Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800 Books

Book SynopsisTraditionally, Christian martyrdom is a repetition of the story of Christ's suffering and death: the more closely the victim replicates the Christological model, the more legible the martyrdom. But if the textual construction of martyrdom depends on the rehearsal of a paradigmatic story, how do we reconcile the broad range of individuals, beliefs, and persecutions seeking justification by claims of martyrdom? Observing how martyrdom is constituted through the interplay of historical event and literary form, Alice Dailey explores the development of English martyr literature through the period of intense religious controversy from the heresy executions of Queen Mary to the regicide of 1649. Through close study of texts ranging from late medieval passion drama and hagiography to John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, martyrologies of the Counter-Reformation, Charles I's Eikon Basilike, and John Milton's Eikonoklastes, The English Martyr from Reformation to RevolutionTrade Review“'Martyrdom is not a death but a story that gets written about a death.' From this simple yet profound premise, Alice Dailey takes us into a tour de force of historical formalism. Martyrdom, as Dailey brilliantly and delicately unpacks it, sits at the nexus of story and the material world. It works through both the suffering of the flesh and the shifting contours of narrative form. In a study that reaches across time (medieval to postmodern) and confessions (Protestant and Catholic), Dailey herself masterfully crafts a compelling story about the life of narrative. This book will naturally be of great value to students of early modern religion, but it will also fascinate anyone interested in how human lives—and the meanings of those lives—are shaped by, and lived through, narrative forms." —Kristen Poole, University of Delaware"Alice Dailey’s innovative new study of English martyrology details the transformations undergone by the narrative forms, theological meanings, and visual imagery of sacred suffering in Reformation England. In the period stretching from the sixteenth century through the end of the English Civil War, the Catholic underground was stymied in its search for the glory of the martyrs by the rhetoric of treason wielded against them by the Protestant state, but periodically sustained by its own powerful and resilient treasury of religious narratives. In this broad and bracing study, Dailey conceives of the Catholic question in a pluralist manner, to include not only the fates of individual Catholics and Catholic communities, but also the survival of Catholic literary and architectural forms in post-Reformation England." —Julia Reinhard Lupton, The University of California, Irvine“By emphasizing the significance of the formal qualities that characterize English Christian martyr narratives, Dailey insightfully demonstrates how attitudes toward martyrdom changed over time. . . . The readings of individual texts are both grounded and provocative.” —The Medieval Review“Detailed and lucid. . . . A fluent and thoughtful critique of some familiar texts.” —Renaissance Quarterly“Alice Dailey’s The English Martyr accounts for a transformation of the Christian martyr narrative through an analysis of four historical stages—paradigmatic establishment, appropriation, crisis of representation, and its ultimate shift in signification. Her account suggests that as historical pressures undermined typological repetition, the language remained while its signification changed.” —Sixteenth Century Journal“Alice Dailey’s The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution makes a persuasive case for the value of the new formalist trend in literary studies. . . . Dailey’s book is a useful contribution to several intersecting scholarly conversations about martyrdom, early modern English religious and political strife, and new formalism more generally. . . . Students and scholars looking to gain a solid, detailed grounding in any of these conversations will find this book very helpful.” —Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies“The strength of this book is not just that Dailey discusses the traditions of martyrology. She also discusses the ways in which these traditions changed over time. . . . Her careful and insightful reading of contemporary texts and the thoughtful conclusions she draws from this reading will be of great interest not just to historians of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries but to anyone interested in how the modern world was, and is, constructed and how we both create and re-create the stories of the past.” —Journal of British Studies“Dailey’s prose is lucid and her close analysis of these key martyrological texts portrays the model Christian martyr comprehensively. It is admirable that she tackles martyrologies by both Catholics and Protestants, and across such a broad chronological range.” —English Historical Review“Dailey has provided an original work of contemporary scholarship . . . . Dailey has insightfully targeted her study at England from the time of its Reformation to its Revolution . . . . Dailey has provided a worthwhile volume.” —Anglican and Episcopal History

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Book SynopsisEisenbichler analyzes the work of Sienese women poets during the early 1500s and their contribution to culture.Trade Review“As if holding a diamond in the twilight, Eisenbichler examines each facet of [these women’s] lives, including intellectual friendships, heresy, political intrigue, and even a lesbian romance. . . . The Sword and the Pen is a major contribution to our understanding of female poets in the Renaissance and the glittering cultural climate of a proud but doomed city.” —Renaissance Quarterly“Eisenbichler not only provides an analysis of the poetry of these women [Aurelia Petrucci, Laudomia Forteguerri, and Virginia Salvi] but also book dedications to them, revealing an intersection of poetry, politics, and sexuality. He has rescued their poetry from the narrow confines of interpretation . . . [and] contributed greatly to our knowledge of women’s thinking and writing.” —Magistra“Eisenbichler brings to his study of Aurelia Petrucci, Laudomia Forteguerri, and Virginia Martini Salvi the deep understanding of Renaissance culture, the confident mastery of archival and manuscript material, the keen eye for revelatory detail, and the lucid expository style that have distinguished his many previous publications. The result is a book that both increases the reader’s knowledge of particular writers in a particular time and place and shows how such particularities can be used to advance understanding of an entire society and its literary culture.” —Choice“This book is an excellent combination of historical and literary analysis. Confronted with a frustrating dearth of information on these women, The Sword and the Pen combines painstaking archival research, a careful analysis of biographical material, and a consideration of the women’s own works to sketch their family ties, their intellectual networks, and the details of their lives.” —Sixteenth Century Journal“Our knowledge of how gender functions on many levels during the Renaissance has been greatly enhanced by Eisenbichler’s work. The inclusion of sonnets and poems composed by several other Sienese women, and their excellent translations, raises many more questions than it answers on the history of gender in Italy—which is Eisenbichler’s goal. A job well done.” —Renaissance and Reformation“Eisenbichler makes a compelling case for the unique aspects of women’s participation in sixteenth-century Siena’s literary networks. His book offers an enticing panorama of literary culture, where men and women of noble families wrote to each other, provoked one another, and built up each other’s reputations in the final years of the Republic of Siena.” —European History Quarterly“. . . Eisenbichler has authored a book which breaks new ground, suggests new readings of texts and places a number of Italian language texts into the hands of English language readers for the first time. . . . The book is well worth the read and the academic community will be well served through this important contribution.” —Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance StudiesPainstakingly researched and well-argued throughout, The Sword and the Pen offers us case studies centered on Siena, showing that the silence enjoined on early modern women was a fiction for at least a literate subset of the population, who wrote not only about love but on politics. . . . this volume will become necessary reading for any scholar working on Italian early modernity, women writers, and cultural history.” —Early Modern Women Journal“Through nuanced renderings and interpretations of their poetry, poems written about them, and works dedicated to them, as well as biographical reconstructions drawn from his meticulous archival research, Eisenbichler fills lacunae, corrects errors, and uncovers his protagonists’ roles in and commentary upon their afflicted city and era . . . . This engagingly written and primary-source-rich study offers much to readers interested in Renaissance studies, Italian literature, and women’s and gender history.” —The Historian“Konrad Eisenbichler presents a sustained investigation of key female protagonists in sixteenth-century Siena’s literary culture. A key strength of this work is its careful analysis of three Sienese [women:] Aurelia Petrucci, Laudomia Forteguerri, and Virginia Martini Salvi. . . . Fine translations are followed by the original citations and Eisenbichler contextualizes his literary analysis with an impressive range of archival research.” —Parergon

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Book SynopsisThe Genius to Improve an Invention derives its title from John Dryden's phrase for the British tendency to take up literary masterpieces from the past and perfect them. Distinguished literary scholar Piero Boitani adopts Dryden's notion as a framework for exploring ways in which classical and medieval texts, scenes, and themes have been rewritten by modern authors. Boitani focuses on a concept of literary transition that takes into account both T.S. Eliot's idea of tradition and individual talent and Harold Bloom's anxiety of influence. In five elegant essays he examines a wide range of authors and texts, including Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Voltaire, Goethe, Sartre, Dante, and Keats. Appearing for the first time in an English translation, The Genius to Improve an Invention will appeal to anyone interested in the Western literary tradition.Trade Review“The book’s linguistic vicissitudes are intriguingly appropriate to its topic, which is the (mostly) translingual commerce between literary texts in which the difference evident in imitation can be understood as an inspired improvement." -- American Journal of Philology“Boitani’s slim book more than lives up to its unique production history in the extraordinary range of its subjects and insights. It is the kind of book that great men of letters once wrote.... [The Genius to Improve an Invention], once opened, it is a book almost impossible to put down.” -- Medium Aevum“This book deserves the attention of all who are interested in the processes of literary continuity and change.” -- Frank Kermode, King’s College, Cambridge University“The Genius to Improve an Invention is both substantial and graceful–a fascinating journey through some of the greatest works of Western literature, with a guide who is at once learned and entertaining, impassioned and moving.” -- Jill Mann“The Genius to Improve an Invention is supported with a thorough theoretical awareness and a flexible intelligence enabling Boitani to move comfortably within a vast array of texts and thus take the reader on a fascinating literary journey. Through his pressing and detailed argumentations, the author suggests original approaches to some of the great works of European literature—each of them is considered as a solution to a specific problem and, at the same time, as a probative argument in favor of applied rationality. Reading these essays calls to mind what Henry James once said, ‘all the pieces of the game [are] on the table together and each unconfusedly and contributively placed, as triumphantly scientific.’” -- Mario Lavagetto, University of Bologna

