retail merchants, and shopkeepers comprised the middle classes.6 Artisans did not always form a part of the urban oligar- chy, which in most cases was open only to those not obliged to perform manual labor...

..., but also a fancy article or trifle. Thomas Starkey, for instance, writes of “merchants which carry out things necessary and bring in again vayn tryfullys and conceipts.”23 Gascoigne himself remarks that “daintie fare” has quickly led to “excesse on Princes bordes, / [Where] euery dish, was chargde...

....) At Leadenhall, the Italian merchants had built a genealogical tree sprouting from a figure of John of Gaunt, showing that he was a common ancestor of both sovereigns, Catherine of Aragon, and Charles the Bold. This arboreal device repeated a tableau that had previously welcomed Cath- erine of Aragon...

..., to a different conception of the relationship between mankind and nature. In Le Goff’s view this shift is closely connected to the culture of merchants, a culture that, due to the stimulus of the circulation of money, is dominated by quantification: Time is rationalized because it can be bought and sold...

... a Marranos and Nicodemites in Sixteenth-­Century Venice John Jeffries Martin Duke University Durham, North Carolina Gaspare Ribiera, an aging Portuguese merchant who lived...

... or awed some commentators. Gerard de Malynes, an English merchant acutely interested in the Italian banks, expressed his wariness about how money going into such banks never seemed to come out again; it existed merely in the form of an “account.” And “[W]hat is this credit?” he straightforwardly...