In 2007, Peter Burke reformulated L.P. Hartley's oft-cited phrase from the 1953 novel, The Go-Between: "If the past is a foreign country, it follows that even the most monoglot of historians is a translator" (Burke, "Cultures of Translation" 7). Certainly, any historical enterprise is a work of translation—the bringing of a text, an idea, an object, an experience—out of one context and into another. This process is far from passive, for either the bearer of translation or for the meaning of translation. In 1994, Ruth Evans defined translation as a "metaphor and a practice, since it is in and through actual translated texts that human subjects are contained and constructed, and enact their resistance to various forms of power."1 The source of the English word, from the Latin translatio, conveys the physicality of such a transfer, of meaning and value moved from a specific site and context into another. With translation comes both displacement and an inevitable transformation. Indeed, any enterprise of translation—over time, over space, across linguistic or cultural codes—is also, to some degree, a work of interpretation in the sense of the exegesis and explanation conveyed by the Latin interpretatio through which meaning is made anew in a distinct context.

:This essay proposes that in Samson Agonistes (1671) Milton represents Samson's development of self as a psychological process that is conditioned on Samson's capacity to change his initial Hobbesian idea of self as a spatial construct to an understanding of himself as self-constituted by acts of consciousness. Samson's process of self-constitution is, it is suggested, very similar to Locke's theory of personal identity, published twenty-three years later in the second edition of his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1694). Further, the connection Milton makes between personhood and freedom is strikingly similar to Locke's understanding of the way in which these terms are linked. For Milton, as for Locke, only persons can become full-fledged agents. In Samson Agonistes, Milton offers the reader an opportunity to experience the process by which Samson develops into person, his choice not to respond to divine call, and, consequently, his failure to become a free agent. In Milton's representation, Samson's failure to achieve free agency results in a violent act that destroys both the Philistines and himself.

Reviewed by: Spa Culture and Literature in Early Modern England, 1500–1800 ed. by Sophie Chiari and Samuel Cuisinier-Delorme Susannah Lyon-Whaley (bio) Sophie Chiari and Samuel Cuisinier-Delorme, eds. Spa Culture and Literature in Early Modern England, 1500–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 324 pages (290 + xxxiv pages). $169.00 Hardback, $39.99 Paperback. In Sophie Chiari and Samuel Cuisinier-Delorme's jointly edited volume, Spa Culture and Literature in Early Modern England, Alix Desnain draws attention to the "fluidity of water," with its ability to defy "any clear-cut definition" (14). Fluidity is an appropriate starting point to describe this wide-ranging collection of essays on the culture and literature surrounding England's healing waters. Fourteen chapters navigate springs, baths, and waters, some physically located in notable English spa towns such as Bath, Bristol, and Scarborough, and others that exist ephemerally in waters that percolate through novels, poems, and other texts. Chiari and Cuisinier-Delorme note their intention is to capture "the rich ambivalence" of spa waters: "the emerging and complex relationship between English spa culture and literature and its societal, spiritual, humoral, medicinal, as well as deep historical contexts [. . .] articulated in a range of literary texts, movements, and expressions" (vii) from the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries. Part of the expansive Palgrave series on Early Modern Literature in History, the collection channels interdisciplinary methodologies that render it broadly useful to social and cultural historians: intersecting with recent sensory trends and the history of medicine, the work charts overlapping tensions of cleanliness, religion, science, class, and gender. Looking forward, Chiari and Cuisinier-Delorme term these essays as "groundwork" (xii) to re-ignite interest in early modern spa culture. Spa Culture and Literature stirs up waters disturbed by few, albeit strong, articles since Phyllis Hembry's social history of England's spas twenty-five years ago.1 [End Page 95] Spa Culture and Literature in England is divided into four sections. Despite the unassuming epithet "Generic Explorations," the first section helpfully and chronologically analyzes baths and waters in early modern poetry, drama, and prose, introducing tensions in (spa) waters that later sections develop. For Desnain, bathing females in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene are paradoxically sexual and chaste, hidden and seen beneath the veil of the water, while baths discussed by Francois Laroque in the Duchess of Malfi represent a failed opportunity for cleansing in a play stained with blood. Tiffany Jo Werth's reading of Lady Mary Wroth's The Countess of Montgomery's Urania underscores the failure of healing waters to fully quench the fires of love. Moving to the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, Anne Rouhette and Marie-Laure Massei-Chamayou interrogate baths as social and geographical settings. While Frances Burney's lack of experience at spas rendered her descriptions in Evelina vague, Jane Austen's experience of Bath as a "contaminated" city "whose economy flourished on illness and sickness" (71) emerged in her fiction, where spa societies evince dubious social and moral virtues. The second section, "Taking the Waters: Myth, Recreation and Satire" begins with Tiffany Stern's navigation of the ever-changing roles of Bath's mythical founding king, Bladud, from magician, to Icarus-figure, to pig keeper. This essay, and briefly Amanda Herbert's, tantalizingly discloses a spa that is literally unhuman, where animals also enter the water for cures. In a chapter brilliant in its materiality, Herbert evocatively douses the reader in the waters as she considers their look, noise, taste, smell, and feel, alongside their ability to physically and emotionally unsettle. The world she presents is (deliberately) obfuscated and confused by steam, shouts, and dirty, seething waters. Shaun Regan's essay on Georgian satire on the spa in the context of Christopher Anstey's The New Bath Guide is followed by Pierre Degott's innovative chapter on Bath's music, particularly the Pump Orchestra situated in the Pump Room in the early eighteenth century, as "ritually attached to the curative process" (162) and restorative for soul and body. The collective focus on cultural and social ideas in interaction with waters gives way to a heightened medical focus in "Emerging Science: The Therapeutic Uses of Waters." Micka...

