From Departing Editor

Since this issue of JEMCS marks the end of my service to the journal, my co-editors have kindly allowed me to compose a final introductory column in propria persona.

The five essays appearing in JEMCS 8.1 represent three recurring areas of interest for the journal’s contributors and its parent Group: the history of cross-cultural exchange, the articulation of gender, and the growth of the modern scientific imaginary. Carmen Nocentelli’s “The Erotics of Mercantile Imperialism” and Lucas Marchante-Aragón’s “The King, the Nation, and the Moor” represent the first of these general topics, which they approach from different geographical angles. Nocentelli explores the dynamics of early European trade and diplomacy primarily in East Asia, whereas Marchante-Aragón engages Europe’s long and troubled history with the Islamic Middle East and North Africa. In both cases, what emerges is a complicated legacy of interdependence, such that the European self seeks to distinguish itself from racial and cultural others that nonetheless reemerge as objects of desire and fascination in the discourse of European supremacy.

In examining the notion of cross-cultural desire, both Nocentelli and Marchante-Aragón nudge their work in the direction of gender studies. Two other essays in this issue of JEMCS address questions of gender more squarely. In “‘Rich Like a Lady’: Cross-Class Dressing in the Brothels and Theaters of Early Modern London,” Cristine Varholy seizes upon a common preoccupation of recent scholarship on the early modern English theater—cross-dressing. But she studies this subject from the standpoint of class rather than gender, in the process shedding light upon a whole vocabulary of theatrical and non-theatrical desire keyed to expressions of social privilege. For her part, Amy Greenstadt reads Aemilia Lanyer’s “Description of Cooke-ham” as an allegory of femme-femme desire, relayed across the boundaries of rank and imprinted upon the landscape of the Countess of Cumberland’s country residence.

Finally, in “Ben Jonson’s Alchemist and Early Modern Laboratory Space,” John Shanahan presents Jonson’s great comedy as a literary anticipation of the experimental method, as this was envisioned by Bacon and developed by the Royal Society. For Shanahan, The Alchemist proceeds by the limitation and manipulation of variables, particularly time and space, thus creating an artificial space for the production of truths that may then be taken as representative of the broader world beyond the theater itself. In this respect, we may see Jonsonian neoclassicism as implicated in the development of early modern proto-scientific theory and procedures.

These fine articles comprise the current issue of JEMCS. But since this issue marks the end of my service on the JEMCS editorial board, it is perhaps also appropriate to offer a brief appraisal of the journal’s development over the past eight-and-a-half years.

My earliest involvement with JEMCS—and with The Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies—came with my appearance at the Group’s 1999 meeting in Coral Gables, Florida. At that year’s business meeting, GEMCS agreed to pursue the possibility of establishing an affiliated journal, and so, after gaining some early financial assistance from the Florida State University Department of English, the JEMCS editorial board (then consisting of Laura J. Rosenthal, Daniel Vitkus, Helen Burke, and me) sent out our first call for papers and advertisement for the new journal in February 2000. Over the next twelve months we read submissions, assembled a preliminary backlog, and prepared the first issue of the journal, which appeared in late spring 2001.

For three-and-a-half years thereafter, JEMCS developed as a semi-annual self-published project housed primarily within the FSU English Department. By late 2004, however, some members of the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies had begun calling for the journal to affiliate itself with a university press, in order to enhance its visibility and distribution network. In response to these calls, the journal signed an initial publishing contract with Indiana University Press, with the result that JEMCS started appearing in a redesigned format in Fall/Winter 2004, under the umbrella of the IUP Journals Division. Last year, JEMCS renewed...