This article examines a curious digression in Ralph of Coggeshall's account of the preparations made for the Fourth Crusade in the Chronicon Anglicanum, an anecdote about heresy and witchcraft known as "The Witch of Rheims." The drama of institutional efforts to control the reprobate bodies of heretics or women can obscure the degree to which a nexus of textuality and sexuality fragmented the ecclesiastical establishment itself, particularly as the rise of early scholasticism alienated the cloister from the cathedral. "The Witch of Rheims" reveals the ideological link between the integrity of the texts and the integrity or deceptiveness of the body through the author's deployment of the interrelated discourses of virginity and witchcraft. Coggeshall's narrative presents an important moment in anti-heretical discourse that means to police the boundaries of the authentic church practices through the symbolics of the female body.

Although ekphrasis has been received conventionally as a semiotic phenomenon, Chaucer's most extensive application of the trope, in the descriptions of the temples in part 3 of the Knight's Tale, is essentially social in its themes: as the representation of representation, ekphrasis allows Chaucer to comment on the economic and political conditions of artistic production. In a meticulous alteration to Boccaccio's Teseida, Chaucer's temples are works of human artifice commissioned by Theseus for political purposes. The temple decorations, revealing a universe of capricious violence, should reasonably undermine Theseus's justification of his rule by analogy to the benevolent order of the universe. Instead, the ironically detached voice of the esthetically sophisticated narrator exposes the functioning of "symbolic violence," not only because the art represents violence, but also because it translates Theseus's political ambitions into the field of artistic production, thereby obscuring and denying its own origins in and extension of violent power.

This essay offers further evidence that Henry Constable's Spirituall Sonnettes are stylistically and devotionally distinct from the predominant poetic modes of the late sixteenth-century English Counter-Reformation, particularly as represented by the work of Robert Southwell. While Southwell's poetry is generally written in the complaint mode, Constable opts for unusually eroticized expressions of affective piety. In order to account for the rhetorical structure and devotional character of Constable's use of affective piety, this essay situates the Spirituall Sonnettes in relation to contemporary psychoanalytic accounts of identification and Michel de Certeau's analysis of the rise of mystics in the early modern period.

This article argues that the dominant discourse in The Tempest is not colonialism but humanism, and also a critique of humanist education and government, with Prospero playing both a failed humanist governor and a humanist educator. It also argues for a reading of The Tempest that recovers the play as being about the Old World, not the New World, as post-colonial approaches have done. The essay examines the interplay of the two aspects of humanism: one is humanism in its original meaning as a transmission of knowledge through reading, education, rhetoric (especially memory), and narration; the other is a critique of humanism and its dark side. This dark side of humanism is defined as the discontent with political pragmatism and the abuse of authority brought by the new individualism of the humanist West.

Until a few years ago, it was a critical truism that Addison's play Cato existed as a glorification of the personal conduct and political philosophy of its central character. Untidy details such as Cato's stoicism, a doctrine largely discredited in the eighteenth century, tended to be passed over as detracting little from his general admirableness, even as essentially congruent with a sort of liberal Christianity. Furthermore, those parts of the plot not directly addressing the political struggles in which Cato immerses himself, the love scenes, were routinely dismissed as little more than a distraction from what the play is primarily about. This essay challenges this comfortable view of Cato, and shows how a concentration on the play's details can give rise to a much less attractive view of its supposed hero. It also suggests that eighteenth-century audiences and readers may have been more divided over the merits of Cato than is often taken for granted.

Eliza Haywood's domestic fiction, epitomized by The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), does not reject the modes of her earlier amatory fiction work (such as her 1724 Fantomina), but instead dialectically incorporates it. By considering both Pamela and Betsy Thoughtless in the context of Haywood's amatory fiction of the 1720s, this paper argues that the struggle to appropriate the narrative of the sexually experienced woman highlights the dialogic complexities of the relationships between amatory and domestic fiction in the mid-eighteenth century. The perseverance of amatory modes of writing in later eighteenth-century domestic novels gestures toward alternate ideological possibilities for female subjectivity through both the exercise of virtue and the exploration of sexual desire.

This article begins with an account of the life and work Cecilia Gidoin Jenkins, née Knowles (c.1792-1868), a lifelong friend of Thomas Love Peacock and a hitherto unrecognized Victorian novelist whose work is noteworthy for its critique of the institution of marriage in early nineteenth-century England. It then proceeds to examine Mrs. Jenkins's autobiographical novel Wedlock; or, Yesterday and To-day (1841), in which she relates otherwise unrecorded anecdotes of Shelley and Peacock, quotes the full text of an otherwise unknown love poem that Peacock sent her, and even describes how, one summer day, Peacock proposed to her. Wedlock not only contains the only extensive personal reminiscence we have of Peacock as a young man, but also throws new light on Peacock's relationship with Shelley in 1813-14 as well as his later treatment of their friendship in his "Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley."

