Books in the Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture series

Constitutes an original intervention into longstanding but insistently relevant debates around the significance of notions of 'performativity' to the critical analysis of early modern drama - particularly that of Jonson and Shakespeare.

Presents a comprehensive study of over 120 printed news reports of murders and infanticides committed by early modern women. This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of female homicide in post-Reformation news formats ranging from ballads to newspapers.

Re-thinking the role played by mathematics and cartography in the English seventeenth century, this book argues that the cultural currency of mathematics was as unstable in the period as that of England's controversial enclosures and plantations. It is useful to all those affected by the 'spatial turn' in early modern cultural studies.

Offering an exploration of the issues and circumstances at work in representations of old age in the early modern period, this book draws upon both factual and literary material from a range of genres.

Presents a study that reveals the surprisingly rich potential for the emergent 'green' criticism and offers insights into early modern English literature. This book argues that environmental issues such as nature's personhood, deforestation, energy use, air quality, climate change, and animal sentience are formative concerns in early modern texts.

Restores the rich tradition of the Sibyls to the position of prominence they once held in the culture and society of the English Renaissance. This book explores the many identities, the many faces, of the prophetic sibyls as they appear in the works of English Renaissance writers.

Using the literature of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson, this title investigates the social narratives of several social groups - an urban, middling group; an elite at the court of James; and an aristocratic faction from the countryside.

Provides a reading of Restoration plays through a performance theory lens. This book shows that an analysis of the conjoined performances of torture and race not only reveals the early modern interest in the nature of racial identity, but also how race was initially coded in a paradoxical fashion as both essentially fixed and socially constructed.

Presents evidence about the ways in which English Renaissance dramatists such as William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, John Fletcher, and Thomas Middleton composed plays and the degree to which they participated in the dissemination of their texts to theatrical audiences. This monograph is useful to the field of Shakespeare studies.

This collection examines the widespread phenomenon of hypocrisy in literary, theological, political, and social circles in England during the years after the Reformation and up to the Restoration.

Visiting memory and erotics in the early modern period, this volume brings together two vibrant areas of Renaissance studies: the study of memory and the study of sexuality. Essays explore how memory re-shapes the concerns of queer studies, including the unhistorical, the experience of desire, and the limits of the body, and how the erotic revis

This collection of essays examines the idea of the future in early modern European literature, politics, religion, science, and social life. Investigating how both elite and popular writers represented their access to or control over the future, it proposes new insights into one of the defining characteristics of modernity.

Exploring the meanings early modern people found in dreams, this compelling collection of essays looks at a range of topics, including prophetic dreams, ghosts in political writing and the dreams of animals.

This collection analyzes how narrative technique developed from the late Middle Ages to the beginning of the 18th century. Taking Chaucer''s influential Middle English works as the starting point, the original essays in this volume explore diverse aspects of the formation of early modern prose narratives. Essays focus on how a sense of selfness or subjectivity begins to establish itself in various narratives, thus providing a necessary requirement for the individuality that dominates later novels. Other contributors investigate how forms of intertextuality inscribe early modern prose within previous traditions of literary writing. A group of chapters presents the process of genre-making as taking place both within the confines of the texts proper, but also within paratextual features and through the rationale behind cataloguing systems. A final group of essays takes the implicit notion of the growing realism of early modern prose narrative to task by investigating the various social discourses that feature ever more strongly within the social, commercial, or religious dimensions of those texts. The book addresses a wide range of literary figures such as Chaucer, Wroth, Greene, Sidney, Deloney, Pepys, Behn, and Defoe. Written by an international group of scholars, it investigates the transformations of narrative form from medieval times through the Renaissance and the early modern period, and into the eighteenth century.

In this book, McKeown gives new coherence to the literature of the early modern Atlantic world by placing it in the context of radical changes to urban space following the Italian War of 1494-1498.

Between the medieval conception of Christendom and the political visions of modernity, ideas of Europe underwent a transformative and catalytic period that saw a cultural process of renewed self-definition or self-Europeanization. The contributors to this volume address this process, analyzing how Europe was imagined between 1450 and 1750. By whom, in which contexts, and for what purposes was Europe made into a subject of discourse? Which forms did early modern ΓÇÿEuropesΓÇÖ take, and what functions did they serve? Essays examine the role of factors such as religion, history, space and geography, ethnicity and alterity, patronage and dynasty, migration and education, language, translation, and narration for the ways in which Europe turned into an ΓÇÿimagined community.ΓÇÖ The thematic range of the volume comprises early modern texts in Arabic, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, including plays, poems, and narrative fiction, as well as cartography, historiography, iconography, travelogues, periodicals, and political polemics. Literary negotiations in particular foreground the creative potential, versatility, and agency that inhere in the process of Europeanization, as well as a specifically early modern attitude towards the past and tradition emblematized in the poetics of the period. There is a clear continuity between the collectionΓÇÖs approach to European identities and the focus of cultural and postcolonial studies on the constructed nature of collective identities at large: the chapters build on the insights produced by these fields over the past decades and apply them, from various angles, to a subject that has so far largely eluded critical attention. This volume examines what existing and well-established work on identity and alterity, hybridity and margins has to contribute to an understanding of the largely un-examined and under-theorized ΓÇÿpre-formativeΓÇÖ period of European identity.

This book explores the work of Cervantes in relation to the ideas about the mind that circulated in early modern Europe and were propelled by thinkers such as Juan Luis Vives, Juan Huarte de San Juan, Oliva Sabuco, Andres Laguna, Andres Velasquez, Marsilio Ficino, Gomez Pereira, and others.