Books in the Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture series

The literary biography, or 'life of the poet', is vital to an understanding of the historical emergence of the author. Kevin Pask offers the first full-scale history of the cultural construction of literary authority in early modern England, and studies the early life-narratives of Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, Donne and Milton.

In this 2001 book, Jones and Stallybrass argue that the making and transmission of fabrics and clothing were central to Renaissance culture. Their examination offers a close reading of literary texts, paintings, textiles, theatrical documents, and ephemera to reveal how clothing and textiles were crucial to gender, sexuality, and religion in the Renaissance.

Christopher Highley's study shows how writers from the English Renaissance produced a complex discourse about Ireland that cannot be reduced to a simple ethnic opposition. Highley argues that this interaction became a profound factor in the definition of an English poetic self.

Valerie Traub analyzes the representation of female-female love, desire and eroticism in a range of early modern discourses, including poetry, drama, visual arts, pornography and medicine. A contribution to the history of sexuality and feminist and queer theory, the book addresses current theoretical preoccupations through the lens of historical inquiry.

Reformation iconclasts viewed the verbal images of poetry with distrust - yet the Reformation also produced the defining monuments of English epic. Linda Gregerson traces the ideological, political, and gender conflicts that Spenser and Milton confronted as they transformed the epic into an instrument for the reformation of the political subject.

In this seminal work, Robert Weimann redefines the relationship between writing and performance, or 'playing', in Shakespeare's theatre. Through close reading and careful analysis Weimann offers a reconsideration and redefinition of Elizabethan performance and production practices. The study reviews the most recent methodologies of textual scholarship, the new history of the Elizabethan theatre, performance theory, and film and video interpretation, and offers a new approach to understanding Shakespeare. Weimann examines a range of plays including Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Henry V, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Macbeth, among others, as well as other contemporary works. A major part of the study explores the duality between playing and writing: the imaginary world-in-the-play and the visible, audible playing-in-the-world of the playhouse, and Weimann focuses especially on the gap between these two, between the so-called 'pen' and 'voice'.

The importance of heterosexual masculine identity in Renaissance culture is explored through the work of a wide range of writers, including Shakespeare, Montaigne, Bacon, Burton, and Jane Anger. Mark Breitenberg traces masculine anxiety as both a problem and a productive force in the perpetuation of patriarchal ideologies.

Combining close readings of pamphlets by Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Deloney and others with a discussion of the history and deployment of print technology, this 1997 book is both a work of historical recovery and a reflection on the ongoing relationship between the marketplace and the public sphere.

Frank Whigham presents a detailed analysis of English Renaissance plays in the context of social rank, gender, kinship, and service relationships. He explores fantasies of the lurid and decadent life at the centre of national culture, and examines the collisions between rural values and newfangled metropolitan behaviour.

Traditionally, Renaissance studies have concentrated on the human subject. This collection of original essays by leading scholars brings objects - purses, clothes, tapestries, houses, maps, feathers, tools, skulls - back into view. The result is an entirely new view of Renaissance literature and culture.

Traditionally, Renaissance studies have concentrated on the human subject. This collection of original essays by leading scholars brings objects - purses, clothes, tapestries, houses, maps, feathers, tools, skulls - back into view. The result is an entirely new view of Renaissance literature and culture.

A full-length study of the use of dialogue form in Italy, from the early sixteenth century to the age of Galileo, which draws on a wide range of literary, philosophical and scientific sources to examine the genre's unrivalled popularity as a vehicle for polemic.

The experience of powerful emotion is central to dramatic presentation and audience response. T. G. Bishop examines ways in which wonder has been used by playwrights as an integral part of theatre, both in classical and medieval drama and in the plays of Shakespeare. His study offers an alternative approach to understanding plays.

Douglas Brooks examines how Renaissance dramatists made the difficult transition from writing plays for the theatre to publishing them as literary works. Tracing the path from playhouse to printing house, he looks at the book trade's role in shaping the literary reputations of Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster, Beaumont, Fletcher and Thomas Heywood.

Douglas Bruster's provocative study of English Renaissance drama explores its links with Elizabethan and Jacobean economy and society, looking at the status of playwrights such as Shakespeare and the establishment of commercial theatres.

Mario DiGangi analyses the relation between homoeroticism and social power in a wide range of literary and historical texts from the 1580s to the 1620s, drawing on the insights of materialist, feminist and queer theory.

Timothy J. Reiss argues that the massive changes in thought in early modern Europe occurred, not because of a move from orality to print culture, but rather because the means and methods of discovery came to depend on the mathematical disciplines, including music, instead of the language arts.

Textual Intercourse brings together literary criticism, theatre history, the study of printed books and gender studies to offer new readings of plays by Shakespeare and others. Jeffrey Masten shows how the writing of Renaissance drama was conceptualised (on stage and in print) in the languages of sex, gender and eroticism.

What were the possibilities of prose as a literary medium in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? How did it operate in the literary and social world? In this 1997 book, leading scholars of the literatures of Europe and the Americas demonstrate the increasing importance and diversity of prose in the early modern period.

American colonial voyage narratives evolved almost from the outset as a genre concerned with recuperating failure - as noble, strategic, even as a form of success. Reception of these texts since the Victorian era has often accepted their claims of heroism; this study argues for a more complicated, less glorious history.

Howard Marchitello's 1997 study of narrative techniques in Renaissance discourse analyses imaginative conjunctions of literary texts with developments in scientific and technical writing. Marchitello uses a wide range of cultural documents to illustrate the importance of narrative in constructing the Renaissance understanding of time and identity.

Seth Lerer reveals the culture of spectatorship and voyeurism that shaped early Tudor English literary life. Through close readings of early Tudor poetry, court drama, letters, anthologies and printed books, Lerer illuminates a world of displayed bodies, surreptitious letters and transgressive performances.

Heather James shows how Shakespeare's use of Virgil, Ovid and other classical sources forms part of a larger attempt to find historical legitimacy for Britain as a realm asserting its status as an empire. She goes on to distinguish Shakespeare's deployment of the myth from 'official' Tudor and Stuart ideology.

In this 1998 book, Celia Daileader explores paradoxes of eroticism on the early modern English stage, where women were materially absent but symbolically central. She draws an analogy with the suppression of religious drama in England and draws together questions about the bodies - of Christ and of woman - banished from the stage.