This article first argues that the twelve Old English poetic lines usually considered the beginning of “The Husband’s Message” in fact constitute an independent riddle, which can be solved “cross.” Then, the article suggests how this rediscovered riddle fits into a thematically-linked group within the Exeter Book. Riddle 30b, Riddle 60, this rediscovered riddle, and the remainder of “The Husband’s Message” represent a sequence of enigmatic texts concerning the way natural materials, transformed by people, interact with different kinds of symbols to create meaning. In Riddle 60 and the remainder of “The Husband’s Message,” natural materials become display-places for letters and runes, while in Riddle 30b and the rediscovered riddle, wood becomes the cross, an iconographic symbol in itself. Viewed in this context, the rediscovered riddle emphasizes the duality of the Anglo-Saxon conception of the cross as simultaneously object and symbol.

First published in quarto in 1595, George Chapman’s Ovid’s Banquet of Sence was reissued in octavo in 1639, five years after the poet’s death. Despite its scarce value from a strictly textual point of view, there are circumstances that signal this second edition as an important document in the history of this work’s reception. First, the new publishers removed all traces of Chapman’s authorship and changed the poems’ titles to make them pass as Ovidian works. Besides, six of the extant copies of this edition have been preserved in Sammelbände containing other translations of Ovid’s works published no later than 1640. Drawing on recent work on the literary significance of material and editorial practices, this essay discusses the new meanings that Chapman’s poems acquire as they enter the dense intertextual, cross-referential universe of Ovid’s work and its multi-faceted poetic personae—lover, praeceptor amoris and exile. By enlarging their own conceptual and referential scope as the result of their Ovidian guise, Chapman’s “Banquet,” “Coronet,” and “Zodiac” contribute to the shaping of new literary and cultural interpretations of Ovid in late Caroline England.

Thomas Sampson in 1613 published a poem, Fortunes Fashion, his only known publication. The poem, in the voice of the queen, focuses on Elizabeth Grey, widow of King Edward IV. Sampson revisits Shakespeare’s treatment of her in 3 Henry VI and Richard III and in 16th-century sources, as he creates an analysis of Elizabeth’s role and personality. The poet wants to restore Elizabeth, who has been unfairly forgotten, in his judgment. Sampson creates a strong, resolute, resourceful, and politically active queen. She exhibits agency, including political and rhetorical skill, in her action and function both as the focus and narrator of the poem. In this largely overlooked poem, Sampson makes an explicit and distinctive contribution to the understanding of Queen Elizabeth, filtered through the 16th-century chronicles and Shakespeare’s plays.

Eliza Haywood’s theory of the passions has long been studied for its advocacy of healthy female sexuality, pushing against eighteenth-century views that position women as inherently virtuous and female desire as an aberration. Less emphasized is the cautionary element to her theory, her acknowledgement that, if not paired with reason, the passions can prove destructive. This article forefronts passionate introspection as the means of granting individuals, both male and female, strategies for negotiating their social interconnectedness with others, period restrictions regarding gender, and assumptions about civic participation. Through the use of examples provided in both her amatory fiction of the 1720s and her later, more overtly didactic novels and periodical essays, Haywood consistently creates an entertaining voice meant to instruct individuals in the proper handling of the passions so that they may avoid committing misdeeds, both morally and socially.

Despite many efforts by pre-modern scholarship to establish a solid foundation for global perspectives (global Middle Ages), in essence we continue to be limited by a standard list of famous western travelers to the East, such as Marco Polo. Those were, however, mostly exceptions, and we would need to take into consideration a more thorough approach to the question to what extent pre-modern Europe really engaged with the East. The artificial divide between the Middle Ages and the early modern age appears to be the first hurdle we would have to remove to advance the notion of global studies. Second, we would have to take into consideration western reports – those by eastern travelers are much harder to come by – which were not simply those by missionaries or merchants, but those that were informed by an authentic interest in the foreign world and tried their best to come to terms with it in their narratives. Two of those hitherto little studied by themselves and never in tandem were the anonymous Niederrheinische Orientbericht from ca. 1350 and the travelogues by the northern German Adam Olearius (middle of the seventeenth century). In both narratives we discover an unprecedented degree of honest interest in and curiosity about foreign fauna and flora, geography, human culture and languages, and politics. Although Olearius was probably entirely unaware about the much earlier travelogue, he himself composed an astounding report characterized by a similarly  high degree of respect for the Persian world, culture, and language. There are certainly similarities to Marco Polo’s Travels, and yet both authors appear to be much less informed by myth and religious preconceived notions. Especially in the case of Olearius, we recognize an astounding degree of linguistic curiosity and effort to create bridges between the western and eastern culture, which we could identify as the groundwork of pre-modern globalism.