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Book SynopsisIn this new book, Arthur F. Marotti analyzes some of the rhetorical and imaginative means by which the Catholic minority and the Protestant majority defined themselves and their religious and political antagonists in early modern England. He considers Catholic writings that have been relatively neglected, as well as the discourse of anti-Catholicism. Straddling the boundary of history and literature, this study offers an intriguing cultural history that focuses on the ideologized fantasies and language found on both sides of the early modern Christian religious divide. Marotti focuses on the period between the arrival of the first Jesuit missionaries in England in 1580 and the climax of ongoing religious conflict in the Restoration-era Popish Plot and the 1688 Glorious Revolution. In a series of thematically focused essays, he covers such issues as the relationship of print culture to the residual Catholic culture in Elizabethan England; recusant women, Jesuits and the cultural otheTrade Review“Marotti’s well-researched account is convincing and informative. . . .” —First Things“. . . Compelling and immensely readable . . . Marotti specifically chooses not to examine the canonical literature of the time in order to focus instead on the literature of religious controversy, in particular how the printing press affected the Reformation in England. He examines how opposing factions (Catholic and Anti-Catholic) used the printed word in an attempt to influence their respective audiences and characterize the times.” —Religion and the Arts“. . . The book’s coverage is broad; and though several of these essays have been reprinted from previous collections, they have a striking unity of purpose. . . Marotti’s study is probably the nearest ting we have to a survey: proudly anti-canonical, but also looking towards a new canon.” —Early Modern Literary Studies“. . . [Marotti] investigates the spirited conflict between Papists and Protestants from the time of Queen Elizabeth I to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Studying the use of printed material, the portrayal of martyrdom, the role of women and zealots, and Papish plots that threatened all levels of society, Marotti offers insight into a world not unlike our own.” —History“Arthur F. Marotti’s Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England restores visibility to the Catholic Other demonized by the Protestant Reformation in his exploration not about Catholics and especially about English Jesuits. Simultaneously impassioned and reasonable, Marotti’s work goes beyond a study of cultural operations to restore a sense of why these operations mattered, how they were experienced, and how they caused very real suffering and death.” —SEL: Studies in English Literature“Marotti . . . has written a book that is encyclopedic in scope, examining dozens of examples of English Recusant literature together with an ample supply of counter-examples from the Protestant majority. This literature had enormous impact on the political motivations of certain parties, and Marotti lays these out with considerable skill. This highly recommended volume surely will be of use to specialists in tracking the trajectory of English recusancy, though graduate and undergraduate readers in programs dealing with British literature will also take away much from Marotti’s exacting monograph.” —Catholic Library World“Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy makes a significant contribution to the literature and understanding of this period of passionately held faiths in conflict, of blurred political and religious identities, and of martyrs, royals, disguised religious, and troubled service of two (or more) masters—or the appearances thereof. Marotti’s endnotes deserve special mention. Because he employs so many rarely cited sources, historians will find these extensive listings a valuable and productive resource. This volume is an adept and adroit study of a crucial period in Catholic life in a time when Counter Reformation was a distinctly personal, daily, and uncomfortably mortal aspect of a Catholic’s life.” —Cistercian Studies Quarterly“This book is in itself an index of the degree to which the study of English recusant literature, and of the literary and controversial writings of the English Catholics, has entered the mainstream of literary and historical debate. Indeed, it should be honoured as something of a monument in the history of this area of scholarship.” —Archivum Historicum“Superb. . . . Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy is modestly disguised as a record of the imaginative life of the oppressed Catholic community in England—less a minority than a silenced and stricken majority—and of the cultural fantasies by which they and their Jesuit priests were steadily demonized in text, trial and on the scaffold. Its significance is much greater. The stories told in this book were taken as true by generations of Englishmen; they formed—and to some extent still form—part of British identity. . . .” —Times Literary Supplement“Professor Marotti’s book makes a constructive addition to the literature on religious conflict in early modern England. . . The primary value of the volume is his addition of Catholic sources to a discussion that among literary critics has been largely confined to their opponents.” —The Catholic Historical Review

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Book SynopsisWhat happens when poetry deals explicitly with a serious theological issue? In Poetry Does Theology, Jim Rhodes seeks one answer to that question by analyzing the symbiotic relationship that existed between theology and poetry in fourteenth-century England. He pays special attention to the narrative poems of Chaucer, Grosseteste, the Pearl-poet, the author of Saint Erkenwald, and Langland.Rhodes shows that Chaucer and his contemporaries wrote at the end of a linguistic and theological revolution-a time when revised perspectives on the creation and incarnation gave rise to a new humanistic spirit that transformed late medieval theological culture and spurred the development of vernacular theology and poetry. Rhodes'' careful analysis describes how the relationship between theology and poetry underwent a radical transformation as the latter half of the fourteenth century progressed.What had previously been the exclusive prerogative of a Latinate and clerical eliTrade Review“Rhodes’ book is an affirmation of the role that poets played in religious transformations of the late medieval period and a readable series of essays, each chapter acting as a fairly self-contained reading of one or two texts.... The text also contains several analytical gems relating the poetry to detailed readings of Hebrew Scripture, demonstrating the author’s exegetical talent. Of most interest to the literary scholar of late medieval poetry, it should also prove interesting to serious students of pre-Reformation English Christian thought.” —Religious Studies Review"The influence of Christian thinking on medieval English society is often reflected and refracted through the literature of the period. Analyses of the interplay between poetry and doctrine regularly add to the stream of literary criticism of Middle English texts, a tally to which Jim Rhodes adds his own contribution with this volume." —The Heythrop Journal"...refreshing and original points of view on well-known works. Rhodes's book establishes a provocative topic most worthy of further consideration." —Journal of Religion"As Jim Rhodes demonstrates in this readable and extremely intelligent book, the diverse ways in which Chaucer, Grosseteste, and the Pearl-poet treat theological themes are intricate and subtle. ... Rhodes's book definitely breaks new ground by advancing our understanding of the theological facets of Ricardian literature." —Studies in the Age of Chaucer“Rhodes has produced an elegant and comprehensive assessment of the symbiotic relationship between poetry and theology in the late 14th century.” —Choice“Jim Rhodes, professor of English at Southern Connecticut State University, studies the symbiotic relationship between the poetry of 14th-century England and theology. He does this by a careful analysis of Robert Grosseteste’s Le chateau d’amour (The Castle of Love); Langland and the Four Daughters of God; the Pearl-Poet; the author of Saint Erkenwald; and four tales of Chaucer: the Prioress, the Second Nun, The Reeve, and the Pardoner.” —Theology Digest“Rhodes emerges as a reader to whom fictive persons matter, regardless of the century they inhabit, because they and their lives speak about us—not as subjectivities but as souls. His book deserves credit for treating both medieval religion and medieval poetry seriously as liberating elements in human life.” —Speculum

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Book SynopsisRandall explores the link between philosophical and theological discussions of the nature and status of animals vis-à-vis the rest of existence, particularly humans.Trade Review"Here is a book that breathes and inspires: terse and compelling, every page written with flair and force, The Wisdom of Animals reaches into the past to remind us that we are animals and that we must commit our faith to the world that, by no casual miracle, it is a gift for us to inhabit. Randall’s informed and sustained readings of a panoply of early modern writers tell us, in both their words and hers, why the intricate webbings of our ecosphere must be nurtured and cherished. Weaving together literature, theology and philosophy, she affirms over and again how and why animal wisdom is vital for the present and future of our imperiled planet." —Tom Conley, Abbot Lawrence Lowell Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University"Catharine Randall has written an informative, erudite, and convincing study of the complexity of thought concerning animals in the early modern period, and the importance of theological perspectives for that thought. The Wisdom of Animals: Creatureliness in Early Modern French Spirituality is an original contribution to the field, and is of potential interest not only to scholars of early modern French history and literature, but also to readers interested in religious studies, the history of animality, and the antecedents to current discussions of the status and rights of animals." —Kathleen Perry Long, Cornell University“. . . an engaging and lively piece of scholarly exposition. Randall’s writing is fluent, the theological background is accessibly incorporated into the argument, and the succinct conclusion is compelling, uniting as it does a range of ‘creatures . . . who [open] up new, vibrant ways of experiencing both this world and that beyond it.’” —French Studies“This book is not without merits: the study of the swallow as an emblem and figure of Montaigne’s hermeneutics, for example, is a highly sophisticated reading of the literary uses of animals.” —Renaissance Quarterly“Randall’s book is an amazing testimony of the fact that early modernity did not only bring us René Descartes and his animal-despising philosophy but also has to offer animal-friendly philosophers, theologians, and poets. The book made me ponder how much human animals can learn from non-human animals and how much wisdom and ingenuity animals possess.” —Journal of Animal Ethics“In this book, Randall has offered the reader multiple avenues for entry: as a historian of animals, as one of early modern spirituality or of currents in the proto-scientific movement, and as an individual on a personal spiritual journey. Randall leaves the reader with many directions for further research . . . . Randall has produced a book provocative in its methodological apparatus, valuable in its textual analysis, and stimulating less for its conclusions than for its inspiration toward further research.” —H-France Review“Catharine Randall has written a welcome contribution to the growing scholarship on animals and early modern cultures . . . . It is a testament to the interest of Randall’s analysis that the reader might be left wanting more.” —Modern Language Review“Drawing on a broad interdisciplinary context, Randall eruditely weaves together theology, anthropology, animal studies, and literature. . . She does a first-rate job exploring the significance of animals in each narrative in the context of their relationship to authority and tradition.” —Sixteenth Century Journal “Catharine Randall’s The Wisdom of Animals: Creatureliness in Early Modern French Spirituality argues . . . that religious writings and practices in early modern Europe reveal a shift toward increased compassion for animals that contributed directly to the animal rights movement and contemporary calls for animal liberation. The Wisdom of Animals represents a highly original contribution to the history of thinking about and thinking with animals.” —Modern Philology“Early modern scholars will be grateful to Catherine Randall for bringing Bougeant’s fascinating and little-known work to a wider readership. The Wisdom of Animals does begin, as its author claims, to map the many overlapping fields that comprise the study of early modern theology and the natural world. . .” —Medievalia et Humanistica

