16th-century and Renaissance Literature

This book is about one of the most important features of early modern gardens: the fountain. It is also a detailed study of works by Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Ben Jonson, and of an influential Italian romance, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Fountains were ‘strong points’ in the iconography and structure of gardens, symbolically loaded and interpretatively dense, soliciting the most active engagement possible from those who encountered them. This book is not a simple motif study of fountains in English Renaissance literature: it is, rather, an investigation of how each might work; of how literary fountains both inform and are informed by real fountains in early modern literature and culture. While its main focus remains the literature of the late 16th century, the book recognises that intertextuality and influence can be material as well as literary. It demonstrates that the ‘missing piece’ needed to make sense of a passage in a play, a poem, or a prose romance could be a fountain, a conduit, a well, or a reflecting pool, in general or even in a specific, known garden; it also considers portraits, textiles, jewellery, and other artefacts depicting fountains. Early modern English gardens and fountains are almost all lost, but to approach them through literary texts and objects is often to recover them in new ways. This book offers a new model for the exploration of the interconnectedness of texts, images, objects, and landscapes in early modern literature and culture.

The Face of Mammon studies the gold and silver coins of sixteenth‐century England as they are articulated in literary writing. Landreth argues that the coinage of the sixteenth century is a very different object from the money that we know—not only formally but conceptually, in that modern money is the object proper to a discourse, economics, that had not yet taken shape in the sixteenth century. Instead, a Renaissance coin is an arena contested among multiple early modern discourses that each seek to encompass it, such as ontology, ethics, and politics. The writers central to this study—among them Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Nashe, and Donne—use the coin to demonstrate the interdependence of these competing discourses as they converge upon a single, ubiquitous object. For these authors, an understanding of the world that humans make for themselves relies upon understanding how the material world is made. The small circumference of the coin brings these contending worlds into contact.

Scholarship on Middle English romance has done little to access the textual and bibliographical continuity of this remarkable literary tradition into the 16th century and its impact on Elizabethan works. To an even greater extent, Spenserian scholarship has failed to investigate the significant and complex debts The Faerie Queene owes to medieval native verse romance and Malory's Le Morte D'arthur. This book accordingly offers a comprehensive study of the impact of Middle English romance on The Faerie Queene. It employs the concept of memory, in which both Middle English romance writers and Spenser show specific interest, in building a sense of the thematic, generic, and cultural complexity of the native romance tradition. The memorial character of Middle English romance resides in its intertextuality and its frequent presentation of narrative events as historical and consequently the basis for a favourable sense of local or even national identity. Spenser's memories of native romance involve a more troubled engagement with that tradition of providential national history as well as an endeavour to see in pre-Reformation romance a prophetic and objective authority for Protestant belief.

The works of John Lyly, Robert Greene, and Thomas Lodge effectively established prose fiction in print at the end of the sixteenth century. In these extraordinary pamphlets, rhetorical sophistication is married with the outlandish adventures of young lovers, ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture combined. Fictions of Authorship re-examines these narratives in the light of their creators' developing understanding of the implications of authorship. Christened the ‘University Wits’ by an earlier generation of critics, Lyly, Greene, and Lodge were themselves displaced persons, attempting to shape careers in the new and often despised medium of print. Their attempts to demonstrate their learning while appealing to as wide a readership as possible led them to manufacture multiple authorial personae, and to reflect critically and sometimes outrageously on the works of their contemporaries and predecessors. Their texts are closely interwoven with each other. The authors competed to set new literary trends, often by overgoing the attempts of their peers. Apparently opposed literary modes were mixed, resulting in the placement of a persona like Lyly's Euphues in Philip Sidney's Arcadia. Meanwhile the relationship between writer and reader became increasingly complex, as the authors began to tailor their fictions to an ever expanding market. By providing close and comparative readings of these short fictions, Fictions of Authorship charts the authors' increasing disillusionment with the confines of romance, but also their popular success. As they assimilated and domesticated the experiments of writers like Harvey, Sidney and Spenser, they created an irreverent alternative canon of ‘English literature'.

This book is a study of Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena, an intemperate, comprehensive attack on religious radicalism and religious toleration, published in three parts in 1646. It explores the place of Gangraena within traditions of writing about heresy, and outlines the ways in which Edwards persistently smeared respectable Independents by associating them with more radical sectaries. Analysis of Edwards’s place within London Presbyterianism reveals the networks that enabled him to compile his book, and the accuracy of his accounts of religious divisions in London and beyond is assessed. The book discusses how Gangraena was produced and circulated, and shows how important it was within the print culture of the English Revolution — a struggle to which print was crucial. The various ways in which readers — contemporary and later — responded to the Edwards’s books are elucidated. The part played by Gangraena’s vivid polemic in encouraging polarization on the Parliament’s side as parliamentarians became divided over church government and political settlement once the civil war was won is highlighted, with particular emphasis on its connections with Presbyterian mobilizations and campaigns in London, and on the ways in which it encouraged hostility to the New Model Army. Readings of Gangraena from the later 17th century to the 20th century are covered in the final chapter.

Caught in the grip of savage religious war, fear of sorcery and the devil, and a deepening crisis of epistemological uncertainty, the intellectual climate of late Renaissance France (c. 1550–1610) was one of the most haunted in European history. And yet although existing studies of this climate have been attentive to the extensive body of writing on witchcraft and demons, they have had little to say of its ghosts. Combining techniques of literary criticism, intellectual history, and the history of the book, this study examines a large and hitherto unexplored corpus of ghost stories in late Renaissance French writing. These are shown to have arisen in a range of contexts far broader than was previously thought: whether in Protestant polemic against the doctrine of purgatory, humanist discussions of friendship, the growing ethnographic consciousness of New World ghost beliefs, or courtroom wrangles over haunted property. This book describes how, over the course of this period, we also begin to see emerge characteristics recognisable from modern ghost tales: the setting of the ‘haunted house’, the eroticised ghost, or the embodied revenant. Taking in prominent literary figures (Rabelais, Ronsard, Montaigne, d'Aubigné) as well as forgotten demonological tracts and sensationalist pamphlets, the book sheds new light on the beliefs, fears, and desires of a period on the threshold of modernity.

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf described fictions as ‘grossly material things’, rooted in their physical and economic contexts. This book takes Woolf’s brief hint as its starting point, asking who made the books of the English Renaissance, and what the material circumstances were in which they did so. It charts a new history of making and use, recovering the ways in which women shaped and altered the books of this crucial period, as co-authors, editors, translators, patrons, printers, booksellers, and readers. Drawing on evidence from a wide range of sources, including court records, letters, diaries, medical texts, and the books themselves, this book moves between the realms of manuscript and print, and tells the stories of literary, political, and religious texts from broadside ballads to plays, monstrous birth pamphlets to editions of the bible. In uncovering the neglected history of women’s textual labours, and the places and spaces in which women went about the business of making, the book offers a new perspective on the history of books and reading. Where Woolf believed that Shakespeare’s sister, had she existed, would have had no opportunity to pursue a literary career, the book paints a compelling picture of Judith Shakespeare’s varied job prospects, and promises to reshape our understanding of gendered authorship in the English Renaissance.