Renaissance

SHAKESPEARE: increasingly irrelevant or lone literary genius of the Western canon? 'Powerful and illuminating' James Shapiro, author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, winner of the Baillie Gifford 'Winner of Winners' 2023 ...

1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear traces Shakespeare's life and times from the autumn of 1605, when he took an old and anonymous Elizabethan play, The Chronicle History of King Leir, and transformed it into his most searing tragedy, King...

The first authorized copy of this mysterious, much-speculated-upon, one-of-a-kind, centuries-old puzzle"For the first time, a complete reproduction [of] The Voynich Manuscript, has been published, featuring essays exploring what is known about the book...

Shakespeare and the Book Trade follows on from Lukas Erne's groundbreaking Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist to examine the publication, constitution, dissemination and reception of Shakespeare's printed plays and poems in his own time and to argue that...

From Tudor to Stuart: The Regime Change from Elizabeth I to James I tells the story of the troubled accession of England's first Scottish king and the transition from the age of the Tudors to the age of the Stuarts at the dawn of the seventeenth century...

A THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2019'The best introduction to the plays I've read, perhaps the best book on Shakespeare, full stop' Alex Preston, Observer'It makes you impatient to see or re-read the plays at once' Hilary MantelA genius and prophet whose...

Volume I of The Cambridge History of American Literature was originally published in 1997, and covers the colonial and early national periods and discusses the work of a diverse assemblage of authors, from Renaissance explorers and Puritan theocrats to...

Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690-1830, is the first book to apply recent trends in new materialist criticism to Ireland. It radically shifts familiar colonial stereotypes of the feminized, racialized cottier...

John Lyly's Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and his England, created a literary sensation in their own age, and had a profound influence on Elizabethan prose. This modern-spelling edition of the two works, the first for nearly a century, is...

'Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?' Dark and violent, Macbeth is a restless, haunting exploration of the human costs of violence and power. One of the most theatrically spectacular of Shakespeare's plays, Macbeth has...

'If the English people were to be set a test to justify their history and civilization by the example of one man, then it is Sir Thomas More whom they would perhaps choose.' So commented The Times in 1978 on the 500th anniversary of More's birth. ...

A key anthology for students of English literature, Metaphysical Poetry is a collection whose unique philosophical insights are some of the crowning achievements of Renaissance verse, edited with an introduction and notes by Colin Burrow in Penguin...

SHAKESPEARE: increasingly irrelevant or lone literary genius of the Western canon? 'Powerful and illuminating' James Shapiro, author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, winner of the Baillie Gifford 'Winner of Winners' 2023 Professor...

The sense of touch had a deeply uncertain status in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It had long been seen as the most certain and reliable of the senses, and also as biologically necessary: each of the other senses could be relinquished, but to...

Philip Sidney was in his early twenties when he wrote his `Old' Arcadia for the amusement of his younger sister, the Countess of Pembroke. The book, which he called 'a trifle, and that triflingly handled', reflects their youthful vitality. The `Old'...

To the extent that she is popularly known, Katherine Parr (1512-48) is the woman who survived King Henry VIII as his sixth and last wife. She merits far greater recognition, however, on several other fronts. Fluent in French, Italian, and Latin, Parr...

Easy to use in the classroom or as a tool for revision, Oxford Literature Companions provide student-friendly analysis of a range of popular A Level set texts. Each book offers a lively, engaging approach to the text, covering characterisation and role,...

'How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world That has such people in't!' Performed variously as escapist fantasy, celebratory fiction, and political allegory, The Tempest is one of the plays in which Shakespeare's genius as a poetic dramatist found its...

'Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the King's English.' The Merry Wives of Windsor is the only Shakespeare play named entirely after female characters and his only comedy set in England. These features underscore some of its most...

A detailed comparison of Machiavelli with Shakespeare, grounded in their common use of rhetoric. Although the question of Machiavellian influence on Shakespeare has been thoroughly debated, this book represents the first attempt to compare the two...

