Hamlet’s tragic flaw is not hesitation, “To be or not to be” is not about suicide – and it matters!!
There is quite a lively discussion about this topic currently taking place on LinkedIn. Please join in or comment below if you wish to add your voice to the debate! Different critics have talked about Hamlet’s tragic flaw in different ways, but what most of them boil down to is dithering. Coleridge talkesabout “the lingering […]
Eating Nasty Things (reposted)
[This is a reposting of a post from 2014 that seems to have spirited itself away. Fortunately I had a copy of the content tucked safely away…] This post is inspired partly by a paper written in 1976, but which I have only just come across (Frank Paul Bowman, “Suffering,Madness and Literary Creation in Seventeenth-Century […]
Protestant Polemic and the Japanese Martyrs
This is my first post for a while, partly because I’ve been focusing on other things, and partly because, when I did turn my attention in this direction and tried to post, the blog had disappeared! It took a while, but eventually I managed to sort out the problems and get it back, so here […]
TIDE (Travel, Transculturality and Identity in England, c. 1500-1700)
Travel, Transculturality and Identity in England is a project funded by the ERC (European Research Council), exploring issues relating to strangers, travellers, migrants and so on. The website is an open-access resource consisting (at present) of some 40 essays contributed by Nandini Das, João Vicente Melo, Haig Smith, and Lauren Working based on keywords, such […]
“Jesus wept: and no wonder by Christ!”
“Jesus wept” – the shortest verse in the Bible (John 11:35) and the subject of a short piece on by Thomas Dixon on Umberto Eco and John Donne in the History of Emotions blog. The post makes the point that “Donne is one of a very few sermon writers to discuss Christ’s tears”, though I […]
Masochism and Anachronism
What does it mean to talk of “masochism” prior to the publication, in 1870, of Sacher-Masoch’s Venus im Pelz [Venus in furs], or of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s adoption of Masoch’s name to describe the condition of deriving pleasure from pain in Psychopathia Sexualis: eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie [Sexual psychopathy: a clinical / forensic study]? Rob Boddice’s […]
The OED and EEBO TCP
Last Christmas, a friend who happens to be an antiquarian bookseller posted on Facebook an image of what he took to be the first recorded instance of the expression “merry Christmas” in print. The book in question was An Itinerary VVritten by Fynes Moryson Gent (1617). A basic search on the Early English Books Online […]
Digital humanities links
A downloadable list of some of the most useful digital sources I’ve come across so far. Click here.
Early modern discourse communities: Catholics and Protestants
A discourse community can be defined as having six clear characteristics: 1. “A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.” 2. “A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.” 3. “A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.” 4. “A discourse community utilizes and […]
John Gray on the decline of violence
John Gray argues in The Guardian that Pinker’s got his sums all wrong and there has been no decline in violence.