Set against the backdrop of the First Crusade's conquest of Jerusalem, Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata (1581) channels both the aspirations and the failures of city-building and destruction. The poem explores probing questions about territorial ownership, religious right, and the materiality of space, extending from the Middle East to its symbolic New World shores. Central to the article's analysis is Canto XV, whose prophecy of Columbus and his distant voyage engages pre-, anti-, and decolonial modes of thought. This prophecy unfolds as two Crusaders approach the Atlantic island of the enchantress Armida, a space charged with imperial tensions. Although resembling an earthly paradise, Armida's island functions as a paradise-prison, a heterotopia generating what the present study terms decolonizing doubts - critiques and counternarratives that arise when one colonial context is forced to assess another. These doubts unsettle the poem's portrayals of conquest, liberation, captivity, and the epistemologies of discovery. Tasso's emphasis on the verbal and visual proof of lands beyond known bounds exposes the anxieties surrounding both colonial and authorial power. By examining the interplay between utopian and decolonial perspectives, the present article brings into relief Tasso's geographical critique of center and periphery, and foregrounds the pivotal role female artistry plays within epic history and its (im)possible future.
The article discusses how the presentation of the career, arrest and imprisonment of Sir Thomas Overbury illustrate the importance of place. Looking at epistolary material between 1611 and 1613, it examines how Overbury was represented by courtiers, diplomats and commentators in connection to different royal locations. It argues that the rhetorical training of such writers led to the use of places of argument which aimed to guide readers’ emotional responses to the information presented. Having begun with Overbury’s disagreement with the queen at Greenwich in May 1611, the article then moves on to his role in the competition for the position of the royal secretary and the connection of the courtier at this time to the king’s hunting lodge at Royston. Finally, moving to the reception of Overbury’s arrest by those watching the court and his own letters from the Tower, it considers how he uses the same rhetorical techniques in an ill-fated attempt to influence the king’s favourite, Robert Carr, then Viscount Rochester, and secure his release from close imprisonment.
The present introductory article presents comparative readings of each of the four pairs of case study articles. In it, four respondents each offer an in-depth analysis of the connections between a pair of articles and their resonance for the volume as a whole. Each respondent also gestures towards productive avenues for further research which are opened up by the articles in their pair, offering up new directions for the ever-expanding field of space and place studies.
The article examines the mechanism by which space is created and disrupted in Michael Drayton’s chorographic poem, Poly-Olbion (1612 and 1622). Gaston Bachelard propounds that ‘Inhabited space transcends geometrical space’: once space is inhabited, it develops the agency to co-create with its inhabitants. Applying this theory of domesticity to Drayton’s representation of water, the article argues that the poem similarly presents the non-human with agency to shape and disrupt space alongside people and their histories. Attending to the spatial agency of the non-human in this way allows for a new ecocritical reading of space in Poly-Olbion, aiming to address what it means to read space in the face of environmental change.
The article examines Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo's Istorica descrizione de' tre regni Congo, Matamba, et Angola (1687) as a key text in the seventeenth-century Catholic effort to render West Central Africa legible within a Christian epistemological framework. Produced under the auspices of Propaganda Fide, Cavazzi's chronicle translates African political sovereignty-most notably that of Queen Njinga of Matamba-into a moralized narrative of sin, conversion, and redemption. Drawing on Cavazzi's firsthand experience as Njinga's confessor, as well as the visual regime established by Paolo da Lorena's engravings, the article shows how admiration and censure coexist within missionary representation. Rather than dismissing such accounts as purely didactic or exploitative, the present essay situates them within a broader historiographical dialogue that includes the more empathetic portrayals of Antonio da Gaeta and Francesco Maria Gioia, as well as modern historical reconstructions by John Thornton and Linda Heywood. Mobilizing theoretical frameworks from Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Martin Jay, and Robyn Wiegman, the article analyzes how space, vision, and racialized visibility structure missionary knowledge. It argues that Capuchin texts functioned simultaneously as ethnographic records and performative scripts that sought to regulate bodies and territories, yet inadvertently opened sites of negotiation and resistance.
The essay argues that Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundred Pointes of Good Husbandrie amends and enhances the kind of simplified instructions found in early modern almanacs. Through his unusual formal choices, such as his digressions and contractions, Tusser registers the difficulties and inconsistencies of farming in southern England, in turn preparing his readers for what he believes is the ‘slippery’ nature of his readers’ own environments.
The article explores a late medieval manuscript from a Dominican nuns’ convent in the city of Nuremberg, Holy Roman Empire, in which the sacristan describes her duties in ensuring the successful performance of the liturgy. By focusing on sound, the connections between liturgical practice and the spaces in which it took place are revealed. These diverse spaces were shaped by sound, which had not only sacred but also social implications.
