This article proposes a new methodology for engaging with early modern legal metaphor. It argues that a full account of the trope must integrate its legal-historical, cultural, literary, and philosophical dimensions. After discussing what makes early modern legal metaphor unique (and thus uniquely challenging to decipher), I consider various philosophical, legal, cognitive, and literary approaches to the rhetorical figure and demonstrate how each perspective adds additional insight to its untangling in juridical contexts. The article culminates in a reading of a single metaphor taken from lawyer John Exton's treatise “The maritime dicæologie, or, the Sea-jurisdiction of England” (1664): “The ship dieth at sea.” Ultimately, I argue that this metaphor references admiralty actions in rem, which were integral to the functioning of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English High Court of Admiralty, an interpretation that emerges only when accounting for the trope in both its textual and intertextual frameworks.

Early modern Gospel harmonies have received little attention and are mostly studied as poor precursors to modern synoptic criticism. This article reassesses the harmony's significance by reconstructing its development ca. 1500–1700, reaching two conclusions. First, it argues that Gospel harmonies acted as a touchstone for critical intellectual developments such as the rise of scientific chronology. Second, it argues that the harmony's transformation over this period, influenced by multiple overlapping disciplines, resulted in it becoming one of the most creative scholarly genres by the late seventeenth century. This interdisciplinarity was simultaneously the prime attraction of the harmony and the reason for its eighteenth-century decline.

The global dimensions of Anthony van Dyck's portrait of Genoese noblewoman Elena Grimaldi Cattaneo have been largely overlooked by art historians. Seventeenth-century Genoa was immersed in the global movement of goods, knowledge, and peoples; these encounters and exchanges shaped Genoa's fashion system. This article situates the portrait within networks of international exchange to explore the meaningful representation of dress and globalized materials. The global is not restricted to Elena Grimaldi Cattaneo's attire, however; it extends to the African servant, whose presence and dress bring the portrait into dialogue with histories of global commodities, race, and Atlantic and Mediterranean slavery.