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Book SynopsisIn Unwritten Verities: The Making of England''s Vernacular Legal Culture, 1463-1549, Sebastian Sobecki argues that the commitment by English common law to an unwritten tradition, along with its association with Lancastrian political ideas of consensual government, generated a vernacular legal culture on the eve of the Reformation that challenged the centralizing ambitions of Tudor monarchs, the scriptural literalism of ardent Protestants, and the Latinity of English humanists. Sobecki identifies the widespread dissemination of legal books and William Caxton''s printing of the Statutes of Henry VII as crucial events in the creation of a vernacular legal culture. He reveals the impact of medieval concepts of language, governance, and unwritten authority on such sixteenth-century humanists, reformers, playwrights, and legal writers as John Rastell, Thomas Elyot, Christopher St. German, Edmund Dudley, John Heywood, and Thomas Starkey. Unwritten Verities argues that Trade Review"Sebastian Sobecki’s lucid and lively study seeks to address a major lacuna in the current understanding of English vernacularity from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries: English common law. This huge body of knowledge and practice, written and unwritten, awaits focused attention from historians and literary historians, particularly in the light of new scholarship on Anglo-French vernacularity in this period. Sobecki’s ambitious, original, and deeply considered account includes such figures as John Fortescue, John Rastell, and Christopher St. German and their investments in and influence on early Tudor commonality. The range and intelligence of his approach to this material, his ability to think beyond period and disciplinary boundaries, and his alertness to the complex bilingual condition of English intellectuals add a compelling dimension to the debate on the linguistic and political shapes of insular identity in these centuries." —Ardis Butterfield, John M. Schiff Professor of English, Yale University"Unwritten Verities proposes an arresting and original thesis: that the English common law’s commitment to an oral tradition permitted it, on the eve of the Reformation, to become a transformative repository for notions of consensual government, of the inwardness of spiritual jurisdiction, and of the preeminence of English. This elegantly written and engagingly controversial book will stimulate literary scholars, legal historians, and historians of political thought to look afresh at some of their fundamental assumptions about English literature, politics, and the law at the turn of the fifteenth century." —Lorna Hutson, Berry Professor of English Literature, University of St. Andrews"Unwritten Verities boasts persuasive and original arguments that genuinely reframe the ways we understand English humanism, the history of print, and vernacular culture. . . . [The book] will surely become an indispensable text for anyone working on English law and vernacularity." —H-Law, H-Net Reviews“In this book, [Sobecki] delivers the sum of a wide range of parts and convey the importance of those pieces to a community of scholars accustomed to looking past them. Chapter after chapter features fresh, robust claims that shed light on authors rarely considered by critics and are sure to shape the direction of future scholarship.” —The Medieval Review"In his accessible and carefully researched book, Sobecki repositions Fortescue, St. German, and Rastell as thinkers concerned as much with the relationship between the English language and the common law as with England’s constitutional arrangements. The result is an argument that is simultaneously controversial, thought-provoking, and wide-ranging in its implications." —Sixteenth Century Journal"Unwritten Verities is an eloquently written work. In it, Sobecki’s absorbing arguments as to the significance and impact of the developments in English legal vernacularity are presented eruditely. . . . Due to the varied nature of the source material selected for analysis and the arguments proffered, Sobecki’s overarching discussion will be of undoubted value to those with interests as varied as medieval literature, early modern studies, constitutional law, social history and legal history in general." —Journal of Legal History“As readers of Sobecki’s earlier works already know, he is a very clever writer: both his general arguments and his asides are full of rich ideas. His literary analysis . . . is always clear and convincing. Indeed, it is an achievement to have written a book about literature that legal historians would find useful. . . The book [has] enduring value as a sharp explication of the textual and ideological complexities at work in the late-medieval and early modern common law.” —Speculum“Sebastian Sobecki makes the argument that English common law became the repository of consensual theories of government in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Unwritten Verities challenges the view of common law as insular even though in the early seventeenth century it later became the conduit for the idea of English particularity.” —Studies in English Literature“Pointing to the thousands of men in the mid-sixteenth century England—from attorneys and clerks to scriveners and lay readers of legal publications—who would be engaged with vernacular legal culture on a regular basis, Sobecki makes a compelling case for the development by the mid-sixteenth century of a vibrant vernacular legal culture in England. . . . Socbecki rightly questions assumptions that this period saw a turning away from the medieval and toward the modern. If Unwritten Verities is controversial, it is so not least because it challenges its readers to recognize the enduring if unacknowledged influence of medieval ideas about language, law, and the nature of political society.” —Sixteenth Century Journal“In Unwritten Verities, Sebastian Sobecki provides an engaging, interdisciplinary study of English Common law’s oral tradition. Emerging from this volume is a provocative consideration of the relationship between common law and Anglo-French vernacularity in late mediaeval and early modern England. Importantly, Sobecki’s examination of vernacular legal culture challenges late medieval periodization, connecting the writing of John Fortescue and other English legal thinkers to subsequent ideas about consensual and even socially inclusive government.” —Renaissance and Reformation

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Book SynopsisThis book examines the role poetry played in England after religious reformation and shows that the liturgical character of poetry is essential to comprehending the shifts in English spiritual attitudes and practices of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Trade Review“Conflicts of Devotion is exceptionally well written and is subtly and persuasively argued, advancing scholarship in such important ways as to change our ways of thinking about the major poets of this period. It will have special value to graduate students and young academics looking for an approach to their own writing.” —Gerard Wegemer, University of Dallas"Cogent, clear and beautifully written, Conflicts of Devotion looks at how early modern English poets and prelates negotiate the threshold of religious identity in a religiously pluralist society. Ranging from Spenser to Southwell, from Cranmer to Crashaw, this book revises our understanding of generic conventions from the pastoral to the metaphysical. While Gibbons does not eschew controversy, he focuses on the strategies of compromise: liturgy, and the poetics that proceed from it, accommodate diverse religious belief in the rituals that give structure to the social world. Conflicts of Devotion provides stunning close readings and sound insights into the ecumenical design of early modern English poetry." —Kimberly Anne Coles, University of Maryland"Although Daniel Gibbons' Conflicts of Devotion engages with the tensions suggested by his title, he incisively emphasizes the countervailing searches for spiritual unity and community. The argumentation is original and persuasive, the scholarship impeccable, and the prose elegant." —Heather Dubrow, Fordham University“. . . a valuable addition to the work being done on the intersection of literature and religion in early modern literary studies. The book’s approach, in contrast to the somewhat indistinct title, is specific and illuminating. . . . Gibbon’s approach to the complexities of early modern religious identities and to the nuances of the poets’ engagements with the religious controversies and subjects of their day is skillful, generous, and in this reviewer’s opinion, exemplary.” —Renaissance and Reformation“The book treads a careful path between emphasizing the religious discord and fragmentation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and producing the kind of ecumenical account of the period that has become more common in recent years and that has tended sometimes to overlook difference in the interest of affirming continuities among those of distinct religious persuasions. Gibbons locates the efforts of a wide range of writers to foster community specifically in the rhetorical techniques that they employ to accommodate difference.” —Modern Philology

