"To Bark With Judgement": Playing Baboon in Early Modern London

Who or what played the baboon on early modern London's stages? Such a question may seem as obscure as its answer obvious; I ask it, however, to foreground the long history of trained animal performers and their relationship to canonical English drama. The surprising presence of performing baboons in early modern London has been mostly forgotten or overlooked; yet a striking amount of plays between 1595 and 1616 mention their presence, suggesting that simians may have been more important to London's stage history than we have realized. This forgotten aspect of the Renaissance English stage connects with some of the most celebrated aspects of the theater itself--its profound mimetic potential to represent real and imagined social spaces. It also gestures towards its underbelly: its harsh labor conditions, spectacular violence, and audiences who were seemingly willing to laugh at both. In this essay, I connect early modern cultural ideas about baboons with some of the valences of their performance history, arguing that both suggest early modern London's stage baboons may have been more culturally relevant than we think

Scent of a Woman: Performing the Politics of Smell in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

Olfaction has not figured largely in scholarly or popular understanding of early English stages; as stage properties, scents have rarely impacted the critical work on late medieval or early modern material histories of the stage, no doubt due to the assumption that olfaction lacks both a history and an archive. Nonetheless, for late medieval and early modern men and women, olfaction was a key component of theatrical experience. Three examples of late medieval and early modern English drama underscore this point: the Digby Mary Magdalene, and Shakespeare's Antony & Cleopatra and Twelfth Night. Tracing the use of perfume as a theatrical trope in these plays, I argue that reading late medieval drama's saintly and sinful bodily odors alongside early modern drama's emphasis on gender as a sartorial practice enhances our understanding of how social differences materialized on England's sixteenth-century stages.

Introduction: Fabulous Animals

Although "fabulous" animals tend to be thought of as, say, unicorns, for early modern and medieval natural history, as well as the developed attention to gender and reproduction in twenty-first century science, the "fabulous" animal might be the one next door, like, say, squirrels

Smelling Contagion: The Sensory Experience of Plague in Seventeenth-Century London and the Covid-19 Pandemic

This paper came out of our reflections on the sensory experiences during the Covid-19 lockdowns in the US and UK, particularly around smell, or its absence. As early modernists, we wondered how seventeenth-century people experienced the plague: how did their smellscapes change? Miasma, or foul air, was thought to be a cause of plague outbreaks. But the urban smellscape also changed during an outbreak: vinegar to cleanse money, burned rosemary to purify the air, and bodily odors to indicate infection. Focusing on London, we consider the overlap between the sensory and emotional experiences during an outbreak. We argue that the smells of plague outbreaks shifted people’s ways of being within collective spaces by emphasizing the presence of disease, sharpening social class distinctions, increasing isolation and fear, and requiring specific types of essential labor

Guidelines For The Standardization Of Preanalytic Variables For Blood-based Biomarker Studies In Alzheimer\u27s Disease Research

The lack of readily available biomarkers is a significant hindrance toward progressing to effective therapeutic and preventative strategies for Alzheimer\u27s disease (AD). Blood-based biomarkers have potential to overcome access and cost barriers and greatly facilitate advanced neuroimaging and cerebrospinal fluid biomarker approaches. Despite the fact that preanalytical processing is the largest source of variability in laboratory testing, there are no currently available standardized preanalytical guidelines. The current international working group provides the initial starting point for such guidelines for standardized operating procedures (SOPs). It is anticipated that these guidelines will be updated as additional research findings become available. The statement provides (1) a synopsis of selected preanalytical methods utilized in many international AD cohort studies, (2) initial draft guidelines/SOPs for preanalytical methods, and (3) a list of required methodological information and protocols to be made available for publications in the field to foster cross-validation across cohorts and laboratorie

Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research Consortium: Accelerating Evidence-Based Practice of Genomic Medicine

Despite rapid technical progress and demonstrable effectiveness for some types of diagnosis and therapy, much remains to be learned about clinical genome and exome sequencing (CGES) and its role within the practice of medicine. The Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research (CSER) consortium includes 18 extramural research projects, one National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) intramural project, and a coordinating center funded by the NHGRI and National Cancer Institute. The consortium is exploring analytic and clinical validity and utility, as well as the ethical, legal, and social implications of sequencing via multidisciplinary approaches; it has thus far recruited 5,577 participants across a spectrum of symptomatic and healthy children and adults by utilizing both germline and cancer sequencing. The CSER consortium is analyzing data and creating publically available procedures and tools related to participant preferences and consent, variant classification, disclosure and management of primary and secondary findings, health outcomes, and integration with electronic health records. Future research directions will refine measures of clinical utility of CGES in both germline and somatic testing, evaluate the use of CGES for screening in healthy individuals, explore the penetrance of pathogenic variants through extensive phenotyping, reduce discordances in public databases of genes and variants, examine social and ethnic disparities in the provision of genomics services, explore regulatory issues, and estimate the value and downstream costs of sequencing. The CSER consortium has established a shared community of research sites by using diverse approaches to pursue the evidence-based development of best practices in genomic medicine

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Shakespeare Performed: Courtyard Theatre's King Lear with Sheep

Draft of pre-publication review of Courtyard Theatre's 2016 production of Missouri Williams' King Lear with Sheep. For the published and corrected version, please see: https://shakespearequarterly.folger.edu/web_exclusive/shakespeare-performed-courtyard-theatres-king-lear-with-sheep