16th-century and Renaissance Literature : oso

Reforming Printing

Alexandra da Costa — 2012-09-20

Author:: Alexandra da Costa
ISBN:: 9780199653560
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199653560.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-09-20

This book documents the different ways by which Asian governments have been pursuing economic nationalism even as they have been integrating with the world economy. The book challenges the popular view that with globalization either the role of the state becomes redundant or that states are unable to purposefully intervene in the economy. The book argues that since most states pursue national interests, which largely include economic development, they work with national businesses and often intervene on their behalf to create internationally competitive industries. States are thus viewed as integral to capitalist development and economic nationalism today is neither theoretically nor empirically redundant. Contributors from Asia and elsewhere present wide-ranging arguments and evidence to counter the view that with globalization economic nationalism is passé. Instead, they demonstrate that states in Asia are active in shaping critical trade, investment, technological, industrial, and financial outcomes. Using interdisciplinary social science approaches that are also historically sensitive, this book addresses critically why and how states in select Asian countries continue to intervene in the economy in both familiar and novel ways. Countries covered include India, China, South Korea, Singapore, Japan, and the East Asian region as a whole. Together they illustrate why these states practice economic nationalism even as they enthusiastically embrace the generalized process of globalization through domestic reforms and liberalization.

The Quest for Cardenio

David Carnegie and Gary Taylor — 2012-09-20

Author:: DavidCarnegieProfessor of Theatre, Victoria University of WellingtonGaryTaylorGeorge Matthew Edgar Professor of English, Florida State University
ISBN:: 9780199641819
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, Shakespeare Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199641819.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-09-20

Celebrating the quatercenary of publication of the first translation of Don Quixote, this book addresses the ongoing debates about the lost Jacobean play The History of Cardenio, based on Cervantes, and commonly claimed to be by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. It also re-examines Lewis Theobald’s 1727 adaptation Double Falsehood. Offering new research findings based on a range of approaches — new historical evidence, employment of advanced computer-aided stylometric tests for authorship attribution, early modern theatre history, literary and theatrical analysis, study of the source material from Cervantes, early modern relationships between Spanish and English culture, and recent theatrical productions of both Double Falsehood and modern expansions of it — this book throws new light on whether the play deserves a place in Shakespeare’s canon and/or Fletcher’s. The book establishes the dates, venues, and audience for two performances of Cardenio by the King’s Men in 1613, and identifies for the first time evidence about the play in seventeenth-century documents. It also provides much new evidence and analysis of Double Falsehood, which Theobald claimed was based on previously unknown manuscripts of a play by Shakespeare. His enemies, especially Pope, denied the Shakespeare attribution. Debate has continued ever since. While some contributors advocate sceptical caution, new research provides stronger evidence than ever before that a lost Fletcher/Shakespeare Cardenio can be discerned within Double Falsehood. This book explores the Cardenio problem by reviving or adapting Double Falsehood, and demonstrates that such practical theatre work throws valuable light on some of the problems that have obstructed traditional scholarly approaches.

'Grossly Material Things'

Helen Smith — 2012-09-20

Author:: Helen Smith
ISBN:: 9780199651580
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199651580.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-09-20

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.

Drama and the Transfer of Power in Renaissance England

Martin Wiggins — 2012-09-20

Author:: Martin Wiggins
ISBN:: 9780199650590
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, Drama, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199650590.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-09-20

The state is at its most volatile when supreme power changes hands. This book studies five such moments of transfer in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, from Henry VIII to the English Revolution, with particular attention to the political function and agency of drama in smoothing the transition. Masques and civic pageants served as an art form by which incoming authority could declare its power, and subjects could express their willing subordination to the new regime. The book contains vivid case studies of these dramatic works, some of which have never before been identified, and the circumstances for which they were written: the use of London street theatre in 1535 to promote Henry VIII's arrogation of Royal Supremacy; the aggressively Protestant court masque of 1559 which marked the accession of Elizabeth I, and the censorship which resulted when the same mode of dramatic discourse spread to more plebeian stages; the court masques and progress entertainments of James I's initial year on the English throne, through which the new Stuart dynasty asserted its legitimacy and individual courtiers made their bids for influence; and the formal coronation entry to London, furnished with dramatic pageants, which London paid for but Charles I refused to undertake. The final chapter describes how, in 1642, a very different incoming regime planned to ignore drama altogether, until some surprisingly contingent circumstances forced its hand.

Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting

Chris Stamatakis — 2012-05-24

Author:: Chris Stamatakis
ISBN:: 9780199644407
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, Poetry
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199644407.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-05-24

This study reappraises Sir Thomas Wyatt (c.1504-1542) as a poetic innovator from the literary avant-garde of early Tudor England. It discusses Wyatt’s self-conscious reflections on the writing process, and his awareness of how words are turned in new directions over the course of a text’s production, transmission and reception. Where previous studies have aligned Wyatt’s poetry with his courtly biography, this book examines the reading practices of his Tudor audiences and editors, and considers the types of textuality shown by the manuscript collections of his verse. By setting Wyatt’s writings in the context of sixteenth-century theories of language and literary practice, and by drawing on early Tudor educational treatises, rhetorical handbooks, and manuals of courtly behaviour, this monograph examines the rhetoric of rewriting that colours Wyatt’s texts. Repeatedly, his writings invite readers to ‘turn’ or perform the word—to draw out something that lies inert within it. These rescriptive habits often serve to sustain an intimate dialogue between writers and readers. Special attention is paid to the materiality of Wyatt’s texts: the margins around and the interlinear spaces within his poems are regularly filled with new text, supplied by Wyatt himself or by his copyists, editors and readers. Chapters are devoted to the types of rewriting found in each of Wyatt’s main genres: Plutarchian essays; forensic apologias; psalm paraphrases; letters and verse epistles, and lyrics or ‘balets’. Two appendices offer further detail about patterns of manuscript transmission. Throughout, this study argues that reading often shaded into writing (and rewriting) in the early sixteenth century, and that acts of apparent copying often transformed texts inventively.

The Face of Mammon

David Landreth — 2012-05-24

Author:: David Landreth
ISBN:: 9780199773299
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, Shakespeare Studies, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199773299.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-05-24

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.

Ben Jonson: Poetry and Architecture

A. W. Johnson — 2012-03-22

Author:: A. W. Johnson
ISBN:: 9780198117599
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198117599.001.0001
Published in print:: 1995
Published Online:: 2012-03-22

Although Ben Jonson's association with architecture is well known, comparatively little research has been devoted to the influence of architectural thinking on his literary work. This book sets out to explore the possibilities suggested by such an interrelationship. Using annotated architectural volumes surviving from Jonson's library as well as his published works, it surveys the evidence for Jonson's knowledge of, and theoretical agreement with, the architectural principles enunciated in the ‘De Architectura Libri Decem’ of the Roman architect Vitruvius. The book goes on to examine Jonson's poetry and the early masques in the light of his interest in architecture, finding in them forms that suggest a much closer proximity between Jonson's and Inigo Jones' aesthetic in the early years of the Jacobean period than has formerly been supposed. It argues that Jonson employed a form of literary Vitruvianism which was a potent force in the shaping of the early masques of his Catholic period, and was to remain an active influence on poetic composition throughout the succeeding century.

