In 1477 William Caxton published the first edition of Earl Rivers’s Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers, one of the several translations of Guillaume de Tignonville’s Ditz Moraulx des Philosophes that were produced in England in the second half of the fifteenth century. Two more editions by Caxton followed shortly after (ca. 1480 and 1489) together with several manuscript copies, most of which, unfortunately, have not yet received scholarly attention. One of them is extant in New York, Columbia University Library, MS Plimpton 259. A remarkably abridged version of Caxton’s first edition, this version is included in a miscellany of secular and religious works produced for Robert Gottes, a Norfolk gentleman. The article proposes a study and an edition of the text, followed by a commentary.

While critics have always known that Skelton’s Replycacion was written as part of an official attack on two heretics—Thomas Bilney and Thomas Arthur—there has been a tendency to subordinate that attack to Skelton’s own, ongoing pursuit of poetic authority, or, as Jane Griffiths puts it, to his concern with the poet’s “liberty to speak.” Focusing on Bilney and Arthur changes the rhetorical signifance of Skelton’s claim to be divinely inspired in the poem. This paper argues that Bilney’s turn to an individual conscience no longer bound by the church creates a significant problem for Skelton: he and the ecclesiastical authorities he represents can claim to represent the church, state, or whatever institutionalized tradition they want, but those claims hold little or no power over the heretic’s conscience. This leaves Skelton with few options. If Bilney won’t listen to the arguments of the theologians, Skelton needs to find some other, new source of authority. Whether Skelton thinks in quite these terms hardly matters; the point is that he wants to defeat the heretics and so ends up repeating their logic.

John Milton’s Paradise Lost engages dexterously with previous epics, especially those of Homer and Virgil. In the conventional epic scene of a descent from heaven, a deity gives commands to a heavenly messenger who then conveys them to an earthly audience. Beginning with Homer, this essay shows how later poets—and particularly Milton—harness the resonances of repetition within these command speeches in order to highlight variant approaches to obedience. In Paradise Lost, both Eve and Adam recast the words of God’s messenger Raphael in the separation scene of book 9, creating an implicit, triangulated dialogue with this angel instead of merely a two-sided debate. Whereas critics often apportion blame in the debate and the fall based on gender roles, I argue that this is not a zero-sum game: Adam and Eve mutually animadvert Raphael’s instructions and then, unlike analogues in classical epic, together disobey the messenger’s instructions.

Hilton Kelliher’s suggestion that John Dryden may have been the author of a satiric Latin epigram on Juno, depicted as a scolding wife, has been met with caution by scholars. A hitherto unnoticed attribution of these verses to Dryden in The British Apollo bolsters Kelliher’s suggestion and reinforces his inferences about the occasion of the poem’s composition, as do the circumstances of an anonymous printing of the piece in an anthology of Latin verse called Examen poeticum duplex (1698). The Latin epigram in question enjoyed an afterlife of more than a century in translations, paraphrases, and imitations that appeared in poetic miscellanies and other publications. Its appeal and spread in the vernacular can be traced to its rhetorically efficient encapsulation of misogynistic views of women’s speech, its resonance with other similarly stereotyped patterns of representation, and the prestige granted by its Latin origins.

The epigram In Locupletissimum ornatissimumque SYL. URB. Thesaurum (On the most opulent and ornate treasury of Sylvanus Urban), signed by “Rusticus,” which appears after the title-page in volume 6 of the Gentleman’s Magazine (1736), was attributed to Samuel Johnson by John Nichols in 1821. This article disputes the attribution on two main grounds: (i) A contribution by Rusticus follows Johnson’s ode Ad Urbanum (GM, vol. 8, 1738, 156) which, according to Boswell, was his first contribution to the Gentleman’s Magazine. (ii) This Rusticus can be linked to the Rusticus who was a regular contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1735–36 (vols. 5–6). At least twenty of the twenty-five poems signed by Rusticus in 1735–36 (excluding In Locupletissimum) can be shown to be by the same author, and a case can be made for his having composed them all. The combination of these points makes it highly probable that he was also the author of In Locupletissimum, and that Johnson’s ode Ad Urbanum was influenced by his epigram.

Seamus Heaney’s “Station Island” sequence records the poet’s experience of a three-day penitential pilgrimage to the shrine at Lough Derg, long associated in literature with Purgatory. Caught between private confession and public examination, through “Station Island” Heaney confronts the inheritances and insufficiencies of his own poetic fashioning in dialogue with a series of imagined ghostly interlocutors. In its setting and in its contents, the sequence occupies a place of intersection between this world and the next, where the living meet the dead. Critical accounts often understand the authoritative voice of James Joyce, the ghostly speaker ventriloquized by Heaney in the final section of the sequence, to provide a primary solution to difficult problems of cultural representation raised by Station Island and so to inform a major shift in Heaney’s œuvre. In contrast, this essay argues that “Station Island” develops a poetic ideal which recognizes and incorporates the ethical accusations Heaney’s ghosts level at him without accepting any final imperative to aesthetic detachment or liberation from the world’s traumas in poetic fashioning. Particularly in sections 8 and 9, “Station Island” purges any poetic stance that would take the severing of social and religious ties as necessary grounds for poetic fashioning. Rather visionary than revisionary, the sequence acts as an enduring juridical and confessional ars poetica, in which poetry is not for the poet but for the communities he inhabits, their living and their dead.