Many European seventeenth-century travellers to Persia observe that the Persians did not produce printed books. The article explores the context for the apparent absence and attempted introduction of printing with movable type in Persia in the seventeenth century and considers the representation of Persian textual culture in European travel writing. European attempts to introduce printing with movable type were unsuccessful due to technological challenges, but also because of the book culture that already thrived in Persia, in which manuscript and oral traditions played an important part. European travel writings noted the presence of these other forms of literary culture, even when they did not fully understand them. The article seeks to contribute to our understanding of how Persia as a material space was understood in early modern Europe by examining the ideas about Persia which the absence and introduction of printing technology permitted or perpetuated.
The article interrogates the assumption that Aemilia Lanyer’s poem ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’ describes a classic country house. Utilizing early modern maps, it expands the definition of Cookham and questions the importance of the alleged ‘country house’ to Lanyer, thereby enriching discussions of Lanyer’s unique proto-feminist poetics. Understanding the place and space of Cookham allows readers to properly position Lanyer and her companions, Margaret and Anne Clifford, in an elided literal and spiritual landscape where autonomous female religious community thrives. The article contends that Lanyer’s poems must be read as tightly interwoven pieces which have the place of Cookham as the unifying, palimpsested theme. Restoring the context of Lanyer’s book and returning to the context of her writing are a means of moving beyond tokenism to study Lanyer as a talented, innovative writer keenly in tune with her social, religious, and physical environments.
The early Royal Society was an intellectual movement with remarkably homogenous epistemological and methodological features. Despite the petty squabbles fellows occasionally engaged in, general agreement existed among them about the principles, methods, and aims of their collective enterprise. On rare occasions, however, the society was genuinely infiltrated by someone with incompatible conceptions and principles, upsetting the sober equilibrium of society meetings. One spectacular example of such an intruder was the Cambridge-educated Oliver Hill who was fellow of the society from 1677 to 1682. This paper offers an account of Hill’s short tenure and studies some possible sources for better reconstructing two discourses, today lost, that he presented at meetings in December and January 1677/78. The paper aims to show how Hill, most often presented as a puritan mystic, also pursued a natural philosophical project in which he defended a speculative philosophy and spiritualist cosmology not unlike Henry More’s.
Selon l’historiographie traditionnelle, le Novum organum se distingue dans l’histoire de la logique par une provocation majeure : la disqualification du syllogisme comme opérateur de la science, au profit d’une induction pensée à nouveaux frais tant du point de vue de sa place dans l’édifice logique que du point de vue de sa structure. Pourquoi Bacon envisage-t-il un tel renversement ? Comment s’y prend-il pour l’élaborer conceptuellement ? On se propose de contribuer à répondre à ces questions encore peu traitées par les interprètes, pour clarifier la fonction assignée par Bacon à sa logique. On étudie en ce sens le plus long des aphorismes composant l’ouvrage et qui est consacré à la distinction de 19 mouvements primordiaux de la matière. Comment Bacon peut-il tout à la fois concevoir la logique comme un organon, c’est-à-dire comme l’instrument d’une philosophie naturelle à venir, et construire cette logique en prenant appui sur plusieurs des principes de cette philosophie ? On montre qu’il n’y a pas là une tension mais une nouvelle approche de l’instrumentalité logique. Bacon entend réfuter la logique d’Aristote, en tant que source de principes erronés de la philosophie naturelle, pour éviter qu’une fausse logique ne déteigne sur l’analyse de la nature.
Scholarship on the popular psychology of the early modern period has not infrequently neglected the English treatise on the government of thoughts, despite how prolific this species of writing came to be by the end of the seventeenth century. This literature was written by a highly diverse and eclectic group of authors, ranging from Cambridge theologians to High-Anglican clergymen and from natural philosophers to astrologer-physicians. It includes works by William Perkins (1607), Thomas Cooper (1619), Thomas Goodwin (1637), Robert Boyle (1645), Edward Reyner (1656), John Angell (1659), William Shewen (1679), William Penn (1682), Richard Saunders (1682), Richard Allestree (1694), John Sharp (1694), George Tullie (1694), and William Chilcot (1698). In this article, I look at two early treatises by Reformed theologians Perkins and Goodwin, and two late High-Anglican works by Allestree and Sharp. My aim is to reconstruct the precise conception of human “thoughts” foregrounded in this literature and examine two important consequences that stem from this articulation: (1) the elevation of the imagination to the status of an “arch-faculty” of the mind that participates in all other operations of the soul and (2) the tension between depravity and diversion that shapes the practical rules for self-government offered in this literature. I explore these alternatives to the standard faculty psychology and moral instruction found in competing genres of popular psychology and practical moral philosophy at the time, with the aim of complicating more traditional historical interpretations of Protestant self-regulation.
