Critics of the “Orlando furioso” have analyzed at length the poem's darker veins, lying just beneath its ostensibly sunny surface, where Ariosto comments on the violence and political, intellectual, and religious upheavals of the early sixteenth century, often through allegory and irony. Readers have also noted the text's meticulously curated geography that lends to the story world of the “Furioso” extraordinary breadth of scale and specificity of detail. This study identifies the poem's geography as an important locus of irony, both in service to larger allegorical programs and as a means of remarking on the contemporary revolution in geographic knowledge and cartographic practice.

This article relocates John Milton's Latin poem to his father (“Ad Patrem”) in the contexts of the young Milton's literary self-fashioning and the changing patterns of early modern Virgil reception. Here and in his prose epistles, Milton establishes the persona of a scholarly, questing filial figure, grounded in a reading of book 6 of the “Aeneid” and its drama of fathers and sons. He makes a case for poetry and scholarship as shared practices. This article reflects on a new archival turn in Milton studies and, in turn, how Milton himself invites the reader to become a questing scholar.

This article investigates architectural responses to everyday sociospatial practices in public spaces in the postconflict urban landscape of Belfast, where public buildings and façades impact pedestrian flows and movement patterns in the public space. While the city has an extended history of vibrant public spaces and active urban life throughout the first half of the twentieth century, devastating memories of the so-called Troubles leave imprints of division across the city’s public spaces. Inscribed by memories of conflict and violence, ground floor façades are mainly solid, disengaging, and do not encourage fluid movement across their thresholds. This article argues that the architectural design of public buildings and spaces characterise attributes of a reciprocal reproduction of memories of fear. A comparative analysis of the architecture of four different public spaces in Belfast city centre highlights factors that inform the relationship between the building façades, ease of accessibility, and use of the public space.

By their very nature writing manuals encourage viewer participation, as they illustrate how to form lines into letters. In Johann Neudörffer's “Gute Ordnung” (Good order, 1538–50s) this genesis of lines extends beyond pure pedagogy. By displaying etchings in mirror writing alongside true-sided counterproofs, Neudörffer invites viewers to consider methods of mechanical production of seemingly handwritten lines. His text-images share their self-aware attention to linear aesthetics and process with drawings and etchings by Albrecht Altdorfer and Albrecht Dürer. As Neudörffer's manual taught the formation of beautiful written lines, it also trained contemporaries to become sophisticated consumers of linear beauty in figurative art.