ONCE, AS A JOKE, some friends and I invented advertisements for university positions in nonexistent disciplines. We divided these disciplines into four departments: adynata, or impossibilia, containing sciences that were historically impossible, such as history of the wheel in the pre-Columbian empires, history of painting on Easter Island, Aztec horse racing; oxymoronica, containing sciences that were self-contradictory and analytically impossible, such as nomadic urban studies, institutions of deviance, binary logic of the included middle; byzantinica, containing sciences of utter uselessness, such as potiosection, or the art of cutting broth; and tetrapiloctomia, or the art of quartering a hair, containing sciences of excessive subtlety, such as microscopy of indiscernibles.

This essay closely examines several mythological autos sacramentales by the seventeenth-century Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca. These eucharistic dramas, allegorizations of famous tales from antiquity, raise provocative questions about the relation of myth to allegory and about the hermeneutical problems inherent in both. By explicitly thematizing the Word as source and guarantor of pagan myth and of language and illuminated interpretation themselves, the plays embody a powerful allegory of the assumed divine origin and sacral significance not only of myth but also of an essential and radical logocentrism. For Calderón divine ordination and revealed truth implicitly sacramentalize the auto and sanction the human author's hermeneutical and creative endeavors. This study shows that Calderón's metaphysics and allegorical theory constitute a timeless witness to Christian truth and a timely challenge to some widely accepted tenets of modern literary theory.

Previously unpublished archival material and recent scholarship in legal history provide new information and allow a coherent account of Daniel Defoe's arrest, interrogations, conviction, and release for the seditious libel The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. Details about Nottingham's questioning of Defoe, the costs of the prosecution, and the final decision to send him to the pillory emerge. More significantly, it is now clear that Defoe's case came before the justices at five (not two) Old Bailey sessions, and the full records have come to light. These records and those in the Lowndes papers provide a full account of Defoe's release from Newgate Prison.

Gender conflicts troubled Hawthorne's personal life and afflicted his daughter Una badly enough to bring on episodes of disabling psychic isturbance. They are likewise inherent in The Scarlet Letter, where Hawthorne subverts the norms of womanhood and manhood that were asserted by the domestic ideal, a middle-class version of male dominance then coming to the fore. Yet the work also affirms that those norms provide a measure against which his daughter's aberrations should be corrected. Hawthorne's solution to Una's problem is depicted in Pearl's redemption, so that Una's unhappy later life—as well as Hawthorne's—provides a biographical countertext. By treating Nathaniel Hawthorne, Una Hawthorne, and The Scarlet Letter as interdefining arenas of conflict, this essay provides a glimpse into the processes by which gender is constructed in persons and works of art.