The Paramaterial Phantasy
Than who is he that will take pleasure in vayne apparell, which if it be worne but a while will fall to ragges, and if it be not worne, will soone rotte or els be eaten with mothes. –Anatomie of Abuses. Philip Stubbes. The past week I’ve been terribly sick, and while I was not […]
While working on my previous post on the possible relationship between Richard Pynson’s 1506 Kalender of Shepherdes and William Shakespeare’s Othello, I turned to the sources of the Kalender’s Vision of Lazarus. I checked Pynson against not only the French Compost et kalendrier des bergers, but also against the Ars Moriendi in general and L’Art […]
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 […]
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 […]
While I should have spent the past few days finishing my post on Othello’s “Arabian trees” that drop “medicinable gum,” I, instead, spent the last day or so working on a new late medieval/ early modern meme experiment. The “Harlem Shake” phenomenon’s coolness has dissipated in about the amount of time it takes to watch […]
When I started using Twitter regularly about a year ago, I was drawn to the fascinating Twitter Feeds of medievalists like @Erik_Kwakkel and @Sarah_Peverley, both of whom not only use their Twitter Feeds to discuss medieval art and literature but also post beautiful and oftentimes funny images taken of medieval manuscripts. I always looked forward […]
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 […]