Books in the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture series

The first full-length study of how the concept of the "e;girl"e; was constructed in sixteenth and seventeenth century literature and drama.The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Sisters argues for a paradigm shift in our current conceptions of the early modern sex-gender system, challenging the widespread assumption that the category of the "e;girl"e; played little or no role in the construction of gender in early modern English culture. Girl characters appeared in a variety of texts, from female infants in Shakespeare's late romances to little children in Tudor interludes to adult "e;roaring girls"e; in city comedies. Drawing from a variety of print and manuscript sources, including early modern drama, dictionaries, midwifery manuals, and women's autobiographies, this book argues that girlhood in Shakespeare's England was both a time of life and a form of gender transgression.Key Features:* Charts the emergence of the word "e;girl"e; into early modern English and its evolution from a gender-neutral term applied to both male and female children to one used only for female individuals* Challenges the misconception that girls were largely absent from English Renaissance literature* Offers a literary history of female child characters in Renaissance drama* Features an examination of how women writers described their own girlhoods

Examines the structural similarities between English mercantile treatises and drama c1600-1642. This book analyses the representational conventions of plays and mercantile treatises written between the chartering of the English East India Company in 1600 and the closing of the public playhouses at the outset of the English Civil War in 1642.

This book investigates rhetorical and representational practices that were used to monitor English law at the turn of the seventeenth century.

Theatrical Milton' brings coherence to the presence of theatre in John Milton through the concept of theatricality. In this book, 'theatricality' identifies a discursive field entailing the rhetorical strategies and effects of framing a given human action, including speech and writing, as an act of theatre.

A new reading of madness in Don Quixote based on archival accounts of insanity.From the records of the Spanish Inquisition, Dale Shuger presents a social corpus of early modern madness that differs radically from the literary madness previously studied. Drawing on over 100 accounts of insanity defences, many of which contain statements from a wide social spectrum - housekeepers, nieces, doctors, and barbers - as well as the testimonies of the alleged madmen and women themselves, Shuger argues that Cervantes exploration of madness as experience is intimately linked to the questions about ethics, reason, will and selfhood that unreason presented for early modern Spaniards.In adapting, challenging and transforming these discourses, Don Quixote investigates spaces of interiority, confronts the limitations of knowledge - of the self and the world - and reflects on the social strategies for diagnosing and dealing with those we cannot understand. Shuger discovers an intimate connection between Cervantess integration of this discourse of madness and his part in forging the new genre of the European novel.Key Features* Challenges the Foucauldian narrative of repression and the Bakhtinian narrative of liberation* Uses a historicist approach to show how Don Quixote engages, transforms and transcends the historical* Proposes a new reading of the development of the novel that comes from the unreasonable Baroque subject as opposed to the rational Enlightenment subject

Charting a new course between performance studies and literary criticism, this book explores how recognition of the dramatic person is involved in theatrical materiality.

How the classical and medieval conceptions of Fortune shifted to the modern notion of chance.Is chance nothing more than a projection of human desire on to the world?In this fascinating new study, John Lyons argues that the idea of chance assumed new vigour in the late Renaissance, when converging philosophical and literary currents demystified the powerful concept of Fortune, sensitizing writers to the relationship between human desire and the world's apparent randomness.Up to now, the story of chance has been written by historians of mathematical thought and has focused on calculation, probability and gambling. Lyons, by contrast, highlights the ethical, aesthetic and even erotic aspects of chance. He offers detailed readings of the works of major French authors - Montaigne, Corneille, Lafayette, Scudery, Pascal, Racine, Bossuet, and La Bruyere.Key Features* Renews our understanding of romance, tragedy, comedy & religious polemic in the light of the changed conceptions of the fortuitous * Shows how the emergence of suspense and subjective interest are linked to the shift from Fortune to randomness* Proposes a new view on how religious writers, faced with the sceptical challenge of late Renaissance thought, integrated chance into the post-Reformation mainstream of Catholic teachingsKeywords: Chance, Fortune, Randomness, Probability, French Early Modern Literature, post-Reformation, Genre, Romance, Prose, Montaigne, Corneille, Moliere, Lafayette, Scudery, Pascal, Racine, Bossuet, La Bruyere

Studies of the republican legacy have proliferated in recent years, always to argue for a polity that cultivates the virtues, protections, and entitlements which foster the self's ability to simulate an invulnerable existence. James Kuzner's original new study of writing by Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell and Milton is the first to present a genealogy for the modern self in which its republican origins can be understood far more radically. In doing so, the study is also the first to draw radical and republican thought into sustained conversation, and to locate a republic for which vulnerability is, unexpectedly, as much what community has to offer as it is what community guards against. At a time when the drive to safeguard citizens has gathered enough momentum to justify almost any state action, Open Subjects questions whether vulnerability is the evil we so often believe it to be. Key features: * First study to explore how early modern republican and contemporary radical thought connect with and complement each other * Traces the presence of English republicanism from the late sixteenth century to the late seventeenth * Analyses Renaissance literary texts in the context of classical, early modern, and contemporary political thought to add to how we think about selfhood in the present * Offers illuminating new readings of the place that English Renaissance figures occupy in histories of friendship, the public sphere, and selfhood more generally

Examines the impact of the royal politics of amnesia on tragedy and national historiography in France, 1560-1630This study argues that the political and legislative process of forgetting internal differences, undertaken in France after the civil wars of the sixteenth century, leads to subtle yet fundamental shifts in the broader conception of the relationship between readers or spectators on the one hand, and the matter of history, on the other. These shifts, occasioned by the desire for communal reconciliation and generally associated with an increasingly modern sensibility, will nonetheless prove useful to the ideologies of cultural and political absolutism. By juxtaposing representations of the French civil war past as they appear (and frequently overlap) in historiography and tragedy from 1550-1630, Andrea Frisch tracks changes in the ways in which history and tragedy sought to 'move' readers throughout the period of the wars and in their wake. The book shows that a shift from a politically (and martially) active reading of the past to a primarily affective one follows the imperative, so clear and urgent at the turn of the seventeenth century, to put an end to violent conflict. The emotions that neoclassical tragedy and absolutist historiography sought to elicit were intended above all to be shared, and thus a medium via which political and religious differences could be downplayed or forgotten. The book aims to illuminate some of the ways in which the experience of the wars of religion, as registered in tragedy and historiography, contributed to a restructuring of the ever-vital relationship between emotion and politics, and thereby to historicize the very concept of 'esmouvoir'. Key FeaturesConfronts historiography and tragedy in the era of the French Wars of ReligionAddresses the themes of amnesty, pardon, memory, and forgetting in the context of civil warProvides both close readings and a broad argument about the impact of the monarchical politics of reconciliation on conceptions of how history and tragedy should 'move' their audiencesTreats multiple French authors including Andr de Nesmond; Henri-Lancelot Voisin de la Popelinire; Pierre Matthieu; Jean de la Taille; Robert GarnierAndrea Frisch is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland. KeywordsFrench Wars of Religion; Saint Bartholomew's Day massacres; Edict of Nantes; tragedy; historiography; emotion; reconciliation; Henri IV (Henri de Navarre); Robert Garnier; Pierre MatthieuSubject: Literature

This book changes the terms of scholarly discussion and discovers how the social structures of theatre afforded Milton resources for poetic and polemical representation and uncovers the precise contours of Milton's interest in theatre and drama.