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The Sasanian Kingdom (224–651 CE) was the last dynasty before the Muslim-Arab invasion of Iran (Pourshariati 2008: 1–2). Sasanian-era architectural remains—mostly including palaces, castles, temple...

This essay poses a corrective to the longstanding critical tradition that reads John Donne’s elegy “To his Mistress going to bed” as a satirical attack on both Reformed doctrine and sexual ...

Spenserians have long recognized the imperial overtones in the Briton moniments sequence at Alma’s Castle in book 2 of The Faerie Queene, in which the frantic narrative pauses to allow the ...

Barry Unsworth’s 1992 historical fiction novel Sacred Hunger explores the eighteenth-century slave trade while meditating upon utopian societies through an imagined community of shipwrecked...

To date, about 470 female ceramic figurines are known to originate from Iron Age sites across Jordan.1 This article sheds light on a distinct type by studying a recently discovered figurine from a ...

Hieronymus Bosch’s painting known as The Ship of Fools (c. 1490–1500) has long provoked questions regarding the meaning behind its absurd tableau of singers. For more than a century, critics have taken Bosch’s representation of Franciscans as a sign of his anticlericalism. This article reevaluates Bosch’s possible motivations, taking into consideration the literary and visual cult of folly, the agency of women song collectors, Franciscan songs and preaching method, and the practice of contrafaction in devotional lyric. Appraising the evidence using an interdisciplinary method reveals a program of symbolic inversion at work in Bosch’s painting that implicates the renowned Franciscan preachers Olivier Maillard and Jan Brugman, their religious contrafacta, and those who sang them. Depicting music as folly, I argue that Bosch may have wished to represent inversely the virtues of Franciscan preaching. What better way to portray a penitential song sung to the tune of a well-known love song than by depicting a friar and a nun singing a lute song while surrounded by symbols of lust? Consequently, one might consider these as jongleurs of God, doing something recognizable and following a tradition that goes back to the founders of the order: preaching penance by converting the folly of secular love songs into tools of piety.

This paper focuses on a hitherto unnoticed parody of a scene in Euripides’ Auge by the comic poet Philyllius at the outset of the fourth century. It argues that fragment 4 from Philyllius’ ...

This paper offers a reading of C. Memmius’ characterization in Catullus 10 and 28 in light of coinage, RRC 427/1, issued by his nephew and hailing him as C. MEMMIVS IMPERATOR for unknown vi...

In Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, Ismene wears a broad-brimmed hat, a hat that is not normally worn by women or female mythical figures in literature or iconography. This essay suggests tha...

I offer an intertextual analysis of a medieval Pseudo-Ovidian metamorphosis (found in the margins of a fourteenth-century manuscript of the Metamorphoses). This forty-four-line hexameter po...

As a young teacher, Jane Katch was mentored by Vivian Paley. Katch watched how Paley turned puzzling issues into exciting explorations. Later in her own class, Katch became intrigued by the...

This is a reconstruction of John H. Schaar’s first introductory lecture for his course on American political thought taught often at University of California, Berkeley, and University of Ca...

This essay examines Sir John Davies’ long poem Nosce Teipsum in dialogue with an unpublished contemporary critique by the otherwise unknown Robert Chambers, written in the same verse form. ...

This is a three-part perspective on a single work of art: Edward Savage’s The Washington Family (1789–96). Mia L. Bagneris’s essay places this painting alongside other images of George Washington w...