Virginia Woolf and the Literature of the English Renaissance

Alice Fox — 2011-10-03

Author:: Alice Fox
ISBN:: 9780198129882
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198129882.001.0001
Published in print:: 1990
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book examines the profound effect, on a major critic and novelist of the twentieth century, of the period of English literature's greatest glory, the Renaissance. Beginning in the sixteenth century, with the poems and plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and with prose writings such as Hakluyt's Voyages, and continuing through the great lyric poets of the seventeenth century, the Renaissance influenced every aspect of Virginia Woolf's work. All her available writing – letters, diaries, reading notes, drafts of essays, novels, and feminist polemic – are explored in this study of Virginia Woolf's varied reactions to the period, and its impact on her fiction and criticism. Each of the novels, in particular, is shown to integrate some element of Renaissance literature in its language, characterization, and often structure, enriching the fiction.

Villon's Last Will

Tony Hunt — 2011-10-03

Author:: Tony Hunt
ISBN:: 9780198159148
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, Poetry, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198159148.001.0001
Published in print:: 1996
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Villon studies have traditionally emphasized the documentary and didactic value of the Testament, concentrating on problems of historical referentiality. It is assumed that the work has a significant autobiographical element and that it has much to tell us about life in fifteenth-century Paris. The Testament has thus been avidly exploited by historians of the period and its interest as a document is well-established. This study concentrates exclusively on the textual strategies of the Testament, in particular on rhetorical techniques involving dialogue and irony. The book views the Testament as ironic from start to finish, and the main objects of the irony are identified as language and authority. The dissolution of meaning, authority, and even authorial identity are seen to be the principal results of the poet's rhetoric.

The Uses of the Canon

Howard Felperin — 2011-10-03

Author:: Howard Felperin
ISBN:: 9780198122654
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, Criticism/Theory, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122654.001.0001
Published in print:: 1992
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The critical school of ‘new historicism’ is very much at the centre of contemporary debates on literary studies and theory. Much ‘new historicist’ writing has focused on Renaissance texts, and this book is a timely exploration of that connection and its significance for ‘English’ as a whole. This book subjects many of the most challenging claims of ‘new historicism’ to rigorous analysis, distinguishes sharply between its American and British versions, and probes the causes and consequences of its politicization of literary studies. The philosophical as well as political issues central to current debates are examined and the uses served by the canonical texts at their centre analysed within a broad cultural and historical perspective. This searching reconsideration of contemporary critical theory and practice yields fresh readings of a number of classic texts — including those of William Shakespeare's Sonnets, Thomas More's Utopia, John Donne's poetry, and Robert Conrad's Heart of Darkness — as well as a deepened understanding of the complex and changing functions of the canon itself.

Time's Purpled Masquers

Alastair Fowler — 2011-10-03

Author:: Alastair Fowler
ISBN:: 9780198183402
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183402.001.0001
Published in print:: 1996
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book explores the extraordinary prominence of astronomical imagery in Renaissance literature. Although the stars were important astrologically, this is at best a partial explanation for the popularity of such imagery, and the impact of astronomical discoveries (particularly their implications for stellification, or translation to the stars) is also an important factor. Seventeenth-century culture was both religious and materialistic and the literature of the period shows a great variety of negotiated reconciliations of the two.

Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton

Swapan Chakravorty — 2011-10-03

Author:: Swapan Chakravorty
ISBN:: 9780198182665
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, Drama, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198182665.001.0001
Published in print:: 1996
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

A comprehensive reassessment of Thomas Middleton’s cultural importance, this book examines both the writer’s dramatic and non-dramatic texts to show how he laid bare the complicit interests at work behind assumptions about sex, morality, society, and politics in late feudal culture. Middleton’s importance has long been acknowledged in the modern theatre, but academic criticism still seems distracted by questions regarding his morals and ‘Puritanism’. The book argues again the reductivism of such enquiries, and demonstrates the complexity behind the texts’ disengagement from received ideological premises and generic formulae. Combining close reading with lively historical analysis, this book reveals Middleton to have been a pioneer of politically self-conscious theatre. Full of insight, this study brings alive the plays’ meanings by engaging with the social, political, and cultural concerns of Middleton’s day.

Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640

H. R. Woudhuysen — 2011-10-03

Author:: H. R. Woudhuysen
ISBN:: 9780198129660
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198129660.001.0001
Published in print:: 1996
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This is the first modern study of the production and circulation of manuscripts during the English Renaissance. The book examines the relationship between manuscript and print, looks at people who lived by their pens, and surveys authorial and scribal manuscripts, paying particular attention to the copying of verse, plays, and scholarly works by hand. It investigates the professional production of manuscripts for sale by scribes such as Ralph Crane and Richard Robinson. The second part of the book examines Sir Philip Sydney's works in the context of research conducted for this book, discussing all of Sidney's important manuscripts, and seeking to assess his part in the circulation of his works and his role in the promotion of a scribal culture. A detailed examination of the manuscripts and early prints of his poems, his Arcadias, and of Astrophil and Stella shed new light on their composition, evolution, and dissemination, as well as on Sidney's friends and admirers.

Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn

Ann Moss — 2011-10-03

Author:: Ann Moss
ISBN:: 9780199249879
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199249879.001.0001
Published in print:: 2003
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book provides an entirely new look at an era of radical change in the history of West European thought, the period between 1480 and 1540, mainly in France and Germany. The lens for this novel perspective is the Latin language shift, from the Latin idiom in which late medieval intellectual inquiry was conducted to the reinvented classical idiom aggressively promoted and finally imposed by the humanists. This is not a narrow philological study of language change. The book's main thesis is that the Latin language turn was not only concurrent with other aspects of change, but was a fundamental instrument in reconfiguring horizons of thought, reformulating paradigms of argument, and rearticulating the relationship between fiction and truth. The book examines particularly crucial documents by a few major figures, but it is original in the way it brings to the fore the contributions of secondary writers who rarely find their way into general histories of the period, but who are important markers of stages in the shift that the book is charting, and hence of the overall change that shift helped to engineer. Topics in this book include the history of Latin dictionaries and phrase-books; discourses of theological debate and popular piety; the changing ground-rules for religious disputation; early ventures in literary criticism; the emergence of personal subjectivity and a new religious sensibility; and the posthumous fortunes and misfortunes of a major saint.

Proportional Form in the Sonnets of the Sidney Circle

Tom W. N. Parker — 2011-10-03

Author:: Tom W. N. Parker
ISBN:: 9780198184430
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, Poetry, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184430.001.0001
Published in print:: 1998
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The structure of Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella is governed by a distinctive and complex set of proportions, found also in the sonnet sequences of Fulke Greville and Robert Sidney written under its influence. For all these works to be ordered around the same set of proportions indicates a remarkable degree of careful planning and precise execution, and in turn affects their meaning. The tremendous effort of constructing the sequences according to intricate mathematical patterns suggests that the patterns themselves held a particular significance, one that requires investigation for the light it throws on these authors' intentions in composition. This study reveals cosmological ideas implicit in the form of Astrophil and Stella, ideas which not only undermine much of the romantic and biographically-based criticism of the sequence, but call into question how we should read the sonnet sequences that were influenced by Sidney, both within and beyond his immediate circle. As well as those of Greville and Robert Sidney, the book looks in detail at the sonnet sequences of Giordano Bruno, Mary Wroth, Henry Constable, Barnabe Barnes, and Michael Drayton, to determine the extent to which the sonnet vogue of the 1590s incorporated Sidney's broader cosmological concerns.

Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought

Ann Moss — 2011-10-03

Author:: Ann Moss
ISBN:: 9780198159087
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198159087.001.0001
Published in print:: 1996
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This is a study of the Renaissance commonplace-book. Commonplace-books were the information-organizers of Early Modern Europe, notebooks of quotations methodically arranged for easy retrieval. From their first introduction to the rudiments of Latin to the specialized studies of leisure reading of their later years, the pupils of humanist schools were trained to use commonplace-books, which formed an immensely important element of Renaissance education. The common-place book mapped and resourced Renaissance culture's moral thinking, its accepted strategies of argumentation, its rhetoric, and its deployment of knowledge. This book investigates the commonplace-book's medieval antecedents, its methodology and use as promulgated by its humanist advocates, its varieties as exemplified in its printed manifestations, and the reasons for its gradual decline in the 17th century. The book covers the Latin culture of Early Modern Europe and its vernacular counterparts and continuations, particularly in France.

Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance

David Norbrook — 2011-10-03

Author:: David Norbrook
ISBN:: 9780199247189
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, Poetry
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199247189.001.0001
Published in print:: 2002
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This edition of this text provides an extensive introduction which gives an overview of developments in methodology and research since the first edition of this book was published in 1984, responds to some criticisms, and points the way to further inquiry. Footnotes have been updated to take account of the current state of knowledge, and a chronological table has been provided for ease of reference. The book brings out the range and adventurousness of early modern poets' engagements with the public world. The first part of the book establishes the more radical currents of thought shaping Renaissance poetry: civic humanism and apocalyptic Protestantism. The book also shows how such leading Elizabethan poets as Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, often seen as conservative monarchists, responded powerfully though sometimes ambivalently to more radical ideas. A chapter on Fulke Greville shows how that ambivalence reaches an extreme in some remarkable poetry.

The Poet's Odyssey

George Hugo Tucker — 2011-10-03

Author:: George Hugo Tucker
ISBN:: 9780198158653
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, European Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198158653.001.0001
Published in print:: 1990
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This title traces the artistic development of one of the major poets of the French Renaissance, Joachim Du Bellay (1522–60), showing how he differed from his contemporaries (in particular his great rival Ronsard) and the importance of his move to Rome in 1553. In this unique study of Du Bellay and his Antiquitez de Rome, Dr Tucker makes this complex sonnet sequence more accessible to the modern reader, highlighting its rich intertextual framework in Classical, neo-Latin and vernacular literature. He also redresses a critical imbalance. Du Bellay and his immediate contemporaries identified the Antiquitez, rather than the Regrets, as his major work. The author demonstrates its central importance within the poet's production, and further situates it within a whole tradition of reflection upon Rome and her destiny from Classical times onwards. The Antiquitez is also seen to represent the ultimate step in the development of a poetic style and sensibility in diametric opposition to Ronsard's. Finally, the author also relates the collection to the literary and scholarly context of Du Bellay's Rome.

Pilgrimage and Narrative in the French Renaissance

Wes Williams — 2011-10-03

Author:: Wes Williams
ISBN:: 9780198159407
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, European Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198159407.001.0001
Published in print:: 1998
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book studies the place and meaning of pilgrimage in European Renaissance culture. It makes new material available and also provides fresh perspectives on canonical writers such as Rabelais, Montaigne, Marguerite de Navarre, Erasmus, Petrarch, Augustine, and Gregory of Nyssa. The book undertakes a bold exploration of various interlinking themes in Renaissance pilgrimage: the location, representation, and politics of the sacred, together with the experience of the everyday, the extraordinary, the religious, and the represented. It also examines the literary formation of the subjective narrative voice in the texts examined, and its relationship to the rituals and practices the book reviews. This book aims both to gain a sense of the shapes of pilgrim experience in the Renaissance and to question the ways in which recent theoretical and historical research in the area has determined the differences between fictional worlds and the real.

The Palace of Secrets

Neil Kenny — 2011-10-03

Author:: Neil Kenny
ISBN:: 9780198158622
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198158622.001.0001
Published in print:: 1991
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

During the Renaissance, very divergent conceptions of knowledge were debated. Dominant among these was encyclopaedism, which treated knowledge as an ordered and unified circle of learning in which branches were logically related to each other. By contrast, writers like Montaigne saw human knowledge as an inherently unsystematic and subjective flux. This book explores the tension between these two views by examining specific areas such as theories of knowledge, uses of genre, and the role of fiction in philosophical texts. Examples are drawn from numerous 16th- and 17th-century texts but focus particularly on the polymath Béroalde de Verville, whose work graphically illustrates these two competing conceptions of knowledge, since he gradually abandoned encyclopaedism. Hitherto Béroalde has been mainly known for the extraordinary and notorious Moyen de parvenir; this book provides a detailed study of the whole range of his work, both fictional and learned. The book straddles literary and intellectual history, and indeed it demonstrates that the division between the two has little meaning in Renaissance terms. The intellectual conflicts which it explores have significance for the history of thought right up to the Enlightenment.

The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing

J. B. Bullen — 2011-10-03

Author:: J. B. Bullen
ISBN:: 9780198128885
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198128885.001.0001
Published in print:: 1994
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Few people who use the word ‘Renaissance’ today realize that it is a comparatively recent historical idea, or that it is a ‘myth’ or story constructed by writers to explain the past. This innovative and wide-ranging book traces the genesis of that myth back to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The seeds of the idea are to be found in Voltaire, but the book shows how it was taken up by French art historians and Gothic revivalists as an important element in the acrimonious political and religious debates with French historiography. The book’s main focus, however, is on English intellectual life and the ways in which writers like Augustus Welby Pugin, John Ruskin, Robert Browning, and George Eliot took up the terms established by Victor Hugo, Francis Alexis Rio, and Jules Michelet in France and adapted a reading of fifteenth-century Italy to suit the special conditions of Victorian England. Ultimately, in the work of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, Walter Horatio Pater, and John Addington Symonds the Renaissance became a key factor in relating ethics and aesthetics, and in its late nineteenth-century phase, the myth figures prominently in an important discussion about the relationship between power, authority, and individualism.

Milton's Angels

Joad Raymond — 2011-10-03

Author:: Joad Raymond
ISBN:: 9780199560509
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, Milton Studies, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199560509.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Milton's Paradise Lost is a poem about angels. It is told by and of angels; it relies upon their conflicts, communications, and miscommunications. They are the creatures of Milton's narrative, through which he sets the Fall of humankind against a cosmic background. Milton's angels are real beings, and the stories he tells about them rely on his understanding of what they were and how they acted. While he was unique in his imaginative rendering of angels, he was not alone in writing about them. Several early modern English poets wrote epics that explore the actions of and grounds of knowledge about angels. Angels were intimately linked to theories of representation, and theology could be a creative force. Natural philosophers and theologians too found it interesting or necessary to explore angel doctrine. Angels did not disappear in Reformation theology: though centuries of Catholic traditions were stripped away, Protestants used them in inventive ways, adapting tradition to new doctrines and to shifting perceptions of the world. Angels continued to inhabit all kinds of writing, and shape the experience and understanding of the world. This book explores the fate of angels in Reformation Britain, and shows how and why Paradise Lost is a poem about angels that is both shockingly literal and sublimely imaginative.

Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance 1545–1625

Andrew Hadfield — 2011-10-03

Author:: Andrew Hadfield
ISBN:: 9780199233656
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199233656.001.0001
Published in print:: 2007
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

What was the purpose of representing foreign lands for writers in the English Renaissance? This book argues that writers often used their works as vehicles to reflect on the state of contemporary English politics, particularly their own lack of representation in public institutions. Sometimes such analyses took the form of displaced allegories, whereby writers contrasted the advantages enjoyed, or disadvantages suffered, by foreign subjects with the political conditions of Tudor and Stuart England. Elsewhere, more often in explicitly colonial writings, authors meditated on the problems of government when faced with the possibly violent creation of a new society. If Venice was commonly held up as a beacon of republican liberty which England would do well to imitate, the fear of tyrannical Catholic Spain was ever present—inspiring and haunting much of the colonial literature from 1580 onwards. This book examines fictional and non-fictional writings, illustrating both the close connections between the two made by early modern readers and the problems involved in the usual assumption that we can make sense of the past with the categories available to us. The book explores representations of Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the Far East, selecting pertinent examples rather than attempting to embrace a total coverage. It also offers fresh readings of Shakespeare, Marlowe, More, Lyly, Hakluyt, Harriot, Nashe, and others.

Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance

Martin L. McLaughlin — 2011-10-03

Author:: Martin L. McLaughlin
ISBN:: 9780198158998
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, European Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198158998.001.0001
Published in print:: 1996
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The concept of imitation — the imitation of classical and vernacular texts — was the dominant critical and creative principle in Italian Renaissance literature. Linked to modern notions of intertextuality, imitation has been much discussed recently, but this is the first book to offer a comprehensive survey of Italian Renaissance ideas on imitation, covering both theory and practice, and both Latin and vernacular works. The author charts the emergence of the idea, in vague terms in Dante, then in Petrarch's more precise reconstruction of classical imitatio, before concentrating on the major writers of the Quattrocento. Some chapters deal with key humanists, such as Lorenzo Valla and Pico della Mirandola, while others discuss each of the major vernacular figures in the debate, including Leonardo Bruni, Leon Battista Alberti, Angelo Poliziano, and Pietro Bembo. For the first time scholars and students have an up-to-date account of the development of Ciceronianism in both Latin and the vernacular before 1530, and the book provides fresh insights into some of the canonical works of Italian literature from Dante to Bembo.

The Literary Culture of the Reformation

Brian Cummings — 2011-10-03

Author:: Brian Cummings
ISBN:: 9780198187356
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198187356.001.0001
Published in print:: 2002
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book examines the place of literature in the Reformation, considering both how arguments about biblical meaning and literary interpretation influenced the new theology, and how developments in theology in turn influenced literary practices. Part One focuses on Northern Europe, reconsidering the relationship between Renaissance humanism (especially Erasmus) and religious ideas (especially Luther). Parts Two and Three examine Tudor and early Stuart England. Part Two describes the rise of vernacular theology and Protestant culture in relation to fundamental changes in the understanding of the English language. Part Three studies English religious poetry (including Donne, Herbert, and, in an Epilogue, Milton) in the wake of these changes. Bringing together genres and styles of writing that are normally kept apart (poems, sermons, treatises, commentaries), the author offers a re-evaluation of the literary production of this intensely verbal and controversial period.

Journeymen in Murder

Martin Wiggins — 2011-10-03

Author:: Martin Wiggins
ISBN:: 9780198112280
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, Drama, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112280.001.0001
Published in print:: 1991
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Torture and murder are the sort of dirty jobs that rich and powerful men have always considered beneath them. In sixteenth and seventeenth-century English drama, they often employed others to take care of that side of the business of being a villain. Such characters developed from being minor but memorable Elizabethan bit-parts into key figures in some of the greatest Jacobean tragedies: The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Changeling. This book shows how assassins, embroiled though they are in violence and intrigue, often served to address issues of political and moral concern in the period, such as the dangers of tyranny, or the corrupting power of money. The book's scope is broad, covering the entire corpus of English Renaissance drama, and it offers detailed critical consideration of many plays, including several that are here studied in depth for the first time. Throughout, the achievement of major dramatists is placed in the context of other writers' use of similar material, illuminating the ways in which they create their own distinctive and disturbing effects by using playgoers' prior experience of the character.

Issues of Death

Michael Neill — 2011-10-03

Author:: Michael Neill
ISBN:: 9780198183860
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, Drama, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183860.001.0001
Published in print:: 1997
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Tragedy was one of the principal instruments through which the culture of early modern England imagined the encounter with mortality. The essays in this book approach the theatrical reinvention of Death from three perspectives. Those in Part 1 explore Death as a trope of apocalypse – a moment of unveiling or discovery that is figured both in the fearful nakedness of the Danse Macabre and in the shameful ‘openings’ enacted in the new theatres of anatomy. In Part 2, the book explores the psychological and affective consequences of tragedy's fiercely end-driven narrative in a number of plays wherein a longing for narrative closure is pitched against a particularly intense dread of ending. The imposition of an end is often figured as an act of writerly violence, committed by the author or his dramatic surrogate. Finally, Part 3 focuses on the way tragedy articulates its challenge to the undifferentiating power of death through conventions and motifs borrowed from the funereal arts. Analyses of major plays by Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare, John Webster, Thomas Middleton, and John Ford explore the relation of tragedy to the macabre tradition, to the apocalyptic displays of the anatomy theatre, and to the spectacular arts of funeral.

In Defence of Rhetoric

Brian Vickers — 2011-10-03

Author:: Brian Vickers
ISBN:: 9780198117919
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198117919.001.0001
Published in print:: 1989
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Setting out to reinstate rhetoric, this book opens with an overview of the rhetorical system as developed in classical times. It surveys and analyses material from Aristotle to Plato through the Renaissance to the modern novel and the critical theories of Roman Jakobson and Paul de Man.

The Faerie Queene and Middle English Romance: The Matter of Just Memory

Andrew King — 2011-10-03

Author:: Andrew King
ISBN:: 9780198187226
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198187226.001.0001
Published in print:: 2000
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

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.

Epic Romance

Colin Burrow — 2011-10-03

Author:: Colin Burrow
ISBN:: 9780198117940
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, Poetry, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198117940.001.0001
Published in print:: 1993
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book presents a comprehensive view of the epic tradition from Homer, through Virgil, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, and the host of minor writers who helped create the idiom within which these writers worked, to the idiom within which these writers worked, to the individual authors in historical context link to develop a powerful explanation of how and why the epic changed from Homer to Milton. The book shows how the romance hero, whose prime motives are love and pity, emerged from a sequence of reinterpretations of Homer that runs from Virgil's Aeneid and its medieval redactions to Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. Relating the emergence of the romance hero to the digressive, decentred form of romance, the book explores how later writers sought to control the digressive energies of the romance hero and to create a language and form of heroism more like those of classical epic. This analysis leads to a fresh account of the way in which Renaissance writers responded to, and moved tentatively towards, the writing of the past. Arguing against the view that Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, and Milton were engaged in a battle for mastery over their predecessors, the book reveals how they transformed interpretations of past epic in order to draw closer to the narrative forms of their classical forebears.

England's Helicon

Hester Lees-Jeffries — 2011-10-03

Author:: Hester Lees-Jeffries
ISBN:: 9780199230785
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230785.001.0001
Published in print:: 2007
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

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.

Elizabethan Fictions

R. W. Maslen — 2011-10-03

Author:: R. W. Maslen
ISBN:: 9780198119913
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198119913.001.0001
Published in print:: 1997
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book argues that English writers of prose fiction from the 1550s to the 1570s produced some of the most daringly innovative publications of the sixteenth century. Through close examination of a number of key texts, from William Baldwin's satirical fable Beware the Cat, to George Gascoigne's mock-romance The Adventures of Master F.J. and John Lyly's immensely popular Euphues books, he sets out to demonstrate the courage as well as the considerable skills which these undervalued authors brought to their work. They wrote at a time when the Elizabethan censorship system was growing increasingly rigorous in response to the perceived threat of infiltration from Catholic Europe, yet they chose to write books of a kind that was specifically associated with Catholic Italy and France. Their topics were the secrets, lies, and acts of petty treason which vitiated the private lives of the contemporary ruling classes, and their vigorous experiments with style and form marked out prose fiction for years to come as shifty and perilous literary territory. These writers presented themselves as masters of the arts of duplicity, talents which made them eminently suitable for employment as informers or spies, whether for the government or for its most deadly ideological opponents. Their sophisticated narratives of sexual intrigue had a profound effect on the development of the complex poetry and drama that sprung up towards the end of the century, as well as on the modern novel.