A comprehensive resource to understanding the hand-press printing of early books Studying Early Printed Books, 1450 - 1800 offers a guide to the fascinating process of how books were printed in the first centuries of the press and shows how the mechanics...

"Reader's Guides" provide a comprehensive starting point for any advanced student, giving an overview of the context, criticism and influence of key works. Each guide also offers students fresh critical insights and provides a practical...

'We that are true lovers run into strange capers.' Four centuries after its publication in the Folio, As You Like It's capacity to entertain and instruct remains evergreen. This edition provides a friendly yet authoritative introduction to the play,...

'What is honour? A word. What is in that word 'honour'? What is that 'honour'? Air.' A history play that combines a coming-of-age narrative with a tale of power, rebellion, friendship, and betrayal, Henry IV, Part I has been a perennial favourite from...

This critical edition of two early modern marriage sermons provides an important resource for students and scholars of early modern literature and history, allowing them to experience firsthand the competing and historically layered ideas about marriage...

Whitney's two volumes of verse miscellany, 'Sweet Nosegay' (1573) and 'The Copy of a Letter' (1567), were part of a literary trend of combining classical and Biblical references with popular and vernacular sources, and reflect the growing literary...

The era between the accession of Henry VIII and the crisis of the English republic in 1659 formed one of the most fertile epochs in world literature. This anthology offers a broad selection of its poetry, and includes a wide range of works by the great...

A uniquely personal account of the life and enduring legacy of the Renaissance libraryWith the advent of print in the fifteenth century, Europe's cultural elite assembled personal libraries as refuges from persecutions and pandemics. Andrew Hui tells the...

This is a collection of essays on an important but overlooked aspect of early modern English life: the artistic and intellectual patronage of the Inns of Court and their influence on religion, politics, education, rhetoric, and culture from the late...

Satan is out for revenge. His rebellion has failed, he has been cast out from heaven and is doomed to spend eternity in hell. Somehow he must find a way to prove his power and wound his enemies. He fixes upon God's beloved new creations, Adam and Eve, as...

Niccolo Machiavelli taught that political leaders must be prepared to do evil so that good may come of it, and his name has been a byword ever since for duplicity and immorality. Is his sinister reputation deserved? In answering this question Quentin...

A preeminent Renaissance scholar illuminates early modern encounters with books, in which literature became a portal to self-awareness and miraculous communion between author and reader.The experience of reading is often presented as personal and...

This collection of newly commissioned essays explores the extraordinary versatility of Renaissance tragedy and shows how it enables exploration of issues ranging from gender to race to religious conflict, as well as providing us with some of the earliest...

Shakespeare and the Law appreciates Shakespeare and his works as expressions of an English early modern culture in which the shared rhetorical practices of dramatists and lawyers were informed by the renaissance of classical practice. It argues that...

Who during the Renaissance could have dissented from the values of reason and restraint, patience and humility, rejection of the worldly and the physical? These widely articulated values were part of the inherited Christian tradition and were reinforced...

First published in 1968, Alastair Fowler's annotated edition of Paradise Lost is acknowledged as the most authoritative guide to this major work. It is the only recent edition of Paradise Lost to be based on the text of the first (1667) edition, now...

'I liv'd indeed like a Queen; or if you will have me confess, that my Condition had still the Reproach of a Whore, I may say, I was sure, the Queen of Whores.' Left destitute by her husband, the heroine of Defoe's final novel has to choose between her...

Easy to use in the classroom or as a tool for revision, Oxford Literature Companions provide student-friendly analysis of a range of popular A Level set texts. Each book offers a lively, engaging approach to the text, covering characterisation and role,...

'Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.' Can one life be measured against another? Can a woman's body be measured against a man's life? Can consensual sex be measured against rape? Measure for Measure explores these questions through a series of...

This masterly edition contains all of Milton's English poems, with the exception of Paradise Lost, together with translations and texts of all his Latin, Italian and Greek poems. First published in 1968 - and substantially updated in 1996 - John Carey's...