... in Premodern Devotion Jessica Brantley Yale University New Haven, Connecticut When Learning first Enter’d the world, not words but Figures Nurst Her, to the strength she walks in; now declin’d...

...Marion Turner Medical language permeated all kinds of texts in premodern Europe, including legal, literary, devotional, political, autobiographical, and philosophical writings. The essays in this special issue are particularly interested in the functions of metaphor and of narrative. Many thinkers...

.... 29 Bloom, Bosman, and West, “Ophelia's Intertheatricality,” 169. Thus, James's performance on the occasion of his royal entry reveals that premodern performance may be best characterized by meanings that are suspended between the archive and the repertoire. While Jonson's publication may...

...Susan Zimmerman The phenomenon of disease played an important role in the development of premodern European culture, and in the reciprocal exchanges between Europe and the New World. Its understanding and regulation involved all sectors of society–religion, politics, science, law, commerce...

... into dialogue with their early modern counterparts. This special issue focuses the conversation at an especially rich point, that of Shakespearean theater. These essays explore “premodern Shakespeare”: how Shakespeare's drama addresses and expresses the cultural revolution of the relatively recent past, and how...

...Blaire Zeiders This article posits the importance of John Dee’s Brytanici Imperii Limites in navigating the borders of credibility from the premodern to the post-truth era. While participating in the stated empiricism of early modern scholars like John Leland, Dee also drew upon the methodologies...

...David Wallace a Periodizing Women: Mary Ward (1585 – 1645) and the Premodern Canon David Wallace University of Pennsylvania...

...Bruce Holsinger; Ethan Knapp The Marxist Premodern Bruce Holsinger University of Colorado Boulder, Colorado Ethan Knapp...

... in the early modern period. As much as by their manufacturing and retailing work, premodern artisans may be recognized by specific social practices, such as guild membership, devotional associations, relations to community and nation, and distinctive gender organization. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth...

...Sarah Kay; Nicolette Zeeman; Sarah Kay; Nicolette Zeeman This volume explores new ways of understanding medieval and early modern conceptualizations of nature in light of current developments in critical animal studies, ecocriticism, new materialism, as well as our expanding knowledge of premodern...

.... As the essays gathered in this special issue suggest, that behavioralist redefinition of diplomacy might apply just as well to the premodern state system, before the rise of the familiar foreign office, as to the postmodern state system, whose multilayered complexities extend, resist, and often successfully...

... to another, but instead makes visible a dialectical relationship between the two. Examining literary representations of individual and social experiences of premodern pregnancy, the essay offers a complementary approach to historical archival methods. © 2017 by Duke University Press 2017 microhistory...

...Peter Arnade; Elizabeth Colwill Late medieval and early modern pardon letters are among the best sources of ordinary people's voices in the premodern period. The stuff of social history, these legal documents allow us access to nonelite social actors and masculine spaces of sociability. Yet...

...Carol Symes As an afterword to the special issue of JMEMS “Performance beyond Drama,” this essay reflects on the complex ways that premodern performances and their embodied actors are captured in, mediated by, or dependent on the texts that we use to study them, and on the special importance...

...Ineke Murakami; Donovan Sherman The field of performance studies has invigorated premodern scholarship by directing critical attention to live, ephemeral events that unsettle the textual archive. This special issue of JMEMS builds on this work by stepping away from the usual emphasis on theater...

...Shannon Gayk; Evelyn Reynolds This special issue considers how depictions of premodern catastrophe—environmental, social, political—shape and are shaped by literary form. The issue's introduction explores what form has to do with catastrophe and offers a case study of how form moves in a Middle...

... and fate, to consider the unexpected forms that poetic representations of catastrophe take in a premodern poem. 34 McCoy, trans., Book of Theseus , 29. 35 H. Marshall Leicester, The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press...

... of playerly routines register the actor's dramatic situation on stage and how these scenes are deployed for the poetic and dramatic ends of the works. These deployments register a distinctly premodern approach to the energies of the theatrical occasion, an approach that is submerged by later developments...

... the “virtue trouble” inherent to performative gender ideals, as well as the ethical importance of poetic responses to scripted femininities in premodern England. © 2013 by Duke University Press 2013 a “As false as Cressid...