...Beverly Bossler © by Duke University Press 2004 Gender and Empire: A View from Yuan China Beverly Bossler University of California, Davis...

...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...

... practice. Masons understood ritual, the core of Masonic “craft,” as a philosophical activity in itself. Supporting this claim requires a critique of the prevalent view that Freemasonry was uniquely compatible with specific Enlightenment philosophical constructs—constitutional monarchism in political...

...Joshua C. Birk This essay provides an account of the uncomfortable discrepancies in the way Muslim conversion is depicted among the early Latin histories of the First Crusade. Local contexts within western Europe shaped fundamentally different views of the Crusades. An author writing from within...

...Sarah Hogan Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland is one of the most notorious works in the imperial archive, yet its fantasy of annihilating reform, or what might now be called “creative destruction,” schemes a highly specific kind of colonial project driven by novel kinds...

... (who will still hunt counter) to a loss in all their disquisitions, and undertakings.” Wotton’s contrasting views point to the early modern concern with true, bold, and plain speech, known as parrhesia , and its importance in diplomatic practice. Combining Quentin Skinner’s rhetorical approach...

... assent to such punishments and eventually accept burning as a legal form of punishment. Rejecting a purely theological or symbolic view of the dead consigned to the flames as representing the punishments of hell, this article stresses the parallel between the saints and the cursed. If from a medieval...

... 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...

...Maya Mathur The Life and Death of Jack Straw chronicles the main events of the 1381 Rising in England and has traditionally been viewed as a warning about the dangers of rebellion from below. While recent studies of the play have challenged this perspective, they have focused chiefly on the drama’s...

..., in other words, do we engage textual remnants to locate traces of embodied action? A forum midway through the issue offers speculative and provocative answers to this question, and an afterword takes a wider view of the enterprise to think through its implications for periodization and historical analysis...

... understand its destructive power as rooted in linguistic choices that disrupt the crucial nexus of virtue, the virtual, and the corporeal. In More's view, Tyndale's Bible thus deserves immolation along with the heretics themselves. 28 Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins, The Writings of Julian...

... of the judicial process, eventually adopting the view that it was possible to convict an individual on the basis of indicia indubitata (compelling circumstantial evidence) alone. Attitudes about the body and torture in the sixteenth century must be examined in relation to a broad range of medical, theological...

... examines in detail Christ's speech after he has harrowed hell, the principal locus for the expression of Langland's views on the matter, but attempts to place this speech in the context of and as the climactic statement of Langland's salvation theology as it develops through the poem. Important variations...

...Andrew Wear In the early modern era, physical place, health, and disease were integrally linked in a geographical and climatological theory of the environment. The Hippocratic treatise Airs, Waters, Places served as a template for viewing the relationships between places, health, disease...

... or couldn't reform their spiritual lives, and suggests a new view of why changing minds wasn't as easy as the reformers had hoped, and why stripping the churches of their rood screens, burning or hiding statues of saints, overpainting narrative wall murals, and replacing stained glass with plain windows...

... on how merchants, diplomats, humanists, artists, mendicants, pilgrims, itinerant artisans, and laborers viewed their world and moved within it. a Cultures of Clothing in Later Medieval and Early Modern Europe...

... as silk merchants and as agents purchasing goods on behalf of others. Buying clothing was also a strongly gendered pursuit, shaped by contemporary views of women's domestic roles. Despite the influence exercised by consumers, members of the clothing trade played a significant part in promoting change...

.... The essays keep the focus on De Bry's volumes as they form part of a series that builds a sense of the entire world from the point of view of its northern European readership. In this way, the essays underscore the global effect of the collection, a positioning of northern Europe not merely with respect...

... lexicographical to theoretical. Yet the “Preface” that Valla wrote for the Annotations has not been studied in great detail; the two versions of this “Preface” represent Valla’s views on the importance of studying scripture with philological tools, his respect for the Greek language, and his strong sense...

... by or acquired from a Chester guild that had once used it to advertise the artisanal skill of its craftsmen-players? Tracing the ass’s cultural associations implicates long-held views of the medieval/early modern divide and of Shakespeare as an author. For once the ongoing agency of supposedly superseded...