Edmund Spenser's Irish Experience

Andrew Hadfield — 2011-10-03

Author:: Andrew Hadfield
ISBN:: 9780198183457
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183457.001.0001
Published in print:: 1997
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book argues that Edmund Spenser's perception and fragmented representation of Ireland shadows the whole narrative of his major work, The Faerie Queene, traditionally regarded as one of the finest achievements of the English Renaissance. The poem has often been read in specifically English contexts but, as the author argues, demands to be read in terms of England's expanding colonial hegemony within the British Isles and the ensuing fear that such national ambition would actually lead to the destruction of England's post-Reformation legacy. Spenser should be seen less as an English writer and more as a new English writer in Ireland, his prose and poetry expressing the hopes and fears of his class. Where A View of the Present State of Ireland attempts to provide a violent political solution to England's Irish problem, The Faerie Queene exposes the apocalyptic fear that there may be no solution at all. The book contains an analysis of Spenser's life on the Munster plantation, readings of the political rhetoric and antiquarian discourse of A View of the Present State of Ireland, and three chapters that argue the case that the apparently Anglocentric allegory of The Faerie Queene reveals a land gradually, but clearly, transformed into its Irish other. Spenser emerges from this study as a writer whose experience in Ireland rendered him implacably opposed to the vacillations of his English monarch.

Dunbar the Makar

Priscilla Bawcutt — 2011-10-03

Author:: Priscilla Bawcutt
ISBN:: 9780198129639
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, Early and Medieval Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198129639.001.0001
Published in print:: 1992
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Dunbar's genius has been recognised not only by critics but by modern poets such as Auden and Eliot. This critical study examines Dunbar's view of himself as a poet, or ‘makar’, and the way he handles various poetic genres. New emphasis is placed on the petitions, or begging-poems, and their use for poetic introspection. There is also a particularly full study of Dunbar's under-valued comic poems, and of the modes most congenial to him: notably parody; irony; ‘flyting’, or invective; and black dream-fantasy. The author takes account of recent scholarship on Dunbar and also the literary traditions available to him, both in Latin and the vernaculars, including ‘popular’ and alliterative poetry as well as that of Chaucer and his followers. In her account of the poetry, she contests the over-simple and reductive views purveyed by some critics that Dunbar is primarily a moralist, or no more than a skilled virtuoso.

Dublin's Trade in Books 1550–1800

M. Pollard — 2011-10-03

Author:: M. Pollard
ISBN:: 9780198184096
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184096.001.0001
Published in print:: 1990
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The Irish book trade has hitherto been viewed as a footnote to the English trade. This book studies Irish bookselling practices, particularly those of Dublin. The study draws on a wealth of material — daybooks, imprints, advertisements, and the books themselves — to build up a detailed picture of the fortunes and practices of Irish bookselling. The English book trade bore heavily on the Irish, especially in the areas of legal restraints and censorship. Interestingly, there are documented instances of book-smuggling to Britain. But the study does not concentrate solely on relations with London: it looks at the market at home, the structure and economic background to the Dublin trade, and at what books were published and for whom. In particular, it examines the significant expansion of the book trade during the 18th century, and surveys imports and exports for the first time.

Distinguo: Reading Montaigne Differently

Steven Rendall — 2011-10-03

Author:: Steven Rendall
ISBN:: 9780198151807
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, European Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198151807.001.0001
Published in print:: 1992
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Most modern critics (even those who have emphasized the ‘evolution’ of Montaigne's ideas) have sought to explain away the contradictions and incoherences of Montaigne's Essais. This book investigates the role of these internal differences in the opinions recorded, in voices and modes of discourse, in logical levels, in conceptions of writing and of reading, through a series of careful, lucid readings of selected passages from the Essais. The author tracks their operation in Montaigne's text and shows how Montaigne's writing constantly recontextualizes his own discourse (through his practice of interpolating new material in successive editions and adding new chapters) as well as that of other authors (through quotation, paraphrase, commentary). Rather than merely negative features, the author argues that such ‘differences’ are essential to a practice of writing that both defines and challenges a notion of ‘unity’, and can be seen as an uneasy and disturbing element related to a historical shift from earlier ways of controlling meaning, to one based on ‘the author function’.

Politics and the Paul's Cross Sermons, 1558–1642

Mary Morrissey — 2011-09-22

Author:: Mary Morrissey
ISBN:: 9780199571765
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199571765.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-09-22

Scholars do not contest that English Reformation culture centred on ‘the word preached’; that before the advent of newsbooks, sermons were the primary means available for shaping public opinion; or that the sermons of men like Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne were valued as literary works of the highest order. Throughout the Reformation period, England’s most important public pulpit was Paul’s Cross, which stood in the churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. This book offers a detailed history of the Paul’s Cross sermons from the reign of Elizabeth I until the destruction of the pulpit under Charles I. It explains the arrangement for the sermons’ delivery and the tensions between the different authorities (the royal government, the bishops of London, and the Corporation of London) who controlled them. The increasing role that the Paul’s Cross sermons played in London’s civic culture after the Reformation is discussed, and an account is given of the narrowing of the sermons’ audience in the years preceding the English Civil War. This book explores early modern English homiletics, so that preachers’ adaptation of sermon genres to suit sermons on religious controversies or on political anniversaries (such as 5 November) can be described. The relationship between the different textual forms in which sermons are preserved is considered. This is an interdisciplinary study of England’s most significant sermon series, and will be of interest to early modern historians and literary critics.

Monsters and their Meanings in Early Modern Culture

Wes Williams — 2011-09-22

Author:: Wes Williams
ISBN:: 9780199577026
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, European Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199577026.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-09-22

To call something ‘monstrous’ in the mid-sixteenth century is, more often than not, to wonder at its enormous size: it is to call to mind something like a whale; by the late seventeenth century ‘monstrous’ is more likely to denote hidden intentions, unspoken desires. Several shifts are at work in this word history, as in what Shakespeare's Othello terms the ‘mighty magic’ of stories about monsters. These shifts can be described in a number of ways. The clearest and most compelling is the migration of monsters from natural history to moral philosophy, from the margins of maps to a central role in the drama of human motivation, of sexual and political identity. A (richly illustrated) meditation on monsters of various descriptions, from natural phenomena to members of the same human family, this study offers a new account of the place of monsters in the early modern imagination. Literature makes a particular kind of sense when studied in relation to what anthropologists call ‘thick descriptions’ of context. This study relates the peculiar questions and insights proposed by literary writing to those produced by historians of science, of religious conflict (this was a time of civil war and persistent rebellion), as of printing, philosophy, natural history, and medicine. At its centre are readings of major works of early modern French literature — from Rabelais to Racine, from the 1540s to the early 1690s — in which monsters do meaningful work. From these focal points, digressions are undertaken through the archives of the history of medicine as of politics, the visual representation of monsters, and the reception of classical antiquity. Each new chapter establishes the contours of the intellectual context within which change takes place, and so leads us to better understand the issues and questions raised throughout. Charting a process of sustained and distinctive transformation, this book seeks to understand the cultural work performed by monsters in early modern Europe: monsters in books, in paintings, onstage, and in the street; in the study, as in the state, and the self.

