Project MUSE®: Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 33 (2002) through current issueLatest Articles: Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies1557-02900069-6412Latest articles in Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®The Sword in the Mere: Transcultural Memory, Nationhood, and the Case for Brittonic Influence in Beowulf
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972539
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Past studies exploring the possible influence of Brittonic or Gaelic traditions on Beowulf almost invariably consider Irish sources.1 Early twen tieth-century scholars such as Heinz Dehmer, C. W. von Sydow, and Gerard Murphy have convincingly demonstrated the presence of the Irish "demonic arm" motif in Beowulf's struggle with the Grendel-kin,2 disproving the long-held notion that the episode solely anticipates the Germanic "son of bear" device seen in ninthto early fourteenth-century traditions reflected in the Old Icelandic Grettis saga.3 Likewise, possible connections between Grendel's mother and the Gaelic "water-hag" tradition captured the imagination of earlier scholars, perhaps most notably Martin Puhvel
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546/image/coversmallThe Sword in the Mere: Transcultural Memory, Nationhood, and the Case for Brittonic Influence in Beowulf2025-10-28text/htmlen-USThe Sword in the Mere: Transcultural Memory, Nationhood, and the Case for Brittonic Influence in Beowulf2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®1322202026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Authorizing Islam and Christianity: Examining the Spiritual Authority Between Iberian Mudejares and Muslim Jurists, 9th–16th Centuries
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972540
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In 1238, the Christian Aragonese King Jaume I conquered Valencia, sealing the fate for thousands of Muslims and reducing their political, social, and economic autonomy. They were now Mudejares, or subjects of the crown allowed to retain their religion under Christian rule. And yet, even as evidence exists of escalating forms of persecution and violence towards Mudejares, in 1285 the crown of Aragon sought jenets, or bands of North African Muslim cavalry, to join their army, employing local Mudejares to facilitate their recruitment. Evidence from the Aragonese royal archives describes how Mudejares negotiated spiritual and social rights for jenets. They secured jenets the ability to relocate their families to the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546/image/coversmallAuthorizing Islam and Christianity: Examining the Spiritual Authority Between Iberian Mudejares and Muslim Jurists, 9th–16th Centuries2025-10-28text/htmlen-USAuthorizing Islam and Christianity: Examining the Spiritual Authority Between Iberian Mudejares and Muslim Jurists, 9th–16th Centuries2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®570732026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Translatio populorum—Translatio virtutis: A Typological Rethinking of Translatio imperii in Twelfth-Century Historiography
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972541
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During the first half of the twelfth century, two fundamental historiographical texts were composed, one in the expanding Anglo-Norman realm written in Latin prose, and one in the Holy Roman Empire written in vernacular Middle High German verse. The first work, Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain; henceforth referred to as the Historia), written around 1136 in Norman England, recounts, based on a supposedly ancient but fictitious British book, the history of the Britons and their kings, from the days of Aeneas's great-grandson, Brutus, until the Saxon takeover of the realm. The second work, written anonymously by a cleric from Regensburg between 1140 and 1150 and simply
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546/image/coversmallTranslatio populorum—Translatio virtutis: A Typological Rethinking of Translatio imperii in Twelfth-Century Historiography2025-10-28text/htmlen-USTranslatio populorum—Translatio virtutis: A Typological Rethinking of Translatio imperii in Twelfth-Century Historiography2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®671452026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28The Tears of Kököchin: Bodies, Sexuality, and Suffering in Marco Polo's Asia
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972542
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Who is the subaltern for Marco Polo? What place is ascribed to a gendered or ethnically encoded subalternity in his portrayal of medieval Asia? A trenchant display of gender dynamics (and gendered violence) tucked in the opening rubrics of his Devisement dou monde can help us answer this question. Polo's narrative takes us back to the shores of Çaiton, now Quanzhou (泉州) in southeast China. There, in the spring of 1291, Polo was offered to join a delegation of Mongol dignitaries heading toward the Persian Gulf. The ambassadors of Kublai Khan were to escort a young girl of the imperial family to a marriage with the influential fourth ruler of Mongol controlled Persia, the Ilkhan Arghun. Little has been recorded about
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546/image/coversmallThe Tears of Kököchin: Bodies, Sexuality, and Suffering in Marco Polo's Asia2025-10-28text/htmlen-USThe Tears of Kököchin: Bodies, Sexuality, and Suffering in Marco Polo's Asia2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®1679832026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Unfolding Dante's Map: Spatial Meaning, Moral Cartography, and Epistemology in the Commedia
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972543
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Dante's Commedia unfolds across a geography that is both meticulously constructed and radically imaginative.1 From the inverted cone of Hell to the celestial spheres of Paradise, space in the poem is not a passive setting but an active principle of meaning. This essay argues that knowledge is spatially organized in the Commedia and that spatial relationships—distances, directions, and placements—serve as a framework through which Dante articulates moral hierarchies and theological insights.In reading this geography, I draw on geocriticism, particularly the work of Bertrand Westphal, which treats space as relational, dynamic, and shaped by textual and cultural discourses. I also engage spatial theory more
