In Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Aemilia Lanyer articulates a subversive female identity using a diverse religious lexicon, but no discourse is more vital to her than that of the Eucharist. By considering the theological particularities of Lanyer’s poetry, I contend that she relies on the Protestant, rather than Catholic, version of this ritual as the structural and theological framework of her book. As both a woman and a writer, she wields the power of the Eucharist as she advocates for the unity of women, de-hierarchizes their relationship to each other, and empowers them as readers of metaphor. Seeing Salve Deus through the lens of the Protestant Eucharist exposes new valences to the themes so readily associated with her work and illustrates how even subversive early modern texts find their nuance and vitality via religious experience. 

The essay explores the relationship between Defoe’s portrayal of Colonel Jack and eighteenth-century discourses of criminal children in England. As contemporary legal treatises, Old Bailey trials, criminal biography, social reform pamphlets and charity school debates suggest, Defoe’s depiction of an underworld of criminal children captures important nuances of the culture’s concerns about the bands of youngsters begging, shoplifting, or picking pockets on the city streets. However, Defoe’s engagement with contemporary discourses about the nature and manifestations of child criminality is complex and often contradictory. On the one hand, he makes his protagonist appealing by sanitizing the young Colonel Jack of some particularly anxiety-triggering aspects of the eighteenth-century criminal street boy. On the other, he includes a downright repulsive model of child criminality in the character of the cruel and incorrigible Captain Jack. Colonel Jack’s construction of criminal children thus strategically straddles contrasting narrative registers suggesting that the figure of the criminal child in eighteenth-century England was a shifting and incoherent entity: oftentimes a source of anxiety, sometimes an object of sympathy—but always a target of adult social control. And it is this aspect of adult control that is crucial to the ideological implications of child criminality as represented by Defoe. His contrasting representations of the boy thief in the figures of Colonel and Captain Jack serve the function of preserving the status quo of relations between adulthood and childhood in which the child is marked by dependence and deference toward adult privilege and authority. Thus, Defoe’s novel, an important contribution to the eighteenth-century discourse about London’s child criminals, suggests that in the period, appropriately subservient childlike behavior is as important as honesty or innate rectitude in the child. 

Samuel Richardson helped create the modern self, the heroic individual with a rich vibrant interiority who maintains her internal integrity as she stands against the pressures of an external society. This vision of self emerges from a reading of Richardson that privileges Pamela and Clarissa but ignores Sir Charles Grandison. Grandison limits, polices, and flattens the self in order to fit it into an affective community. This article examines several of Grandison’s many narratives about secrets and secret-sharing in order to theorize a “Grandisonian” self. This “Grandisonian” self is a modification of the heroic “Clarissean” self; while it retains “Clarissean” features, it insists that the self limit its desires, submit to the affective community’s authority, and disclose the secret contents of its heart, in such a way that limitation leads to expansion, submission to freedom, and exposure to protection. 

George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72) is widely regarded as exemplifying a mode of moral perfectionism, yet this conclusion tacitly convicts the novel of Friedrich Nietzsche’s indictment of her work as an incoherent secularization of the Christian doctrine of redemption. This essay argues, by contrast, that Eliot dramatizes the temptations of perfectionism in three distinct forms—as flawlessness, redemption, and exemplary striving—and rejects the concept in all its guises. Middlemarch limns the insidious ways that perfectionism paralyzes the self in egoism and nurtures the illusion that sin is a debt best expiated by suffering. Discarding hollow idealism, Eliot develops an account of ethical transformation based on responsiveness to irremediable failures.

While the history of close reading has been the subject of numerous high-profile academic studies in the past four decades, there has been a dearth of research on the adoption, proliferation, and usage of the phrase “close reading” itself. This article presents a more detailed history of the phrase during the mid-twentieth century, and examines the arguments over New Critical reading methods that were rhetorically informed by the “closeness” of “close reading.” The article then uses this history to re-conceptualize the scalar terms that populate current debates between “close reading” (traditional literary analysis) and “distant reading” (subsumed under the loose term of the “digital humanities”). Rather than opposing or reconciling the two along a single scale, often via a micro/macro distinction, I suggest that a synecdoche/metonymy distinction would help us better see and coordinate the different kinds of scales at work in both “close” and “distant” reading. 

