What’s Wrong with Mis-devotion? A John Donne Enigma

Contributor(s): Ronald Huebert

The nominal purpose of this article is to develop a cogent and persuasive interpretation of the term “mis-devotion,” a coinage John Donne uses twice in his poems: once near the end of The Second Anniversary and once in the second stanza of “The Relic.” I also cite the two known examples of this...

Friction in the Archives: Storytelling in Sixteenth-Century Anabaptism

Contributor(s): Erin Lambert

The writings of martyrs have been at the centre of the history of Reformation-era Anabaptism since the sixteenth century itself, and scholars have long used them as sources of information about a persecuted and typically clandestine community. Based on a rare confluence in the surviving source...

Introduction: “Utopia for 500 Years”

Contributor(s): Brent Nelson

Utopia’s Moorish Inspiration: Thomas More’s Reading of Ibn Ṭufayl

Contributor(s): Daniel Regnier

A promising but neglected precedent for Thomas More’s Utopia is to be found in Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ibn Ḥayy Yaqẓān. This twelfth-century Andalusian philosophical novel describing the self-education and enlightenment of a feral child on an island, while certainly a precedent for the European...

“Real versus ideal”: Utopia and the Early Modern Satirical Tradition

Contributor(s): Bernd Renner

Building on previous studies of satire in Thomas More’s Utopia, this article aims at situating More’s founding text of utopian literature more firmly in the early modern satirical tradition, a tradition that gradually dissociated itself from its conventional generic definition informed by...

Utopia and the Enclosing of Dramatic Landscapes

Contributor(s): Régis Augustus Bars Closel

This article focuses on the enclosing of the land as depicted in More’s Utopia (1516); the anonymous domestic tragedy, Arden of Faversham (1589); and the Carolinian play, A Jovial Crew (1641), by Richard Brome. It discusses how the relationship between the multiple resulting changes in...

“[T]he fault of the man and not the poet”: Sidney’s Troubled Double Vision of Thomas More’s Utopia

Contributor(s): Daniel T. Lochman

In the Defence of Poesy, Philip Sidney refers puzzlingly to Thomas More and Utopia. He praises the “way” this work presents a commonwealth yet faults the man who produced it. Sidney might have followed religious writers who condemned More’s Catholicism and his use of poetic fictions rather than...

Minor if Entertaining Post-Utopian Nowheres

Contributor(s): Anne Lake Prescott

Not all utopias are truly imaginative, yet minor ones can be instructive or amusing. This article explores the hierarchy-obsessed French Antangil as well as some minor English ones so as to deduce further what so entranced so many about Nowhere’s possibilities. None is as radical as...

All That Glitters: Devaluing the Gold Standard in the Utopias of Thomas More, Francis Bacon, and Margaret Cavendish

Contributor(s): Catherine Gimelli Martin

Francis Bacon’s and Margaret Cavendish’s ideal societies unexpectedly follow Thomas More’s Utopia in eliminating the exchange value of gold and replacing it with a knowledge economy. Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) and Cavendish’s Blazing World (1666) similarly pursue new “light” and shun selfish...

More, Huxley, Eggers, and the Utopian/Dystopian Tradition

Contributor(s): Peter C. Herman

From its inception in Plato’s Republic and revival in Thomas More’s Utopia, the concept of a perfect (or as More originally put it in a qualification often lost, “best”) form of a republic has been dogged by the spectres of hypocrisy, contradiction, and authoritarianism. However, the matter...

Editor’s Note

Contributor(s): William R. Bowen

“My Own Worst Enemy”: Translating Hamartia in Sixteenth-Century Italy

Contributor(s): Bryan Brazeau

This article considers the ways in which Aristotle’s notion of hamartia (ἁμαρτία) in the Poetics—the tragic fault that leads to the protagonist’s downfall—was rendered in sixteenth-century translations and commentaries produced in Italy. While early Latin translations and commentaries initially...

L’Inquiétante tradition de La Strega de Lasca. Variantes d’auteur ou réécriture éditoriale ?

Contributor(s): Michel Plaisance

In the 1976 edition of Anton Francesco Grazzini’s La Strega, the author of this article found reason to suspect the textual differences between the Magl. VII 1385 autograph version and the 1582 editions published by the Giunti of Venise in 12° and in 8°. M. Durante has since sought to...

Exploring Verbal Relations between Arden of Faversham and John Lyly’s Endymion

Contributor(s): Darren Freebury-Jones

Several scholars, utilizing traditional reading-based methods, have highlighted intertextual links between the anonymous domestic tragedy Arden of Faversham (1590) and John Lyly’s comedy Endymion, The Man in the Moon (1588). The authorship of Arden of Faversham is fiercely contested: Brian...

Hurried to Destruction: Reprobation in Arden of Faversham and A Woman Killed with Kindness

Contributor(s): Glenn Clark

This essay demonstrates that Arden of Faversham and A Woman Killed with Kindness explore important tensions in the Elizabethan understanding of the lived experience of the damned. Calvinist theologians tended to describe reprobation in terms that unintentionally suggested direct divine agency and...

“A Virgine and a Martyr both”: The Turn to Hagiography in Heywood’s Reformation History Play

Contributor(s): Gina M. Di Salvo

This article considers the narrative and theatrical strategies used by Thomas Heywood to sanctify Elizabeth I as a virgin martyr saint in the remarkable, yet understudied, Reformation history play If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part I, or the Troubles of Queen Elizabeth (ca. 1605). I...

Greengrass, Mark, project dir. The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (TAMO)

Contributor(s): Joseph L. Black

Hunter, Michael, project dir. Bpi:1700: British Printed Images to 1700. Digital library

Contributor(s): Meaghan J. Brown

Knutson, Roslyn L., David McInnis, and Matthew Steggle, eds. The Lost Plays Database

Contributor(s): Paul Brown

McGann, Jerome, project dir. Juxta. Open-source tool and web service

Contributor(s): Matthew Evan Davis