Renaissance

The pantheon of renowned melancholics-from Shakespeare's Hamlet to Walter Benjamin-includes no women, an absence that in Juliana Schiesari's view points less to a dearth of unhappy women in patriarchal culture than to the lack of significance accorded to...

In the landscape of the early modern European comic novel the inn often features as a monument to digression - the perfect setting for chance encounters with strangers who always have a story to tell. This wide-ranging comparative study explores the...

What did Romantic writers mean when they wrote about "progress" and "perfection"? This book shows how Romantic writers inventively responded to familiar ideas about political progress which they inherited from the eighteenth century. Whereas earlier...

For a significant part of the early modern period, England was the most active site of recipe publication in Europe and the only country in which recipes were explicitly addressed to housewives. Recipes for Thought analyzes, for the first time, the full...

In his Essais, Montaigne stresses that his theoretical interest in philosophy goes hand in hand with its practicality. In fact, he makes it clear that there is little reason to live our lives according to doctrine without proof that others have...

Measured Words explores the rich commerce between computation and writing that proliferated in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. In this captivating and generously illustrated work, Arielle Saiber studies the relationship between number, shape, and...

The ideological roots of the British Empire have been widely discussed in early modern studies, as have maritime settings in the period's imaginative writing. However, these perspectives have not adequately accounted for how literature's evolving...

Before Utopia demonstrates that Thomas More's Utopia (1516) is not, as is widely accepted, a rhetorical play of spirit but is instead built from a particular philosophy. That philosophy is not Platonism, but classical Stoicism. Deeply disturbed in his...

This volume contains the Alexander Lectures in University College, University of Toronto, for the session 1945-46, delivered by Samuel C. Chew, Professor of English Literature at Bryn Mawr College and author of Byron in England and The Crescent and the...

With The Ethical Dimension of the "Decameron" Marilyn Migiel, author of A Rhetoric of the "Decameron" (winner of the MLA's 2004 Marraro Prize), returns to Giovanni Boccaccio's masterpiece, this time to focus on the dialogue about ethical choices that the...

This book considers melancholy as an "assemblage," as a network of dynamic, interpretive relationships between persons, bodies, texts, spaces, structures, and things. In doing so, it parts ways with past interpretations of melancholy. Tilting the English...

Appearing in tandem with the publication of an authoritative text of the first edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost, these insightful essays by ten Miltonists establish the significant differences between the text, context, and effect of the poem's...

Forgiving the Gift challenges the tendency to reflexively understand gifts as exchanges, negotiations, and circulations. Lawrence reads plays by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare as informed by an early modern belief in the possibility and even...

The ubiquity of waste paper in early modern England has long been misunderstood. Though insults and modesty tropes that refer to waste paper are widespread, these have often been dismissed as nothing more than rhetorical flourishes. Paired with the...

This interdisciplinary volume explores core emerging themes in the study of early modern literary-diplomatic relations, developing essential methods of analysis and theoretical approaches that will shape future research in the field. Contributions focus...

We have become used to looking at art from a stance of detachment. In order to be objective, we create a "mental space" between ourselves and the objects of our investigation, separating internal and external worlds. This detachment dates back to the...

With Faithful Translators Jaime Goodrich offers the first in-depth examination of women's devotional translations and of religious translations in general within early modern England. Placing female translators such as Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Sidney...

First published in 1954, Literature and Science discusses historically the relationship between science and literature and between scientists and men of letters from the Renaissance onwards. It shows periods when writers were enthusiastic about science...

This book relates developments in the visual arts and printing to humanist theories of literary and bodily imitation, bringing together fifteenth- and sixteenth-century frescoes, statues, coins, letters, dialogues, epic poems, personal emblems, and...

The four-hundred-year story of readers' struggles with a famously unreadable poem-and what they reveal about the history of reading and the future of literary studies"I am now in the country, and reading in Spencer's fairy-queen. Pray what is the matter...

