...Caitlin Mahaffy This article investigates two literary works from the premodern era: Mandeville's Travels (composed between 1357 and 1371) and Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World (1666) , both of which depict hybrid creatures as natural rather than monstrously unnatural. These two texts...

...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...

..., material historicism, albeit a plea that impresses on us the need to think about our idea of authorship at least as seriously as we think about the premodern text. And if the hairline between word and world continues to invite new departures, then it also is the place where old certainties go to die...

..., even secular, than religious or theological. All contributions combine the detailed study of specific texts and problems with wider historical, theoretical, or philosophical inquiry. premodern concepts of the natural world ecological criticism human and nonhuman relations philosophy medicine...

... benefit from a broader awareness of premodern global interconnections. For Watkins, crude peri- odizations and the geographical emphasis on Europe as a region isolated from the rest of the world (and even conceptually divided from within reli- gious and dynamic struggle) compromise the diverse...

... to define itself.1 The line, that is, is itself a product of revolutionary rupture and of revolutionary ideol- ogy. The very ideas of worlds whole unto themselves, or of past civilizations “in their own terms” are themselves products of revolutionary thought. Our conception of historical periods...

... 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...

... the linguistic system, Saussure’s conception of syntax seems exceptionally weak.”6 Here a distinct likeness to the premodern grammatical tradition is undeniable. Anyone who inspects a Latin grammar from the age of Thomas Linacre (ca. 1460 – 1524) will find comprehensive treatments of morphology...

... 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...

... vantage point to elucidate and refresh the interpretative role of intention. The truth wreckage inflicted by Trumpism might deliver a salutary jolt to literary scholars. Trumpistas may celebrate the forever-constructed nature of truth, but that is precisely what literary scholarship had been doing...

... have made visible the long and complex lineages of these contemporary polarizations, arguing that cul- ture wars of the premodern world are indeed the precursors of colonial and postcolonial divisions, while others have preferred to illuminate an equally long history of porous boundaries between...

... a third world coun- try) to catch up, often by stretching the starting point of the modern back a century or more so that the Middle Ages is no longer a middle of any kind, but rather a beginning avant le lettre, an earlier early modern or premodern. (The Renaissance finds itself in the same...

... of theology, particularly in the realm of canon law and medieval jurisprudence. A good place to examine the role of credulitas in canon law is the discussion on the nature and role of witnesses. While canon law was based on the principles of Roman law, in some cases it managed to integrate a few...

...- ism that refuses to be locked away from the world. A vein of longing for such a life runs, through centuries of English women’s writing, directly to Vir- ginia Woolf and her audiences at Cambridge in 1928. The absence of Mary Ward from the corpus of premodern English women’s writings speaks both...

.... In sum, this essay argues that concepts of prosthesis and the prostheticized body enable readers of “Grete Myracle” to better perceive how devout subjects and devotional objects were understood to interact in premodern Europe, and the complex negotiations of matter and agency that could be imagined...

... before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World . Tempe: ACMRS Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 2023. xxix, 300 pp., 25 color plates, 50 halftones. Hardcover, paperback. Pargas, Damian Alan, and Juliane Schiel, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Global Slavery throughout History...

... and large; we microhistorians attend to microcosms. Unlike premodern Platonizers, we do not look to the small for a clear mirror of any macrocosm similar in shape and structure. We do not, like Shakespeare, see his whole world distilled on Prospero’s charmed island, but, still, we often do view our...

... of ecocriti- cism, elucidating premodern representations of the ethical custodianship of the natu- ral world. She notes, concerning the medieval concept of nature, that “as a principle of motion and a force of desire medieval nature or kynde has little material substance...

... direct, though engaged at many levels with Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Whereas Braudel’s mag- num opus is concerned principally with the second half of the sixteenth century, The Corrupting Sea spans no less than the three millennia from...

..., that is, natural theology. These debates revolved around the role of Mary’s menstrual blood in generating Jesus. According to Aristotle, the mother’s menstrual blood provided the fetal body and the male sperm animated it, giving it form. Yet in the case of Jesus’s conception, in which there was no male...