Scholars have long noted that the Old English poem Christ and Satan applies typically sympathetic elegiac topoi to the devil; however, few have explored what emotional response this is intended to elicit. Using cognitive theories of reader response and philosophical models of medieval empathy and counter-empathy, this article reads Christ and Satan against Old English elegies and depictions of unsympathetic exiles to argue that the poem elicits a complex emotional response that cannot be reduced either to sympathy or antipathy. While the inherent poignancy of elegiac tropes pulls the reader toward sympathy, the poem subverts these tropes by denying that the consolation frequently offered in elegies is in Satan’s case possible or merited by the subject, pushing readers toward a reaction of pleasure at Satan’s suffering. The poet thus stages a Christian critique of Germanic elegy, exposing how dubious subjects could appropriate its aesthetic language and emotionally charged forms for specious ends.

This essay examines the two earliest extant images of the Wandering Jew, both from thirteenth-century England. These images appear in Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora and the De Brailes Hours. In the Chronica, Jewish immobility seems to represent an imaginative overcoming of Jewish messianism through a fantasy about Christ depriving a Jew of any such temporal control. In the De Brailes Hours, Jewish stasis acts as a foil to the quotidian devotional progress of pious Christians. In both texts, the Wandering Jew speaks to investments in Christian temporal mobility that inform the Christian anti-Jewish tradition. Matthew’s drawing of an aged Wandering Jew and William’s of a “wandering” Jew who is actually rooted in place visually render the idea that the Jews are always out of sync with the flow of Christian time and can, at best, only serve as signs to be interpreted by Christians. This denial of coevalness represents a denial of a shared humanity and thereby of the humanity of the Jews.

William Forrest’s long poem, “The History of the Patriarch Joseph,” survives in three versions in four manuscripts, only one of which is dated (to 11 April 1569). From this one datable manuscript, it is however possible to place the others at least approximately, though there is an unacknowledged disagreement in the available scholarship about this, with some dating the first version of Forrest’s poem to 1545, and others dating it to 1547. Here I outline and comment upon the discrepancy, noting in particular that the poet volunteers a chronology for his own poem that describes its development in three stages, the first version having been finished in 1547, the second in 1569, and the third in 1571. I end this essay by suggesting why an initial terminal date of 1547 may prove important to any future discussion of Forrest’s poem.

While insisting on the greater flexibility of nonreferential characters as crucial to the rise of fictionality in the eighteenth century, Catherine Gallagher admits that the same generality that allows readers to identify with such characters has its own limitations. Though unassociated with actual historical individuals, nonreferential characters still may bear “the burden of their type,” though, she contends, they escape this burden through “the process of individuation.” But how is that escape enabled in novels like those of Henry Fielding, which forego the portrayal of interiority that Gallagher and others identify as essential to individuation? This article offers one answer to that question through the example of the eponymous hero of Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749). I argue that in the narrative’s repeated rehearsal and rejection of the “typical” stories about a bastard that cling to Tom, we see the mechanism through which Fielding gradually frees Tom from his type.

Wordsworth’s “Ode,” without the subtitle by which we know it, was initially received with ridicule by his opponents and incomprehension by his friends. However, although it gained popularity―especially among discerning readers―it did so principally on account of its magnificent poetry―or rhetoric, or bombast. The incomprehension remained, moderating into a perception of its failure to reveal any recognizable form of immortality. But that has been judged by simplistic conceptions which Wordsworth repudiated. His idea of immortality depended on a perceived unity of life, a power flowing through us, in which we learn to participate, enabling us to ‘to look through a grave’, in John Smith’s words. The first part of this paper tries to clarify the relation of that idea to Wordsworth’s sense of eternity remembered from his childhood; unwittingly he shared that quality of experience with Thomas Traherne―examined in some detail in part two.

