In 1579, Gabriel Harvey bound together in a composite collection surprising group of texts: an Italian grammar, translation Terence’s comedies, Lodovico Dolce’s rifacimenti Euripides’ Medea and Seneca’s Thyestes, Hecuba Iphigenia Erasmus’ Latin. The volume is now dispersed, but all its parts survive. This essay explores the story this hitherto unknown artefact what it reveals about Harvey’s rea...

This review considers Household Servants in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy.

This paper explores coevolution and governance of common goods using models of coevolving biospheres, in which adapting populations must collectively regulate their planet’s climate or face extinction. The results support the Gaia hypothesis against challenges based on the tragedy of the commons: model creatures are often able to work together to maintain the common good (a suitable climate) wi...

“Poetry,” claims Aristotle, “is a more philosophical and more serious thing than history.” Exactly how tragedy can be such occupies much of Aristotle’s subsequent thought in the Poetics, but he is referring here to all dramatic poetry. This is significant; it implies that comedy (the other dramatic genre he discusses) shares tragedy’s capacity for serious speculative thought. Just how comedy mi...