As a student and teacher of medieval literature, I have for some time been simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the phrase "emotional intelligence." Coined by Michael Beldoch in 1964, 1 the phrase was widely popularized in the mid-1990's by Daniel Goleman whose "mixed model" conceptualizes emotional intelligence as a complex of competencies involving selfawareness, self-regulation, social skill, empathy and motivation. 2 On the one hand, at a time when humanistic inquiry is under constant attack, 3 I find the phrase useful in justifying not only the importance of reading and composing literature, but also the relevance of teaching literature.

Cahiers Élisabéthains, 2015

Comparative Drama, 2017

Renaissance Quarterly

Part 4 is in some ways the weakest, simply because the cohesion and development found in the other parts is here strained by the diversity of the articles. Despite the evident clash, the authors themselves manage to write competent pieces about less prominent authors. For example, Mathilde Bernard presents a straightforward reading on myth and fable in the works of Guillaume Guéroult, though the analysis could benefit from further distinction of Calvin's and the Huguenots' views. Matthieu de La Gorge's essay on Pierre Viret's view of Greco-Roman myth as biblical plagiarism surprises. Padraic Lamb examines Anglican minister Stephan Batman, but settles this sudden geographic displacement with clarification of Reformist attitudes and anti-Catholic sentiment in England vis-à-vis Continental discourse. In the final two essays, Inès Kirschleger and Christabelle Thouin-Dieuaide discuss Calvinist influences in the earlier part of the seventeenth century. Part 5 addresses the overarching question, and the essays ultimately demonstrate authors' often paradoxical solutions in a religious discourse that shifts through the decades. Nadia Cernogora and Gilles Couffignal discover an intentional distancing from Ronsardian poetics in the second half of the sixteenth century. Audrey Duru shows that for André Mage, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, fable can cautiously serve as an experience that leads to a spiritual rebirth. In Adrienne Petit's study, Antoine de Nervèze, a Catholic, and Nicolas Des Escuteaux, a Protestant, exemplify another shift in religious discourse. Overall, this collection of conference essays reads as a cohesive discussion, with the minor exception of a few moments in part 4. The fact that this part stands out further demonstrates the overall cohesion of the collection. For this reason, this anthology's strengths lie in the cyclical and focused presentation, and in the ways various contributors engage discursively.

Shakespeare Quarterly, 2017

The Tempest (1954) by William Shakespeare was first performed during the Elizabethan era on the 1 November 1611. It was not printed until 1623, 7 years after Shakespeare's death. His plays were recorded and published by two of his fellow actors John Hemminges and Henry Condell. The setting is on board of a ship an unnamed island where 4 characters live before the other characters come after a shipwreck due to the storm -The Tempest. The human characters on the island are Prosperoa magician who is the rightful Duke of Milan and his daughter Miranda. There is a half-human, half-beast character called Caliban and Ariel, a sprite. This essay will discuss the idea of freedom, friendship, repentance and forgiveness. The discussion will be conducted by using Jean-Jacque Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1755) to discuss the theme of slavery which can be comprehended in the text and how the master repents and the slave forgives. The issue of slavery and the idea of repentance and forgiveness will be discussed using the Christian and Islamic framework which discuss the two ideas in the Bible and the Al-Quran respectively as well as the hadith (the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). The Tempest was written during the European Renaissance eraafter the fall of the Muslim Empire in Spain. European literature shows how both religions have influenced the writings of the Enlightenment era. This paper will discuss this influence as well.

Style. Special Issue on Applied Evolutionary Criticism. 46.3&4 (2012), 355-77.

2016

Critics have long addressed questions of affect, feeling and emotional expression in Middle English literature , but only in recent years has their interest begun to take theoretical form under the rubric of the 'history of emotions'. Current critical attitudes to the study of emotions in the past have been shaped substantially by the work of historians, whose focus on emotion in documentary sources has been inf luenced in turn by research in the fields of sociology, anthropology, psychology, linguistics and, increasingly, the cognitive sciences. How might existing methodologies situating emotions historically drive new approaches in Middle English literary studies? This article contends that existing analyses of Middle English literature relating to affective discourses might fruitfully be brought into conversation with new multidisciplinary forms of research into past emotions. We survey current critical trends in both the history of emotions and in Middle English literature. Case studies of two late Middle English literary texts, the anonymous Sir Orfeo and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, show how the last fifty years of scholarship has addressed emotions in Middle English literature. We conclude by suggesting future directions that might be taken up by critics of medieval English literary texts and genres to develop further the relationship between literary studies and the history of emotions.

The purpose of our collection of essays is to frame Shakespeare’s representation of human moral choice within the context of intellectual history. The contributors extend the Cambridge method of moderate contextualism from its origins, the study of political philosophy, to a parallel study of Shakespeare’s thought about ethics, situating Shakespeare’s ideas within contemporary debate about rival, overlapping moral paradigms. Christianity, Skepticism, Epicureanism: these and other such schools of thought serve as examples of Pocock’s “languages,” but in the realm of moral philosophy, rather than political. The collection also places Shakespeare in dialogue with a representative Continental analogue, Montaigne. Our animating premise is that Shakespeare's ideas about ethics can be best understood within a larger historical frame: sources, paradigms, and problems already extant and even highly elaborated, well before Shakespeare himself ever set pen to page. The terminus a quo is just as important as the terminus ad quem: as Bacon writes, “Things in themselves new will yet be apprehended with reference to what is old." Shakespeare’s perspective on morality does not emerge ex nihilo, the product of an inexplicable rupture, but instead draws upon a rich variety of intellectual traditions, Christian as well as classical, even in its moments of most ardent critique. The choice of the term “Renaissance” for the title, for example, rather than “early modern,” is deliberate: our hope is to foreground the resurgence of classical paradigms in this period. Over the course of Shakespeare’s life, new moral systems such as Neo-Stoicism and Epicureanism challenged prevailing ethical assumptions, began to contest the preeminence of Christianity, and laid the groundwork for what we now call “modernity”: Charles Taylor’s “secular age.”