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Book SynopsisTrade Review“This exhilarating and brilliant book will be a most welcome and timely addition to the ReFormations series, to which it will add distinction. . . . It is also a book that can be relished sentence by sentence, as Escobedo is a writer of intellectual verve and boldness, making hard-won claims look obvious once made.” —Sarah Beckwith, Katherine Everett Gilbert Professor of English, Duke University"In Volition's Face, Andrew Escobedo tracks the uses of allegorical personification from its prehistory in the Greek daemonic to its high points in Spenser and Milton. The originality of the argument is sure to draw attention, for Escobedo engages with the landmark studies of Fletcher, Teskey, and others, respectfully but convincingly redrawing the boundaries of the topic. He does so on the basis of a sustained and rigorous engagement with modern philosophical approaches to agency and volition, which lets him return to early modern literary texts in order to show how distinct conceptions of these categories are encoded within the literary practice of personification. It's a very strong book." —David Miller, Carolina Distinguished Professor, University of South Carolina"Volition’s Face is remarkably subtle, nuanced, and comprehensive. Engaging works by Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, the book aims to capture premodern intuitions about the human will. Escobedo’s deft treatment of the tensions inherent in such a will—both cause and effect, both active and passive, both within and without—shows an intellectual control of a very high order. The historical sweep of Volition’s Face and its compelling arguments will make it an influential contribution to early modern literary studies." —David J. Baker, Peter G. Phialas Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill“In chapter after chapter, Escobedo sees and delineates the connections between ancient and early modern ideas of personification and will, and it is difficult to do justice to the nuances of Escobedo’s argument in a brief review. Regardless, it is clear that specialists in medieval and Renaissance studies will find rewarding insights and significant contributions to the field in these pages.” —Sixteenth Century Journal“Volition’s Face is a highly exhilarating, informative, and entertaining study. Escobedo often reminds the academic reader that the most obvious explanations belie a complex theoretical framework.” —Parergon“An excellent study, Volition’s Face is the most sophisticated account to date of the trope known as prosopopoeia, personification, as it developed from Classical times through the Christian Middle Ages to the Renaissance.” —Religion and Literature

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Book SynopsisModern readers and writers find it natural to contrast the agency of realistic fictional characters to the constrained range of action typical of literary personifications. Yet no commentator before the eighteenth century suggests that prosopopoeia signals a form of reduced agency. Andrew Escobedo argues that premodern writers, including Spenser, Marlowe, and Milton, understood personification as a literary expression of will, an essentially energetic figure that depicted passion or concept transforming into action. As the will emerged as an isolatable faculty in the Christian Middle Ages, it was seen not only as the instrument of human agency but also as perversely independent of other human capacities, for example, intellect and moral character. Renaissance accounts of the will conceived of volition both as the means to self-creation and the faculty by which we lose control of ourselves. After offering a brief history of the will that isolates the distinctive features of the faculTrade Review“This exhilarating and brilliant book will be a most welcome and timely addition to the ReFormations series, to which it will add distinction. . . . It is also a book that can be relished sentence by sentence, as Escobedo is a writer of intellectual verve and boldness, making hard-won claims look obvious once made.” —Sarah Beckwith, Katherine Everett Gilbert Professor of English, Duke University"In Volition's Face, Andrew Escobedo tracks the uses of allegorical personification from its prehistory in the Greek daemonic to its high points in Spenser and Milton. The originality of the argument is sure to draw attention, for Escobedo engages with the landmark studies of Fletcher, Teskey, and others, respectfully but convincingly redrawing the boundaries of the topic. He does so on the basis of a sustained and rigorous engagement with modern philosophical approaches to agency and volition, which lets him return to early modern literary texts in order to show how distinct conceptions of these categories are encoded within the literary practice of personification. It's a very strong book." —David Miller, Carolina Distinguished Professor, University of South Carolina"Volition’s Face is remarkably subtle, nuanced, and comprehensive. Engaging works by Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, the book aims to capture premodern intuitions about the human will. Escobedo’s deft treatment of the tensions inherent in such a will—both cause and effect, both active and passive, both within and without—shows an intellectual control of a very high order. The historical sweep of Volition’s Face and its compelling arguments will make it an influential contribution to early modern literary studies." —David J. Baker, Peter G. Phialas Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill“In chapter after chapter, Escobedo sees and delineates the connections between ancient and early modern ideas of personification and will, and it is difficult to do justice to the nuances of Escobedo’s argument in a brief review. Regardless, it is clear that specialists in medieval and Renaissance studies will find rewarding insights and significant contributions to the field in these pages.” —Sixteenth Century Journal“Volition’s Face is a highly exhilarating, informative, and entertaining study. Escobedo often reminds the academic reader that the most obvious explanations belie a complex theoretical framework.” —Parergon“An excellent study, Volition’s Face is the most sophisticated account to date of the trope known as prosopopoeia, personification, as it developed from Classical times through the Christian Middle Ages to the Renaissance.” —Religion and Literature

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Book SynopsisThe belief that the Virgin Mary was bodily assumed to be crowned as heaven's Queen has been celebrated in the liturgy and literature of England since the fifth century. The upheaval of the Reformation brought radical changes in the beliefs surrounding the assumption and coronation, both of which were eliminated from state-approved liturgy.Queen of Heaven examines canonical as well as obscure images of the Blessed Mother that present fresh evidence of the incompleteness of the English Reformation. Through an analysis of works by writers such as Edmund Spenser, Henry Constable, Sir John Harington, and the writers of the early modern rosary books, which were contraband during the Reformation, Grindlay finds that these images did not simply disappear during this time as lost Catholic symbols, but instead became sources of resistance and controversy, reflecting the anxieties triggered by the religious changes of the era.Grindlay's study of the Queen of Heaven affordsTrade Review"Grindlay writes about an era that was going through a sort of adolescence, as new forms of power emerged in the body politic, in academia, and in the market place. In our own time, we face a similar sort of adolescence as the issues of communication, intelligence, and human identity confront us. This thoughtful study of the Virgin Mary reminds us that it is in beauty rather than function that the heavenly power and attraction of the Mother of Christ resides." —Church Times"Despite being powerfully backed by a reigning monarch, the English Reformation also necessitated the dethronement of a reigning monarch. Dethroned monarchs never go quietly into the dark. Ever fainter echoes? Fading nostalgia? Secular disguise? A vanishing Virgin? Not so, argues Lilla Grindlay in this vigorous and rich book: Mary the Queen of Heaven stubbornly sticks around, taking many forms, some lurid, as she reclaims her throne." —James Simpson, Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English, Harvard University"The book makes an original contribution to the fields of gender studies and English religious and literary studies. Lilla Grindlay offers an important corrective to the long-standing claim that the Blessed Virgin Mary disappears from English religious writing at the dawn of the Protestant Reformation. The book is very well written. Grindlay's care for her subject is evident in every sentence. Ultimately, her goal is to persuade the reader that their understanding of the post-Reformation/post-medieval status of the Virgin is incomplete. The book is really lovely to read. Grindlay has taken great care to make her work accessible, interesting, and important."—Patricia Badir, author of The Maudlin Impression: English Literary Images of Mary Magdalene, 1550–1700“This is a thoroughly stimulating volume, clearly written and helpfully sign-posted throughout that demonstrates Grindlay’s erudition as a literary scholar. It makes a helpful contribution to the field of English Reformation Studies and offers interesting insights for those studying gender in the early modern period.” —British Catholic History“Grindlay’s book is timely and valuable, and remedies an important gap in Reformation studies by encouraging its readers to consider more nuanced accounts of cultural loss.” —Renaissance and Reformation“Grindlay explains clearly and concisely why the (extra-scriptural) teachings that Mary was physically taken into heaven after her death and crowned queen of heaven created such a stark dividing line between Protestant and Catholic religious and literary culture.” —The Journal of Theological StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Notes on the text Introduction: The Vanishing Virgin? 1. The Virgin’s Assumption and Coronation through the Ages Part 1. “Some out of Vanity Will Call Her the Queene of Heaven” 2. The Queen of Heaven in Protestant Religious Discourse 3. Sham Queens of Heaven: Iconoclasm and the Virgin Mary Part 2. Voices from the Shadows 4. The Virgin Mary and the Godly Protestant Woman 5. The Queen of Heaven and the Sonnet Mistress: the Sacred and Secular Poems of Henry Constable 6. A Garland of Aves: The Queen of Heaven and the Rosary 7. The Assumption and Coronation in the Poetry of Robert Southwell Epilogue Bibliography

