Renaissance

Bad Blood explores representations of race in early modern English and Spanish literature, especially drama. It addresses two different forms of racial ideology: one concerned with racialized religious difference-that is, the notion of having Jewish or...

Broadening the conversation begun in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe (2009), this book examines how the spatial dynamics of public making changed the shape of early modern society. The publics visited in this volume are voluntary groupings of...

Between the medieval conception of Christendom and the political visions of modernity, ideas of Europe underwent a transformative and catalytic period that saw a cultural process of renewed self-definition or self-Europeanization. The contributors to...

Desires of Credit in Early Modern Theory and Drama traces the near-simultaneous rise of economic theory, literary criticism, and public theater in London at the turn of the seventeenth century, and posits that connecting all three is a fascination with...

Sick Heroes examines the cultural practices that created those remarkably offensive, though strangely appealing, romantic heroes that appeared in European and especially in French literature in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Romanticism has...

Although war is a heterogeneous assemblage of the human and nonhuman, it nevertheless builds the illusion of human autonomy and singularity. Focusing on war and ecology, a neglected topic in early modern ecocriticism, Bestial Oblivion: War, Humanism, and...

Annual collection of essays, this year treating works by Donne, Shakespeare, Marvell, and Spenser, among other topics. Renaissance Papers is a collection of the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The...

Other Englands examines the rise of the early English utopia in the context of emergent capitalism. Above all, it asserts that this literary genre was always already an expression of social crisis and economic transition, a context refracted in the...

Original and thought-provoking, this collection sheds new light on an important yet understudied feature of seventeenth-century England's political and cultural landscape: exile. Through an essentially literary lens, exile is examined both as physical...

An exploration of early modern encounters between Christian Europe and the (Islamic) East from the perspective of performance studies and performativity theories, this collection focuses on the ways in which these cultural contacts were acted out on the...

Carnival and Literature in Early Modern England explores the elite and popular festive materials appropriated by authors during the English Renaissance in a wide range of dramatic and non-dramatic texts. Although historical records of rural, urban,...

Ruin and Reformation in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Marvell explores writerly responses to the religious violence of the long reformation in England and Wales, spanning over a century of literature and history, from the establishment of the national church...

Katarzyna Lecky explores how early modern British poets paid by the state adapted inclusive modes of nationhood charted by inexpensive, small-format maps. She explores chapbooks ('cheapbooks') by Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, William...

Engaging with fiction and history-and reading both genres as texts permeated with early modern anxieties, desires, and apprehensions-this collection scrutinizes the historical intersection of early modern European superstitions and English stage...

Though the gender-coded soul-body dynamic lies at the root of many negative and disempowering depictions of women, Sarah Johnson here argues that it also functions as an effective tool for redefining gender expectations. Building on past criticism that...

The Baroque Spanish stage is populated with virile queens and feminized kings. This study examines the diverse ways in which seventeenth-century comedias engage with the discourse of power and rulership and how it relates to gender. A privileged...

Using Hannah Arendt's account of the Greek polis to explain Milton's fascination with the idea of public speech, this study reveals what is distinctive about his conception of a godly, republican oratory and poetics. The book shows how Milton uses...

The first full-length study of the reception of John Milton's (1608-74) writings in the Arab-Muslim world, this book examines the responses of Arab-Muslim readers to Milton's works, and in particular, to his epic poem: Paradise Lost. It contributes to...

The early modern period inherited a deeply-ingrained culture of Christian remembrance that proved a platform for creativity in a remarkable variety of forms. From the literature of church ritual to the construction of monuments; from portraiture to the...

Contributing to the growing interest in early modern women and religion, this essay collection advances scholarship by introducing readers to recently recovered or little-studied texts and by offering new paradigms for the analysis of women's religious...

Recurring to the governing idea of her 2005 study Shakespeare on the Edge, Lisa Hopkins expands the parameters of her investigation beyond England to include the Continent, and beyond Shakespeare to include a number of dramatists ranging from Christopher...

Genealogies of Fiction is a study of gender, dynastic politics, and intertextuality in medieval and renaissance chivalric epic, focused on Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso. Relying on the direct study of manuscripts and incunabula, this project...

This book investigates the complex interactions, through experiencing drama, of readers and audiences in the English Renaissance.Around 1500 an absolute majority of population was illiterate. Henry VIII's religious reformation changed this cultural...

Designed to contribute to a greater understanding of the religious foundations of seventeenth century political writing, this study offers a detailed exploration of the significance of the figure and story of Adam at that time. The book investigates...

A study of the cultural mechanisms in early modern Spain that led to the translation, imitation and selective adoption of the values embodied by the Italian Renaissance. This innovative study examines the cultural mechanisms in early modern Spain that...

The current volume contains nine articles reflecting a wide range of approaches to Renaissance literary performance and theory. Renaissance Papers is a collection of the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance...

Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell offers fresh perspectives from leading and emerging scholars on seventeenth-century British literature, with a focus on the surprising ways that texts interacted with writers and readers at specific cultural...

The turn of the fifteenth century saw an explosion of literature throughout Iberia that was not just sentimental, but about sentiment. Alone Together reveals the political, ethical, and poetic dimensions of this phenomenon, which was among the most...

In the first book-length study explicitly to connect the postcolonial trope of hybridity to Renaissance literature, Gary Schmidt examines how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English authors, artists, explorers and statesmen exercised a concerted...

Today we are used to clear divisions between science and the arts. But early modern thinkers had no such distinctions, with 'knowledge' being a truly interdisciplinary pursuit. Each chapter of this collection presents a case study from a different area...

What is the role of disgust or revulsion in early modern English literature? How did early modern English subjects experience revulsion and how did writers represent it in poetry, plays, and prose? What does it mean when literature instructs, delights,...

More than five hundred years after the fact, present-day writers still use hyperbolic adjectives to describe the "discovery" of the Americas. Columbus's crossing of the Atlantic-and the age of exploration that ensued-dramatically and forever changed the...

Alvise Cornaro (c.1484-1566) was the son of a Paduan innkeeper with presumed ties to the patrician Cornaro family of Venice. Highly ambitious, he acquired a name for himself as a businessman, architect, and patron of the arts. Critically ill around age...

In the seventeenth century the ancient hope for the physical resurrection of the body and its flesh began an unexpected second life as critical theory, challenging the notion of an autonomous self and driving early modern avant-garde poetry. As an...

Awarded a 2014 Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Prize Honourable Mention.This book explores the creation and use of artificially made humanoid servants and servant networks by fictional and non-fictional scientists of the early modern period...

Exploring how readers received and responded to literary works in the long eighteenth century, M-C. Newbould focuses on the role played by Laurence Sterne's fiction and its adaptations. Literary adaptation flourished throughout the eighteenth century,...

In Masculinity and Queer Desire in Spanish Enlightenment Literature, Mehl Allan Penrose examines three distinct male figures, each of which was represented as the Other in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Spanish literature. The most common...

Drawing on art history, literary studies and social history, the essays in this volume explore a range of intersections between gender and constructions of childhood in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries in Italy, England, France and Spain. The essays...

A study of European utopias in context from the early years of Henry VIII's reign to the Restoration, this book is the first comprehensive attempt since J. C. Davis' Utopia and the Ideal Society (1981) to understand the societies projected by utopian...

Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England studies how immersion in the Bible among layfolk gave rise to a non-professional writing culture, one of the first instances of ordinary people taking up the pen as part of their daily lives. Kate...