The Paramaterial Phantasy
For some time, I’ve been toying around with the idea of making small semi-interactive interfaced presentations on various important aspects of early modern life and culture. My first attempt, which was quite long, explained the sensitive soul and is still in progress. Because that file is so large and unwieldly, I thought I would try […]
In his poem “To His Coy Mistress,” Andrew Marvell’s speaker begins by imagining a scenario in which he and his lover have all the time in the world to love one another without a fear of death. During the course of his musings, the lover makes an odd metaphor for the growth of his love […]
The World Turned Upside Down: Revolutions in the Microcosm and Macrocosm and the Crystalline Humor in the Three Eyes of Early Modern Optical Anatomy Part I. The Three Fleshly Eyes of Early Modern Optical Anatomy Augustine famously discusses the three eyes of a perceiver. He details that, first, there is the eye of the flesh. Second, […]
The World Turned Upside Down: Revolutions in the Microcosm and Macrocosm and the Crystalline Humor in the Three Eyes of Early Modern Optical Anatomy Part II. The Revolution of the Eye and De-centering the Eye’s Sovereign In the first section, I discussed Andre du Laurens’ extended metaphorical treatment of the eye’s structure. There, du Laurens […]
“He that filches from me my good name”: Envy, the Kalender of Shepherds, and the “iii Edgyd sworde” of Iago’s Tongue. A Possible New Source for Othello. Part I: “Envious people be the greateste mortherers of the worlde & gretest theves”: Othello III.iii. 160-166 and Richard Pynson’s 1506 The Kalender of Shepherdes In Shakespeare’s Proverbial […]
Growing up and developing my own sense of identity through the products of popular culture in the Reagan era, I must admit that Red Dawn (1984) played an important role not only in defining the imaginative landscape of my six year old self, but also, I should think, in helping define and in producing my […]
I. “The Arbaian trees their medicinable gum”: Othello’s Weeping Trees During Othello’s suicide speech, he makes several references that have attracted the attention of modern editors and scholars. The most famous concerns the textual variations between the Quarto and Folio versions of the line “Like a base Indian, threw a pearl away.” Whereas the Quarto […]
For the past few days, I have been working on a long essay on the anatomy of the eye and the importance of the crystalline humor in early modern elite and popular discourses on sight, but I took some time away from editing to play around with both Flash and a digital edition of George […]
As I have only been starting to blog in earnest for a few months, my experience doing so has given me occasion to reflect on the typical form of the journal article and scholarly publication. While many journals now have online editions or make their publications available through PDF versions, those online editions try to […]
Hitherto, I have been focusing on the relationships established among the objects of the world and the objects of the mind predominantly in popular sixteenth- and seventeenth-century natural philosophy. I do so, in part, because the divisions between perception and reality, and between appearance and reality, for contemporary critical practice, are a given and are […]