This study examines the use of manuscript text in two medieval literary portrayals of love relationships in which male protagonists are trapped in “prisons of love”: Jean Froissart’s fourth and penultimate dit (narrative poem), the Prison Amoureuse (1372), hereafter Prison, and Diego de San Pedro’s (ca. 1437–ca. 1498) Cárcel de amor (Cárcel). Both Prison and Cárcel are literally comprised of the exchange of material texts; these texts, used in intellectual and talismanic ways, foster a close relationship between the male protagonists rather than a readily apparent love between lover and beloved. The male protagonists in both works are intimate friends and the success of both the love relationships and the relationships between those men relates directly to the protagonists’ ability to read. Women play only an inspirational and supportive role in Prison. Men in Cárcel are poor readers, while the male protagonists in Prison are skilled in hermeneutics, unhindered by a strong female reader. Whereas the metaphorical love prison in Prison, which is synonymous with the book, is “fair and amorous” and the tenor of the texts exchanged is positive, Cárcel’s allegorical prison is menacing and ultimately fatal for the lover. Through the reading and writing of their imprisoned male protagonists, and the relative absence or outright resistance of the beloveds, Prison and Cárcel evince a literary depiction of the range and permutations of attitudes, tastes, and practices that fall under medieval manuscript culture, including both successful and failed hermeneutic uses and both successful and failed talismanic employment of manuscript material.

Shakespeare’s wordplay is known to be a distinctive feature of his writing, yet compared to the works of his middle and later years, little attention has been paid to the unique puns and quibbles of his early period. This essay examines the distinguishing features of Shakespearean wordplay in such early works as Arden of Faversham, Edward III, The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, the Henry VI trilogy, and various early sonnets. As many of these works are of contested attribution, we hope to demonstrate that wordplay characteristic of Shakespeare can be used to help clarify authorship and chronology. Various features of puns across these early works, such as self-awareness, punning by higher-register characters, a focus on proper names, punning in moments of distress, and homographic wordplay, point toward a distinctly Shakespearean style, and reveal a writer unable to resist the linguistic pleasure of a quibble.

Here I engage two critical questions regarding Donne’s Devotions: first, what is the Devotions, or, by what devotional tradition can we identify it? And second, how can we read it most “profitably”? I argue that the Devotions is best understood according to a medieval tradition of reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation known as lectio divina. Donne’s work closely imitates the devotional style of lectio divina in its structure, content, and rhetorical strategy. Rather than read the Devotions as “profitable,” we should instead consider its cyclical, receptive structure, and its striving to abandon the self into God’s “way.” As a participation in lectio, the Devotions indeed becomes a “holy delight,” a fruitful endeavor, rather than a product for our gain.

The estate poem tends to be thought of as a seventeenth-century phenomenon. As a number of critics have argued, poems such as Jonson's "To Penshurst" and Carew's "To Saxham" represent a distinct early modern subgenre, dedicated to praising landowners for the virtuous manner in which they husband their estates and sustain local communities. Though estate poetry in fact continued to flourish as a branch of epideictic verse throughout the early and mid-eighteenth century, its afterlife has received very little critical attention. In this article, I look closely at a handful of Restoration and eighteenth-century estate poems, considering the ways in which later writers responded to the changing economic conditions of landownership and house building. In particular, I suggest that poets who adopted the estate poem framework in the eighteenth century used the imaginative space of the form to engage positively with strands of Enlightenment political economic thought.

This essay relates Ruskin’s “pathetic fallacy” for the first time to his theory of the ideal as it develops in the course of the early volumes of Modern Painters. Beginning in Modern Painters I with a theory of art centred on the ideal, Ruskin is led, not through a break from, but an intensification of the key emphases of his own theory, to the rejection of idealism in the framing of “pathetic fallacy” in Modern Painters III. Analogous to the via naturaliter negativa, the path through nature to its negation, famously shown in Wordsworth’s poetry by Geoffrey Hartman, in Ruskin we might discern the opposite trajectory, through the ideal to its negation. In the version of realism that arises from that negation, Romantic imagination is superseded by a new emphasis on feeling, and Ruskin’s departure from his Romantic precursors is fully achieved.

