Like other Lollard writings on the basic articles of belief, the Lollard commentary on the Pater Noster combines familiar ingredients of orthodox catechetical teaching with the virulent criticism and complaint typical of the heretical sect. Scholars have tended to view such a combination as a consequence of Lollards inserting polemical interpolations into complete or "fixed" orthodox texts. Such a view, however, fails to take into account the nature of the genre of vernacular commentary on the Pater Noster. This article studies the Lollard text in the context of the tradition of Pater Noster commentary, a tradition marked by a high degree of movement of not just schemata and teachings, but also particular expressions and formulations among texts. The tradition of vernacular Pater Noster commentary provided a storehouse of material that was drawn upon, used, and borrowed in a variety of ways and by writers of various theological persuasions.

In detailing the workings of poetic creativity in "La Lyre" (1569), Pierre de Ronsard draws upon the structure and themes of Horace’s Odes 1.32. Recalling the tripartite composition of ancient hymns, both texts include an invocation, a description of poetic aspirations, and a concluding prayer. Both poets, moreover, incorporate the motif of the four furors that, associated with Venus, Bacchus, the Muses, and Apollo, enable them to identify the source of originality. However, whereas Horace accommodates Greek thought to Roman form, Ronsard probes the operations of inspiration. Renaissance glosses place 1.32 within a Neoplatonic context, and Ficino’s commentaries on Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus enable him to understand the role of dialectics in visualizing and expressing a harmony that combines earthly sensibilia and divine intelligibilia. Thus, in employing Horace’s allusions to the lyre and the four furors, Ronsard produces a picture of the "La Lyre" that applies Neoplatonic epistemology to Pléiade poetic practice.

Audiences in the Elizabethan-Jacobean period attended plays partly to learn new locutions, in a period when the English language was rapidly expanding, and when broader social changes created strong incentives for rhetorical mastery. Playwrights such as Jonson, Marston, and Dekker competed fiercely in this market, partly (as in the War of the Theaters) by humiliating characters who echoed the neologisms of rival playwrights. They boasted of contributing to England’s verbal wealth, and of protecting against "canting" criminals by explaining their secret vocabulary. Only by combining philological and economic-materialist approaches can we understand how and why words were coined in this great era of public theater.

The obscured origin of Anne Finch’s "The Bird and the Arras" has inevitably produced incomplete interpretations of Finch’s lines. "The Bird and the Arras" was never constructed by Finch as a discrete poem. Its transmission has misrepresented the inclusion of these lines in a longer poem by Finch concerned with the theme of representation and occasioned by her experiences in the Stuart court and her political exile in England after 1688--"Some occasional Reflections Digested (though not with great regularity) into a Poem." Answering why Finch never recast the lines on the bird and the arras in this longer poem as a separate poem, this essay analyzes the function of birds in her earlier manuscripts, the aesthetic and political references of "Some occasional Reflections," and Finch’s changes to her poetic aviary in print and in her final manuscript.

Daniel Defoe’s 1724 novel, Roxana, was reprinted during the eighteenth century with a number of continuations. This article interprets the first continuation, a serialized and continued production of 1740-41, in light of contemporary publication practices, and more particularly as a response to the furor that greeted the publication of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in 1740. Questions about the status and purpose of prose fiction and about the proper role of women were answered in the 1740s in relation to Richardson’s iconic version of feminine domesticity. The conservative ending and lengthy plagiarism of an Eliza Haywood "amatory fiction" in the 1740 Roxana necessitate a reconsideration of Defoe and Haywood’s relationship as early novelists, of received truths about the elevation of the novel in the mid-eighteenth century, and of the division of early English fiction into "amatory" and "domestic."

William Shenstone, the eighteenth-century Worcestershire poet and owner of the ferme ornée, The Leasowes, creatively deployed the genre of the elegy and linked it modally with other genres such as the ode and pastoral to construct a unique medium for capturing his vision of a constructed pastoral Eden. While Shenstone provides a high-cultural model, the laboring-class shoemaking poet, James Woodhouse, who benefitted from Shenstone’s patronage, imitates his genre of pastoral elegy and appropriates it to his own lower-class voice and concerns. This essay addresses Shenstone’s and Woodhouse’s complex uses of the pastoral elegy (and ode), and relates the vision informing Shenstonian pastoral to the republican landscape he fashions at The Leasowes.

George Eliot's Romola (1862-63) appears precisely at the time that history is, according to standard narratives, becoming more defined and contained within the boundaries of the university and in the hands of professional historians. Despite this trend of standardization, the novel expresses a pervasive ambivalence about the purpose of history and the appropriate stance that should be taken by the writer relative to the past. The novel never settles on one perspective on the past, showing that a single, fixed, and sanctioned notion of history has not emerged. Romola asks not only how the individual subject should position himself or herself in relation to the past, but also addresses the self-reflexive question within the historical novel of how historical knowledge should properly be pursued and rendered into narrative. The character Romola's process of trying on and discarding successive epistemological stances represented by the various male authority figures in her life is a process that is also mirrored in the narration of the novel itself. The novel's shifting narrative lenses then become a model for an amalgamation of different historical subject positions that opens the way for a sympathetic and productive relationship to the past.

