...Jessica Rosenfeld Medieval penitential writings often proclaim envy to be the “worst” sin because it is committed without pleasure. Envy thus poses a problem for traditional moral frameworks that suggest sin can be avoided by turning one’s desire away from earthly pleasures — envious desire...

... of creation's sympathy with Christ appears throughout medieval theology, Christ III 's treatment of this motif raises two sets of questions about medieval depictions of catastrophe, one set focused on represention of ecological catastrophe and one focused on causes of catastrophe. Christ III leads the reader...

...Valerie Allen Christian devotion often focused on holy measurements such as those of Christ's height, side wound, and the nails that pierced him. This article focuses on ones occurring in English manuscripts, primarily from the late fourteenth to the mid‐sixteenth century. The devout touched...

... the built environment of the 1599 Globe Theater, we discover not one measure of space but ten: (1) geographical, (2) temporal, (3) fictional, (4) characterological, (5) social, (6) political, (7) interpersonal, (8) performative, (9) receptive, and (10) phenomenal. The confluence of the ten measures of space...

... fundamentally on the process by which one arrives at it. Discord therefore serves as a hermeneutic tool, one that Julian uses deliberately. Understanding her method of interpretation also illuminates the role of dissimilarity elsewhere in medieval commentary. © 2012 by Duke University Press 2012...

... of church design. But how was such a new form incorporated into traditional architectural language? This article examines one formal aspect in the design of flying buttresses: the column, an iconographically potent form that communicated the idea of support through its several-millennia-long history of use...

...Stephen Gaukroger One of most surprising aspects of the shift from scholastic natural philosophy to the new mechanist natural philosophies in the early decades of the seventeenth century is the retention of a doctrinal conception of knowledge. There was an assumption not only among scholastics...

... illness with readers when he believes its physical symptoms resist communication? This essay argues that Donne bypasses this impasse by formally recreating one of his illness's contemplative symptoms: the vexed temporal disorder caused by interpreting one's world from within a sick body. Because...

...Myra Seaman This article offers an alternative story of the transmission of Middle English verse romance to the one traditionally told by textual scholarship, one rooted in stemmatics' focus on genealogical descent and its principal interest in origins. Like the medieval romance hero himself...

... colored depictions of local fashions in dress and various regional customs witnessed while traveling. Along with these miniatures, the album combines sententious mottoes, heraldic shields, and personalized inscriptions from friends met during one's travels. The album owner and friends display their newly...

...Shayne Aaron Legassie In spite of its violent origins, medieval chivalry provided rich imaginative resources for bridging ethnic, religious, and linguistic divisions. Pero Tafur’s Andanças (ca. 1453) relates the travels of one Castilian knight through the Mediterranean and Black Seas. Tafur’s...

...John Jeffries Martin Studies of religious dissimulation have generally assumed a moral topography of concealment: one holds one’s true religious beliefs privately, internally, while conforming outwardly to the expectations of the dominant society. This essay challenges this assumption through...

...Barbara F. Weissberger Anti-Semitic myths of ritual murder are less developed and more belated in medieval Spain than in northern Europe, where they flourished since the twelfth century. This essay suggests one reason for this difference: the presence and increasing importance in late medieval...

... the book's annotator as John Bois (1561–1644), one of the principal translators of the King James Bible of 1611. The article explains why this and other material pertaining to Bois and the King James Version has previously been overlooked and considers how further evidence might be uncovered in the future...

...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...

...H. M. Cushman The representations of the midwife Salome and the Apostle Thomas in the N-Town and Chester plays complicate the relationship between two modes of knowledge: “clergie” or male clerical learning, on the one hand, and knowledge derived from sensory experience on the other. The plays...

... the fate of souls after death felt particularly urgent and important evidence for the afterlife was provided by spirits traveling back and forth between this life and the next. Insisting on a bodily experience of a spiritual space, rather than a visionary one, the knight Owein provided powerful eyewitness...

... that increasingly restricted their physical enclosure; they contend that these women also resisted through more subtle cultural means, such as the devotional practice of imagined pilgrimage. Yet recent studies — including one by this author — have argued unconvincingly that late medieval Dominican nuns in southwest...

... by incorporating an innovative guide for discernment in A Revelation of Love that prioritizes trust over suspicion. Julian's trusting form of discernment offers a way to recuperate one of the most stigmatized aspects of femininity: woman's perceived susceptibility to diabolical influence. A Revelation of Love...

... of what's absent from the country house—a rude steward counting one's cups—repurpose resentment into a celebration of lordly generosity. Yet this solution to the problem of resentment is paradoxical insofar as the plenty underlying the lords’ generosity does not require management. Aemilia Lanyer and Andrew...