This article analyzes the representation of grief in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess and the text’s anxiety at depicting scenes of intense male bereavement or sorrow. The poem’s three major sections imagine their grief-stricken characters as naked or made naked by Death. This establishes thematic similarity between all three figures and allows the text to elide the experience of grief by substituting it with another, more acceptable form of exposure. While Chaucer’s Alcyone first appears naked when mourning her husband’s disappearance, the poem also characterizes both the Man in Black and the narrator as naked at key moments in the text and obscures the reader from witnessing true sorrow or emotional distress by turning instead toward the metaphor of nakedness. This anxiety within Book of the Duchess takes place within a larger contemporary rejection of scenes of public, male grief, evident from conduct literature, mirrors for princes, and courtier books.

Francesco Petrarch’s canzone 360 “Quel antico mio dolce empio signore,” a debate poem in which the speaker initiates a legal suit against Love in the court of Reason, inspired at least two early modern English texts. Thomas Wyatt translated it as “Myne Olde Dere En’mye” around the 1530s, and in the 1590s, a certain J. C. again rewrote the Italian poem as “Lovers Accusation at the Judgment Seat of Reason.” Separated by six decades of juridical, poetic, and societal change, the two English texts register important changes in the patterns English love poetry’s engagement with the discourse of law over the course of the sixteenth century. In both Wyatt and J. C., the conflict between the lover and his personified desire hinges on accusations of failure to honor a legal obligation. However, Wyatt’s “Myne Olde Dere En’mye” presents the relationships between the lover and his adversary as governed by the codes of feudal loyalty, while J. C.’s poem approaches the dispute through the lens of the emerging law of contract, as a friction between promissory intent and inadequate performance.

This article reframes John Milton’s Eve as the first naturopath by placing Paradise Lost into conversation with popular herbals. These medicinal manuals, which combined empiricism and eschatology to offer a cure for the social ills plaguing Civil War–era England, were marketed toward the distaff healers who formed the backbone of the seventeenth-century medical profession. Milton draws from these works to paint an Edenic pharmacopeia controlled by the first woman, whose botanical experience leads directly to her homeopathic administration of the fruit. In this way, Milton’s epic embeds in the fallen world the seeds of Paradise.

After William Lee ascribed The King of Pirates (1719) to Daniel Defoe in his study of Defoe in 1869, no scholar expressed any doubt about Defoe’s authorship. But in a series ofbooks attacking the makeup of the Defoe Canon, P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens argued that there was no reason to ascribe this particular work to Defoe. They argued it was too much like Defoe’s Captain Singleton (1720), that it would be unlikely that Defoe would write two works about the pirate Captain Avery, and that it lacked Defoe’s interest in ideas. None of these arguments are capable of standing up under close scrutiny. It seems as if Captain Singleton, written for a different set of publishers, makes a deliberate attempt to avoid accounts of Captain Avery. Whereas Avery was famous for capturing the fleet of ships with the granddaughter of the Great Mogul, with all its sexual overtones, this story is barely mentioned in Captain Singleton. It is given an interesting, novelistic treatment in The King of Pirates. A close examination would suggest that the dozens of scholars who ascribed The King of Pirates to Defoe were correct.

Thomas Love Peacock’s enigmatic essay “The Four Ages of Poetry” (1820) is a Swiftian satire with a carefully contrived persona, identifiable as Francis Jeffrey, the influential editor of the Edinburgh Review. Within the discourse of the fictitious author, it is possible to distinguish two voices: the first is that of the Edinburgh reviewer, as caricatured by Peacock, while the second is Peacock’s own satiric voice, subtly modulated to accord with Jeffrey’s. Once we recognize the nature of Peacock’s ventriloquism, his essay can be seen to have a unity of purpose that explains and reconciles all its most outrageous features: the too-neatly-schematic historical theory, the attacks on contemporary poets and poetry, the utilitarian hyperbole of the conclusion, and what has been called its “waggishly provocative and bumptious rhetoric.” Thus, “The Four Ages” is a sort of “Modest Proposal” for the abandonment of poetry, with the Jeffreyan essayist representing much that Peacock despised in the intellectual climate of the early nineteenth century.