Since the 1970s, much Donne scholarship has focused on the apparently overdetermined misogyny exhibited through his texts. While it is true that several of Donne’s poems lend themselves to such a reading, such criticism often overlooks the more complex postures that the poetry displays towards sexuality and gender. This becomes clearer when examining poems that blur the boundaries between and refuse stable conceptions of genders. While it is true that, during the English Renaissance, gender was more overtly acknowledged to be contingent than it is today, the recognition of gender’s mutability was often met with anxiety and the attempt to discursively erect barriers between the sexes; through a reading of several of Donne’s lyrics, I suggest that, far from being anxious about the malleable quality of gender, Donne instead viewed it with intellectual and imaginative delight, and thereby complicate modern critical attempts to fix him as a straightforward misogynist.

This article reconsiders Henry Fielding’s attitude towards science. The eccentric practices of the early Royal Society provided easy material for humorists such as Fielding. However, critics have been too quick in assuming that his frequent satirical jabs indicate deep ideological, and aesthetic, aversions to experimental philosophy. Examining three standalone parodies of the Royal Society, along with key moments in Tom Jones, I argue that Fielding had a much greater appreciation for science than has thus far been recognized. While he mocks certain practices and pretensions of the Royal Society, he evinces a firm grounding in popular science and the conventions of scientific writing. His ambivalent treatment reflects an increasing cultural engagement with science, which was facilitated by England’s expanding periodical market.

In the Preface to Shakespeare Johnson attacks Thomas Edwards and Benjamin Heath as William Warburton’s most relentless critics, who are allegedly not even worthy of comparison with the bishop. Yet Johnson’s contemporaries and some modern scholars alike have remarked his unacknowledged debt to these two critics in his 1765 edition. Immediately after Johnson’s edition appeared in 1765 William Kenrick, a learned but libelous journalist, reviewed it at length and demonstrated some of the many lapses in giving credit to Edwards’s commentary. For the revisions of 1773 and 1778, George Steevens even cited Kenrick favorably for some readings and also made a point of including not only Edwards’s relevant commentary from the Canons of Criticism but also new Edwards manuscript material he had acquired in time for the revisions. It was not until the twentieth century that fresh allegations of plagiarism were leveled against the 1765 Shakespeare. This essay reviews the charges presented and concludes that what is unquestionable is a neglect to acknowledge sources properly, and largely because Johnson simply did not have the time or patience to do his homework. Nothing shown by Johnson’s detractors suffices as evidence of deliberate stealing of intellectual property.

This essay considers the challenges of communicating botanical information in scientific and literary texts written between 1735 and 1807. Looking at the systematic botany established by Carl Linnaeus and its representation in Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants (1789) and Charlotte Smith’s Conversations Introducing Poetry (1804) and Elegiac Sonnets (1784-1800), it argues for the centrality of analogy to reading and learning natural history in this period. Analogy is shown to be central to didactic poetry and to thinking about the specialist perception and replication of plants. The essay explores how two kinds of categorical system, language and plants, are made analogous by Linnaeus, and poets such as Darwin, through figures such as personification and through a more abstract system of classification through designation. Through a consideration of these analogical connections and the perceptual mimesis of plants, evidence is demonstrated for an approach to botanical poetry that is a unique product of Linnaean botany.

Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock has inspired numerous imitations that follow the pattern of parodic reformulation belonging to its own use of the mock-heroic form to apply similar methods, and for similar satirical purposes, to new times and places. Two poetic parodies of 1838—The Rape of the Whisker and Fuzwhiskiana—both appropriated and reshaped the form and content of Pope’s poem to apply to a comparable event as that which inspired The Rape of the Lock. Now, however, a dispute between undergraduate students at Cambridge University—and the mock-tragedy to which it led—offered the squibbing poets who wrote about it an opportunity to reflect satirically on the very different social mores shaping their world, from university drinking-culture to the discourse of male grooming. Both poems show the enduring appeal Pope’s poem exerts to those who similarly seek to expose triviality and more pressing social preoccupations alike to comical scrutiny.

Written on the cusp of a wave of vernacular pastoral literature, William of Waddington’s Manuel des péchés (c. 1250-1260) stands as a valuable witness to the impact of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 on religious education. This article takes up the question of who read Waddington’s text by exploring all available information about those who owned or commissioned copies in the medieval period. The evidence offers additional support for the text’s notable Yorkshire connections and suggests that, while scholars tend to emphasize the text’s clerical audiences, lay ones were nearly as important as clerical for the text’s circulation.

