Books in the Early Modern Cultural Studies series

An early modern domestic and spiritual memoir, this book depicts the life of Alice Thornton (1626-1707), a complex, contradictory woman caught in the changing fortunes and social realities of the seventeenth century.

This analysis of five exemplary domestic plays offers a new approach to the emerging ideology of the private and public, or what Ann C. Christensen terms "the tragedy of the separate spheres". Separation Scenes exposes the intimate and disruptive relationships between the domestic culture and business culture of early modern England.

Research on European food culture has expanded substantially in recent years, telling us more about food preparation, ingredients, feasting and fasting rituals, and the social and cultural connotations of food. At the First Table demonstrates the ways in which early modern Spaniards used food as a mechanism for the performance of social identity.

Popular English travel guides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries asserted that women who wandered too far afield were invariably suspicious, dishonest, and unchaste. As the essays in Travel and Travail reveal, however, early modern women did travel, and often quite extensively, with no diminution of their moral fibre.

Examines New World plants - tobacco, amaranth, guaiacum, and the prickly pear cactus - and their associated Native myths as they moved across the Atlantic and into English literature. Edward McLean Test reinstates the contributions of indigenous peoples to European society, charting an alternative cultural history that explores the associations and assemblages of transatlantic multiplicity.

The title Age in Love is taken from Shakespeare's sonnet 138, a poem about an aging male speaker who, by virtue of his entanglement with the dark lady, "vainly" performs the role of "some untutor'd youth." Jacqueline Vanhoutte argues that this pattern of "age in love" pervades Shakespeare's mature works.

Misanthropoetics explores efforts by Renaissance writers to represent social flight and withdrawal as a fictional escape from the incongruous demands of culture.

This edited collection explores what trauma-seen through an analytical lens-can reveal about the early modern period and, conversely, what conceptualizations of psychological trauma from the period can tell us about trauma theory itself.