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546/image/coversmallUnfolding Dante's Map: Spatial Meaning, Moral Cartography, and Epistemology in the Commedia2025-10-28text/htmlen-USUnfolding Dante's Map: Spatial Meaning, Moral Cartography, and Epistemology in the Commedia2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®1097862026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Compiling Vices, Curating Hell, and Sinners on Display: Museological and Encyclopedic Readings of Trecento and Quattrocento Hell Scenes
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972544
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This paper proposes that parallels can be drawn between trecento and quattrocento hell scenes and a museum collection. Its general scope is twofold: First, it retrospectively examines these images through a contemporary analytical lens drawn from modern museology, interpreting hell scenes as (alternative) exhibition spaces in which punished sinners are displayed as exhibits. While modern theories and practices cannot be consistently or uncritically applied to medieval and early modern imagery, this paper proposes that such a displaced perspective may reveal an underlying epistemological structure—rooted in the desire to collect, order, and communicate knowledge—comparable to that of the modern museum. This
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546/image/coversmallCompiling Vices, Curating Hell, and Sinners on Display: Museological and Encyclopedic Readings of Trecento and Quattrocento Hell Scenes2025-10-28text/htmlen-USCompiling Vices, Curating Hell, and Sinners on Display: Museological and Encyclopedic Readings of Trecento and Quattrocento Hell Scenes2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®2168702026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Like a Hound upon Its Quarry: Noble Animals as Elements of Knightly Material Culture, ca. 1350–1425
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972545
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An early fifteenth-century manuscript of Froissart's Chroniques, now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, shows the knight Bertrand du Guesclin at the battle of Nájera in 1367. The illumination (fig. 1) places him and his opponent, the Count of Foix, in the center of its drama. The two men appear dressed in plate armor with visored bascinets. They clash head-on with swords raised above their plumed helmets. Each man bears his heraldic insignia. Du Guesclin's two-headed black eagle, emblazoned on his coat-armor and his shield, hurtles toward the count's red bulls. Above their heads their banners also fly, the animal designs distinguishing them from the great mass of embattled cavalry. Thus does du Guesclin
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546/image/coversmallLike a Hound upon Its Quarry: Noble Animals as Elements of Knightly Material Culture, ca. 1350–14252025-10-28text/htmlen-USLike a Hound upon Its Quarry: Noble Animals as Elements of Knightly Material Culture, ca. 1350–14252025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®1887152026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Monarchical Deafness: Archbishop Scrope's Rebellion in Henry IV, Part 2 and the Cess Controversy in Tudor Ireland
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972546
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Shakespeare's history play Henry IV, Part 2 was written in the late 1590s when the Nine Years' War in Ireland was reaching its climax. At the same time, tensions between the English government and the Old English in Ireland were intensifying.1 Shakespeare's depiction of the rebellion led by Archbishop Scrope foregrounds discontent fueled by failed counsel—an issue that was also central to the Anglo-Irish controversy of the period. This paper examines Scrope's failed counsel within the broader context of Elizabethan Anglo-Irish relations. It asserts that political dilemma, rather than moral or ethical issues, is a key factor contributing to the monarch's "deafness" to counsel. Moreover, the play itself functions as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546/image/coversmallMonarchical Deafness: Archbishop Scrope's Rebellion in Henry IV, Part 2 and the Cess Controversy in Tudor Ireland2025-10-28text/htmlen-USMonarchical Deafness: Archbishop Scrope's Rebellion in Henry IV, Part 2 and the Cess Controversy in Tudor Ireland2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®1334872026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Battle of the Bruts: A Comparative Reading of MSS 224 and 253 at the University of Chicago
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972547
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At the University of Chicago Library, there are two manuscripts containing the same type of chronicle. They were written at roughly the same time and within 100 miles of each other on the island of Britain. Later, they were even acquired by the university within a year of each other. Their differences are nonetheless manifold and demonstrate the variability of the tradition they participate in. These differences, moreover, can be interpreted to signify the sociopolitical shifts that took place at the time of their creation.These two manuscripts, MSS 224 and 253, are Brut chronicles from the late fourteenth century. These are histories of Britain, particularly England, that dominated historical writing throughout
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546/image/coversmallBattle of the Bruts: A Comparative Reading of MSS 224 and 253 at the University of Chicago2025-10-28text/htmlen-USBattle of the Bruts: A Comparative Reading of MSS 224 and 253 at the University of Chicago2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®1014922026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World by Chelsea Berry (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972548