This essay challenges the traditional historical narrative of character focused on Shakespeare's epochal "inward turn." It offers an alternative history that re-shapes the story of character around the cultural and commercial impact of so-called "non-Shakespearean" and "pre-modern" characters. Investigating intersections between the neo-Theophrastan "Character," commercial drama, and news culture in seventeenth-century England, the essay traces the augmentation of character as a word and a concept. Character was a key noun and verb in a shifting lexicon of identity, a new generic brand inaugurated and appropriated by Ben Jonson and John Webster, and a rhetorical technology for estranging and trade-marking forms of humanity. The essay argues that the impact of the English Character-sketch—on theatre and performance, on news and print culture, and on the cult of the author—marked a historical turning point in consumer relations with virtual humanity. Character became a popular method of transforming persons, fictional and real, into coherent units of cultural value, from dramatis personae to scandalized court figures to Shakespeare and Jonson as historical authors. In offering this new story about character, the essay suggests that history and its agents are inevitably shaped by the characterological screens through which we view early modern culture, and through which the early moderns increasingly viewed themselves.

In 1630, the Stationer Richard Hawkins began selling an edition of Shakespeare's Othello from "his shoppe in Chancery-Lane, neere Sergeants-Inne" (Othello 1630 title page). This edition, identified by modern scholars as Q2, is remarkable as the first edition to fully conflate existent quarto and folio texts of a Shakespeare play. Scholars have remarked on the process that brought Q2 into being—but the question of why a seventeenth-century publisher/bookseller would invest the time and money to create such an edition remains to be considered. This article decenters the author to reconsider Q2's place among the people and ideas of the area in which it was published and sold: the Serjeants' Inn in the heart of the Inns of Court area of London. The article examines how Hawkins fashioned the books sold in his shop to entice this local readership. Literary and textual evidence from the Quarto is then reconsidered in the light of this new readership, providing fresh insights into the construction of this unique quarto and its place in modern editorial practice. This article also highlights the extent to which individual members of the book trade in the early seventeenth century engaged with local readerships and looks at the value of second-plus editions to that market.