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Book SynopsisThe belief that the Virgin Mary was bodily assumed to be crowned as heaven's Queen has been celebrated in the liturgy and literature of England since the fifth century. The upheaval of the Reformation brought radical changes in the beliefs surrounding the assumption and coronation, both of which were eliminated from state-approved liturgy.Queen of Heaven examines canonical as well as obscure images of the Blessed Mother that present fresh evidence of the incompleteness of the English Reformation. Through an analysis of works by writers such as Edmund Spenser, Henry Constable, Sir John Harington, and the writers of the early modern rosary books, which were contraband during the Reformation, Grindlay finds that these images did not simply disappear during this time as lost Catholic symbols, but instead became sources of resistance and controversy, reflecting the anxieties triggered by the religious changes of the era.Grindlay's study of the Queen of Heaven affordsTrade Review"Grindlay writes about an era that was going through a sort of adolescence, as new forms of power emerged in the body politic, in academia, and in the market place. In our own time, we face a similar sort of adolescence as the issues of communication, intelligence, and human identity confront us. This thoughtful study of the Virgin Mary reminds us that it is in beauty rather than function that the heavenly power and attraction of the Mother of Christ resides." —Church Times"Despite being powerfully backed by a reigning monarch, the English Reformation also necessitated the dethronement of a reigning monarch. Dethroned monarchs never go quietly into the dark. Ever fainter echoes? Fading nostalgia? Secular disguise? A vanishing Virgin? Not so, argues Lilla Grindlay in this vigorous and rich book: Mary the Queen of Heaven stubbornly sticks around, taking many forms, some lurid, as she reclaims her throne." —James Simpson, Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English, Harvard University"The book makes an original contribution to the fields of gender studies and English religious and literary studies. Lilla Grindlay offers an important corrective to the long-standing claim that the Blessed Virgin Mary disappears from English religious writing at the dawn of the Protestant Reformation. The book is very well written. Grindlay's care for her subject is evident in every sentence. Ultimately, her goal is to persuade the reader that their understanding of the post-Reformation/post-medieval status of the Virgin is incomplete. The book is really lovely to read. Grindlay has taken great care to make her work accessible, interesting, and important."—Patricia Badir, author of The Maudlin Impression: English Literary Images of Mary Magdalene, 1550–1700“This is a thoroughly stimulating volume, clearly written and helpfully sign-posted throughout that demonstrates Grindlay’s erudition as a literary scholar. It makes a helpful contribution to the field of English Reformation Studies and offers interesting insights for those studying gender in the early modern period.” —British Catholic History“Grindlay’s book is timely and valuable, and remedies an important gap in Reformation studies by encouraging its readers to consider more nuanced accounts of cultural loss.” —Renaissance and Reformation“Grindlay explains clearly and concisely why the (extra-scriptural) teachings that Mary was physically taken into heaven after her death and crowned queen of heaven created such a stark dividing line between Protestant and Catholic religious and literary culture.” —The Journal of Theological StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Notes on the text Introduction: The Vanishing Virgin? 1. The Virgin’s Assumption and Coronation through the Ages Part 1. “Some out of Vanity Will Call Her the Queene of Heaven” 2. The Queen of Heaven in Protestant Religious Discourse 3. Sham Queens of Heaven: Iconoclasm and the Virgin Mary Part 2. Voices from the Shadows 4. The Virgin Mary and the Godly Protestant Woman 5. The Queen of Heaven and the Sonnet Mistress: the Sacred and Secular Poems of Henry Constable 6. A Garland of Aves: The Queen of Heaven and the Rosary 7. The Assumption and Coronation in the Poetry of Robert Southwell Epilogue Bibliography

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Book SynopsisFleshly Tabernacles examines how John Milton’s engagement with the Incarnation affected nonconformist sects of revolutionary England.Trade Review"Fleshly Tabernacles is an important investigation of the Incarnation in Milton's thought and works and in revolutionary England, especially in the 1640s and 1650s. This is a learned, often powerful, and conceptually rich study of an important topic in its broad cultural context. Bryan Adams Hampton makes an original contribution to the field of seventeenth-century literary and religious studies." —David Loewenstein, University of Wisconsin-Madison"In Fleshly Tabernacles Bryan Adams Hampton brings fresh attention to the critical topic of Milton's heterodox Christology and its implications for his efforts as polemicist and poet. Hampton's arguments are particularly illuminating as they concern the idiosyncratic doctrine of the incarnate word presented in Milton's theological treatise in relation to his poetry. This original and thought-provoking book concludes with telling studies of heterodox incarnational theology as it shapes the writings of other radical seventeenth-century English religious writers such as Gerrard Winstanley and James Nayler." —John Rumrich, University of Texas at Austin“Bryan Hampton’s book makes an original and important contribution to the field of Milton studies, as well as to the study of seventeenth-century radical English religious thought. His work has further implications for the study of comparative hermeneutics, proposing provocative continuities and correlations between medieval and early modern approaches to interpretation on the one hand, and contemporary theories of language and meaning on the other. Exhaustively researched and meticulously annotated, Hampton’s readings of incarnational epistemologies offer a wealth of insights and suggestive parallels among early modern writers who are not often taken together.” —Jeffrey Spencer Shoulson, University of Miami“By taking the Logos seriously as divinity and language, Fleshly Tabernacles finds new depths in seventeenth-century religious poetry, and adds a great deal to our understanding of Milton’s Christology. It develops a wide array of critical approaches, deftly synthesizing Patristic with postmodern theologians, with the historically specific discourses of early modern preachers and radicals, with language theorists such as Ricoeur and Wittgenstein, with Milton and Milton criticism.” —Milton Quarterly“Hampton’s Fleshly Tabernacles is an interesting exposition of how Milton’s Christology shaped his reading, writing, and politics. It focuses on the Incarnation as a central preoccupation throughout Milton’s oeuvre and how Incarnational thinking was applied to such disparate realms as poetics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and economics. . . . Hampton’s book can be praised for its boldness, and the requisite command of the Miltonic corpus required to sustain such a sweeping argument is impressive.” —Sixteenth Century Journal“Fleshly Tabernacles is a clearly learned and meticulously researched piece of Milton scholarship, which students of intellectual and cultural history will find extremely useful.” —Renaissance Quarterly“. . . anyone interested in Milton will want to engage Fleshly Tabernacles. Hampton’s scholarship here is certainly worthy of the common accolade offered in each of three back-cover blurbs from eminent Milton scholars (David Loewenstein, John Rumrich, Jeffrey Spencer Shoulson): this book makes an ‘original’ and ‘important’ (or ‘thought-provoking’) contribution to Milton studies. This I affirm and add only that Hampton does this in a lucid prose style that incarnates his superb reading of Milton’s texts in a more virtuous fashion.” —Modern Philology“The strength of this book lies in Hampton’s wide interests in literature, theology, and hermeneutics. . . . Fleshly Tabernacles sets us well on the way toward discovering new registers of meaning in writing that embodies the complex material, spiritual, and political meanings of the Incarnation in seventeenth-century England.” —Renaissance and Reformation

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Book SynopsisPina Palma's Savoring Power, Consuming the Times: The Metaphors of Food in Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature is an innovative look at the writings of five important Italian authorsBoccaccio's Decameron, Pulci's Morgante, Boiardo's Innamorato, Ariosto's Furioso, and Aretino's Ragionamento. Through the prism of gastronomy, Palma examines these key works in the Western literary canon, bringing into focus how their authors use food and gastronomy as a means to critique the social, political, theological, philosophical, and cultural beliefs that constitute the fabric of the society in which they live. Palma begins with the anthropological principle that food represents the universal transformation of nature into culture and that it functions as a language that distinguishes every society and its culture from others. This suggests that foodits preparation, presentation, and consumptionis more than merely a source of nourishment. RTrade Review"With clarity and wit, Pina Palma has used the central metaphor of food to uncover unexpectedly fresh dimensions of Renaissance intellectual traditions. Her fascinating and original exploration of the connections between food and sexuality, political power, moral hypocrisy, ascetic discipline of the body, and the world of the appetites in a selection of key Italian Renaissance works is sure to engage historians as well as literary scholars." —Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University"Savoring Power, Consuming the Times is not simply a book about food in Italian literature. It is a subtle and far-reaching work of criticism, which discloses an original aspect of the Renaissance. Not only does food provide a way of accessing a privileged perspective on the Renaissance religious, philosophical, and moral thinking; but it is also the perfect means of building an unexpected web of relationships between authors." —Salvatore Silvano Nigro, Libera Universita di Lingue e Comunicazione, IULM“This book will be a landmark. . . This richly detailed, consistently fascinating study deepens readers’ understanding of early-modern Italian literature and shows there is much more to literary criticism than the merely literary. Highly recommended.” —Choice“Savoring Power, Consuming the Times studies a group of important literary works of the Italian Renaissance in an attempt to understand the ideological and literary implications of food metaphors. . . . The main thrust of the book remains high literature where the analysis of food metaphors is the key to understanding that culture in its broadest context.” —Renaissance Quarterly“. . . the strength of Palma’s book is the variety of texts considered and the messages she is able to tease out in her analysis. Her weaving of historical context throughout her literary analysis not only supports her themes, but also allows Savoring Power, Consuming the Times to serve as a relevant text for historians, as well as for literary scholars.” —Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies“. . . the reality of this beautiful book is that it analyzes food not only as nourishment but as reference and ‘tool’ used by culture and literature to teach, explain, and critique. Pina Palma’s book is an intriguing read that goes well beyond appearances and brings to light an intricate network of connections that a modern reader would definitely miss without the help of her accurate and well-balanced transversal reading.” —Renaissance and Reformation“In undertaking this broader analysis, Palma illuminates the shared ideas and concerns that link her five authors across three centuries. Her work, then, is more than a simple canonical study. . . . it is a rich and useful work with many fascinating ideas for students of literature, history, philosophy, and cultural theory.” —Sixteenth Century Journal“Pina Palma investigates the representation of food in medieval and Renaissance Italian literature by stressing its metaphorical meanings and its multifaceted connections with language, society, history, politics, power, art, and nature. . . . Savoring Power, Consuming the Times provides a stimulating opportunity to reread some masterpieces of medieval and Renaissance Italian literature through the lens of food, and to discover fascinating, complex, and sometimes overlooked metaphorical meanings.” —Modern Language Review“The volume of Pina Palma presents the analysis of a series of works or Italian literature medieval and early modern age, centered on food and the different implications it entails: the representation of power relations among social groups to ethical evaluation of the reports and human behavior.” —The Medieval Review