As critics have long recognized, Book VI of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene features some of the most supremely meta-poetic fictions in the entire poem. In particular, critics have explored, on the one hand, the Petrarchan significances of Mirabella and Serena in cantos vii and viii and, on the other, the reemergence of pastoral in cantos ix and x. By charting the continuity between these self-reflexive episodes, I argue that Spenser represents a powerful tension between the Petrarchan and pastoral modes. Through Calidore’s courtship of Pastorella, Spenser exposes Petrarchism’s characteristic violence against self and other, presents pastoral as a means to contain Petrarchan violence, and makes that containment fundamental to his epic conclusion. In an allegory of literary modes, Spenser mitigates the threats of fragmentation that attend upon early modern existence and militates against a Petrarchism that has helped to perpetuate, and not merely express, those threats.

This essay focusses on Matthew Prior’s intellectual debt to Montaigne in Prior’s late works. It argues that Prior’s literary scepticism cannot be considered as an unproblematic ‘inheritance’ of Montaigne’s philosophical position: by concentrating on the issues involved in the acts of ‘borrowing’ (Montaigne’s ‘emprunt’) passages from earlier authors, I contend that Prior applies to Montaigne (from whose Essais he plentifully borrows) the problems that Montaigne had applied to his eclectic sources of exempla and sententiae. Thus Prior builds, between himself and Montaigne, a similitude which is intrinsically impossible (no knowledge is achievable through association of similar traits for a sceptic). But it is this dialectic of impossible similitude that dictates the literary and philosophical resources of Prior’s pieces.

Eighteenth-century satirists maintained that because there was a distinction between legitimate satire and libel, satire should be immune to prosecution. But in response to the political satire on members of government in the early years of the eighteenth century, the courts responded to the satirists’ reliance on irony and indirection by seeking to redefine  the presence of irony as a “certain sign” of libelous intent. The effort to criminalize satiric indeterminacy  found a focus in the attempts  to convict The Craftsman for “seditious libel,” legal actions that offer  a case study of the larger effort on the part of the government to establish legal criteria by which all  forms of  satire, allegory, fable and parallel history might be redefined as essentially subversive modes of discourse, and therefore punishable as libel.  

Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is ostensibly an unsuccessful aesthetic project. It contains, however, the account of a successful one: Uncle Toby’s modelling of the Nine Years’ War and the War of the Spanish Succession on his bowling green. While scholars have traditionally characterized Toby's fascination with siege warfare as a displaced effect of the trauma to his groin, this essay argues that his bowling green sieges can be read formally as well as psychologically. When considered within the context of eighteenth-century diagrammatic illustration, Toby’s bowling green project appears as a counter-model to the unwieldiness of the novel in Sterne’s time. Governed by strict rules of probability that render them uniquely susceptible to diagramming, sieges might be called ideal events for reconciling similitude with intelligibility. Toby Shandy thus emerges as more than a sympathetic foil, but as a master of modern representation.

No other episode captures quite as well how the Libro de buen amor parodies authority and translatio studii than the Disputación que los griegos e los rromanos en uno ovieron (The Disputation between the Greeks and the Romans). A Greek sage and a Roman rogue exchange four hand-signs, and then translate these visible signs into their respective vernaculars, resulting in wildly different interpretations: the Greek experiences a conversation of doctrinal agreement, while the Roman reports exchanging threats of physical violence. Scholarship on this comic exemplum has, rightly, focused on sign theory and interpretation. However, and even though the protagonists engage in multiple acts of (mis)translation, and translation necessarily involves the interpretation of signs, the Disputación has yet be read from the perspective of translation history and theory, which, as this article will argue, elucidate not only how the Libro de buen amor turns sign theory into fiction, but also fashions the role of the clerical poet as translator and transmitter of auctoritas.

This article presents a new approach to reading the famous tapestry metaphor that has circulated in discourses on translation for centuries. Popularized by Miguel de Cervantes in the second part of Don Quixote (1615), the image of the tapestry’s two sides—the smooth front side and the messy reverse side—has long been assumed to illustrate the uneven relationship between an original and its translation. Following the lead of seventeenth-century English translator Leonard Digges, who urges readers to remember “the knots within” that make the tapestry possible, the article advocates for a method of reading backwards toward a history of translation that pays careful attention to the material and textual circumstances from which this metaphor emerged. Reconsidering the inner workings of both texts and textiles in this way allows us to understand that the relationships between translations and originals were messy, knotty, and not at all binary.

