Books in the Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture series

A collection that offers readers an encounter with the historical experience of people adapting to a pandemic emergency and the corresponding narrative representation of that crisis, as early modern writers transformed the plague into literature.

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.

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.

Opening up an area overlooked by Renaissance scholarship, this collection of essays historicizes and theorizes 'forgetting' in English literary texts.

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.

Covers the continuities between three forms of romance that have often been separated from one another in critical discourse: early modern prose fiction, the dramatic romances staged in England during the 1570s and 1580s, and Shakespeare's late plays.

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.

A collection of essays that examines the idea of 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 fresh insights into one of the defining characteristics of modernity.

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.

Offers a look at how people, things, and fresh forms of knowledge created 'publics' in early modern Europe, and how publics changed the shape of early modern society.

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.

This book analyzes how narrative technique developed from the late Middle Ages to the beginning of the eighteenth-century. The contributors address issues such as subjectivity, performance, voice, narrative time, character development and genre, placing their readings of early modern prose texts within the diachronic frame of the overall topic. Individual chapters will treat texts from a variety of genres, offering analyses of individual texts in the context of changes and developments within literary forms. The book in its entirety will cover a period of approximately 350 years, from 1370 to 1720.

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.

Dreams have been significant in different cultures, carrying messages about this world and others, posing problems about knowledge, truth, and what it means to be human. This book is a collection of essays which explore dreams and visions in early modern Europe, canvassing the place of the dream and dream-theory in texts and in social movements.

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.

Broadening the conversation begun in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe (2009), this book examines how the spatial dynamics of public making changed the shape of early modern society. The publics visited in this volume are voluntary groupings of diverse individuals that could coalesce through the performative uptake of shared cultural forms and practices. The contributors argue that such forms of association were social productions of space as well as collective identities. Chapters explore a range of cultural activities such as theatre performances; travel and migration; practices of persuasion; the embodied experiences of lived space; and the central importance of media and material things in the creation of publics and the production of spaces. They assess a multiplicity of publics that produced and occupied a multiplicity of social spaces where collective identity and voice could be created, discovered, asserted, and exercised. Cultural producers and consumers thus challenged dominant ideas about just who could enter the public arena, greatly expanding both the real and imaginary spaces of public life to include hitherto excluded groups of private people. The consequences of this historical reconfiguration of public space remain relevant, especially for contemporary efforts to meaningfully include the views of ordinary people in public life.

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.

Luce Irigaray is one of the most influential and controversial feminist theorists of the 20th century. This text explores the pre-Enlightenment roots of Irigaray's thoughts, as well as the impact that her writing has had on our understanding of classical, medieval and Renaissance culture.

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 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.