Reviewed by: Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico by Daniel Nemser Kelly S. McDonough (bio) Review of Daniel Nemser. Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico. University of Texas Press, 2017. viii + 221 pages. $90.00 (hardcover); $29.95 (paperback). Daniel Nemser’s groundbreaking and beautifully written monograph centers on how racialized social orders in colonial Mexico were inherently linked to spatial order. The study is a powerful intervention into the “coloniality of power” literature. Aníbal Quijano rightly emphasized that a racialized labor schema became naturalized in the colonial world, but this reading tends to suggest that race was a static, pinpointable “thing” that was the starting point of colonial order. In Infrastructures of Race, race is the endpoint of a process always poised to begin anew. Yes, we know that race is linked to power, but how did ideas and experiences of race come to be, Nemser asks, and through what mechanisms and for what reasons did they change? Infrastructures of Race answers these questions by taking the reader down a road little explored in studies of colonial race: through the analysis of material systems—infrastructures—that would have made such ascriptions possible, namely the “roads, walls, ditches, buildings, boundaries and towns, into which both human and nonhuman subjects were concentrated” (5). Instead of viewing race primarily as an attribute (as does most of the literature), Nemser insists that race is also “an effect of the material practices of power” (9); that is, the focus here is less on how ideas of difference played out and more about how materiality created the means of domination. Infrastructures of Race is divided into four chapters, each of which tracks shifts in ongoing processes of racialization and the material regimes upon which they depend. The first and second chapters address how the Spanish Crown and Catholic church physically removed and resettled bodies—collected them—as a strategy of governance during the sixteenth century. Both chapters deftly demonstrate how subjectivities were produced vis-à-vis [End Page 113] infrastructures, in this case the figures of the “Indian” and the “Mestizo.” The first chapter, “Congregation: Urbanization and the Construction of the Indian,” looks at how the spatial organization of certain peoples was a hinderance to evangelization and tribute/labor extraction, and how Euro-criollos deemed resettlement into centralized, manageable, and monitorable spaces the appropriate solution. The violent dispossession of Indigenous lands and the forced removal and resettlement of Indigenous peoples (often with peoples of different ethno-spatial origins) in colonial Mexico has received surprisingly little attention. In this chapter, Nemser provides the most thorough and nuanced analysis of congregation to date, arguing that the very category of “Indian” and related “qualities, capacities, and obligations” (2) was articulated and solidified through the process of congregation. Having established that the figure of the “Indian” was born of a slippery bundle of ideological premises and spatial and institutional practices, the second chapter, “Enclosure: The Architecture of Mestizo Conversion,” shows how the “Mestizo” came to be in similar fashion. This chapter addresses the practices of recogimiento, literally rounding up and enclosing young mestizo bodies and minds within the walls of the Colegio de San Juan Letrán in order to produce a new creature that could successfully mimic hispanidad while retaining enough “Indio” to be able to assist in the evangelization project. The third chapter, “Segregation: Sovereignty, Economy, and the Problem with Mixture,” moves to the end of the seventeenth century to show how European criollos understood the 1692 riot in Mexico City as the failure of earlier practices of concentration. Yet they still turned to segregation, in the form of a Spanish-only traza, as a protectionary measure that would safely cocoon them from a terrifying, undifferentiated, and undesirable mass of bodies that were becoming more populous than the elite. The fourth chapter, “Collection: Imperial Botany and Racialized Life,” rounds out the book’s focus on the role of concentration in ongoing processes of colonial racialization. This chapter seems at first out of sync with the others as it discusses the collection and organization of plant life, not people. But imperial botany of the eighteenth century is actually the ideal case study...

Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra repeatedly stages scenes of historical knowledge-making, often foregrounded through two devices: historical mini-narratives and the use of messengers. These devices, over the course of the play, articulate three successive models of the exchange and circulation of historical knowledge. These models effectively explain how we make sense of historical information and, in Cleopatra’s eulogy of Antony, project a sophisticated understanding of historical subjectivity. Enobarbus’s Venus speech, as one model of historiography, emerges from the discourse of interpersonal credibility. His narration of past events is underscored by conditions that legitimize his claims of historical knowledge. Through the play’s imagining of counterfactual history, this essay considers how its representation of Emperor Antony as a “path not taken” in Roman history challenges teleological assumptions that underlie traditional historical narrative. The article shows how Cleopatra’s ironic deconstruction of the myths formed around the dead Antony affords her agency over the making of history. While mocking the pretensions of historical authority, her manipulation of messengers provides a fresh construction of temporality and narrativity. Finally, this essay turns to the ways in which Antony and Cleopatra’s mediations on historiography might inform and complicate a scholarly intervention in contemporary “alt-right” appropriations of early modern culture.

This article explores various early modern figurations of the eunuch as a part of trans history as they featured prominently in the Ottoman court and on the English stage. It specifically focuses on the figure of the black eunuch within the gender and racial economy of the Mediterranean world in which not all eunuchs were marked as the same. The Ottomans maintained and promoted the visibility of eunuchs, and contributed to the proliferation of the eunuch imagery in early modern Europe. The Ottomans also separated eunuchs racially as black and white. In parallel to this separation emerged an essentializing anti-black racism in the Ottoman elite's writing that relegated black Africans to the bottom of an established racial hierarchy while marking whiteness as the ideal. These figures further circulated within a racialized hierarchy throughout Europe via chronicles, travelogues, and stories, and eventually appeared on the English stage as well-known oriental theatrical figures. This essay shows that eunuchs of the past not only denaturalize dichotomous gender models and upset phallocentric gender signification, they also illustrate how gender and race are mutually constitutive in the making of normative bodies on a global scale.