This article explores the connections between official history writing, the genre of political biography and translation practices in France and Spain in the seventeenth century. It argues that Juan Pablo Mártir Rizo’s Historia trágica de la vida del duque de Biron, a biography he wrote using Pierre Matthieu’s monumentally large Histoire de France as a source, served to refashion contemporary history by actively intervening in the text in order to change its political and ideological implications. Early modern theories on imitation and the hackneyed traduttore, traditore motif are thus the backbone of the analysis of a translation that shows how historical truth depended on what side of the Pyrenees writers and historians stood, and how both the original French source and the Spanish involvement in the Conspiracy of the Duke of Biron are “betrayed” in one and the same process.

Paolo Sarpi, a Venetian priest of the Servite order, rose to international prominence during the quarrel between the Republic of Venice and Pope Paul V at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Sarpi has long been regarded as an anti-papalist and anti-Council of Trent polemicist, which he undoubtedly was. From the Venetian interdict to the publication of Istoria del Concilio Tridentino twelve years later, he grew increasingly hostile to the papacy. Yet his earliest published writings, those from the interdict crisis, reveal that during the crisis Sarpi reinforced post-Tridentine translation culture by upholding the Catholic Church’s understanding of words and by not permitting Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino, S. J., any latitude with translation, while Bellarmino’s inability to develop a consistent translation scheme left him and the papacy he defended vulnerable to accusations of ineptitude and dishonesty.

Drawing evidence from four recently identified contemporary translations, in Spanish, Italian, and Latin, of two lost English narratives of the life and martyrdom of John Cornelius, SJ (1557-1594), this study argues that Dorothy Arundell, self-identified author of the lost Life of Father John Cornelius, SJ (written ca. 1600), also authored the previously anonymous “Letter from London” sent out of England to Jesuits within six weeks of the execution of Cornelius in 1594.  Arundell’s sequential narratives are assessed in light of the material circumstances in which each was produced: written in different countries and in vastly different confessional contexts, narrated in distinctly different vocal registers, and separated and inflected by a period of profound change in the author’s life, they have much to contribute to our understanding of the reception, circulation, and transmission of early modern women’s writing and will repay our efforts to consider them as separate accounts.

Milton’s highly literal translation of Horace has been deemed both a masterpiece and a failure. The critical debate up to this point has focused on three issues: the translation’s date of composition, its relation to Milton’s stylistic development, and its poetic merits. This essay engages with all three issues—particularly the translation’s date of composition, for which I present new evidence—but does so in order to give due attention to other concerns, namely the translation’s print history, paratext, and the purpose of literal translation in early modern England. I argue that Milton’s translation demands through its method and its paratext that readers approach it comparatively—that they use, that is, the facing Latin. And whereas other literal translations encouraged comparative reading to further learning, Milton’s literal translation is experimental rather than pedagogical.

This article examines the “translation” of Longinus’ first-century treatise Peri Hypsous into early modern theories of epic poetry in Italy and England. The essay first argues that sixteenth-century scholars—commentators on Peri Hypsous as well as the treatise’s earliest translators—interpreted the Longinian sublime as a conceptual principle of high-mindedness, not simply as a stylistic principle; it then identifies core Longinian principles in two particular theories of heroic poetry: Torquato Tasso’s Discorsi del poema eroico and Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poetry. Ultimately, in identifying a latent Longinian discourse in each of these works, the essay argues that the presence of the sublime in poetic theory helps to repurpose epic beyond the ethical and civic-building aims traditionally attributed to the genre, linking epic with a concept of transcendence.

Translation granted Anne Finch a literary authority to assert cultural values that many in her nation would have found bold or perhaps seditious. These values—Jacobitism and feminism—constituted what I am calling Finch’s double position of internal exile from the dominant British culture. As a mode of representation, translation informed her poetics: the act of translation served to remind her not only of one language’s insufficiency to convey the meaning of another language, but also language’s insufficiency to represent tout court. This essay attends to a spectrum of translation in Finch’s work that establishes the importance of translation as a practice and signifying network in her poetry. Although her attention to Jacobitism and feminism has been acknowledged and explored by many critics, little discussion has considered how Finch, occupying a similarly doubled position as translator and socially displaced person, used a range of translation practices to make these internally exiled cultures legible.