In John Milton’s A Brief History of Moscovia (1682), scholars have identified an influence from Milton’s sources that points to a negative view of the Russian tsar, state, and people. This essay examines how Milton offers a more measured view through examining his use of “absolute,” which is based upon his distinctive use of history and his political philosophy. Milton uses history to present good kings and bad kings to offer a reproach to contemporary leaders, underscoring Milton’s larger ethical aims in promoting Aristotelian virtue and his classical republicanism. The focus upon virtue shows that a tsar may possess extensive power by either mirroring an Aristotelian king or a tyrant: the former governs for the common good and the latter does not. Acting for the common good, which is to say, avoiding corruption, appears in Milton’s depiction of the Russian people too, when he highlights those who act as the regenerate, as they promote liberty of choice and challenge bad kings. Milton’s account reflects criticisms of Russia, but these criticisms relate not only to Russia, but all sovereigns or peoples who choose vice over virtue and corruption over the common good. As such, Milton resists the dominant narrative on Russia in European travel accounts in the seventeenth century, and he offers an Aristotelian basis for positive depictions of Russia, which especially relating to the tsar, anticipates what Anthony Cross describes as the trope of the “good monarch” in 18th-century British travel accounts of the Russian Empire.  

Christopher Anstey’s narrative verse satire, The New Bath Guide, was the literary sensation of 1766. It was a success the author would never repeat. This article explores Anstey’s creative difficulties and misjudgements and the central role that satire played in his career-long decline. The New Bath Guide has frequently been maligned and misunderstood in critical studies that define satire in terms of antagonistic attack or that assume the demise of satiric poetry after Pope. This article reads the poem instead in terms of its contemporary reception and the leisure culture it evokes, and retraces Anstey’s subsequent struggle to match his breakthrough work of 1766.

This essay takes the mythological sculptures of Thomas Hardy’s last novel, The Well-Beloved (1897), as a key to a complex aesthetic program. It places the novel within a neglected context, the history of ideas about classical sculpture and, more broadly, a line in aesthetics that conceives fine art as giving access to abstract ideals. In this reading, the novel refuses powerful precedents to suggest that such abstractions are out of art’s reach. Hardy frames the protagonist’s sculptures with images of the island where most of the story takes place. While the stone island has been understood as plain matter that serves as a corrective to the sculptor’s idealism, it too is represented as an artwork. Applying sculptural attributes to every element—the earth’s surface, the figures upon it, and the moon above—Hardy draws extraordinary beauty away from any transcendent realm and grounds it on earth.

E.E. Cummings has often been criticized for adopting a sentimental attitude towards the natural world. This essay argues that Cummings’ depiction of the environment, and animals specifically, is far more complex than scholars have granted. Rather than assuming an intimate relationship with nature, Cummings presents animal minds as “unknown and unknowable” and makes that opaqueness the very subject of his poetry. Focusing on his bird poems, my article traces the techniques that Cummings developed to portray these animals in verse while emphasizing their unknowability, from the high artifice of his early work to the gnomic restraint of his later writings.

