...Rebecca Field The fourteenth-century contemplative manual The Cloud of Unknowing and the shorter texts attributed to its author explore an extreme form of apophatic spiritual encounter. In order to guide his disciples in this kind of practice, the anonymous Cloud -author adopts a classical theory...

... authoritative text par excellence ) should be implemented. There are striking parallels and intersections between scholastic literary theory and the “originalist” theory of constitutional interpretation; they share a common language of intentionalism, along with difficulties of interpretation. Approached...

... conclusions about early modern English performance in light of new research and theory. The article deploys new thinking about performance historiography, arguing that such perspectives unsettle the easy placement of an event in historical chronology, disrupt archival logic, and insist on a degree...

... required for martyrdom. A new reading of “Batter my heart” reveals that Donne, typically thought of as vigorously dismissive of martyrdom, developed a sophisticated theory of a passive martyrdom. This martyrdom is free from any human willing and cannot be imitated; it is, as Donne calls it, “passive action...

...Jenny C. Mann This essay documents the mutual interactions of philosophy and poesis in early modern theories of knowledge. It does so by following the trajectory of the wax image, or simulacrum, from Greek philosophy to Roman rhetoric and onwards to early modern philosophy and poetry. Ovid’s fable...

...Eleanor Johnson This essay argues that Chaucer’s much- unloved “Monk’s Tale,” rather than being a failure or misfire on Chaucer’s part, actually constitutes a high- water mark of the bold and experimental literary theory that characterizes much of Chaucer’s later career. In this case, the Monk...

.... 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...

... of personality in the visual and literary arts of the period. But nowhere was its influence greater than in the practice of criminal law. This special issue explores the varied ways that jurists and judges drew on theories—ancient and modern—of how to read the human body, the face especially, in order to help...

...Manuela Bragagnolo Sixteenth-century Venice was a creative lab in which physiognomy was undergoing major transformation. The development of art theory, especially the theory of proportions, as well as a new attention to direct observation, parallel to developments in anatomy, decisively enriched...

... of the Discalced founder-reformer, Teresa de Jesus of Avila, whose ideas were themselves shaped in response to Augustine’s theories of temporality. The essay also draws on work by a range of philosophers, most particularly Auerbach, Kant, Kierkegaard, Kristeva, and Levinas. It concludes that early modern nuns...

...Julia Reinhard Lupton This essay uses the concept of affordances, borrowed from design theory and environmental psychology, in order to map the use of space in act 1, scene 5 of Romeo and Juliet . Hospitality provides a socio-symbolic script for objects and persons in action that crosses theatrical...

... . Boccaccio and Sacchetti provide more than just anecdotal bric-a-brac to Vasari and his fellow Renaissance art theorists. Both authors identify the painter’s labor as a central problem for aesthetic theories of painting. In contrast to Boccaccio, Sacchetti sees no contradiction between the daily realities...

...John Jeffries Martin In early modern Europe, judges read the bodies of victims and suspects through a variety of lenses shaped by popular beliefs, Renaissance notions of physiognomy, and by the study of medicine, classical rhetoric, and natural law theory. This article explores the writings...

...John Leeds Recent scholarship has asserted that Renaissance humanists adopted an effectively poststructuralist view of language as a sign system independent of extramental reality. But language involves more than signs, and this scholarly position squares poorly with the theory of verbal mood...

... discourses could act as a vehicle for spiritual and psychophysiological change. Combining cognitive theories that view the heart as the tablet of memory with a physiology of the heart as a breathing organ that creates and circulates spirit, the Livre synthesizes medicine, natural philosophy, and theology...

... prominently in this intriguing textual landscape. Focusing on this particular healing paradigm, and drawing on insights from cultural theory of the body and medical history, this intertextual analysis of medical writings, English Civil War playlets, and political treatises by Harrington, Winstanley, Coppe...

... they also represent a genre of life narrative that profits from the insights of literary and feminist theory. This essay reads the rich harvest of fifteenth-century Burgundian pardon letters as collaboratively authored textual performances as it explores the relationship of these micronarratives...