Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England

The Virgin Knight: Spenser’s Embodiment of Duality in Elizabethan England

Edmund Spenser’s poetry notoriously battles itself, contorting the surface of his poetical works into an ambiguous representation of how he perceived Elizabethan England in terms of theology, sexuality, nobility, and ideology. Written as what he termed “an historicall fiction[sic],” Spenser allowed his imagination to capture and epitomize the perspectives of Elizabethan society, but in a twiste...

An Elizabethan Enigma

The last thing William Shakespeare wants to be is predictable. Roughly halfway through his published collection of one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, he frets that we may find it dull that he “write[s] . . . all one, ever the same,” producing one fourteen-line poem after another (76.5). He has reason to worry: he rarely allows himself to deviate from a strict iambic pentameter, and holds his v...

Elizabethan Dyetary of health

John Banister: an Elizabethan surgeon in Brazil.

In Brazil's sixteenth-century history, very few references are made to health professionals. On the expedition of Edward Fenton, dispatched by the English Crown in 1582 to set up a trading post in Asia, was the famous barber-surgeon and physician John Banister. The naval squadron, diverted from its original route to repeat the feats of Sir Francis Drake, stopped over in Africa, crossed the Atla...

Café Culture in Pune: Being Young and Middle Class in Urban India