Introduction

In this summer issue of JEMCS, we are pleased to be publishing five innovative essays on early modern culture and three excellent reviews of recently published books. These essays and reviews exhibit and discuss a range of approaches and subject matter, exemplifying the rich variety that characterizes early modern studies today. They reach out, from Baghdad to Brazil, to indicate and analyze a range of cultural locations and exchanges.

Three of the articles that appear in this issue explore and transgress the boundaries that often divide national literary traditions. Jonathan Burton, in his article on “Christopher Sly’s Arabian Night,” offers a contrapuntal reading that demonstrates the uncanny resonance between the framing device in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and one of the tales from The Arabian Nights, “The Sleeper and the Waker.” In an essay that deploys Derridean theory and the perspective of animal studies, “Bien Manger, Bien Mangé: Edible Reciprocity in Jean de Léry’s Histoire d’un Voyage Faict en la Terre du Brésil,” Sophia Magnone analyzes a travel narrative written by a French Protestant about his experience in Brazil among the Tupinamba people. Sarah Connell’s article, “The Poetics and Politics of Legend: Geoffrey Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn and the Invention of Irish History,” shows how an indigenous Irish historiography emerged as a Celtic, homegrown alternative, drawing on Ireland’s ancient sources, to the history- writing about Ireland produced by colonialist writers from England or Wales.

The other two articles published here both deal with occult practices that were staged in the Jacobean period, and in doing so they provide new interpretations of important texts by two prominent authors from that era, Ben Jonson and John Webster. Katherine Shrieves’s “Spiritual Alchemy through Embodied Hieroglyphs in Jonson’s Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court” and Lynn Maxwell’s “Wax Magic and The Duchess of Malfi” both reconstruct and contextualize these Jacobean performances in terms of psychosomatic discourses and ways of seeing at court that defined theater and masque as magical spectacles that could actuate the power of sympathetic magic or of alchemical transformation. Both of these fine essays show us how the art of theatrical spectacle drew upon magical thinking and the early modern practices of witchcraft and alchemy to breach the boundaries between subject and object.

We are proud to present these ground- breaking articles and insightful reviews. I would also like to announce here that JEMCS will continue to provide cutting- edge scholarship in two upcoming special issues of JEMCS. The first of these two special issues, edited by Patsy Fowler and Amanda Hiner, will focus on “New Approaches to Eliza Heywood.” It will be followed by a special issue titled “ReOrienting Milton: Reading Milton through Islam,” which is being edited by François- Xavier Gleyzon and David Currell. While these are in the works, we will continue to accept and publish a variety of articles that deal with any aspect of early modern culture, broadly defined, from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth century.