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Book SynopsisIn Shakespeare and Abraham, Ken Jackson illuminates William Shakespeare's dramatic fascination with the story of Abraham's near sacrifice of his son Isaac in Genesis 22. Themes of child killing fill Shakespeare's early plays: Genesis 22 informed Clifford's attack on young Rutland in 3 Henry 6, Hubert's providentially thwarted murder of Arthur in King John, and Aaron the Moor's surprising decision to spare his son amidst the filial slaughters of Titus Andronicus, among others. However, the playwright's full engagement with the biblical narrative does not manifest itself exclusively in scenes involving the sacrifice of children or in verbal borrowings from the famously sparse story of Abraham. Jackson argues that the most important influence of Genesis 22 and its interpretive tradition is to be found in the conceptual framework that Shakespeare develops to explore relationships among ideas of religion, sovereignty, law, and justice. Jackson probes thTrade Review"Ken Jackson's Shakespeare and Abraham poses a powerful model for how a biblical hero can be recovered within a number of divergent dramatic contexts—both Shakespearean and medieval—as well as in philosophy and theology. Writing with great clarity about challenging ideas, Jackson has led us a great deal closer to understanding the meanings that the binding of Isaac held for Shakespeare." —Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine"Ken Jackson’s powerfully argued book challenges us to rethink what religion may have meant to Shakespeare and what it may yet come to mean for us. Neither secular nor orthodox, neither skeptical nor pious, Jackson’s Shakespeare is nevertheless a passionately committed playwright deeply aware of the inescapably religious dimensions of everyday life. Through a series of startling readings, Jackson shows Shakespeare bearing witness to a desire for pure generosity that quickens even as it unsettles the three great monotheisms. Shakespeare and Abraham is high-stakes criticism sure to provoke." —Gary Kuchar, University of Victoria“Ken Jackson’s timely book makes a forceful case for attending to Shakespeare’s engagement with the Abrahamic roots of monotheism as a way of looking anew at some of the most perplexing moments in the plays. Reevaluating the playwright’s attitude toward religion without getting bogged down in debates over doctrinal commitments, Jackson gives us a Shakespeare deeply invested in religious questions, if not religious controversy. Moving effortlessly among theological, literary, and philosophical works from antiquity to the present, Jackson reveals that Shakespeare’s response to Abraham raises urgent questions about the intersections of religion and culture in early modern England that are no less relevant today.” —James A. Knapp, Edward Surtz, S.J., Professor of English, Loyola University Chicago"Not long ago, Shakespeare criticism generally cast the Bard as a protomodern secular humanist. Lately, the foundational importance of religion to his art has come to the fore. To this new critical recognition, Jackson adds a study of how the aborted sacrifice of Isaac by his father, Abraham, in Genesis 22 informs six plays—3 Henry VI, King John, Richard II, Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, and Timon of Athens—that today’s audiences and presenters alike consider difficult. . . . Jackson’s exposition . . . is hardly easy reading, but it is rich in freshening insights." —Booklist"For Ken Jackson, Shakespeare is not the secular, modern writer so many critics construct: he is a deeply religious thinker. . . . Jackson's remarkable conclusion is that Shakespeare, like Kierkegaard and Derrida, points in the direction of a certain Abraham beyond Christianity and outside Western metaphysics." —Times Literary Supplement“Jackson’s stance is less dogmatic than many of the ‘religious turn’ claims that Shakespeare was a closet Catholic . . . . The book is consistently provocative.” —Choice"While any number of books analyze Shakespeare’s plays and either his religious leanings or biblical imagery, Ken Jackson has a much tighter focus: the famously difficult Genesis 22 story of Abraham and Isaac and its echoes throughout certain of Shakespeare’s plays.” —Catholic Library World“Jackson’s approach is not just a philological overview of overt references to Genesis, chapter 22; he makes the so-called Binding of Isaac emblematic of Shakespeare’s philosophical struggles with the relationships between religion, sovereignty, law, and justice. . . Shakespeare and Abraham is an excellent inquiry into a rather niche research question. Jackson’s reading, though novel, is very compelling, and resolves some of Shakespeare’s most perplexing moments in a way that almost seems obvious in hindsight.” —Comitatus “Ken Jackson’s marvelously provocative book Shakespeare and Abraham pushes back against historiographical masterplots in which modernity is realized via secularization. . . Jackson finds, in this premodern text’s grappling with the story of Abraham, a powerful theorization of faith now made legible once again via modern and postmodern theory. This argument works strongly against periodizing ideas about medieval Christianity: it recovers something urgent in medieval though, something that has been occluded and ignored as a result of ideas about progress, secularization and modernity.” —Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama “This very accessible book allows the reader to learn a great deal about major issues in biblical and Shakespearean studies in less than 200 pages.” —America

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Book SynopsisTropologies studies the medieval and early modern theory of morality in scripture, arguing that tropology is both a way to interpret the Bible and a theory of literary invention. Trade Review"This is a major book, which takes us back to a body of well-known vernacular texts and asks us to look at them in an entirely new light. Students of the history of Christian thought and of Middle English literature alike will want to pay careful attention to Tropologies as it traces the close connections between medieval biblical exegesis and vernacular poetics and demonstrates the extent of their interdependence. McDermott’s concern is with literary and religious history, bringing often brilliant new insights to the study of the relationship of Latin and vernacular, the effects of the Reformation on the practice of 'thinking with Scripture,' and the poems and plays that lie at the center of his analysis. In another sense, however, Tropologies is itself an exercise in tropological exegesis, obliging us to confront basic questions about the ethical demands of writing, reading, and living in time. It will be widely read and broadly influential." —Nicholas Watson, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature, Harvard University"Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350–1600 is a work of great and generous ambition, of intelligence both sharp and warm. It takes with equal seriousness the concerns of literary scholarship in our present and the concerns of biblical exegesis in the medieval and Reformation past, and shows how brightly they illuminate each other. At once irenic and challenging, this is a book that needs seriously to be reckoned with." —Steven Justice, Chancellor's Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley"This is an original book. It draws confidently on a wide range of medieval critical and scholarly work, as well as on a cogent body of contemporary theory and theology. It not only moves easily and eloquently between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries but also delves back into the 'tropological' Christian thought of the previous thousand years." —Nicolette Zeeman, University of Cambridge“Ryan McDermott offers an impressive new study on biblical interpretation with Tropologies. He pushes us to consider, to an extent heretofore not done, the importance of the tropological mode of biblical interpretation, which is an approach to finding ethical meaning in biblical passages (even or especially those without explicit moral messages), not only for the late medieval and early modern periods, but also in present day biblical studies.” —Reading Religion“[Tropologies] takes the reader on a fascinating journey of religious exegesis and the moral sense of scriptures. . . . McDermott’s sites of inquiry are poetry, religious literature, and drama, showing how these different types of text ask the reader to reconsider the scriptures leading to salvation and the ways in turn these manuscripts transforms the reader’s perception and support and active contribution to the field of tropological exegesis.” —Sixteenth Century Journal“In this encompassing and intensely argued monograph, Ryan McDermott sets forth an important new account of medieval literary ethics. . . . McDermott articulates his claims in dialogue with an array of intellectual traditions—exegetical, literary-critical, philosophical, phenomenological, and anthropological, among others. There is almost no concept he deploys that is left unsounded: invention, figural reading, the literal sense, exemplarity, chiasmus, mirroring—all are searchingly defined rather than assumed in McDermott’s use of them.” —Modern Philology“This fascinating book investigates the use of the tropological mode of reading in a range of texts, mostly form the late medieval period. . . . I recommend this book highly, especially to those interested in historical continuities between the medieval and early modern periods, and to those interested in alternatives to rhetorical methods of thinking about the link between words and actions.” —Parergon“Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England draws on literary, theological, and other texts in a study of medieval and early modern views of the moral sense of scripture.” —The Chronicle Review.

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Book SynopsisA collection of essays by scholars of eighteenth-century literature, sharing their experiences as both producers and users of explanatory annotations.Trade Review“This collection synthesizes key issues of scholarly annotation for the first time, not by providing a single definitive set of rules and procedures but by setting out the broad spectrum of considerations that should be in the minds of editors (and publishers). It is by far the most comprehensive treatment of these issues to date and thus fills a long-felt want.”—Pat Rogers,author of Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts: History, Politics, and Mythology in the Age of Queen Anne“Every single essay in Notes on Footnotes is not just readable but entertaining, not just learned but intelligent, not just well-argued but compelling. This will be a book with appeal far beyond fellow-editors; it will make eager annotators of us all.”—Cynthia Wall,author of Grammars of Approach: Landscape, Narrative, and the Linguistic Picturesque“A really fascinating look at a subject that few have given more than a passing thought to, Notes on Footnotes is a worthy addition to your bookshelf.”—Cliff Cunningham Sun News Austin

