A new issue of the online journal Early Modern Literary Studies has appeared! It contains an article on the role of Shakespeare’s Richard II in the Essex rebellion, representations of the supernatural in the early modern country house poem, and interestingly in the context of my earlier post on Paster’s fluid sense of selfhood (in [...]

At a time when so much has been said about the principle of order and of the hierarchies in English literature of the Renaissance tradition, it is not likely that anyone will question my conclusion that Shakespeare’s Histories with their constant pictures of disorder cannot be understood without assuming a larger principle of order [...]

Sharon Howard continues the ongoing discussion (see here and here) on forensics with a captivating tale of sheep in court as material evidence — although she still cannot quite picture the fleecy flocks inside a Welsh legal institution.

Jonathan Edelstein at the Head Beeb reminds us that modern forensics has three constitutive parts: investigative methods, physical [...]

I recently bought Joan Bolker’s Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day. OK, so the title is perhaps not quite in accordance with my work ethic, but the book itself is a little miracle.

Bolker is a co-founder of the Harvard Writing Center, and her book is full of really practical advice on the [...]

The 18th issue of the History Carnival is up at Acephalous. I spent my early Sunday morning reading sensational true crime headlines and wartime issues of Good Housekeeping with, shall I say, interesting notions of women’s responsibilities during the war. I compared skulls as well as different ways of opening academic essays, and peered at [...]

Today I met professor Nicole Pellegrin from France, who has just been inaugurated as the new “Belle van Zuylen” (or Isabelle de Charrières)-professor at Utrecht University, and who focuses in her research on representations of femininity in word and image. She showed me the website of a virtual exhibition she worked on at the University [...]

Reading Sharon Howard’s post on forensics in early modern crime cases and Chris Williams’s comments on it, I was scraping my brain for early modern plays that feature what we would now call forensic methods of crime solving. Strange that I never pondered this before, fan as I am of Waking the Dead, Prime Suspect, [...]