This paper attempts to advance our understanding of the emergence of the modern notion of physical Laws of Nature by situating the earliest known discussions of laws of nature, those of Descartes, in the context of the theory of principles and the broader neo-Aristotelian theory of knowledge acquisition. It is claimed that together these theories are an important, though hitherto overlooked, seam within the conceptual resources from which Descartes' distinctive and novel notion of Laws of Nature was developed.
Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP), a searchable database of XML-encoded transcriptions of over 60,000 early English books, has transformed how scholars research and teach early modern texts. This immense archive of digital facsimiles was transcribed and encoded by keyers in India and the Philippines. Despite the keyers’ centrality to the project, EEBO-TCP and its vendors do not disclose the keyers’ wages, labor conditions, or precarity. Examining absences, omissions, and rhetorical maneuvers on the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) website, the article argues that its rhetoric reinforces colonial epistemologies by situating its knowledge production in the United Kingdom and United States while decentering the keyers’ expertise, scholarly labor, and essential role. Ultimately, the labor of digitization must be brought to the forefront in order to understand how digital texts are material and political; otherwise, digital archives will reproduce colonial epistemologies and cultural imperialism in the production of the digital cultural record. Finally, highlighting the work of scholars of critical digital humanities and critical archival studies, the article concludes by considering alternative approaches to digital creation and collaboration that center people, relationships, and process.
This article explores intersections of disability and race embodied in Milton’s Poetical Works (1855), the first edition of John Milton’s poetry published for reading by touch. It describes how Morrison Heady, a blind man from Kentucky, raised funds for the book by traveling extensively across the eastern United States. Heady’s commitment to this project speaks to the important position Milton occupied within the culture that developed around the production of tactile books in the nineteenth-century United States. Many blind readers as well as sighted bookmakers found in Milton a model of the intellectual achievement made possible by the advent of raised-letter printing, and the publication of his poems in 1855 was an occasion for key stakeholders to reflect on the state of tactile bookmaking as it stood at the midcentury. But Morrison Heady was also an enslaver, and historical records suggest that his efforts to publish an edition of Milton for blind readers was supported by the work of enslaved individuals. By acknowledging both the remarkable access provided by the 1855 edition of Milton’s Poetical Works and the coerced labor to which this book owes its existence, this article shows how the study of early modern book history as well as the emerging field of tactile book history can benefit from intersectional approaches.
The article attempts a survey of the ways book prices have been conceptualised and deployed as part of bibliography and book history, with a particular focus on Shakespeare’s First Folio. In part it is an attempt to understand the changing prices of books which become valuable through different possible financial heuristics, but its major interest is in the implicit work, both rhetorical and methodological, that is done by conceptions of price, and through analogies and comparisons with what hypothetical book buyers might also buy or earn. The period in which rare books were invented as a consumer category is the period of wealth created by the trade in enslaved people and in goods produced by enslaved people: this differently freighted comparison brings out the ethical and conceptual problems raised in discussions of historic book prices.
The article discusses the relationship between slavery and cultural history within institutional rare book collections. Beginning with an overview of the media controversy which was caused by the British Library’s publication of an internal document that noted Ted Hughes’ slave-owning ancestors, it argues that the current approach to these questions which have been developed in museum studies are not sufficient when it comes to thinking about libraries. Taking the two examples of Hans Sloane and John Bellingham-Inglis from the British Library as primary case studies, it explores the institutional framing of their ownership of enslaved people. It then moves to an examination of some of the material impacts of provenance, particularly in Bellingham-Inglis’ physical dismantling of his books. By drawing on the twin ideas of ‘bookwork’ (Whitney Trettien) and ‘griefwork’ (Jennifer Scuro), the article argues that the future of provenance studies is an affective one. It argues for the benefits of a provenance research which actively considers ethical and political questions to be material forces with impact on our work.
This article discusses the urgent matter of canonicity in early modern manuscript studies. It argues that the archipelagic turn, first articulated by John Kerrigan, encourages new analyses of manuscripts previously studied for their Anglo-centric canonical authors. By permitting the manuscripts to speak for themselves, new evidence for production and reading practices emerge. Our study centers the Dalhousie manuscripts; we examine the evidence for ownership, compilation, and use, ultimately suggesting the contents work together thematically in ways that highlight Scottish aristocratic reading interests in the early seventeenth century. Thinking archipelagically, this article explores Scottish interest in English poetry, examines thematic evidence in the manuscripts for Scottish provenance, and provides comparative examples of orthographical and lexical evidence.
