Early Modern/Renaissance Literature

The Three Estates..

Charting developments in public rhetoric and political writing from the Elizabethan period through the Restoration, John Staines here explores the political consequences of the emotions generated by the image of Mary Queen of Scots, tragic woman and queen. This study identifies two basic literary t..

At its broadest level, this book contributes to an understanding of how printing changed early modern English literary culture. The author discusses printers’ manuals, William Caxton’s paratexts, Robert Copland’s dramatic dialogues, the prose fictions of William Baldwin, George Gascoigne and Thomas..

This book is the first to connect ideas of time to writerly haste in an interdisciplinary manner, drawing upon rhetorical theory, book history, poetics, religious studies and early modern moral philosophy, which provide a genuinely deep understanding of why the stigma of haste so preoccupied the ear..

The essays gathered here demonstrate and justify the excitement and promise of cognitive historicism, providing a lively introduction to this new and quickly growing area of literary studies. Written by eight leading critics whose work has done much to establish the new field, they display the signi..

Analyzing Shakespeare's ideas on theatre and magic and John Dee's concerns with philosophy and magic in the light of Italian Neoplatonism, this book offers a new perspective on the intellectual history of Renaissance England and Italy...

This is the only complete critical study yet published of an underrated and prolific Restoration dramatist and poet. Durfey's plays and poems are critically discussed and related to their social, political and cultural context,..

In this major reassessment of his subject, Richard Rowland restores Thomas Heywood- playwright, miscellanist and translator-to his rightful place in early modern theatre history. Rowland contextualises and historicises this important contemporary of Shakespeare, locating him on the geographic and cu..

Despite his significant influence as a courtier, diplomat, playwright and Restoration theatre manager, Thomas Killigrew (1612-1683) remains a comparatively elusive and neglected figure. The original essays in this interdisciplinary volume shine new light on a singular, contradictory seventeenth-cent..

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves...

First published in 1902, this volume contains an extensive, technical scholarly introduction, followed by three Middle-English versions of the Rule of St. Benet along with the Northern Lansdowne Ritual on the reception of novices and the Vespasian Ritual of making a nun. As St Benet is the Medieval ..

Exploiting a link between early modern concepts of the medical and the literary, David Wood examines the ways that depictions of time expressed in early modern medical texts reveal themselves in contemporary literary works, demonstrating that the early modern recognition of the self as a palpably vo..