Project MUSE®: Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/293
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2001) through current issueLatest Articles: Journal for Early Modern Cultural StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies1553-37861531-0485Latest articles in Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Bodies of Water and Stephano's Ontological Indulgence in The Tempest
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976201
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Prospero concludes his final monologue in The Tempest with a direct address, telling the audience, "Let your indulgence set me free" (Epilogue 20). Examining the multiple definitions of "indulgence" the play invokes, this article seeks a new dimension to the well-established comparison between Prospero and the drunken butler Stephano. Stephano's consumption of alcohol provides more than comic relief for his futile attempts to usurp power from Prospero; Stephano's consumption makes him a naturalistic foil to Prospero by blurring the ontological distinction between the human body and the ocean that surrounds the play's island setting. Alcohol provides a natural counterpart to the supernatural spells Prospero
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/293/image/coversmallBodies of Water and Stephano's Ontological Indulgence in The Tempest2025-12-09text/htmlen-USBodies of Water and Stephano's Ontological Indulgence in The Tempest2025-12-092025TWOProject MUSE®712912026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-12-09Labor, "Paines," and Social Disorder: Reading the Representation of Wet-nursing in Early Modern Sermons, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and Romeo and Juliet
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976202
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Wet-nursing features in early modern English drama alongside narratives of social disorder, embodying the critical discourse regarding the practice from late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century "Puritan" sermons and domestic guidebooks. "Puritan" writers including Elizabeth Clinton, William Gouge, and Henry Smith warned about the implications of wet-nursing on familial and social orders: they promoted maternal breastfeeding while warning that wet-nursing could lead to poor physical, emotional, or nutritional outcomes for children.1 These writers also warned that using a wet-nurse posed a threat to the family by either passing on poor traits to the child or by usurping maternal (and parental) influence. William
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/293/image/coversmallLabor, "Paines," and Social Disorder: Reading the Representation of Wet-nursing in Early Modern Sermons, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and Romeo and Juliet2025-12-09text/htmlen-USLabor, "Paines," and Social Disorder: Reading the Representation of Wet-nursing in Early Modern Sermons, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and Romeo and Juliet2025-12-092025TWOProject MUSE®1021922026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-12-09Beavers, Silks, and Leveller Indians: Reading the Atlantic World in the Writings of William Walwyn
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976203
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As part of a larger inquiry into the influences of colonial trade on domestic politics and political thought during the English civil war period (1640–50), this article engages William Walwyn's writings in the context of expanding international trade and colonization in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world. In doing so, I aim to trouble traditional historical frameworks that separate England's domestic national history from global imperial history. As David Armitage writes in Foundations of Modern International Thought, imperial histories have generally been studied as "outward extensions of national histories even as they generally maintained a strict separation between the histories of (mostly European)
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/293/image/coversmallBeavers, Silks, and Leveller Indians: Reading the Atlantic World in the Writings of William Walwyn2025-12-09text/htmlen-USBeavers, Silks, and Leveller Indians: Reading the Atlantic World in the Writings of William Walwyn2025-12-092025TWOProject MUSE®1356052026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-12-09Controversy and Conscience: Abiezer Coppe's Return to Orthodoxy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976204
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Early modern Puritans despised routine. A Christian life was an active life involving the constant revision of cherished certainties. This progress, observes Alec Ryrie, gave Puritans "a satisfying and plausible life narrative" that balanced a proper belief in Calvinist total depravity with a "winding but sure path to heaven." Far from routine, repentance was "transformative," an "occasion of closing one chapter and opening another" ("Living the Puritan Life" 1–3). Like Wittgenstein's ladder, the path to salvation demanded overturning long-held assumptions as one ascended to higher planes of existence (189).Practical antinomianism was a perversion of this scheme. "Till I acted that, so called sin," wrote the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/293/image/coversmallControversy and Conscience: Abiezer Coppe's Return to Orthodoxy2025-12-09text/htmlen-USControversy and Conscience: Abiezer Coppe's Return to Orthodoxy2025-12-092025TWOProject MUSE®1021862026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-12-09Renaissance Deepfake and the Duping of Othello: Iago as Archimago
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976205
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Although composed in Elizabethan England and set in a medieval fairyland, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene has acquired a newfound if disturbing topicality in the era of open-access AI and synthetic media. In the opening canto, the sorcerer Archimago conjures two spirits "fittest for to forge true-seeming lyes" (1.1.38) and with his "hidden artes" shapes the second into a living replica of the princess Una:
[He] made a Lady of that other Spright,
And fram'd of liquid ayre her tender partes
So lively and so like in all mens sight,
That weaker sence it could have ravisht quight.
(1.1.45)1
Dispatched to fetch a false vision from the realm of Morpheus, the first spirit addles the sleeping Redcrosse Knight with an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/293/image/coversmallRenaissance Deepfake and the Duping of Othello: Iago as Archimago2025-12-09text/htmlen-USRenaissance Deepfake and the Duping of Othello: Iago as Archimago2025-12-092025TWOProject MUSE®1626022026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-12-09Vanity and Estrangement: The Existential Consequences of Physicalizing the Senses
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976206
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On 6 May 1643, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–80) submitted to René Descartes (1596–1650) a question that would become the cornerstones of modern philosophy: "how the soul of a human being (it being only a thinking substance) can determine the bodily spirits, in order to bring about voluntary actions?" Two years after the publication of Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), Elisabeth formulated what is still the commonplace interpretation of his philosophical legacy, namely, that in founding natural philosophy on the principle that "all determination of movement happens through the impulsion [and] the particular qualities and shape of the surface," Descartes created an unbridgeable gap between the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/293/image/coversmallVanity and Estrangement: The Existential Consequences of Physicalizing the Senses2025-12-09text/htmlen-USVanity and Estrangement: The Existential Consequences of Physicalizing the Senses2025-12-092025TWOProject MUSE®2164282026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-12-09Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia ed. by Michelle-Armstrong Partida, Alexandra Guerson, and Dana Wessel Lightfoot (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976207
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The essays in this volume, based on specific case studies, give us insights into the power or lack thereof that women had at different times and places in late medieval and early modern Iberia, as well as the institutions and communities that defined their roles. The essays are based on in-depth archival research and clearly show that women from different social levels and faith communities in late medieval and early modern Iberia had recourse to the legal system as well as to social customs (some, such as house attacks, understudied), but, not surprisingly, did not always have the same standing as their husbands or other male family and community members, and were often victims of clerical and social repression.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/293/image/coversmallWomen and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia ed. by Michelle-Armstrong Partida, Alexandra Guerson, and Dana Wessel Lightfoot (review)2025-12-09text/htmlen-USWomen and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia ed. by Michelle-Armstrong Partida, Alexandra Guerson, and Dana Wessel Lightfoot (review)2025-12-092025TWOProject MUSE®127362026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-12-09Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race by Noémie Ndiaye (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/976208
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Noémie Ndiaye's Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race is a revelation. Ndiaye continues the immensely necessary work of decentering whiteness and Anglophone literature in early modern studies to put forth an immense work across baroque Spanish, French, and English theater. Ndiaye's project is explicitly not one of reclamation or excavation of pockets of agency within the overwhelmingly white archive, but rather, she seeks to illuminate how multiple threads of impersonation of Afro-diasporic people by white actors wove together to create legible scripts or "ways of acting" black enough to become legible and necessary components of race-making.Ndiaye is most interested in how
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/293/image/coversmallScripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race by Noémie Ndiaye (review)2025-12-09text/htmlen-USScripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race by Noémie Ndiaye (review)2025-12-092025TWOProject MUSE®99842026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-12-09