Books in the Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture series

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.

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 revises the dominant trends of memory studies, from the rhetoric of the medieval memory arts to the formation of collective pasts. Showing that Shakespeare and contemporaries were deeply interested in the interoperability of memory and sexuality, the volume suggests that both undergird the fraught constructions of social identity in early modern England.