Volume 143, Issue 4

Three of the Franks Casket’s five carved panels contain scenes from stories in Latin – from the Gospel of Matthew on the front, Virgil’s Aeneid on the left side, and Josephus’s Jewish Wars (via Pseudo-Hegesippus) on the back. Approaching Africa argues that, in addition to these pictures referring to written texts, a fourth Latin text lies behind the casket’s plan, Orosius’s Historiarum Adversus Paganos Libri Septem (‘Seven Books of History Against the Pagans’). This is a new discovery about this ever-fascinating box. The subjects on the casket’s two sides and back suggest a plan based on the three-continents concept of the ecumene described by Orosius in Book I, while a clockwise ‘journey’ around the back aligns references to place with a later passage by Orosius as modified by a passage from Bede. An Orosian arc of dates then emerges, with all three devices pointing toward ‘Africa’ on the casket’s right side. Unlike the places named on the left side and back, however, that on the casket’s right side is left unnamed as a riddle to be solved. Reading that right-side panel as thematically paired with the Virgilian left-side panel may help to solve it.

This article analyzes the marginalia of Lincoln, Cathedral Library MS 91, especially the marginalia-esque Lamentacio Peccatoris between the famous prose Life of Alexander and the alliterative Morte Arthure , as well as the understudied notes and commentary surrounding the Erthe lyric contained in the compilation. I propose that these texts and micro-texts, as well as their mise en page , reflect a spirituality that is consistent with meditative principles outlined in the more specifically ‘sacred’ works of the manuscript, especially Walter Hilton’s Epistle on the Mixed Life . This text, which was a central and important text to Thornton when he compiled his manuscript, argues that for people living in the world, sacred things are best contemplated after considering the limitations of ‘secular’, worldly things. Only once the sinfulness of humanity, vanity of the world, and neediness of one’s fellow-Christians are addressed can one begin to contemplate divine, sacred things directly. Thus, it should come as no surprise to us that some of Thornton’s texts deliberately eschew contemplating the sacred, although their margins and the liminal spaces between them are populated with meditations on the sacred. This is programmatic for Thornton and reflective of Hilton’s spirituality in the Epistle ; it can also be seen as one guiding principle for Thornton as he compiled and designed his manuscript.

This anonymous, late-medieval Scottish poem has presented editors and critics with many challenges. One such concerns a list of placenames pertaining to northern Germany and the Baltic. Corruption in the (unique) manuscript source is likely, and detailed arguments are proposed for emendations to the text. It is suggested that the anonymous poet’s evident interest in the north-German/Scandinavian area may owe something to the marriage (1469) of Margaret of Oldenburg to King James III.

This article advances the claim that nineteenth-century American literature is best understood as evolving from a limited patronage system in the 1810 s and 1820 s to a relatively open and expanding commercial literary market around 1900. It combines two narrowly focused inquiries into what we call ‘unsettled literary institutions’, based on evidence from periodical archives and government records. We situate the birth of an American national literature less in the emphatic tradition of subversive individualism and the explicit formal negotiations of American Renaissance authors. Instead, we argue that first attempts to create a genuinely US-based literary infrastructure occurred in a top-down manner, steered by political elites in New England and expressed via projects such as the so-called ‘Massachusetts Institution’. In a second step, the article addresses the magazine revolution of the 1890 s, in which new business and marketing strategies led to an explosion in the print-marketplace. Suddenly confronted with an unprecedented audience size, magazine entrepreneurs tested out new forms and formats for literary writing that led to unique inter-institutional constellations, such as Cosmopolitan magazine’s plan to turn itself into a new type of American university.

The narrator in Herman Melville’s “The Encantadas; or Enchanted Isles” leads the reader to a posthumanist world where human beings are no longer in a dominant position while nonhuman beings gain their agency. The exotic isles challenge the anthropocentric sense of temporality and defy the validity of human knowledge. The descent of anthropocentrism is accompanied by the ascent of posthumanism, which undermines the human sense of mastery through oceanic agency and geological agency. The posthumanist accentuation of the longevity of tortoises and the endurance of rocks forms a sharp contrast to the ephemerality of human existence. Melville weaves these elements together to tackle the anthropocentric hubris that resulted from the rapid socio-economic development in the nineteenth century. The exposure of human vulnerability in the unconquerable Enchanted Isles implicitly expresses Melville’s criticism of anthropocentrism and thus provokes human beings to reconsider their position in the vast universe.

Despite the acclaim of Song of Solomon (1977), critics have largely overlooked the profound connection between Ruth Foster and the natural world. This article argues that Toni Morrison reconfigures Black women’s grief, erotic longing, and constrained domestic lives through queer ecological entanglements, revealing how sites of pain become acts of resistance and aliveness. Drawing on Jennifer Nash’s (2022) concept of slow loss, it explores how Ruth as a Black (queer) woman responds to persistent loss and proximity to death by cultivating Black beauty. Ruth’s driftwood arrangement becomes a Black feminist sanctuary, its flower-like watermark on the table serving simultaneously as a beautiful memorial and wellspring of vitality. The evergreen in her father’s study, where she nurses Milkman, symbolizes the persistence of erotic possibility despite the confines of maternal respectability. Meanwhile, Ruth’s lush garden bears the scars of the racial Capitalocene (Vergès 2017), yet she defies these intrusions by wielding it as a space of deviant pleasure, harnessing her Black aliveness (Quashie 2021) and erotic power (Lorde 2007). By reading Ruth’s ecological intimacies as queer acts of care – practices of staying connected to the dead – this article reveals the radical potential of non-human affiliations in understanding Black feminist queerness in Morrison’s work and African American literature.

Mapping spaces across times, Syrian American author Zeyn Joukhadar’s novel meditates self-reflexively on storytelling and its participation in acts of mapping, reimagining maps to break up boundaries. Thus, this article analyzes the novel in terms of Walter Mignolo’s ‘border thinking’. However, The Map of Salt and Stars contrasts enthusiastic appraisals of borders and border crossings with the reality of the border and forced mobility, necessitating an analysis aware of the necropolitics of the border (Mbembe 2019; de León 2015). On the level of form, Joukhadar’s novel resists borders by connecting frame and embedded narrative as well as by fusing narrative genres, among them the travel narrative (Ben Driss 2021b) and the Bildungsroman . Tracing how Joukhadar’s novel resists necropolitics, the article closes by discussing the suitability of a Western-marketed Anglophone novel to capture refugee lives.