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An examination of poison accusations in the Atlantic world reveals a dynamic space of contested knowledge over health, healing, and power. Through a study of the category of "poison" in the Atlantic world from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, Chelsea Berry shows that ideas about poison were numerous, contested, and flowed between imperial borders. Berry underscores the critical role Atlantic African thought played in the development and justification of narratives about poison by exploring the changing ideas of poison between Europeans and Atlantic Africans. Seeking to complicate understandings of poison beyond a "weapon of the weak" or a "tool of resistance," the author illuminates that ideas of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546/image/coversmallPoisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World by Chelsea Berry (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USPoisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World by Chelsea Berry (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®111312026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Bede and the Theory of Everything by Michelle P. Brown (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972549
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Rarely does a study of the "Venerable" Bede satiate both the desires of the academic community while also presenting itself as accessible and engaging for a wider audience. Michelle P. Brown—Professor Emerita of Medieval Manuscript Studies at the University of London—has done just that with this monograph on the Englishman whom Brown dubs as the "greatest Western scholar of the postRoman world" (9). Rather than merely presenting a predictable and dispensable biography of the Anglo-Saxon priest, monk, and scholar, Brown examines Bede's works and the world in which he inhabited to argue that he pursued a "'theory of everything' in which the arts, science, and faith were integrated" (8). According to Brown, a "theory
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546/image/coversmallBede and the Theory of Everything by Michelle P. Brown (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USBede and the Theory of Everything by Michelle P. Brown (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®108602026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28The Merovingians in Historiographical Tradition: From the Sixth to the Sixteenth Centuries by Yaniv Fox (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972550
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How were the Merovingians remembered and reinterpreted throughout the Middle Ages? In this monograph, Yaniv Fox investigates the ways that medieval historians and chroniclers told the story of the Merovingians. He tracks how later generations of history-writers utilized, adapted, and changed the narratives of the main chronicles of the Merovingian period—Gregory of Tours's Histories, the Chronicle of Fredegar, and the Liber Historiae Francorum—in their own works. With a series of examples drawn mostly from later chronicles in western Europe, he argues that although later authors were constrained by the tripartite "ascent," "stasis/conflict," and "decline" narrative set by earlier works (20), the details of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546/image/coversmallThe Merovingians in Historiographical Tradition: From the Sixth to the Sixteenth Centuries by Yaniv Fox (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USThe Merovingians in Historiographical Tradition: From the Sixth to the Sixteenth Centuries by Yaniv Fox (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®107872026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Middle English Literature by Shannon Gayk (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972551
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Fourteenth-century England was marked by ecological disasters, including plague, floods, famine, and a changing climate, as the "medieval warm period" that began in the ninth century gave way to the "Little Ice Age," with temperatures dropping by as much as two degrees Celsius. In this sensitive and searching new book, Shannon Gayk examines medieval English poems, plays, and sermons that draw on sacred history to understand the causes and consequences of such disasters, reimagining biblical stories in response to environmental catastrophes real and imagined. Faced with calamities of all kinds, these writers proved remarkably creative, flexible, and resilient; indeed, Gayk argues their work continues to offer us new
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546/image/coversmallApocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Middle English Literature by Shannon Gayk (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USApocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Middle English Literature by Shannon Gayk (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®94752026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera, vol. 1 ed. by Katherine Gillen, Adrianna M. Santo, and Kathryn Vomero Santos (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972552
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In The Bard in the Borderlands, volume 1, Katherine Gillen, Adrianna M. Santos, and Kathryn Vomero Santos bring to the foreground several unpublished Shakespearean adaptations by Chicanx and Indigenous authors from the Southwestern United States. The editors have coined the term "Borderlands Shakespeare" to describe these works due to the geographical and sociological settings of these adaptations. This area has been labeled "the Borderlands/La Frontera" by noted author and critic Gloria Anzaldua, whose work is referenced throughout the anthology.The purpose of this and the two volumes that follow, according to the editors, is "to center historical and contemporary forms of resistance and resilience" to the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546/image/coversmallThe Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera, vol. 1 ed. by Katherine Gillen, Adrianna M. Santo, and Kathryn Vomero Santos (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USThe Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera, vol. 1 ed. by Katherine Gillen, Adrianna M. Santo, and Kathryn Vomero Santos (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®92342026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Shakespeare Without a Life by Margreta de Grazia (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972553
