About the Journal
Early Modern Culture Online (EMCO) is an open-access, peer reviewed electronic journal. EMCO aims at publishing original research on Renaissance and Early Modern Literature, broadly construed, through a wide variety of interdisciplinary approaches, including art history, architecture, philosophy, religion and musical research.
The themes and cultural expressions discussed, and the wider relevance of Early Modern art forms and cultural statements in contemporary society, turn the series into a valuable resource for specialists as well as for the general reader.
EMCO was initially published by the Early Modern Research Group and The Bergen Shakespeare and Drama Network, the latter currently known as the Bergen-Volda Shakespeare Network.
Current Issue
This edition of Early Modern Culture Online, the first part of issue number eight, presents three articles whose concerns range from the religious and the spiritual to the semi-religious matter of literary canonisation. Opening the issue, Roy Eriksen’s “Marlowe and Prayer” (pp. 1-21) argues that elements of Christopher Marlowe’s style originate in prayer – a much contested but somewhat overlooked religious-poetic sub-genre. Marlowe appears in the next article, too, Charles Moseley’s survey of the literary canon such as it appeared in the time of Shakespeare. Not only was there a Classical canon, he argues in “Shakespeare’s Canon” (pp. 23-37), but an English one to which Marlowe, among others, belonged. Finally, Kent Cartwright delves into the mysterious and strange sides of Shakespearean comedy, his “Twinship and Occult References in Twelfth Night” (pp. 39-58) uncovering how the dénouements of Shakespeare’s comedies are not as settled as it is often assumed; occult and uncanny elements linger on, even after their ostensibly happy endings.
This EMCO also marks an ending. Roy Eriksen, one of EMCO’s founding editors, was working on revisions for the article included in this issue when he passed away in April 2019. The text has been lightly revised in cooperation with one of its reviewers and is included here in memoriam.