The second half of the thirteenth-century French Prose Lancelot features a series of sexual encounters in pavilions, all variations on a theme borrowed from Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du graal where Perceval takes advantage of a young woman in a tent. The contrast between the exploits of knights who quest for Lancelot and his own misadventure in a pavilion appears to glorify the eponymous hero’s fidelity to his love, King Arthur’s wife, Guenevere. Whereas the questers covet, seduce, or debauch a young woman, Lancelot fends off a sexual advance. However, a careful reading of the series reveals no praise for the adulterous lover’s faithfulness to the queen. The prose romancer instead identifies carnal appetites as a destructive force, preparing readers for the austere values of the romance’s sequel, La Queste del Saint Graal.

This essay reviews the codicological evidence for planned collation in the late medieval manuscript British Library Egerton 2862 and examines the evident disruption of these plans over time as a starting point for considering the interaction between reader, text, and manuscript. We highlight how the different ‘life stages’ that emerge out of evolving manuscript contexts complicate readers’ engagement with the narrative worlds presented by the texts. In particular, we focus on the folios from ‘Sir Degaré’ that have been added in to the ‘Bevis of Hampton’ section of the manuscript as an example for how interpolation can force the readers of medieval manuscripts to actively negotiate the intersection between reading medieval texts and interpreting the history and composition of the manuscript in which they are contained.

In 1477–1480 William Worcestre travelled extensively through parts of England, including Cornwall, and these journeys are reflected in his Itineraries, which are preserved in a single manuscript. Notwithstanding considerable subsequent discussion of the text, a number of passages prompt different interpretations. This paper offers brief new readings of some of them in order to concentrate on two passages in greater detail. The first of them deals with Worcestre’s record of Oswestry Castle, aspects of which become clearer when Middle Welsh linguistic data is taken into consideration as well as the oral source of this piece of information. The information (informacio) obtained by Worcestre from the unnamed hermit of Elsing in 1479 regarding Scandinavian history and geography has been judged as misleading in many aspects. However, an attentive reading of the passage allows us to explain some apparent inconsistencies found there, and the linguistic / philological analysis on which this new reading is based points to the possibility that we find in the text the first attestation of the English word Russian. 

This essay explores how Richard Maidstone’s Concordia causes its readers to confront the queerness of time by voicing the losing side of history in a narrative poem about Richard II’s reign. It argues that readers of the text experience an instance of queer temporal asynchrony, as Carolyn Dinshaw terms it, and that this experience necessitates a reexamination of the ways in which current and historical editorial treatments of Richard Maidstone’s Concordia have influenced its reception and our understandings of Richard II’s reign. By rereading the poem, with its multiple histories in mind, the author suggests that this text is important to understanding what Ricardian history looks/ed like, and, further, that this text can serve as an example of how mainstream historiography normalizes certain erasures in order to tell its story.

That Thomas Watson likely wrote the sonnet sequence Tears of Fancie, published posthumously in 1593, has been generally accepted by scholars since the nineteenth century, but an article disputing the attribution was published in 1989. The lack of great critical interest in minor sonnet sequences of the 1590s has allowed doubts raised by that article to go unchallenged for three decades. When the editor of Watson’s Complete Works, Dana Sutton, omitted the sequence from his 1996 publication, credence was given to the idea that the Watson attribution was spurious. A second, online edition of the Works revived the issue in 2022, when Sutton spelled out his reasoning for the first time. This essay reviews the evidence, refutes the arguments that have been made against Watson’s authorship, and presents new arguments in favor of it, based on the similarities between the sonnet sequence and Watson’s English versions of Italian madrigals, published in 1590.

Henry Fielding ends Amelia as he had his other fictions with a providential ending made feasible by the narrator’s ironies. Without irony, Samuel Richardson’s providential ending of Pamela drew Fielding’s scorn, turning Richardson toward a more theologically complicated ending in Clarissa where everything points to a world of truth beyond this one. In Sir Charles Grandison, his final novel, Richardson elaborates this vision by leaving his perfect hero with incomplete enjoyment: torn between two women, he can accept only one, a limitation echoing the wisdom acknowledged by Laurence Sterne in A Sentimental Journey: “there is nothing unmixt in this world; . . . enjoyment itself [is] attended even with a sigh.” Grandison agrees: “In the highest of our pleasures, the sighing heart will remind us of imperfection.” And again: “the human Soul is not to be fully satisfied by worldly enjoyments; the completion of its happiness must be in another, a more perfect state?”   

This essay focuses on Barbauld’s use of seasons in her early didactic series, Lessons for Children (1778–79), and work, Hymns in Prose for Children (1781), as well as her later poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), to connect reading the book of nature in the eighteenth century to reading climate in our own time. Barbauld’s works for children are unique in that they develop a program for interpreting everyday environments that is grounded in the activity of reading. Barbauld’s program for what I call “perennial reading” has two distinctive features. First, it uses seasons as a framing structure to scale down the book of nature. Second, perennial reading is ongoing and recursive because it is partial and imperfect: a scene in the book of nature is never the same upon a reader’s return precisely because of what they missed in prior readings. Perennial reading pursues comprehension despite the empirical gaps of the everyday.