... and the inevitable twin of that desired dissolution: the unraveling of discursive confidence that must accompany, and perhaps produces, the desire for self-dissolution. Elegiac writing unwrites itself. The article then looks behind the literature to the pastoral incitation to crush both selfhood and the self's...

...Terence Irwin Luther’s denials (in his Commentary on Romans ) of the natural capacity to acquire moral virtues rest on three assumptions. (1) Virtue requires the pursuit of virtuous action for its own sake. (2) In the state of sin, human aims and motives are all controlled by self-love. (3) Insofar...

...Katherine Zieman This essay explores the late medieval rhetoric of self-representation and conceptions of audience through an examination of the writings of the fifteenth-century Carthusian monk Richard Methley. Methley is considered as a “public contemplative” — a writer who offers his own...

...Amy Appleford Richard Whitford's A Work for Householders constructs a model of household governance organized around the contemplative life of the lay householder and his pastoral command over his familia. A Work for Householder 's companion text, A Daily Exercise of Death , centers on willed self...

... irenic writings, Erasmus lays out an account of human nature that highlights human beings’ vulnerability, sociability, and creaturely state. How does a naturally gentle species become bellicose? Echoing the teachings of Pythagoras, Erasmus finds the origins of war in the killing of animals, first in self...

... childe” strives to understand sin, guilt, and culpability within the constraints of humanity’s limited self- knowledge. Julian both works within and transcends established scriptural and penitential traditions of representing childhood, childlikeness, and the related quality of meekness, a key virtue...

.... This new analysis of Saewulf’s pre-modern self-fashioning is crucial to ways in which literary historians assess pilgrim literature through the valuable anthropological theories advanced by Edith and Victor Turner. As argued here, the status of a militarized Mediterranean in the twelfth century led...

... the depiction of God, and also to articulate the contours of the devotional self. © 2015 by Duke University Press 2015 rebus Christian devotion words and objects word pictures theology • “In Things”: The Rebus...

... into a program for the reform of memory, imagination, and will. As it articulates this process of reform through a series of meditative surgeries, the text adapts sophisticated Latinate clerical discourses for lay use and consciously uses physiological processes to make its program of spiritual self-reform...

.... These articles reflect the openness and self-reflexivity that often characterize microhistorians and their craft. © 2017 by Duke University Press 2017 This content is made freely available by the publisher. It may not be redistributed or altered. All rights reserved. microhistory historiography...

... Goodman, John Milton, John Wesley). There is evidence of a parallel development in scientific circles, as practitioners like Robert Boyle reflected on the necessary role of implicit faith in the collective production of knowledge, a project to which the ideal image of the self-determining individual...

..., self-reflexive discussion of what microhistory is, how it is done, and its challenges and pitfalls for researchers. The participating microhistorians, whose work is published in this special issue of JMEMS , comment on the special challenges they faced in researching and writing, and the audience...

...Lisa H. Cooper London, British Library, MS Egerton 1995 is a well-known miscellany of the late Middle Ages, filled like others of its kind with practical and didactic texts meant to assist its readers in their attempts at social, economic, and spiritual self-improvement. But it also contains...

... to the writing of microhistory. Vehicles of self-presentation and sources of social history, the pardon letters expose the textual strategies through which those accused sought to perform their innocence. In so doing, the letters reveal something of the vast and shifting terrain of sex, station, status...

..., by affectual speech and speaking, by the penchant for drawing attention demanded from actors, the essay suggests the plays archive a radically mobile, incessantly focalizing, self-dramatizing impulse to embodiment that indexes a way to read the anxious behavioral repertoire of early modern living. Copyright...

... with mountebanks were, after all, functional, inviting their readers to witness performances and test medical services. Self-authored documents like bills as well as representational and fictional texts replicate and reenact performative strategies attributed to mountebanks, namely, the cultivation of ambivalent...

... the extent or, importantly, the causes of ecological catastrophe. Its forms suggest that creation's compassion for Christ's suffering actually results in violent self-destruction—a suggestion that troubles twenty-first-century narratives of ecological catastrophe and human responsibility. Although the motif...

...Chandler Fry While much criticism on the fourteenth‐century English scribe and politician Thomas Usk characterizes him as a self‐interested partisan whose Appeal and Testament of Love lay bare his hopes for material reward from London's rulers, this article argues that Usk's two texts offer...

... by its superior historical self-awareness. This essay reassesses these themes through a reading of Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634). This is a play of knighthood and chivalric spectacle, adapted from Chaucer's Knight's Tale , which brings Chaucer on stage in the play's prologue...