Renaissance

This book explores the fiction of the French writer François Rabelais (d. 1553) and its engagement with the seemingly unresolvable tensions of hierarchy. It analyses how thinkers from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first have reinterpreted this...

Richard Barnfield was an Elizabethan writer and poet and author of the most overtly queer poetry of the English Renaissance. This book offers the first in-depth critical examination of his literary output and his engagement with, and appropriation of,...

Originally published in 1956, this scholarly study of Spenser's poetry shows how the conceptions of his earlier work in complaints, visions and pastorals were of continuing importance to the development of The Faerie Queene. Following on from Bishop...

Originally published in 1963, this is a study of the greatness of Dante, Michelangelo and Milton, and of the differences in the power and effect of their work. This book shows how differing philosophical commitments help explain differences in the...

This classic study of the Elizabethan sonnet, first published in 1956 and as a second edition in 1965, describes the development of the English sonnet from the early poems of Wyatt and Surrey, which were strongly influenced by Petrarch, to the great...

Thomas Leonard-Roy explores the writings of six canonical authors--Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Horace Walpole, Frances Burney, and Lord Byron--to illuminate the ways in which hatred became a particularly vital and animating emotion in...

Uncovers a vibrant literary culture often overlooked by colonial historiography and Anglocentric critical traditions. Reimagines Spenser's Munster through multilingual networks, bardic poetry, and digital methodologies. Long dominated by...

This volume convenes eight noted scholars with varied positions at the interface of formal and historical literary criticism. The editors' introduction-a far-reaching account of how both methods have intersected in studies of early modern English texts...

Attends to the early modern stage as a platform for the creation and interrogation of knowledge and knowledge production, experiential and experimental.

The Fonte Gaia from Renaissance to Modern Times examines the history of Siena's famous public fountain, from its fifteenth-century origins to its eventual replacement by a copy in the nineteenth century (and the modern fate of both). The book explores...

Writing on the cusp of modern botany and during the heyday of English herbals and garden manuals, Shakespeare references at least 180 plants in his works and makes countless allusions to horticultural and botanical practices. Shakespeare's Botanical...

Exposes writers’ reliance on conservative language during one of the most radical periods of English history

Via a hermeneutics focused on Chinese numerology and concentric arrangements, this book offers a novel construal of the textual universe proper to early China writings.The author lays bare distinguishable patterns of textual composition while relating...

Drawing on literature, legal texts, and archival materials, The Ambassador and the Courtesan offers a comparative analysis of these two emerging roles in the early modern period and in Renaissance Italian society. While these two figures may appear...

Drawing on literature, legal texts, and archival materials, The Ambassador and the Courtesan offers a comparative analysis of these two emerging roles in the early modern period and in Renaissance Italian society. While these two figures may appear...

Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution: Forms of Proof argues that the rise of mechanical science in the seventeenth century had a profound impact on both language and literature. To the extent that new ideas about things were accompanied by new...

This volume celebrates Thomas Middleton's legacy as a dramatist, marking the 400th anniversary of Middleton's final and most contentious work for the public theatres, A Game at Chess (1624).The collection is divided into three sections: 'Critical and...

Marguerite de Navarre was one of the most educated and powerful women of Renaissance Europe. The Heptameron, her celebrated collection of tales and debates, offers readers invaluable insights into diverse aspects of sixteenth-century French society...

The governing questions of Milton and the Network of Disability, Embodiment and Care are threefold: What does reading Milton's texts - and literature generally - through the theoretical lens of disability, embodiment and care studies (DEC) reveal that...

An examination of the messy, often contradictory processes of poetic production and reception. The volume offers an invitation to read widely, question deeply and think critically. In the wake of C. S. Lewis's still-contested taxonomy of 'drab'...

Mapping the World at the Dawn of the British Empire is a compact and informative guide to the ways in which the world was understood and imagined by British travellers and readers in the Tudor and Jacobean period, just before the rapid expansion of the...

The Single Life examines five types of never-married men in English Renaissance literature and provides new ways to think about histories of marriage, patriarchy, manhood, sexuality, and gender.Book InformationISBN 9780817362133Author Jordan...

The idea of toxic masculinity might feel like a very modern, even twenty-first-century notion, but similar concerns about male behaviour, also often characterised in terms of poisons and poisoning, can be identified in the literature of four hundred...

Translating Petrarch in early modern Britain gathers twelve essays by international scholars focusing on the translation of Petrarch's vernacular verse (Canzoniere and Triumphi) into English, from the Tudor age to the mid-seventeenth century (and beyond)...

Demonstrates how early modern women writers such as Margaret Cavendish and Hester Pulter wielded poetics as a tool for scientific work Anatomical Forms excavates the shared material practices of women's poetic work and anatomical study in early modern...

This book is about the multiple loves of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained: sanctioned loves and outlawed loves, sincere loves and false loves, Christian loves, classical loves, humanist loves, and love as emotion. In showing how these loves motivate...

Massinger’s Italy: Re-Imagining Italian Culture in the Plays of Philip Massinger offers the first book-length account of the pervasive influence of Italian culture on the canon of Philip Massinger, one of the most successful playwrights of the...

Clever Little Books explores the role of Latin commentaries on the Roman poet Martial as a medium for the transmission of sexual knowledge among male elites in early modern Europe. Valued for its wit and concision, Martial's sometimes shocking poetry was...

This collection is the first to historicise the term ephemera and its meanings for early modern England and considers its relationship to time, matter, and place. It asks: how do we conceive of ephemera in a period before it was routinely employed (from...

Originally published in 1956, this scholarly study of Spenser's poetry shows how the conceptions of his earlier work in complaints, visions and pastorals were of continuing importance to the development of The Faerie Queene. Following on from Bishop...

As an instigator of debate and a defender of tradition, a man of letters and a popular hack, a writer of erotica and a spokesman for bishops, an urbane metropolitan and a celebrant of local custom, the various textual performances of Thomas Nashe have...

Refusing to Behave in Early Modern Literature explores texts shaped by collisions between the idiosyncrasies of individual bodyminds and the values of small communities such as religion, sect, social milieu, congregation and family. The book encompasses...