Abstract Several feminist scholars accuse Hobbes of replicating seventeenth century marital inequality in his political thought vis-à-vis the common law doctrine of coverture. Under coverture, a wife’s legal personality was subsumed by her husband’s legal personality, and she could not function as an independent legal actor. A closer look at Hobbes’s political thought, however, suggests that coverture is absent from his three major political texts. Hobbes’s documented skepticism towards the English common law makes it unlikely that he would have endorsed a common law concept like coverture in his political theory. Further, though coverture required women to exist under their husband’s legal guardianship, women are notably missing from Hobbes’s list of people who must be represented by a guardian in Leviathan . Finally, Hobbes’s writing on women in his political works it at odds with the common law construct of coverture. Exploring the absence of coverture in Hobbes’s political thought has important implications for a longstanding debate in feminist Hobbes’s scholarship about what happens to women once civil society is formed.

Abstract This article explores what Thomas Hobbes saw as the political purpose of immaterial ideals. Late in Leviathan , Hobbes describes past religious images, absurd in that they referred to nothing real. He suggests that the worship of images must be converted from harmful to salutary. The article explores how Hobbes performs that conversion with a religious name, the Kingdom of Heaven. I argue that Hobbes guts the name of its physical referent, but maintains the name itself. Simultaneously, he offers various images representing the name and attaching diverse sects to an immaterial ideal. This transformation serves a political purpose: it defangs spiritual fervor of its practical danger and directs that fervor towards a minimal agreement supportive of an ordered civil society. While this article contributes to the study of Hobbes’s religious thought, Hobbes’s thought also speaks to political theorists inquiring into the purpose of abstract ideals in societies of moral conflict.

Abstract In the first half of the sixteenth century, England’s window glass industry was on the verge of collapse. The glass that was available was translucent, opaque, or stained—it was not intended to provide a clear view. In 1567, Jean Carré introduced advanced glassmaking technologies to England that produced clearer and more uniform glass, though it remained a luxury item. At Robert Dudley’s Kenilworth Castle in 1575, Queen Elizabeth appeared behind transparent bay windows, establishing a new paradigm of royal performance. She was able to observe the festivities outside while becoming a spectacle herself, seated within the bay window. Following this event, a trend emerged among aristocrats who sought to impress the queen with grand homes featuring expansive glass façades, hoping to host her and display her within their own ‘lantern houses.’ A notable example is Christopher Hatton’s Holdenby House, distinguished by its extensive use of transparent glass. To theorize how transparent glass windows blurred the boundaries between inside and outside, allowing the queen to see and be seen by her subjects, the article uses the term ‘domestic theatricality.’ Such reciprocal visibility shaped monarchical subjectivity by framing the queen as both observer and observed. This article argues that transparent glass windows transformed domestic architecture by turning homes into theaters where the queen and her subjects became both performers and spectators.

Abstract Colors play an important role in understanding sixteenth-century clothing, their rich symbolism being part of the conventional code that established who should wear what. A symbol of melancholy and meditation, black was a very popular color in Elizabethan England, worn by both queen and subjects. As a reflection of the real world, theater also used clothing and colors to help the audience understand the plot of plays performed, and their characters’ personalities. After the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, color interpretation came to rely not only on tradition, but took on increasingly political overtones and black was more and more used in contrast with white. Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess is clear evidence of how the clash between white and black pawns on the chessboard can actually be taken as a representation of the political and religious clash between England and Spain.

Abstract Because the Faerie Queene of a borderless empire allies herself with Arthur in a battle against the Paynim King on “Bryton fieldes with Sarazin blood bedyde,” Spenser inverts the relationship between Christendom and the borderless Saracen world of Italian epic-romance. Some critics consider Spenser’s itinerant Saracens representative of the threat to Protestant England posed by the See of Rome and Ottoman Empire, but The Faerie Queene also allegorizes the threat Protestant England and the Ottoman Empire posed to the See of Rome. Instead of an epic conflict between two rival empires, Spenser’s Saracens symbolize persistent threats of rebellion and corruption among diverse peoples coexisting within one empire. If Spenser is rightly called the English Virgil, then he deserves this honor because Protestant England’s vexed relationship with Rome inspires him to thwart readers’ expectations for classical imitations of epic conflict between Christendom and the Saracen world established by Ariosto and Tasso.

Abstract This article explores the relationship in the Early Modern period between visual culture, spectacle, and technology. It investigates the processes that led machinery to become an essential part of the scenic discourse of the time, taking as reference Il Cannocchiale per la Finta Pazza, a unique document produced in 1641 by the Venetian opera industry and which, to date, has received only scant scholarly attention. It studies the information the manuscript provides on how theater engineering acquired a performative value when employed to affect the audience’s sensory experience. The methodological approach takes account of modern performative studies and the ‘sensory turn’ and reflects on how technology became an integral part of consumption of modern spectacle which, when viewed from the physical, social, and intellectual perspectives, constitutes a complex sensory space.