...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...

...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...

...Helen 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 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...

...Thomas Robisheaux Microhistory, far from a brief and controversial experiment in history writing of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, has become one of the most creative ways to tackle the difficult problems of writing history in our time. This JMEMS special issue brings together practicing...

... a single stand-alone sentence, a colophon, from an early ninth-century manuscript, Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique 8216-8218, in which the scribe, one Ellenhart, reports that he copied the book while on a military campaign and supplies the dates of his copying. This evidence leads the author...

..., and ultimately coexisted with one another. © 2017 by Duke University Press 2017 microhistory early modern Manila Chinese immigration Spanish colonialism globalization • • Microhistory and Microcosm...

... itself between a myth of medieval kingship as limited, contingent, and responsive to human need, on the one hand, and on the other, a myth of Tudor pragmatism as a sovereign assertion of law, the play offers two alternatives to the absolutism of Stuart monarchy without endorsing either. © 2017 by Duke...

...Christopher S. Celenza The last fifty years of scholarly research have revealed the fifteenth-century thinker Lorenzo Valla as a powerfully original intellect, difficult to shoehorn into contemporary disciplinary divisions. One of the most interesting areas of his work concerns the intersection...

...” — 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...