Monstrous Kinds is the first book to explore textual representations of disability in the global Renaissance. Elizabeth B. Bearden contends that monstrosity, as a precursor to modern concepts of disability, has much to teach about our tendency to...

In Renaissance England and Scotland, verse libel was no mere sub-division of verse satire but a fully-developed, widely-read poetic genre in its own right. This fact has been hidden from literary historians by the nature of the genre itself: defamation...

Stratford made the man, but London made the phenomenon that is Shakespeare. This volume takes an historical approach to Shakespeare's connections with London. It explores Stratford's various links with the capital, significant locations for Shakespeare's...

Material Philology and the study of Renaissance Latin literatureNeo-Latin Philology: Old Tradition, New Approaches explores the question whether the approaches developed in the so-called New or Material Philology can be applied to the study of...

Ordering Customs explores how Renaissance Venetians sought to make sense of human difference in a period characterized by increasing global contact and a rapid acceleration of the circulation of information. Venice was at the center of both these...

This study, the first book-length assessment of de Crenne, delineates both her conceptual framework and her stylistic concerns. It situates her in the framework of her times and views her as a woman on the cutting edge of her era who both exploited and...

In Renaissance Italy there existed a rich interplay between two cultural practices frequently regarded as entirely separate and mutually antagonistic: the humanistic study of the ancient world and ancient literature, and the oral and improvisational...

Since the late twentieth century, the Venetian courtesan Veronica Franco has been viewed as a triumphant proto-feminist icon: a woman who celebrated her sexuality, an outspoken champion of women and their worth, and an important intellectual and cultural...

In the late Renaissance and Early Modern period, man's relationship to nature changed dramatically. An important part of this change occurred in the way that beauty was perceived in the natural world and in the particular features which became privileged...

Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Women is an incendiary attack on the place of women in 18th-century society. Often considered to be the earliest widely-circulated work of feminism, the book is a powerful example of what can be...

This book examines both the notion that the non-political fiction of the Revolution is responding to the events in France and the idea that trauma theory might shed light on the ways in which novelists responded to the Revolution.About the...

Sir John Denham (1614/15-1669) Reassessed shines new light on a singular, colourful yet elusive figure of seventeenth-century English letters. Despite his influence as a poet, wit, courtier, exile, politician and surveyor of the king's works, Denham,...

While immensely popular in the eighteenth century, current critical wisdom regards graveyard poetry as a short-lived fad with little lasting merit. In the first book-length study of this important poetic mode, Eric Parisot suggests, to the contrary, that...

Taking into consideration the political and literary issues hanging upon the circulation of Machiavelli's works in England, this volume highlights how topics and ideas stemming from Machiavelli's books - including but not limited to the Prince - strongly...

Early modern printed books are copiously illustrated with charts, diagrams, and other kinds of images that represent systems of thought and ways of doing things. Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature shows how these images fostered what...

Taking cross-disciplinary and comparative approaches to the volume's subject, this exciting collection of essays offers a reassessment of Shakespeare's erotic and Ovidian mythology within classical and continental aesthetic contexts. Through extensive...

Shakespeare's Legal Ecologies offers the first sustained examination of the relationship between law and selfhood in Shakespeare's work. Taking five plays and the sonnets as case studies, Kevin Curran argues that law provided Shakespeare with the...

The modern encyclopedia was born in the eighteenth century. Although numerous studies have shed light on its evolution, important participants have been neglected. Dennis de Coetlogon's Universal history of the arts and sciences may be little known to us...

The name of Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) is inscribed in almost every flora and fauna published from the mid-eighteenth century onwards; in this respect he is virtually immortal. In this book a group of specialists argue for the need to re-centre Linnaean...

Following his opposition to the establishment of a theatre in Geneva, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often considered an enemy of the stage. Yet he was fascinated by drama: he was a keen theatre-goer, his earliest writings were operas and comedies, his...