One of the most curious events in Othello is the titular character’s epileptic fit, which does not appear in the story by Cinthio that is the accepted source of the play’s plot. Why does Shakespeare invent such an incident? The easiest direction to take is the equation of epilepsy with demonic possession, a common belief in the early modern period. In this essay, however, I argue from textual and critical evidence for a philosophical interpretation of Othello’s epilepsy: namely, that his seizure, particularly in relation to the play’s conflict of reason and emotion, can be seen as a challenge to early modern orthodoxy concerning the mind-body problem, in that it conflates the distinction between body and soul.

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This article brings attention to three manuscript letters by Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton in the Darmstaedter collection at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, two of which are published here for the first time. Of principal interest is a 1678 letter from Hooke to Newton, which concerns the controversy with Anthony Lucas over Newton's prism experiments and Hooke's disinclination ‘to print transactions’ on behalf of the Royal Society. A second Hooke letter, written to the French savant Nicolas Toinard in 1680, sends some astronomical observations together with English mathematician Robert Wood's book on a proposed calendrical reform. While the text of the third item, a 1706 letter by Newton welcoming its addressee into the Royal Society, has long been available in draft form, the Darmstaedter manuscript allows the recipient to be identified as a Savoyard diplomat, the Comte de Briançon, who can further be recognized as the intended addressee of another Newton letter.

This paper considers a Homeric paraphrase of the Book of Job by James Duport, Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge, as the earliest known Greek textbook in use at the newly founded Harvard College, as recorded in New England's First Fruits (1643).