Abstract This essay reads Thomas Hobbes’s depictions of violent conflict in his translation of Homer’s Iliad in conversation with the lyric poems in the fifth book of Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies , which includes a sequence of poems on battles beginning with a Homeric “epistle to souldiers.” Cavendish follows these precisely-described scenes of grotesque carnage with a series of heartfelt elegies, including two to Sir Charles Lucas, whom she refers to as “my dear brother, kill’d in these unhappy Warres.” Despite the infamously thudding and prosaic verse of Hobbes’s Homeric translations, his battles share much with Cavendish’s, and through these works both poets situate Homer’s equanimity, or his tendency to depict the Greeks and the Trojans as moral and martial equals and likewise suffering, as a defining characteristic of heroic verse. Cavendish and Hobbes deploy the trope of Homeric equanimity to different purposes, however: descriptions which function mimetically for Cavendish, mirrors to a real world of lively corpses and the ubiquitous transformative capacities of matter, have a more complicated and only partially mimetic relationship with fictionality in Hobbes’s aesthetic thought.

Abstract This paper offers an alternative reading of Thomas Hobbes, challenging the view that he is a Eurocentric thinker by reevaluating his engagement with the “New World.” While often criticized for portraying Indigenous peoples as emblematic of the state of nature, Hobbes departs from contemporaries like Francisco de Vitoria and Hugo Grotius—both regarded as founders of international law—by rejecting the use of universal natural law to justify European intervention as punishment. Through an examination of Hobbes’ treatment of cannibalism, the paper shows how his critique of Vitoria and Grotius underscores the necessity of sovereign authority for the enforcement of natural law. In doing so, it reframes Hobbes as a critic of binding international law and questions the Eurocentric assumptions embedded in its early modern formulation.

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 Building on recent work on Hobbes’s Leviathan in light of the COVID -19 dynamic, I explore Hobbes’s debt to Lucretius’ De rerum natura ( On the Nature of Things ) with an eye to what influence, if any, Lucretius’ narrative of the Athenian plague in Book VI may have played in shaping Hobbes’s thought. Through a comparative reading of Thucydides and Lucretius, I suggest that it is not in Hobbes’s account of the natural condition of mankind that we find the clearest echoes of, and engagement with, Lucretius, but rather Hobbes’s account of religion in Chapter XII of Leviathan . I suggest that Hobbes rejects Lucretius’ efforts to explain natural phenomena in naturalistic terms and his related project of revising conventional beliefs about the gods due to Hobbes’s over-riding concern with maintaining social order.

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.