Alex Lewis

“This Forked Plague” examines literary representations of cuckolds from the 15th to 17th century. As historians and critics have demonstrated, cuckolds in daily life were objects of intense derision and anxiety. Representations of these unhappy figures, however, performed a service beyond provoking uneasy laughter. Across six chapters, the project explores how early modern authors conscripted jealous and deceived husbands into thought-experiments, leveraging cuckoldry’s tragicomic predicament to evaluate competing claims about the nature of faith, sexuality, and human difference.