Frances Trollope's bestselling travel narrative, Domestic Manners of the Americans, and its original illustrations place readers at an unusual vantage point. Whereas early-Victorian conduct literature imagined how women's regulation of manners inside the home could influence national identity, the visual/verbal rhetoric of Domestic Manners presents the codes of domestic supervision as a means of domestic and sociopolitical analysis. The reliance of Trollope's text on visual and textual caricature, and, more uniquely, on images of early-Victorian women's headwear, encourages readers to adopt the perspective that conduct literature typically assigned to women. That is, readers are positioned to scrutinize the material and political conditions informing (and deforming) the domestic manners of Americans, and by extension, to recognize the inherent instability of the representational boundaries of home and nation. By aligning readers with this shrewdly supervisory gaze, Trollope and her illustrator illuminate their political argument: the American subordination of women and people of color threatens the civility and humanity of an entire nation.

In selecting a figure from classical history for "Xantippe," Amy Levy inserted her best-known poem into a complex discursive network of British and German classical scholarship, higher criticism, and popular print culture. Doing so enabled Levy to write simultaneously as an authorized participant in classical studies, a Jew, and a woman writer. Levy represents both Xantippe and Socrates, a premier figure to Victorians given his relevance to studies of democracy and sacrificial death in the name of a higher truth (which suggested parallels to Christ). German classical scholar Eduard Zeller, moreover, defended Xantippe in an 1850 essay. By engaging such scholarly cruxes and publishing in University Magazine, Levy performs the role of learned woman that Xantippe longed for and was tragically denied. Levy's skeptical treatment of Socrates, his purported parallels to Christ, and the strong links between classical scholarship and higher criticism also distanced "Xantippe" from dominant Christian poetics and opened a space in which Levy could write as a Jew. Additionally, her poem intersects with longstanding popular depictions of Xantippe, a practice common to women writers who mediated classicism through popular culture.

Hester Thrale Piozzi's unusual diary-commonplace book, the Thraliana (1776-1809), revels in improvisation, fragmentation, and what she terms life "revisal." In it Piozzi brings a literary self into being by collecting anecdotes, texts, and stories, and then re-reading and reflecting on this miscellany. The diary offers a model for thinking about literary history, and, perhaps more important, a way for Piozzi to talk back to literary history. In the pages of the Thraliana, Piozzi's friendship with Samuel Johnson makes this larger conversation possible. By rendering him a "foul copy," a defaced manuscript that is woefully and hopelessly lacking, she exposes the processes of revision, excision, commentary, and self-critique that lie beneath the surface of all textual production and that published texts seek to hide from view.

In contrast to previous studies of Katherine Philips as a poet of female friendship and Royalist loyalty, this article takes as its starting point the fact that Philips wrote most of her poetry while living in Wales. Drawing on recent work in archipelagic British studies and women's literary history, it views Philips in terms of her Welsh location, which allows for a new approach to her poetry of retirement in particular (read alongside her letters) and a fresh perspective on her literary significance in general. While Philips has been recognized as a poet of contradiction and product of an ideologically complex social and political background, the complexities of her geographical location have rarely been explored. Rather than endorse the dominant view of Philips's life in Wales as one of exile and isolation, the article argues that her relation to Wales enabled her as a poet by providing "that private shade" from where she could engage with the world beyond.

In the seventeenth century, all the major European dramatic literatures display an intensified interest in the subject of human sacrifice. On the Continent, this interest manifests itself in a reworking of classical texts such as Euripides' Iphigenia plays, and the predominant theme is the advance of civilization beyond primitive barbarity. While this trend is also evident in England, English dramatists also frequently use the subject of human sacrifice for pessimistic commentary on the political traumas of the Interregnum and Exclusion Crisis, and the subjection of human life to monetary forces. In particular, it is a prominent symbol in Otway's Venice Preserv'd, where it is treated with great depth and originality. Otway suggests that social groups survive by defusing aggression with rituals of submission. Sacrifice is what happens when the rituals of submission fail, and when the proferred victim is claimed.

The recent discovery of a manuscript of Charles Gildon's revision of Nathaniel Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus, later revised by Gildon and staged as The Patriot at the end of 1702, provides an insight into the changing politics between the reign of Charles II with its republican moment during the Exclusion Crisis and the emergence of some form of republicanism with a powerful House of Commons at the end of the reign of William III. Lee's play was swiftly shut down by the government, and Gildon's "A Restoration Defeated," was never permitted to be staged. The politically innocuous anti-republican Patriot was dedicated to Queen Anne.

This article examines the antinuclear writing of three leading African American intellectuals in the postwar period: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, and Lorraine Hansberry. Each of these major figures in civil rights history worked and/or wrote with effectiveness against that age's atomic threat: King spoke frequently against the bomb in his sermons and in his 1964 Nobel Prize Acceptance speech (a quote from which constitutes the title of this article); in his early years Rustin busily organized antinuclear awareness campaigns and protest marches whenever he was not busy organizing landmark civil rights events; and Hansberry moved easily between references to the atomic threat and racial injustice in many of her writings. While each wrestled with dilemmas posed by these dual and ultimately quite diverse callings, King, Rustin, and Hansberry finally left a rich legacy of commitment to both racial equality and a world freed from nuclear threat.

Two instances of the morpheme ouer in the entry for the year 1137 in the Peterborough Chronicle, a familiar annal describing the anarchy that prevailed during the reign of King Stephen, occur in passages that have provoked some controversy about their interpretation. The solution proposed is to regard both instances of ouer as early examples of the adverb in the sense "in addition," which is not otherwise firmly attested until the fourteenth century.