"Full of fresh and illuminating insights into a way of looking at the English past in the sixteenth century... a book with the potential to deepen and transform our understanding of Tudor attitudes to
"A deeply original work of scholarship. Through fine close readings of primary and secondary texts, the author offers the fullest account we have of the related phenomena of pain, sympathy, and sensat
Thomas Traherne has all too often been defined and studied as a solitary thinker, "out of his time", and not as a participant in the complex intellectual currents of the period. The essays c
In his Second Defence of the English People (1654), reflecting on his career as a prose writer, prior to embarking on the composition of Paradise Lost, John Milton identified 'three varieties of liber
The debt owed by Shakespeare to Ovid is a major and important topic in scholarship. This book offers a fresh approach to the subject, in aiming to account for the Middle English literary lenses throug
Tragicomedy is one of the most important dramatic genres in Renaissance literature, and the essays collected here offer stimulating new perspectives and insights, as well as providing broad introducti
There is a great deal of kissing in Renaissance poetry, but modern critics do not generally recognise (as early readers did) that the literary conventions of the kiss were closely related to a fully-f
The Scottish poet George Lauder began as a "university wit", by imitating anti-papal satires popular in the Italian Renaissance. He set off for London as a young man, looking for patronage, but instea
Textual Intercourse brings together literary criticism, theater history, the study of printed books, and gender studies, to show how the writing of Renaissance drama was conceptualized in the language
Writers of the English Renaissance, like their European contemporaries, frequently reflect on the phenomenon of exile—an experience that forces the individual to establish a new personal identity in a
This collection of essays historicizes and theorizes forgetting in English Renaissance literary texts and their cultural contexts. Its essays open up an area of study overlooked by contemporary Renais
