Therapies for Melancholy and Inordinate Passion in the Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple (1652–1654)

Dorothy Osborne’s letters to Sir William Temple, written during the period of the secret, protracted courtship between the pair, demonstrate a persistent interest in melancholy and in the regulation of inordinate passion. Osborne draws on a variety of discourses of melancholy to construct herself and Temple as melancholy lovers. She also uses her letters to express and regulate her passions associated with the uncertainty of the couple’s future. This essay argues that Osborne privileges literary therapies for inordinate passion, employing affective, therapeutic processes of reading and writing within the letters themselves.     

Statesmanship Beyond the Modern State

The concept and ideal of statesmanship have been handed down to us from ancient to modern times, but it has a paradoxical relationship with the modern state. While terminology suggests that statesmanship presupposes the state, in fact it appears rather incongruent with modern (i.e., constitutional, democratic, and bureaucratic) statehood. Nonetheless, statesmanship continues to be promoted and new understandings, such as judicial and administrative statesmanship, have been proposed. Some hope, moreover, that statesmanship becomes more feasible again as we transfer from state government to multilevel governance. There are problems, however, with conceiving of statesmanship, either in its original or in its newer meanings, under these new conditions. Despite the enduring appeal of statesmanship, the changing role of the state in present-day governance does not mean that this ideal can be easily regained.     

Western Mediterranean sand deposits as a raw material for Roman glass production

During the Late Roman and Byzantine period, natron glass was made from its raw materials in a limited number of primary production centres in Egypt and Syro-Palestine. For the earlier Hellenistic and Roman period, no primary furnaces have been found and the location of primary production during this era remains unclear. Ancient authors such as Strabo and Pliny the Elder suggest that glassmaking sands were found near the River Belus (Israel), in Egypt, near the mouth of the Volturno River (Italy) and also in Spain and France. However, primary production in the western part of the Mediterranean is not supported by any direct archaeological evidence and possible sand raw materials from these regions have never been evaluated for their suitability to produce glass.