[opening paragraph:] In darkness, Nashe tells us in The Terrors of the Night (1594), mortals are more vulnerable to the machinations of the devil than they ever are by daylight.[1] Dreams and night visions weave Satan’s most cunning ‘nets of temptation’ (Nashe 1972: 210), and after sunset one’s eyes turn into magnifying glasses, so that ‘each m…[Read more]

[opening paragraph:] Robert Burton’s Latin play Philosophaster, performed in the hall at Christ Church, Oxford, on 16 February 1618,[1] has received more attention than most of the other surviving examples of university drama.[2] Since the mid-nineteenth century, Philosophaster has been published four times, once in Latin, twice with facing-page E…[Read more]

[opening paragraph:] Early in 1621, King James was obliged to recall parliament for the first time in seven years. He took this action in response to the outbreak of war in Bohemia the year previously, a crisis that had already spread to neighbouring states in central Europe.[1] These events had been precipitated by the less than politic actions…[Read more]

[opening paragraph:] It is a complicating factor in the discussion of the renaissance if the historiography of a particular kingdom denies persistently that it ever existed there at all. When we began work on this article, Professor Chris Gane, a senior colleague at the University of Aberdeen, reminded us that the standard school histories of…[Read more]

[Opening paragraph:] The history of the history of Renaissance art is and will remain a messy affair. Diverse narratives compete for audiences and authority. Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of Famous Artists, published in 1550 and re-issued in an expanded edition in 1568, provided a methodological model that prevailed for centuries. His accounts weave b…[Read more]

[Opening paragraph] Herder’s claim already more than two hundred years ago that the history of the Baroque was ‘obscure’ (the German reads: ‘im Dunkeln’, in the dark) is just as appropriate in our early twenty-first century as it was in his day, this in spite of the enormous amount of attention devoted by literary, art historical, and art theor…[Read more]

The idea of the North in Western society has a long and distinguished history. Indeed, the only ‘purely ethnographic treatise that survives from antiquity’ is Tacitus’s Germania, his description of the Germanic peoples (Mellor 1993: 14). Tacitus produced his short treatise as a way of forcing Romans to confront the luxurious decadence that he fe…[Read more]

An introduction and welcome to the Journal of the Northern Renaissance.

Henrietta Liston, wife of a British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century, recorded her travels in a private journal, now held in the National Library of Scotland. Together with academics from Bilkent University in Ankara, the Library is currently working to publish the journal for the first time. Dora Petherbridge,…[Read more]