The Machine in the Text

Howard Marchitello — 2011-09-22

Author:: Howard Marchitello
ISBN:: 9780199608058
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, Shakespeare Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608058.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-09-22

The reassessment of the ‘two cultures’ of art and science has been one of the most urgent areas of research in literary and historical studies over the last fifteen years. The early modern period is an ideal site for such an investigation precisely because of the pre-disciplinary nature of its science. The central focus of this book falls upon the wide-ranging practices of what will come to be called “science” prior to its separation into a realm of its own, one of the legacies of the renaissance and its encounter with modernity. This book offers a new critical examination of the complex and mutually-sustaining relationship between literature and science—and, more broadly, art and nature—in the early modern period. Redefining literature and art as knowledge-producing practices and, at the same time, recasting the practices of emergent science as imaginative and creative and literary, this book argues for a more complex understanding of early modern culture in which the scientific can be said to produce the literary and the literary can be said to produce the scientific. Drawing upon recent work in the field of science studies and focusing on selected works of major writers of the period—including Bacon, Donne, Galileo, and Shakespeare, among others—this book recovers a range of early modern discursive and cultural practices for a new account of the linked histories of science and literature.

Donne's Augustine

Katrin Ettenhuber — 2011-09-22

Author:: Katrin Ettenhuber
ISBN:: 9780199609109
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609109.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-09-22

The poet and preacher John Donne (1572–1631) was one of the most influential authors of early modern England. This book examines his response to an iconic figure in the history of Western religious thought: Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430). This book argues that Renaissance culture saw not only a revival of the classics, but was equally indebted to the intellectual and literary legacy of the Church Fathers. The study recovers an Augustinian tradition of interpretation which permeated the religious world of the period, but which has until now been largely overlooked. It presents a comprehensive re-evaluation of Donne's writings, ranging from the poems to less familiar prose works, situates him carefully in the poetic, intellectual, and political contexts which frame his works, and engages with recent developments in both literary and historical studies. This book is the first sustained study of Donne's reading practices, and of the theological sources which shaped his thought. It discovers a range of medieval and early modern texts which transformed the imagination of literary writers in the period but which have been neglected so far: devotional manuals, Scripture commentaries, and religious commonplace books (often in Latin). The study pays close attention to the intellectual and political conditions which informed the reception of Augustine's works, and offers detailed readings of Donne's texts which illuminate the literary aspects of his patristic heritage.

Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France

Timothy Chesters — 2011-01-01

Author:: Timothy Chesters
ISBN:: 9780199599806
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, European Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199599806.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2011-01-01

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.

Writing and Reading Royal Entertainments

Gabriel Heaton — 2010-09-01

Author:: Gabriel Heaton
ISBN:: 9780199213115
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, Drama, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199213115.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2010-09-01

This major new study of royal entertainments from the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James I, including country house entertainments, tiltyard speeches, and court masques, is focused on the surviving material texts and so is a contribution to book history as well as the study of early modern court culture. Drafts, royal presentation manuscripts, widely‐circulating scribal copies, and printed pamphlets are all carefully placed in their cultural context, and the medium of manuscript is shown to have been at least as important as print for these texts' circulation. From the close collaboration between commissioning host and hired writer, to the varied interpretations imposed by copyists and publishers, entertainments were written and read within a complex social nexus: far from being royal propaganda, they reflected the distinct and sometimes competing agendas of monarchs, commissioning hosts, authors, publishers, scribal intermediaries, and readers. In six chapters Writing and Reading Royal Entertainments explores this interpretative community through a range of texts. The first part of the book looks at Elizabethan court entertainments: the Woodstock entertainment of 1575 (Chapter I); tiltyard speeches (Chapter II); and the distinctive features of printed pamphlets and scribal circulation, notably of the 1602 Harefield entertainment (Chapter III). The second part of the book is mostly concerned with Ben Jonson's work for the Jacobean court, with chapters on the Merchant Taylors' entertainment (Chapter IV) and the Theobalds entertainment (Chapter V). The final chapter looks at the texts of court masques, especially in the light of Jonson's understanding of the poet's elevated role. The chapter‐length conclusion takes the story of these material texts beyond the early modern period and looks at how they have been collected, bought, and sold over the centuries.

In Defiance of Time

Angus Vine — 2010-09-01

Author:: Angus Vine
ISBN:: 9780199566198
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199566198.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2010-09-01

This book explores the emergence of antiquarianism in early modern England, from its first flourishing in the mid-Tudor period through to its 17th-century heyday. At this time, a vibrant antiquarian culture emerged, which reached beyond scholarly and historical circles, and had a profound influence on the literature and thought of the period. Examining the influences on that development of that culture, the book argues that the origins of English antiquarianism need to be found in the methods of continental (and especially Italian) humanism. It shows that, like the humanists, the early antiquaries had the essentially imaginative aim of resurrecting and recomposing the past ‘in defiance of time’. The antiquaries conceived of themselves as bridging the gap between past and present. At the heart of this book is the argument that the antiquarian project depended on the antiquaries' capacity to restore — in their imagination at least — the fragments of the past. The book also traces these arguments through a range of authors and material, both printed and in manuscript. Chapters advance original readings of important authors such as Leland, Stow, Spenser, Camden, Drayton, and Selden, as well as shedding light on institutions such as the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries and reviewing the wide range of activities, interests, and concerns that came under the antiquarian purview. Antiquarianism is thereby shown to be integral to early modern literary and intellectual culture.

Divinity and State

David Womersley — 2010-05-01

Author:: David Womersley
ISBN:: 9780199255641
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, Shakespeare Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199255641.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2010-05-01

In 1589 the Privy Council encouraged the Archbishop of Canterbury to take steps to control the theatres, which had offended authority by putting on plays which addressed ‘certen matters of Divinytie and of State unfitt to be suffred’. How had questions of divinity and state become entangled? The Reformation had invested the English Crown with supremacy over the Church, and religious belief had thus been transformed into a political statement. In the plentiful chronicle literature of the sixteenth century, questions of monarchical legitimacy and religious orthodoxy became intertwined as a consequence of that demand for a usable national past created by the high political developments of the 1530s. Divinity and State explores the consequences of these events in the English historiography and historical drama of the sixteenth century. It is divided into four parts. In the first, the impact of reformed religion on narratives of the national past is measured and described. Part II examines how the entanglement of the national past and reformed religion was reflected in historical drama from Bale to the early years of James I, and focuses on two paradigmatic characters: the sanctified monarch and the martyred subject. Part III considers Shakespeare's history plays in the light of the preceding discussion, and finds that Shakespeare's career as a historical dramatist shows him eventually re-shaping the history play with great audacity. Part IV corroborates this reading of Shakespeare's later history plays by reference to the dramatic ripostes they provoked.

Publishing, Politics, and Culture

Graham Rees and Maria Wakely — 2010-02-01

Author:: Graham Rees, Maria Wakely
ISBN:: 9780199576319
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199576319.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2010-02-01

Based on hitherto unexplored and unpublished legal and business records, this study presents the fullest account so far published of any London printing firm in the reign of James I. In particular it examines the businesses of men associated with that crucial instrument of cultural production: the King's Printing House. This institution stood four-square at the top of the London printing and publishing trade, for it monopolized the right to print the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and other indispensable works promoted or encouraged by the king. The office of King's Printer, initially owned by Robert Barker, was potentially very lucrative, and so attracted the predatory attentions of the prosperous book-trade partnership of John and Bonham Norton, and John Bill. The stage was set for bitter rivalry between Barker and his opponents — rivalry which involved sharp practice, deceit, bullying, and downright thuggery — with lawsuits to match. Barker was no fool, yet he was up against very able, resourceful individuals who understood better than Barker that they were in business to promote the king's politico-cultural programme, and extend his influence at home and abroad. That is exactly what John Norton and John Bill did to such good effect; and with his unique experience of the domestic and continental book trade, Bill eventually became the greatest London book trader, printer, publisher, disseminator of ideas, and cultural entrepreneur of his generation.

