This week, archeologists of the Museum of London, have possibly and quite serendipitously found the foundations of The Theatre on a building site for a new theatre. The Theatre was one of the first purpose-built theatre in London, located in Shoreditch. Shakespeare’s Lord Chamberlain’s men performed at this theatre until a dispute with the landlord forced them to dismantle [...]

“Glosing wordes tickle and stirre vp the affections to be conceited of some fond passion” [1]

Henry Crosse, Vertues Commonwealth (1603)

It took me a while after this first post, but this summer I did finally buy Katherine Craik’s Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). This is a book I wish I had written. Its subject matter is utterly [...]

Sorry for the long silence. No excuse for it either, except a prolonged end-of-semester accumulation of jobs that needed to be done. I just finished grading the final pile of essays for the year, only a last week of catch-up seminars and question hours to go,and then a week of oral exams. I have never [...]

In the latest issue of the TLS, Raymond Tallis, an emeritus professor of geriatric medicine, takes to task the use of neuroscience as a new perspective in literary studies. In “The Neuroscience Delusion” Tallis warns against the tendency to use works of popular science as a basis for interdisciplinarity: in his view, critics use a [...]

This comment on Serendipities in the user notes at del.icio.us just made my day: 

Geek is chic, after all.

After my paper on masculinity and anger in early modern revenge tragedies at the ESSHC conference in Lissabon, I was invited to what promises to be an exciting workshop on the cultural history of the emotions in the early modern period in Umeå, Sweden this October. The call for papers is open until 15 May:
Cultural [...]

My system of keeping track of interesting sites is quite muddled. I use old-fashioned bookmarks in my browser; sticky notes with urls can be found lingering in the corners of my Apple Dashboard; I mail interesting links to whoever I think is interested; I stick links into WordPress posts I think I might at some [...]