Publications

No author in the English canon seems more deserving of the epithet sublime than John Milton. Yet Milton’s sublimity has long been dismissed as an invention of eighteenth-century criticism. The poet himself, the story goes, could hardly have had any notion of the sublime, a concept that only took shape in the decades after his death with the advent of philosophical aesthetics.

Several attempts have been made to demonstrate that Shakespeare knew and drew from the anonymous university drama Caesars Reuenge in writing Julius Caesar. This article revisits the question of influence, making the case that Reuenge not only influenced certain particulars of Shakespeare’s play but also helped to shape its general structure and suggested some of its major themes.

Thomas Creech’s 1682 translation of Lucretius, the first complete English version printed, earned its author praise from the likes of Aphra Behn, John Evelyn, and Nahum Tate. Creech’s work has recently attracted renewed attention from scholars of Lucretius’s reception, who have situated his translation within the context of Restoration intellectual culture.

Published among the posthumous Opuscula of Isaac Barrow in 1687, the Epitome fidei et religionis Turcicae offers an exposition of the main tenets and practices of Islam that is unusually accurate for its time.

Scholarship has slowly come to recognise that the Greek treatise Περὶ ὕψους or On the Sublime ascribed to Longinus was more widely disseminated in the seventeenth century than was once thought.