Narcissism and Suicide in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

Eric Langley — 2010-02-01

Author:: Eric Langley
ISBN:: 9780199541232
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, Shakespeare Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199541232.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2010-02-01

The subjects of this book are the subjects whose subjects are themselves. Narcissus so himself himself forsook, And died to kiss his shadow in the brook. In accusing the introspective Adonis of narcissistic self‐absorption, Shakespeare's Venus employs a geminative construction—‘himself himself’—that provides a keynote for this study of Renaissance reflexive subjectivity. Through close analysis of a number of Shakespearean texts—including Venus and Adonis, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Othello— this book illustrates how radical self‐reflection is expressed on the Renaissance page and stage, and how representations of the two seemingly extreme figures of the narcissist and self‐slaughterer are indicative of early modern attitudes to introspection. Encompassing a broad range of philosophical, theological, poetic, and dramatic texts, this study examines period descriptions of the early modern subject characterized by the rhetoric of reciprocation and reflection. The narcissist and the self‐slaughter provide models of dialogic but self‐destructive identity where private interiority is articulated in terms of self‐response, but where this geminative isolation is understood as self‐defeating, both selfish and suicidal. The study includes work on Renaissance revisions of Ovid, classical attitudes to suicide, the rhetoric of friendship literature, discussion of early modern conceptions of vision, and an extended discussion of narcissism in the epyllion tradition. Sustained textual analysis offers new readings of major Shakespearean texts, allowing familiar works of literature to be seen from the unusual and anti‐social perspectives of their narcissistic and suicidal protagonists.

Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–1580

Cathy Shrank — 2010-01-01

Author:: Cathy Shrank
ISBN:: 9780199268887
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199268887.001.0001
Published in print:: 2004
Published Online:: 2010-01-01

Studying neglected authors such as Andrew Borde, John Leland, William Thomas, Thomas Smith, and Thomas Wilson, Writing the Nation in Reformation England offers a major re-evaluation of English writing between 1530 and 1580. It highlights the significance of those decades to the formation of English nationhood and examines the impact of the break with Rome on the development of a national language, literary style, and canon. As well as demonstrating the close relationship between literary culture and English identities, it explores the sense of civic humanism which motivated these Tudor writers. As authors, counsellors, and thinkers, they were active citizens participating within, and helping to shape, a national community. In the process, their works were used to project an image of themselves as authors, playing — and fitted to play — their part in the public domain. In showing how these writers engaged with and promoted concepts of national identity, the book makes a significant contribution to our broader understanding of the early modern period, demonstrating that nationhood was not a later Elizabethan phenomenon and that the Reformation had an immediate impact on English literary culture, before England emerged as a ‘Protestant’ nation. Finding literary invention in often surprising places (medical handbooks, treatises on spelling reform, topographical surveys), it also counters the characterisation of mid-16th-century literature as ‘drab’, or as a period in retreat from fictive forms. On the contrary, Writing the Nation demonstrates that the Elizabethan ‘Golden Age’ would have been impossible without the preceding generations of writers.

Writing after Sidney

Gavin Alexander — 2010-01-01

Author:: Gavin Alexander
ISBN:: 9780199285471
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199285471.001.0001
Published in print:: 2006
Published Online:: 2010-01-01

Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86), author of the Arcadia, Astrophil and Stella, and The Defence of Poesy, was the Elizabethan writer who had the most immediate influence on his contemporaries and the generation that followed. This book examines the literary response to this major figure through four writers who had an important stake in his afterlife: his sister Mary Sidney, his brother Robert Sidney, his best friend Fulke Greville, and his niece Mary Wroth. At the same time as these authors wrote their own works in response to Sidney they presented his life and writings to the world, and were shaped by other writers as his literary and political heirs. Readings of these four authors and of Sidney's own works are embedded in a more general study of the literary and cultural scene in the years after Sidney's death, and of the reception history of his works; this includes discussion of such writers as Spenser, Jonson, Daniel, Drayton, and Herbert. The study uses a wide range of manuscript and printed sources, as well as perspectives from Renaissance literary theory, especially rhetoric. It offers a new understanding of the nature of Sidney's impact on the literature of the fifty or so years after his death in 1586 and develops a nuanced approach to the questions of imitation and example so central to Renaissance literature. It makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how writing of the English Renaissance offered examples to later readers, and of how it encountered and responded to such examples itself.

Spenser’s Forms of History

Bart van Es — 2010-01-01

Author:: Bart van Es
ISBN:: 9780199249701
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199249701.001.0001
Published in print:: 2002
Published Online:: 2010-01-01

This book describes six modes through which Early Modern England addressed the past: chronicle, chorography, antiquarian discourse, euhemerism, typology, and prophecy. By setting this material alongside the works of Edmund Spenser, the book explores allusive strategies ranging in effect from eulogy to polemic. Key Spenserian texts, including The Faerie Queene, The Shepeardes Calendar, and A View of the Present State of Ireland, are read against Elizabethan cultural documents extending from popular print to restricted manuscripts. Over the course of six chapters, each focusing on a single ‘form’, the book shows Spenser to have been an exceptional historical thinker. Drawing on recent studies of nationhood, the study not only offers a new picture of the English ‘Poet Historical’, but also makes an innovative contribution to current debates concerning the relationship between literature and history.

Ovid’s Changing Worlds

Raphael Lyne — 2010-01-01

Author:: Raphael Lyne
ISBN:: 9780198187042
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198187042.001.0001
Published in print:: 2001
Published Online:: 2010-01-01

This book is about what four renaissance writers do to Ovid, and what he does to them. The four texts at the centre of this book – the Metamorphoses translations of Arthur Golding (1567) and George Sandys (1632), Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion – are all seen to work within the structural themes of Ovid's epic. All these authors imitate the classics but they serve their native culture while doing so, and in the study the moments of competition and crisis come to the fore. The emergence of the English literary language is shown to be a complex and troubled process. Ovid is no passive participant in this process, and the problematic implications of an eternal classic based on change impress themselves on all its imitators. This book uncovers the subtle energies of all four texts, dealing with one of the most important influences on the English Renaissance.

Fictions of Authorship in Late Elizabethan Narratives

Katharine Wilson — 2010-01-01

Author:: Katharine Wilson
ISBN:: 9780199252534
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199252534.001.0001
Published in print:: 2006
Published Online:: 2010-01-01

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'.

