This article examines the way in which the embodied figure of Fortune spoke to formulations of consumer behavior in late medieval English literature and culture. Boethius’s conception of Fortune as the controller of worldly prosperity provided writers throughout medieval England with a theoretical structure through which to explore the pleasures and dangers of materialism. Late medieval writers such as Chaucer, Lydgate, and Charles d’Orléans greatly amplify the inherited notion of Fortune’s powers over changes in clothing, and in doing so they create in Fortune a type of proxy for the newly-emerging concepts of fashion and self-fashioning. These poets associate Fortune with the most fashionable garments of the day and ascribe to her control over the nuances of style and novelty. While each writer addresses the ramifications of these observations differently, collectively they identify the particularly English vice of varietas vestium, or transitory dress, as one of the constitutive ideological structures of their day.

The Old English Soul and Body II, which presents a grim vision of bodily mortification after death, culminates in a particularly gruesome passage that depicts the systematic destruction of the body, piece by piece. Many critics have read this corporeal imagery as metaphorical, a visible manifestation of sin, but this essay argues that the imagery should be read literally as well. By presenting a physical body in need of repair, the poem exploits an anxiety about corporeality to spiritual ends by urging the reader to do everything possible during life to avoid such a bad end in the grave. In this regard, the interest of Soul and Body II in spiritual prophylaxis mirrors an interest in physical prophylaxis found in numerous Anglo-Saxon medical recipes and prayers, which, this essay suggests, provide an important historical and cultural context for understanding the poem.

This essay traces the recurring appearances of minstrels throughout the varied texts of Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61, a late medieval household miscellany. From Sir Orfeo’s portrait of a minstrel king whose redemptive performances can heal all wounds, to a unique stanza criticizing selfish minstrels added to a Lydgate satire, Ashmole 61’s texts continually circle around the image of the minstrel as a definition of entertainment’s relationship to domestic life. Moving beyond Ashmole 61, the argument considers discussions of minstrelsy and household life in Piers Plowman, Winner and Waster, and Middle English romances. Other domestic miscellanies (such as the manuscripts of Robert Thornton) offer further evidence. In all these texts, the minstrel appears crucially important for the imagination of domestic entertainment, and for the articulation of certain domestic ideals, such as generosity, the pleasure of surplus, familial sacrifice, and grace.

Dance offers visible and concrete form for the motion, often understood as abstract, in Paul Zumthor's term mouvance. In dance practice, dance aesthetics, and choreography, the tension between control and instability has always played a crucial role. Dance lends illuminating form to this same tension in the study of textual tradition. The dance world's push-and-pull between mastery and abandon provides an embodied shape for the gestures of interchange between manuscript variants. Using the conventions of the round-dance to structure a comparison between two versions of the English "Holly and Ivy" carol, this essay suggests that dance tradition, in lending form to mouvance, reveals the workings of a conflict between control and instability inherent within the transmission process.

In the Middle English poem Patience, Jonah's tumble into the whale's gullet is described as if he were entering a cathedral. This essay explores the consequences of understanding the whale less as a penitential space than as a sanctuary. Through an examination of the so-called Hawley-Shakell affair, the essay argues that sanctuary documents point to particularly worldly and opportunistic uses of sacred space. Patience demonstrates Jonah's opportunism, as well as his isolation, but it also embraces both God's and Jonah's love of this world.

The study of the "whole" medieval book is flourishing, but still manuscript scholars rarely write "whole" books of their own that use manuscript study to make large, synthetic arguments. Even rarer is the book-length literary study that focuses on one medieval manuscript alone. This review essay investigates why this might be, surveys recent books on the subject of manuscripts, and advocates for more sustained work on individual literary manuscripts.

This article examines the odd reference to Grendel’s glof in Beowulf’s account of his Danish adventures. The sudden appearance of a "glove" at Grendel’s side in the retelling is widely regarded as the remnant of a Scandinavian folk motif where large gloves were "the characteristic property of trolls." Despite the critical consensus around this interpretation, a review of the Scandinavian sources shows that gloves are indeed rare finds among the trolls and giants of Old Norse legend. Instead, this essay argues that the term glof is used by the Beowulf-poet in an elaborate metaphor for Grendel’s stomach, which fits nicely into other patterns of imagery in the poem. When read in this way, the glove/belly riddle employed by Beowulf also has significant implications for the larger question about Grendel’s invulnerability to weapons.

Arguments about Othello’s racism cite racist texts from the period as precedents. A closer look at the play’s context, however, shows that the play shares nothing with many of these texts, parodies or censors others, and models its protagonist on familiar white European heroes who match Othello more closely but have not been recognized in the arguments.

While most eighteenth century novels advocated the virtues of prudence, the novel also relied on sustained narratives of imprudence in which the progression of the plot demanded a suspension of foresight. The fiction of imprudence contributes to the changing relation between phronesis, prudentia and providentia. Tracing earlier discourses of prudence and distinguishing the necessity of imprudence from the virtue of imprudence, the article examines the place of the novel in eighteenth-century debates on moral philosophy, religion and economic exchange. Offering readings of Austen, Burney and Goldsmith, the article focuses on the novels of the 1740s and 1750s. While Defoe and Richardson attempt to reconcile or equate prudence and providence, Fielding insists on their respectful separation and recognizes the variety of roles played by both prudence and imprudence. Haywood in turn gestures to the almost Epicurean opportunities in the novel to forget prudence.

This article explores the opportunities presented by and complications arising from a joint consideration of disability and sensibility in eighteenth-century British literature. The fiction of Elizabeth Inchbald provides a uniquely important instance of the intersection of these two overlapping discourses. Initially, this article collates available evidence to demonstrate that Inchbald’s speech impediment was not a minor aspect of her early life from which she escaped largely unharmed, but rather an important conditioning experience for her later representation of somatic and emotional experience. Reading her novel A Simple Story (1791) with an eye to Inchbald’s experience of disability reveals the monopoly on somatic experience that sensibility had (and has continued to have in critical treatment of her fiction), while an ensuing analysis of her second and final novel, Nature and Art, show that disability could only emerge as a discrete form of somatic reality in the context of a more radical political environment.