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Book SynopsisAppearing in tandem with the publication of an authoritative text of the first edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost, these insightful essays by ten Miltonists establish the significant differences between the text, context, and effect of the poem's first edition (1667) and those of the now-standard second edition. In bringing together essays by various hands, editors Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross seek to map what may be termed a new frontier in Milton studies, one that acknowledges the importance of what Milton himself considered to be the work of a lifetime when he offered Paradise Lost to readers in 1667. While the scholars writing here do not claim that the first edition of Milton's epic should be viewed as supplanting the second and later editions, they do seek to demonstrate the importance of coming to terms with the original ten-book edition both as a work with its own identity and value and as a source of fundamental insight into the nature of the editions that would follow in its wake. Paradise Lost cannot be fully understood without an awareness of the dynamic and ever-changing nature of the forces through which it made its first and subsequent appearances in the world at large.Table of ContentsPreface1. Back to the Future: Paradise Lost 1667Michael Lieb2. “More and More Perceiving”: Paraphernalia and Purpose in Paradise Lost, 1668, 1669Joseph Wittreich3. Simmons’s Shell Game: The Six Title Pages of Paradise LostStephen B. Dobranski4. Milton’s 1667 Paradise Lost in Its Historical and Literary ContextsAchsah Guibbory5. The Emperor’s New Clothes: The Royal Fashion of Satan and Charles IIRichard J. DuRocher6. “Now let us play”: Paradise Lost and Pleasure Gardens in Restoration LondonLaura Lunger Knoppers7. “[N]ew Laws thou see’st impos’d”: Milton’s Dissenting Angels and the Clarendon Code, 1661–65Bryan Adams Hampton8. Poetic Justice: Plato’s Republic in Paradise Lost (1667)Phillip J. Donnelly9. The Mysterious Darkness of Unknowing: Paradise Lost and the God Beyond NamesMichael Bryson10. “That which by creation first brought forth Light out of darkness!”: Paradise Lost, First Edition John T. ShawcrossNotesAbout the ContributorsIndex

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Book SynopsisThe author convincingly shows that writers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England wrote with a lively and creative sense of the visual—a sense richly informed by the theory and practice of Renaissance art.Table of Contents Preface Acknowledgments 1. Visual Art in the New Arcadia 2. Donne, Jonson, and the Priority of Picture 3. Thomas Carew’s “A Rapture” and Lord Herbert’s “To his Mistress for her true Picture”: Poetic Invention on Pictorial Themes 4. Richard Crashaw: The “Holy Strife” of Pencil and Pen 5. Richard Lovelace, Edmund Waller, and the Flowering of English Art 6. Herrick’s Hesperidean Garden: Ut pictura poesis Applied 7. Lady Drury’s Oratory: The Painted Closet from Hawstead Hall Notes Index

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Those interested in Indian religions, bhakti and the formation of mod-ern Hinduism, the history of literatures and languages in South Asia, the emergence of a public sphere and early modernity, and the relationship of images to literature willfind this volume particularly rewarding." * History of Religions *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Notes on Texts, Transliterations, and Dates Introduction: Rādhā-Krishna Devotion in Kishangarh 1. Soldiers Marching: Kishangarh at the Crossroads 2. Gods and Saints Relocated: Sectarian Rivalries and Hinduism in the Making 3. Devotees on the Move: The Pilgrim’s Bliss 4. Legends Mobilized: Garland of Stories and Songs 5. Myth Retold: Garland of Rāma’s Romance Conclusion: Pilgrimage, Hagiography, and Scripture Notes Bibliography List of Illustrations Index

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Book SynopsisCelebrates Shakespeare's influence on American culture. This book contains essays which explore Shakespeare's influence on America's cultural history from a variety of perspectives. It includes essays from the colonial period, to the adoption of Shakespeare as an "American genius" in the nineteenth century, to twentieth-century musical comedy.Table of ContentsForeword / Gail Kern PasterIntroduction / Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. VaughanShakespeare Discovers America; America Discovers Shakespeare / Alden T. VaughanMaking Shakespeare American: Shakespeare's Dissemination in Nineteenth-Century America / Virginia Mason VaughanPlaying with (a) Difference: Early Black Shakespearean Actors, Blackface and Whiteface / Francesca T. RoysterShakespeare Film in America: O Brave New World of Bardolatry! / Kenneth S. RothwellShakespeare and the American Musical / Irene G. DashJazzing Up Shakespeare / Douglas M. LanierAmerican Shakespeare Festivals / Yu Jin KoDuty and Enjoyment: The Folgers as Shakespeare Collectors in the Gilded Age / Georgianna ZieglerCatalogue of the Exhibition / Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. VaughanInterlude: American Scrapbooks / Leigh Anne PalmerNotes on Contributors

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Book SynopsisIn an account of the first 30 years of Shakespeare's life, Eric Sams controverts all orthodox editions, biographies and references. He reveals how the playwright's youth has been concealed within a web of literary theories which misrepresent his life and work, and his early plays.Table of ContentsPart 1 The country background: reading and writing; the family home and trades; religion, school and Latin; the early theatre; poverty; butchery and by-products; John Shakespeare's Catholic testament; Lancashire; the law clerk; Lucy and his deer; marriage and departure; theatre, work and company; the battle of the books; wits and their butts - Marlowe, Greene, Nashe, Lodge, Peele, Lyly. Appendices: allies - Harvey and Spenser; the Parnassus plays; Willobie his avisa; the sonnets; the actor-playwright of the 1590s. Part 2 Style - the noted weed: Ur Hamlet; Hamlet 1603; the taming of a shrew; the troublesome reign; contention and true tragedy; faire em and locrine; man's wit and the dialogue of dives; early start and revision; "Bad Quartos" and "Memorial Reconstruction by Actors"; "Source Plays", "Derivative Plays" and plagiarism; dating and "Collaboration"; "Stylometry"; handwriting; documents.

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Book SynopsisTrade Review“The analysis is sharp, and the points of reference are consistently engaging . . . the syntheses, range of inquiry, and knowledge of the period are impressive.”—Choice * Choice *

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Book SynopsisWilliam Shakespeare'sHamlet is probably the best-known and most commented upon work of literature in Western culture. The paradox is that it is at once utterly familiar and strangely elusivevery like our own selves, argues Gabriel Josipovici in this stimulating and original study. Moreover, our desire to master this elusiveness, to pluck the heart out of its mystery, as Hamlet himself says, precisely mirrors what is going on in the play; and what Shakespeare's play demonstrates is that to conceive human character (and works of art) in this way is profoundly misguided. Rather than rushing to conclusions or setting out a theory of what Hamlet is about, therefore, we should read and watch patiently and openly, allowing the play to unfold before us in its own time and trying to see each moment in the context of the whole. Josipovici's valuable book is thus an exercise in analysis which puts the physical experience of watching and reading at the heart of the critical processat once a prTrade Review“His first book on Shakespeare and it is typically original… Josipovici is such a great critic because he has a nose for the big questions and for what doesn’t work as an answer. Best of all, he reads carefully and asks the right questions.”—David Herman, Jewish Chronicle -- David Herman * Jewish Chronicle *“Full of resonant and evaluative comparisons… Josipovici’s historicism, like that of T.S Eliot whom he he quotes often, is broad-brush and confident… a careful character-based plot summary, the book does give moments of real insight.”—Bart Vanes, TLS -- Bart Vanes * TLS *

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Book SynopsisA masterful, highly engaging analysis of how Shakespeare's plays intersected with the politics and culture of Elizabethan EnglandTrade Review“Subtle and insightful readings . . . The high point of Mr. Lake’s book is his masterly analysis of Henry V. . . . Anyone interested in Shakespeare should make the effort to read this book. Even someone intimately familiar with the plays will discover much that is new, from details of historical background to interpretations of specific passages.”—Paul A. Cantor, Wall Street Journal“In this huge chronologically ordered study, Peter Lake coalesces the English Histories with Shakespeare’s Roman plays to argue that the history plays reflect a distinct trace left by the real political manoeuvrings of the period, and provides a wealth of historical information to underpin his case.”—Rene Weis, BBC History“Well deserving of a space on readers’ shelves” —Marisa R. Cull, American Historical Review“[T]he scholarship on display is admirable, and the arguments clear and well-constructed. Those with an interest in the political dynamics which drove Shakespeare to shape his plays as he did, and who wonder just how he managed to balance the expression on stage of radical ideas about kingship, the rule of law and the will of the people with living in the uncertain and often violent political reality of late Elizabethan England...will find this book deeply thought-provoking.”—Paul Flux, Albion Magazine'An immensely learned and deeply insightful monograph disguised as a page-turner. Lake offers the most lucid and believable account to date of, as the title promises, how Shakespeare put politics on the stage. Required reading not only for all Shakespeareans but for anyone interested in how literature speaks to and is shaped by its historical moment.' - Debora Shuger, author of Political Theologies in Shakespeare's England 'Even as Shakespeare’s histories illuminate his times, his times cast light upon those plays. Peter Lake, whose grasp of the Elizabethan political scene is exceptional, illuminates both Shakespeare’s world and works. Historians and literary scholars alike will find this a deeply engaging and comprehensive study.'—James Shapiro, author of The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606'Peter Lake has written an astonishing book, even for Peter Lake. Learned, lively, provocative and often surprising, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage is a brilliant account of Elizabethan politics and Shakespeare’s extraordinary mediation of them. It is a wonderfully sensitive and supple work of literary criticism as well as a deeply engaged account of how Shakespeare’s England (which only retrospectively became “his”) thought about the most urgent political issues of the day.' - David Scott Kastan, author of A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion

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Book SynopsisHow vagrancy, as legal and imaginative category, shaped the role of policing in colonialism, racial formation, and resource distributionTrade Review“A superb book. Its historical depth and geographical breadth accomplishes far more than most literary scholars, writing on this topic, have done in recent years.”—Betty Joseph, Rice University“A cultural criticism built on the close reading of texts, a model of careful and conscientious reading, and a vital contribution to our understanding of literature’s ideological work.”—Eugenia Zuroski, McMaster University“Nicolazzo finds the roots of modern policing in the earliest days of the American colonies and traces compelling connections between the local minutiae of vagrancy law and the vast, brutal sweep of British imperial expansion.”—Charlotte Sussman, Duke University“Reading lyric poetry, fiction, and memoir together with statutory law and the bureaucratic ephemera of various legal functionaries, Sal Nicolazzo dramatically expands our understanding of policing and of the practices and narratives that accompanied it in the early modern period.”—Simon Stern, University of Toronto

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Book SynopsisA photographic journey into the imaginative world of Shakespeare's plays.