This essay considers the intellectual and rhetorical origins of contemporary forms of surveillance that seek to observe the flecks of identity captured in digital spaces and assembled as the data body. I site these origins in John Locke’s discussion of memory in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and the metaphorical language on which his account of memory depends. These metaphors, in turn, inform Locke’s theory of personal identity offered in the second edition of the Essay (1694), which relies on memory for the continuity of the personal self. Locke’s discussion of memory primarily draws on media for inscription for its metaphors. The conceptual work these metaphors do make possible ideas like the transference of persons across different bodies, much like a hard disk may be installed in different computer systems. Locke theorized a disembodied subject rooted in memory to answer questions about the nature of identity after death and resurrection; the afterlife of that theory, and its rhetorical underpinnings, are woven into the fabric of contemporary surveillance from the banality of a shopper’s loyalty card to the deadly workings of US intelligence.

This article examines the so-called convulsionnaires of eighteenth-century France, a strange but influential fringe group of the persecuted reform movement within Catholicism known as Jansenism. It follows one particular thread in the story of the convulsionary movement’s cultural entanglements: theatrics, broadly construed. I begin by reconstructing the mission underlying the Work of the Convulsions, including the functions attributed to sensibilité, spectacle, and dramatic effect. I then consider the rhetoric of theatricality which anti-convulsionist theologians and doctors used to discredit the Convulsionaries—and the ways in which that rhetoric was borrowed back by critics who disliked the “convulsive” acting style popular in secular theater. I end with a look at Voltaire’s curious role in the popularization of that style, and the equally curious, veiled manner in which he responded to the Convulsionaries through an Orientalist tragedy, Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le prophète (1741).

Eighteenth-century Britain saw efforts to establish a national vernacular in print. The dictionaries and novels that helped institutionalize that vernacular were sometimes wide-ranging and inclusive in their approach. This article situates the work of Henry Fielding within this context and argues that Fielding, particularly in his Jonathan Wild and “Modern Glossary” resists such efforts. The article tracks Fielding’s response to contemporary narrative techniques representing fictional character and his use of verbal irony to illuminate the terms of his rejection of the idea of an inclusive print vernacular that might represent the nation.

This essay investigates Samuel Johnson’s ideas of public works, undertakings for the common good that became a basis and benchmark for collective life in eighteenth-century Britain. An enthusiastic arbiter of everything, Johnson drew upon his faculties of criticism to treat works no merely as sensuous objects or partisan metonyms, but events that occasioned and affirmed society’s judgment. I argue that Johnson’s evaluation of works in texts ranging from the Life of Richard Savage to The History of Rasselas can help us not only appreciate his contributions to the discourse today called infrastructuralism, but also discern from the vast Johnsonian corpus a blueprint for applying the tools of literary analysis to the study of infrastructures past and present.

Contrary to received opinion, Samuel Johnson does not dispatch but instead revives the pastoral mode in English as, prior to the sixteenth century, normatively practiced and theorized. He achieves this improvement by a self-conscious return to sources, valorizing and reactivating the mode’s specifically Greco-Roman tonal and thematic repertoire, in particular the ironized characters, religious traditionalism, and skepticism of “schemes of political improvement” of Theocritus’s Idylls and Vergil’s Eclogues. This Johnsonian revaluation operates both in theory – in Rambler and other essays and individual Lives of the Poets which purge pastoral of its Renaissance-era romance accretions – and in practice: Johnson’s own imaginative writing, dating back to boyhood but expressed most clearly in passages of pastoral (and georgic) prose in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and in the Latin poems that he wrote from Skye.

In this essay, then, I argue that Johnson’s characteristic skepticism extends to eighteenth-century efforts to treat the world, as John Locke does, as a storehouse of endlessly exploitable value open to human labor and ingenuity. In his Second Treatise, Locke describes the Golden Age of abundance by invoking an image of a wilderness waiting to be exploited: “in the beginning, all the World was America.” In contrast, Johnson turns the “barrenness” of the Highlands into a metonymic extension of world that resists the interlocking ideologies of bucolic retreat, georgic improvement, and the visionary productivity that underwrite fictions of English national identity. Rather than treating “all the World” as “America,” Johnson strips the world of its stocks of exploitable resources by reimagining it in the images of “barren hills” and treeless islands. In this respect, his Journey bypasses the arguments of Scottish advocates for planting trees in the Highlands and focuses instead on a metropolitan skepticism of agricultural and arboricultural improvement.