Introduction

The articles in this issue of JEMCS return to some of the perennial concerns of our journal’s readers and contributors, concerns that range from the study of Shakespeare, through issues in the history of science and economic history, to various cultural and ideological transactions at the peripheries of empire.

As to Shakespeare, Aaron Spooner’s “Shakespeare’s Itinerant Soldiers and Foreign Wars: The Elizabethan Crisis of Debt in the Economy of Hal’s England” offers an exercise in new economic criticism that reads the figure of Falstaff against late-Elizabethan England’s growing crisis of debt. In this context, Shakespeare’s comic miscreant helps to focus the particular problems that indebtedness brought to England’s substantial population of discharged and often unpaid veterans, figures both integral to the maintenance of the Elizabethan polity and equally construed as a threat to good order and governance.

Continuing the focus upon Shakespeare, Suparna Roychoudhury’s “For-swearing Fever: Medicine, Materialism, and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 147” reads the poet’s sonnets in light of Lucretian materialism and humoral medical theory on the origins and treatment of fever. From the perspective offered by this approach, the febrile passions of the sonnets embody conditions both external and internal to the constitution of Shakespeare’s poetic consciousness, informing the self of the sonnets at the same time that they call into question the distinction between subjectivity and the material body.

The third article in this issue considers another poem by Shakespeare. Chantelle Thauvette’s “Defining Early Modern Pornography: The Case of Venus and Adonis” reviews Shakespeare’s epyllion in light of the long-presumed conflict between erotic and aesthetic pleasure that lies at the heart of modern definitions of pornography. For Thauvette, Shakespeare’s work resists containment within this dualism, and Venus and Adonis reveals early modern pornography to be more of a reading process than a genre, foregrounding the conflict not between eroticism and aesthetics but rather between anti-social lust and pro-social love.

Finally, Jason Busic’s “Polemic and Hybridity in Early Modern Spain: Juan Andrés’s Confusión o confutación de la secta Mahomética y del Alcorán” explores the tension between Christianity and Islam in the Spanish Reconquista, focusing on the cultural hybridity inherent in Spanish anti-Islamic polemical writing. Busic’s analysis offers a critique of the dualism characteristic of Saidian orientalism, suggesting that—at least in the case of Reconquista polemic—the divide between West and East should be understood less as a firm opposition than as a complex entangling.

While the articles presented here thus return to themes and subjects familiar to readers of JEMCS, the journal itself has undergone both transformation and renewal. For one thing, there have been recent changes to the journal’s editorial team. After logging six years on the JEMCS masthead, pre-1660 Book Review Editor Nancy Warren has moved on to new responsibilities as head of Texas A&M University’s English Department. We gratefully acknowledge her efforts on behalf of the journal, and we warmly welcome her successor, distinguished Shakespearean Thomas P. Anderson of Mississippi State University, as he joins our continuing post-1660 Book Review Editor Patsy Fowler (of Gonzaga University) on the JEMCS masthead. Meanwhile, after three crucial years of service, Co-Editor Elizabeth Spiller has stepped down from the JEMCS editorial board in order to serve as Director of Florida State University’s History of Text Technologies program. During her time with JEMCS, Professor Spiller brought new energy and vision to our undertaking while shepherding it through a series of unforeseen challenges. Together with continuing Co-Editors Daniel Vitkus, Devoney Looser, and Tom DiPiero, she implemented changes to the journal that extend beyond the immediate personnel shifts recorded on our masthead. Most notably, Professors Vitkus and Spiller have overseen the process of moving JEMCS to a new site of publication—the University of Pennsylvania Press, which began its production of the journal with our second issue of 2010. Now, two years later, that relationship has developed further as JEMCS begins, with the present issue, to appear on a quarterly rather than a semi-annual basis.

Taken together, these changes...