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For the modern reader, the material prefacing most printings of the Works of William Shakespeare is the playwright's biography accompanied by his approximate life dates (1564–1616). For many, this introduction serves as a glance into the life and mind of the genius responsible for the plays that are so prevalent in the English literary tradition. The development of this biography has been an obsession for scholars and editors of Shakespeare for the past 200 years, and while many have embarked on this search for the playwright, Margreta de Grazia in her book Shakespeare Without a Life has set out to ask the question why and what do we lose in the creation of Shakespeare's biography?Divided into four chapters, de
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546/image/coversmallShakespeare Without a Life by Margreta de Grazia (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USShakespeare Without a Life by Margreta de Grazia (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®77462026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries by Andrew Hui (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972554
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In this engaging volume, Andrew Hui illuminates the expansive intellectual world contained in the Renaissance studiolo. From Raphael's School of Athens (1511) to literary portrayals in Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Marlowe, Hui uncovers how the inner lives of early modern readers from a variety of geographical and temporal contexts shaped—and were in turn shaped by—the spaces of their personal libraries and studies. The Renaissance studiolo is, Hui demonstrates, "a fulcrum between two sides of Renaissance thought": a place where thinkers balance contradictory impulses toward sociability and solitude, self-cultivation and self-destruction, and the building of knowledge and its dismantling (7). The volume reveals the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546/image/coversmallThe Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries by Andrew Hui (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USThe Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries by Andrew Hui (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®111012026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28An Archaeology of Woodland Transformation: Social Movements, Identities, and Pottery Production on the Gulf Coast by Jessica A. Jenkins (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972555
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Spectacular material evidence such as monumental architecture, weaponry, adornment items, and ritual objects often attracts grand narratives of societal transformation as sudden and drastic ruptures of social organization. Rather than simply accepting stories of conquest, decline, or failure—steeped in Western teleologies of increasing complexity—archaeologists have begun to focus on the complex interplay of factors. Jessica A. Jenkins's An Archaeology of Woodland Transformation is a theoretically sophisticated and empirically grounded contribution, specifically reimagining the dissolution of Middle Woodland civic-ceremonial centers in the Lower Suwannee region of Florida's northern Gulf Coast. Jenkins's new book
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546/image/coversmallAn Archaeology of Woodland Transformation: Social Movements, Identities, and Pottery Production on the Gulf Coast by Jessica A. Jenkins (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USAn Archaeology of Woodland Transformation: Social Movements, Identities, and Pottery Production on the Gulf Coast by Jessica A. Jenkins (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®132022026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Milton's Theological Process: Reading "De Doctrina Christiana" and "Paradise Lost" by Jason A. Kerr (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972556
<p></p>
Jason A. Kerr's Milton's Theological Process: Reading "De Doctrina Christiana" and "Paradise Lost" seeks to shift trends in scholarship surrounding John Milton's De Doctrina Christiana toward a conversation about its underacknowledged methodology. While readings of the treatise have tended to interpret the text as a fixed set of Milton's theological beliefs, Kerr instead analyzes De Doctrina as a work of literature in of itself, illustrating how attention to its formal aspects can illuminate the evident doctrinal contradictions within the manuscript. Such attention to form coupled with material evidence from the manuscript—such as marginal insertions, deleted passages, and interlinear revisions—suggests an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546/image/coversmallMilton's Theological Process: Reading "De Doctrina Christiana" and "Paradise Lost" by Jason A. Kerr (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USMilton's Theological Process: Reading "De Doctrina Christiana" and "Paradise Lost" by Jason A. Kerr (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®110732026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28The Sanctity of the Leaders: Holy Kings, Princes, Bishops, and Abbots from Central Europe (11th–13th Centuries) ed. by Gábor Klaniczay and Ildikó Csepregi (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972557
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In this recent addition to the Central European Medieval Texts series, editors Gábor Klaniczay and Ildikó Csepregi have compiled an impressive selection of editions and translations of prominent medieval saints' lives from throughout Central Europe. Defining this region as the kingdoms of Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary for the purposes of this volume, the book surveys a range of texts dedicated to the lives of various kinds of spiritual leaders. Klaniczay and Csepregi are well positioned to comment upon this material, having published widely on hagiography with a focus on this particular region. The volume itself pairs existing critical editions of the Latin texts and English translations, updated in some places by