Unto the Breach

Patricia A. Cahill — 2009-01-01

Author:: Patricia A. Cahill
ISBN:: 9780199212057
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, Drama, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199212057.001.0001
Published in print:: 2008
Published Online:: 2009-01-01

This book argues that the Elizabethan theatrical repertory was enthralled with the era's martial discourses and beset by its blinding visions. Offering a richly historicized account of the theater's engagement with “modern” warfare, the book juxtaposes the new military technologies and new modes of martial abstraction with the performance of war‐suffused dramas by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and their contemporaries. Equally important, it shows that even as early modern playwrights engaged cutting edge military practices, they routinely trafficked in phenomena resistant to the new rationalities, conjuring up a domain of eerie sounds, uncanny figures, and haunted temporalities. By going beyond the usual protocols of historicist criticism and emphasizing the complex dynamics of theatrical modes of address, this wide‐ranging study investigates the representation of early modern war trauma and recovers for us a compelling sense of the intimate relationship between affect and intellect on the Renaissance stage. Intervening in ongoing conversations about the drama's role in shaping the cultural imaginary, this study argues that, in an era of escalating militarization, England's first commercial theaters offered their audiences something of incalculable value—namely, a space for the performance and “working through” of what might otherwise remain psychically unbearable in war's violence.

Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature

Lesel Dawson — 2009-01-01

Author:: Lesel Dawson
ISBN:: 9780199266128
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, Women's Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199266128.001.0001
Published in print:: 2008
Published Online:: 2009-01-01

The discourse of love, which is subjective, private, and instinctive, is also culturally constructed, public, and learned; it emphasizes the way in which the expression of reflexive feelings is bound up in wider historical narratives about bodies and interiority. In early modern medical texts, intense unfulfilled erotic desire is held to be a real and virulent disease: it is classified as a species of melancholy, with physical aetiologies and cures. This book analyses literary representations of lovesickness in relation to medical ideas about desire and wider questions about gender and identity, exploring the different ways that desire is believed to take root in the body, how gender roles are encoded and contested in courtship, and the psychic pains and pleasures of frustrated passion. It considers the relationship between women's lovesickness and other female maladies (such as hysteria and green sickness), and asks whether women can suffer from intellectual forms of melancholy generally thought to be exclusively male. It also examines the ways in which Neoplatonism offers an alternative construction of love to that found in natural philosophy, inverting much of the medical advice for what is held to be healthy in romantic love and promoting a different hierarchical relationship between the sexes. Finally, this study considers how anxieties concerning love's ability to emasculate the male lover emerge indirectly in remedies for lovesickness, illuminating ideas about masculinity as well as some of the psychic contradictions of erotic desire. Authors considered include: Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Thomas Middleton, John Ford, and William Davenant.

Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland

Christopher Highley — 2008-09-01

Author:: Christopher Highley
ISBN:: 9780199533404
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199533404.001.0001
Published in print:: 2008
Published Online:: 2008-09-01

This book interrogates standard narratives about national identity in early modern England by examining the ways Catholics from the reign of Mary Tudor to the early 17th century contested and shaped discourses of the nation, patriotism, and Englishness. Accused by their opponents of espousing an alien religion, one orchestrated from Rome and sustained by Spain, English Catholics fought back by developing their own self-representations that emphasized how the Catholic faith was an ancient and integral part of true Englishness. After the accession of the Protestant Elizabeth, the Catholic imagining of England was mainly the project of the exiles who had left their homeland in search of religious toleration and foreign assistance. English Catholics constructed narratives of their own religious heritage and identity, however, not only in response to Protestant polemic but also as part of intra-Catholic rivalries that pitted Marian clergy against seminary priests, secular priests against Jesuits, and exiled English Catholics against their co-religionists from other parts of Britain and Ireland. Drawing on recent reassessments of English Catholicism this study foregrounds the faultlines within and between the various Catholic communities of the Atlantic archipelago. The book examines a range of genres, texts, and documents both in print and manuscript, including ecclesiastical histories, polemical treatises, antiquarian tracts, and correspondence. The argument weaves together a rich historical narrative of people, events, and texts while also offering contextualized close readings of specific works by under-studied figures like Edmund Campion, Robert Persons, Thomas Stapleton, and Richard Verstegan.

Writing Under Tyranny

Greg Walker — 2007-09-01

Author:: Greg Walker
ISBN:: 9780199283330
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199283330.001.0001
Published in print:: 2005
Published Online:: 2007-09-01

This book considers the impact of Henry VIII’s break with Rome and the Royal Supremacy of the 1530s upon the generation of poets, playwrights, and prose-writers who lived through those events. Spanning the boundaries between literature and history, it charts the profound effects that Henry’s increasingly tyrannical regime had on the literary production of the early 16th century and shows how English writers strove to mitigate, redirect, and finally resist oppressive royal demands. The book argues that the result of Henrician tyranny was both the destruction of a number of venerable literary forms and the collapse of a literary culture that had dominated the late-medieval period, as well as the birth of many modes of writing now seen as characteristic of the English literary renaissance. Separate sections of the book focus specifically upon the work of John Thynne, the editor of the first collected Works of Chaucer; the playwright John Heywood; Sir Thomas Elyot; Sir Thomas Wyatt; and Henry Howard, the poet Earl of Surrey.

Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution

Ann Hughes — 2007-09-01

Author:: Ann Hughes
ISBN:: 9780199251926
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199251926.001.0001
Published in print:: 2004
Published Online:: 2007-09-01

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.

Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England

Tanya Pollard — 2007-09-01

Author:: Tanya Pollard
ISBN:: 9780199270835
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199270835.001.0001
Published in print:: 2005
Published Online:: 2007-09-01

This book asks why Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights were so preoccupied with drugs and poisons, and why both critics and supporters of the theater as well as playwrights themselves so frequently adopted a chemical vocabulary to describe the effects of the theater on audiences. Drawing on original medical and literary research, it is shown that the potency of the link between drugs and plays in the period demonstrates a model of drama radically different than our own — a model in which plays exert an immediate impact on spectators’ bodies as well as minds. Early modern physiology held that the imagination and emotions were part of the body and exerted a material impact on it, yet scholars of medicine and drama alike have not recognized the consequences of this idea. Plays, which alter our emotions and thought, simultaneously change us physically. This book argues that the power of the theater in Shakespeare’s England as well as the striking hostility to it stems from the widely held contemporary idea that drama acted upon the body as well as the mind. In yoking together pharmacy and theater, this book offers a new model for understanding the relationship between texts and bodies. Just as bodies are constituted in part by the imaginative fantasies they consume, the theater’s success (and notoriety) depends on its power over spectators’ bodies.

Digressive Voices in Early Modern English Literature

Anne Cotterill — 2007-09-01

Author:: Anne Cotterill
ISBN:: 9780199261178
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199261178.001.0001
Published in print:: 2004
Published Online:: 2007-09-01

This book begins and ends with the intellectual and imaginative pleasures of narrative wandering. ‘To digress’ in early modern England carried a range of associations with authority and gender, from amplitude and escape to deviance and transgression. The book argues that writers classically trained in verbal contest used the liberty of digression to create a complex form of underground writing and self-definition in some of the richest non-dramatic texts of 17th-century England; such a pointed use of digressiveness in the period has not been recognized. Within these textual mazes writers captured the ambiguities of political occasion and patronage, while they anatomized enemies and mourned personal loss. The narrator of each text addresses a specter of speechlessness as well as loss of self through a figurative descent to an unstable underworld associated with a female or effeminate weakness. In fresh readings of Donne's Anniversaries, Marvell's Upon Appleton House, Sir Thomas Browne's The Garden of Cyrus, Milton's Paradise Lost, Dryden's The Hind and the Panther and A Discourse of Satire, and Swift's A Tale of a Tub, the book draws attention to the expansiveness of many of the period's literary forms, such as country-house poem, literary anatomy, dedicatory epistle, beast fable, and epic. Turning current sensitivity toward the silenced voice in a new direction, the book argues that rhetorical amplitude might suggest anxieties about speech and silence for early modern men forced to be competitive yet circumspect to make their voices heard.