English

Introduction and a series of articles and poetry concerning the war on terror being imposed by the U.S., and more. Writes Kevin Bowen: One year into the war in Iraq, the ugliness of the undertaking has become more and more inescapable. If anything, the experience has reaffirmed a few simple facts that deserve reiteration. There is no such thing as

Edna St. Vincent Millay's politically-charged compilation of poems, Make Bright the Arrows, does not enjoy a privileged place, if any, amongst either the literary canons of modernist verse or war poetry. Millay's tactic of embracing the ability of lyric poems to do the hard work of political discourse on the home front has gone

Critics have long used the heuristic device of opposing John Milton and Thomas Hobbes, but this essay explores surprising affinities between the two. After observing that Milton and other Restoration dissenters often agreed with Hobbes on questions of ecclesiastic jurisdiction and toleration nearly as much as they disagreed with what seemed at times like Hobbes' unswerving de facto -ism, the essay shows how Milton and other dissenters found in Hobbes' Leviathan an alluring theory of political obligation that, under certain circumstances, offered much-sought-after rights against the persecuting Restoration state. Emphasizing the epistemological questions brought to the fore by Hobbes' distinct focus on self-preservation, the essay reads Milton's Samson Agonistes as a partial and complicated reception of Hobbes' thought. In adopting, and at the same time rewriting, elements of Leviathan's famous state of nature, Samson Agonistes , it is argued, marks an important moment in the history of political theory and a significant moment for the development of modern popular sovereignty.

""For the historian of international law William Grewe in his controversial opus, The Epochs of International Law, it was the English writer John Milton who offered the death blow to an entire epoch, one founded on the principle that discovery brought legal title in international law. Yet John Milton’s Paradise Lost is rarely considered alongside the history of international law.  In this article, I contend that a robust history of international law in the 17th century would profit from engaging head on with literary texts like Paradise Lost.  Milton’s understanding of the law of nations provides legal scholars with a richer intellectual history of 17th-century international law than that typically on offer – one more sensitive to humanist methods, literary texts, and embodied questions of vulnerability.  Approaching the intellectual history of the law of nations dialectically, I suggest that a full reckoning of Milton’s law of nations in Paradise Lost requires a careful balance of presentism and openness to alterity – presentism in the sense that we might appreciate how strongly Milton’s law of nations resonates with debates about international law in our own time, and alterity in the sense that Milton’s law of nations encompassed much that many of today’s readers would hardly recognize as ‘international law’.  A full intellectual history of Milton’s law of nations, then, may require us partly to estrange that term – to set aside a priori definitions of the ‘international’ and resist easy transhistorical transpositions from Milton’s late Renaissance world to our own – but it also requires a paradoxical domestication of the law of nations, a making familiar, a bringing into one’s home. 
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Historians, literary scholars, and international lawyers interested in the early modern period have all grappled with the problem of anachronism, yet mostly independently of one another. This essay uses the question of war crime in Shakespeare’s Henry V to argue that early modernists interested in international law need not reject synchronic historicism for explicitly anachronistic or presentist approaches. Proposing as a new context for Shakespeare’s play a little-known humanist disputation by the civil lawyer Alberico Gentili, De armis Romanis (1599), it illuminates a juridical approach to the international past cultivated in the early modern period alongside the rise of international law—an approach closely linked with literary epistemologies.