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546/image/coversmallThe Sanctity of the Leaders: Holy Kings, Princes, Bishops, and Abbots from Central Europe (11th–13th Centuries) ed. by Gábor Klaniczay and Ildikó Csepregi (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USThe Sanctity of the Leaders: Holy Kings, Princes, Bishops, and Abbots from Central Europe (11th–13th Centuries) ed. by Gábor Klaniczay and Ildikó Csepregi (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®100352026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Making the Renaissance Man: Masculinity in the Courts of Renaissance Italy by Timothy McCall (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972558
<p></p>
To the modern mindset, the words "masculinity" and "power" conjure images of men with loud voices, deep pockets, and military might. In Making the Renaissance Man: Masculinity in the Courts of Renaissance Italy, Timothy McCall applies a different lens. He transports us to a stage where power is crafted not only through actions and words, but through aesthetics, relationships, and performances that are all carefully curated from birth and intertwined with a nuanced interplay of art, romance, violence, and the natural world.Across five chapters, each tackling a different domain in which this evershifting performance of elite ideals was staged, McCall synthesizes academic disciplines from art history to gender and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546/image/coversmallMaking the Renaissance Man: Masculinity in the Courts of Renaissance Italy by Timothy McCall (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USMaking the Renaissance Man: Masculinity in the Courts of Renaissance Italy by Timothy McCall (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®78792026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Historians on Robin Hood: The Outlaw's Legend in the Later Middle Ages ed. by Stephen H. Rigby (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972559
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Historians on Robin Hood joins a tradition of collaborative edited collections on the legendary outlaw Robin Hood. Like Stephen Knight's 1999 edited collection Robin Hood: An Anthology of Scholarship and Criticism (Cambridge University Press) and Alexander Kaufman's more recent collection British Outlaws of Literature and History (McFarland, 2011), Historians on Robin Hood features the generative, cross-disciplinary work of historians and literary scholars that has long defined Robin Hood studies. Across sixteen chapters and a short appendix, Historians on Robin Hood provides not only summative statements on the histories of Robin Hood studies but also important challenges to the long-held views regarding the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546/image/coversmallHistorians on Robin Hood: The Outlaw's Legend in the Later Middle Ages ed. by Stephen H. Rigby (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USHistorians on Robin Hood: The Outlaw's Legend in the Later Middle Ages ed. by Stephen H. Rigby (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®122822026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Inventio meditativa: The Rhetoric and Hermeneutics of Meditation in Hugh of Saint-Victor, Guigo II, and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio by Rafael Simian (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972560
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Rafael Simian's Inventio meditativa is both rather traditional at times and at other moments somewhat innovative in its examination of three well-known medieval theologians. Its thesis is this: "by focusing on their conception and treatment of meditation … it will be argued that rhetoric … offers indispensable analytical tools for exploring, discerning, and understanding the very concepts, doctrines, and arguments that give shape to" the works of Hugh, Guigo, and Bonaventure (22, italics original). Noting that there are three primary meanings of meditation in medieval literature, Simian says that "the guiding and unifying thread across all these aspects of meditation … is the rhetorical treatment of inventio" (23).
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546/image/coversmallInventio meditativa: The Rhetoric and Hermeneutics of Meditation in Hugh of Saint-Victor, Guigo II, and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio by Rafael Simian (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USInventio meditativa: The Rhetoric and Hermeneutics of Meditation in Hugh of Saint-Victor, Guigo II, and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio by Rafael Simian (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®86352026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28Introducing the Medieval Fox by Paul Wackers (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/972561
<p></p>
Paul Wackers's Introducing the Medieval Fox is a short yet concise introduction to the study of the fox and its significance during the European Middle Ages. A longtime member of the International Reynard Society and specialist of the Reynard stories in the Dutch and European traditions, this volume represents a summation of his many years of expertise, expressed concisely in a manageable three chapters on the fox in medieval religion, scholarship, and literature, with the addition of an informative introduction and open-ended postscript. Writing in English, Wackers adopts the English name of the fox, Reynard, to describe the ubiquitous and illusive protagonist of the European Reynard stories.In the introduction
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/546/image/coversmallIntroducing the Medieval Fox by Paul Wackers (review)2025-10-28text/htmlen-USIntroducing the Medieval Fox by Paul Wackers (review)2025-10-282025TWOProject MUSE®124212026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-10-28