The famous thirteenth-century English lyric "Sumer Is Icumen In," also popularly known as "The Cuckoo Song" and usually regarded as a celebration of the natural world in summer, contains accompanying Latin lyrics, beginning "Perspice, Christicola," which seem contrary to the English lyrics. Editors often decide to omit the Latin lyrics, although those lyrics appear prominently alongside the English text in the unique manuscript. That manuscript, British Library Harley 978, folio 11v, a miscellany from Reading Abbey, contains a mélange of spiritual and secular texts in "conversation" with one another. The Latin lyrics of "The Cuckoo Song" offer a heavenly perspective on the cavorting animals of the English text, making sense even of the singing cuckoo.

This essay revaluates the critically neglected Middle English tail-rhyme romance, Emaré. Consigned to folktale status, Emaré has been the subject of few studies largely because of what is seen as a lack of sophistication and historical specificity. Turning to the poem’s central object, a cloth that has typically been read in association with the tale’s heroine and thus in symbolic terms, this essay reads the cloth within an elaborate textual network of romance analogues and late-medieval manuscript culture. It argues that the cloth figures Emaré itself and attests to the self-conscious interests of its newly literate mercantile audience.

John Stow’s detailed description of London’s built environment emphasizes how indiscriminate urban expansion, characterized by substandard construction and overcrowding, threatens the City’s social, political, economic, and ecological welfare. In doing so, Stow’s Survey seemingly adheres to the anti-building rhetoric espoused in numerous Royal Proclamations banning any construction or subdivision of buildings within the City and its outskirts. By attributing specific consequences to particular types and kinds of building, however, the Survey replaces the standard Elizabethan building rhetoric with a more nuanced discourse in favor of controlled construction.

As a literary concept, toleration was tempered by translation--a form of mediation, appropriation, and colonization at once linguistic, cultural, political, and transnational. In this study of toleration as reformulated through translation, early modern English writers serve as translators and transgressors, their works documenting and vindicating England's struggles over foreign lands and peoples. In 1656 John Milton's nephew, John Phillips, published The Tears of the Indians, his translation of Bartolomé de las Casas's Brevissima relación de la destrucciòn de las Indias, which first appeared in English in 1583 as the Spanish Colonie. An examination of the English reception history of the Brevissima relación offers a suggestive context for assessing the negotiations of toleration in translations associated with Milton's circle and in Paradise Lost, which exhibit the English nation's liberty-loving, imperial identity.

This essay explores representations of slavery in several of Montagu’s works, especially The Turkish Embassy Letters. In that text, scholars have generally overlooked the extent to which Montagu’s idealized vision of her elite Ottoman counterparts hinges upon her appreciation for the way they select, maintain, and control large retinues of mostly female slaves. By taking account of slavery in the Ottoman world, we can reappraise Montagu’s texts on Turkey with the understanding that they describe contact zones in which female elites from two very different and powerful slave-holding empires encounter each other. When viewed within such a reconstituted post-colonial paradigm, the progressive and critical potential of Montagu’s feminism appears to be even more limited than most critics have recognized.

Academic and journalistic accounts of the neo-Victorian novel have tended to focus on connections with fiction of the period rather than more varied historical sources. This essay analyzes the reception of one particularly notable non-fictional Victorian text: Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1850–62). Tracing the varied responses to Mayhew’s work in fiction published between the late 1980s and the present, it explores how novels by Charles Palliser, Matthew Kneale, Michel Faber, and Louis Bayard reinterpret Mayhew’s pioneering social survey. The essay shows how these contemporary writers incorporate Mayhew’s work in order to rewrite the conventions of Victorian fiction. It also demonstrates the ways in which they reinvent London Labour for their own purposes, using it not only as source material but also as a commentary on society in late twentieth-century Britain.

Jane Addams’s 1910 autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull-House, like the autobiographies of other social activists of her time, extended both her reputation and her social reform advocacy with the careful metaphor and rhetoric of motherhood. Such a choice made good sense at the turn of the last century, even though Addams was not a biological mother. Her figurative motherhood obscures her transgressions of middle-class expectations of gender and her critique of the limits placed upon women of her day. Addams uses these persuasive tools to cast a mold for transforming society. They enable her to model through the autobiographical self a map for social change that reconfigures the political hierarchy within patriarchal society. Through maternal rhetoric, Addams demonstrates a shift from individualized, male-centered power to interdependency and mutuality—-in short, a redistribution of power for a more just society.

The article argues that Ezra Pound is both the recipient and the creator of Ernest Fenollosa’s version of Japan, a version that emphasizes Japan as a cultural resource for America. Pound created a network of Japanese artists and writers to sustain this version of Japan. He persuaded Yone Noguchi, Michio Ito, Tami Kumé, Sadakichi Hartmann, and Katue Kitasono of traditional Japanese culture’s importance, encouraged them to view it as a resource, and then claimed these men as authorities in order to draw on this resource for his own work.