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Book SynopsisA new Norton Critical Edition to fuel the renewed interest in this energetic field of study.

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Book SynopsisThis book addresses common myths and misconceptions about Shakespeare and his works offering authoritative, up-to-date and even-handed treatments of controversies and scholarly disagreements.Trade Review"Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith's 30 Great Myths About Shakespeare is a thought-provoking myth-buster ... It entertains the reader with new material and detective-like connections ... A huge amount of research, work and selection lies behind this book, and it pays off. Not just students, but every academic should take note." (Times Literary Supplement, 29 November 2013) "Lively, enjoyable and sensible throughout." (London Review of Books, 5 December 2013) "The myth that Macbeth is jinxed in the theatre, is, says Maguire, a 'self-fulfilling prophecy based on a hoax.' And so it is, and delightfully so, but you’ll have to read the book to find out why." (Irish Examiner, 5 June 2013). "This is a good book by trustworthy Shakespeareans ... The individual myths, structured into moderate-length essays (thus you do not have to read them in order), can be excellent for discussions in the classroom or lecture-room. Though the book obviously targets readership already into Shakespeare, every novice will enjoy finding satisfactory answers to the myths they are bothered with." (Huffington Post, 24 April 2013) "The value of this little book lies in its ceaseless exploration." (Times Higher Education, 7 March 2013) "Even if you know Shakespeare well, this delightful book will offer thought-provoking new angles." (The Scotsman, 2 March 2013) "A book that manages the rare feat of exercising scholarly caution...while still providing a highly entertaining portrait of the man himself." (Sunday Times, 24 February 2013)Table of ContentsIntroduction 1 Myth 1 Shakespeare was the most popular writer of his time 6 Myth 2 Shakespeare was not well educated 11 Myth 3 Shakespeare’s plays should be performed in Elizabethan dress 18 Myth 4 Shakespeare was not interested in having his plays printed 26 Myth 5 Shakespeare never traveled 34 Myth 6 Shakespeare’s plays are politically incorrect 40 Myth 7 Shakespeare was a Catholic 47 Myth 8 Shakespeare’s plays had no scenery 54 Myth 9 Shakespeare’s tragedies are more serious than his comedies 60 Myth 10 Shakespeare hated his wife 66 Myth 11 Shakespeare wrote in the rhythms of everyday speech 72 Myth 12 Hamlet was named after Shakespeare’s son 80 Myth 13 The coarse bits of Shakespeare are for the groundlings; the philosophy is for the upper classes 86 Myth 14 Shakespeare was a Stratford playwright 94 Myth 15 Shakespeare was a plagiarist 99 Myth 16 We don’t know much about Shakespeare’s life 106 Myth 17 Shakespeare wrote alone 113 Myth 18 Shakespeare’s sonnets are autobiographical 119 Myth 19 If Shakespeare were writing now, he’d be writing forHollywood 125 Myth 20 The Tempest was Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage 130 Myth 21 Shakespeare had a huge vocabulary 137 Myth 22 Shakespeare’s plays are timeless 143 Myth 23 Macbeth is jinxed in the theater 150 Myth 24 Shakespeare did not revise his plays 156 Myth 25 Boy actors played women’s roles 163 Myth 26 Shakespeare’s plays don’t work as movies 169 Myth 27 Yorick’s skull was real 175 Myth 28 Queen Elizabeth loved Shakespeare’s plays 183 Myth 29 Shakespeare’s characters are like real people 190 Myth 30 Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare 196 Coda 202 Further Reading 207 Index 211

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Book SynopsisBrings together the work of scholars investigating questions about early modern British women's figurative, material, and cultural relationships with books. They highlight case studies of individual readers and their libraries; analyses of readers and readership in the context of their interpretive communities; and new types of scholarly evidence.

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Book SynopsisExamines the dynamism and vibrancy of stage spectacle and its impact in an era of momentous social upheaval and aesthetic change. Situating theatrical production as key to understanding visuality ca. 1780-1830, this book reenvisions traditional approaches to artistic and social production.Trade Review“The volume’s thesis, that a substantive investigation of spectacle and the visual elements of Romantic theatre force us to reconsider the primarily textual theses that govern the idea of Romanticism, is both timely and needed. Its transdisciplinary approach, rooted jointly in performance studies and theatre history, promises to reassess the oft-denigrated 6th category of Aristotelian dramatic analysis and unpack spectacle’s aesthetic, political, and cultural significance, both on and off the stage. These are the most important voices in later-eighteenth-century and Romantic theatre studies, and to have them assembled promises readers that this will not just be a collection but a field-defining conversation.” —Misty G. Anderson, James R. Cox Professor of English, University of Tennessee“A field-shaping collection of essays that unveil the lost delights of Romantic-era theatre culture: playbill typography, costume trimming, souvenir fans, toy theatres, stage makeup, mimodrama, and scene maquettes. Through their wide-ranging analyses, the contributors reanimate the stage productions that thrilled Romantic theatre-goers.” —Judith Pascoe, George Mills Harper Professor of English, Florida State UniversityTable of Contents Introduction: Romanticism, Visuality, and the Theater Diane Piccitto and Terry F. Robinson I. Imagined Scenes 1. The 1794 Macbeth and Its Conjuring Effects: Rethinking Romantic-Era Spectatorship Terry F. Robinson 2. “Mind-forg’d Manacles”: The Scenography of the Romantic Prison Joseph Roach 3. Some Versions of Spectacle: Worldmaking and the Regency Toy Theater Daniel O’Quinn 4. Conjuring the Space and the Right to Appear in Obi; or Three-Fingered Jack (1800) Dana Van Kooy II. Spectacular Bodies 5. “I saw Othello’s visage in his mind”: Visualizing Othello in Nineteenth-Century British Theater Atsede Makonnen 6. Playing “Alive”: Performing Sculpture on the Romantic Stage Sophie Thomas 7. “Dresses in Hand”: Mary Rein’s Costume Workshop and the Spectacle of Romantic Theater Susan E. Brown 8. The Singing Cat: British Audiences, Angelica Catalani, and the Threat of Opera Uri Erman III. Performances in Print 9. The Stage in a Page: A Visual Life of Romantic Playbills Michael Gamer 10. Between Media: Harlequinade’s and Melodrama’s Visuality in Print Deven M. Parker 11. Robert Blemmell Schnebbelie, Londina Illustrata, and the Visual Life of Regency Theater Gillian Russell 12. Staging Satire: Gillray and “Caricatura-Sublime” Heather Mcpherson 13. Theatrical Spectatorship in Byron’s Cain and Blake’s The Ghost of Abel: From Oblivion to Redemption Diane Piccitto Afterword: Romanticism is Seeing Ghosts Jonathan Mulrooney Contributors

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Book SynopsisParticipants in the current debate regarding the literary canon generally separate the established literary order - of which Shakespeare is the most visible icon - from emerging minority literatures. This study insists that the two realms should be brought together.

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Book SynopsisNovels have been a respectable component of culture for so long that it is difficult for twentieth-century observers to grasp the unease produced by novel reading in the eighteenth century. This title shows how the earliest novels in Britain, published in small-format print media, provoked early instances of the modern anxiety.

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Book SynopsisThis title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.

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Book SynopsisThis title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Pressâs mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.

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Book SynopsisThis title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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Book SynopsisThe Ballad-Drama of Medieval Japan delves into the kowaka, a ballad-drama genre that flourished during Japan's tumultuous Medieval Era, a period shaped by samurai culture and the heroic values of loyalty and chivalry. Emerging in the 16th century, kowaka captured the martial exploits and epic struggles of the early Medieval Era, including the famed Genji-Heike conflict. Despite its initial popularity among samurai, the kowaka faded into obscurity during the Edo Period, only to be rediscovered in modern times. This study aims to reconstruct the history, artistry, and literary significance of kowaka, drawing on Japanese scholarship, field observations in Kyushu's Oe Village (where the tradition endures), and textual analysis. The book is divided into two parts. The first examines kowaka as a performing art, detailing its historical development, influences, and stylistic elements while highlighting the author's original fieldwork and critiques of prior research. The second part focuses

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Book SynopsisThis is a bold and original reinterpretation of almost all of Shakespearea s major plays, in the light of the Marxist, feminist and semiotic ideas of our own time.Trade Review"Brilliant little book ... dazzling and exhilarating ... Eagleton is alive to the excitement and originality of a great playwright." Sunday Times "When you read this book you feel Eagleton's pleasure in reading Shakespeare's works. He deals with the plays in chapters which cut across the well-used categories and an excitement is created by the unexpectedness of the directions which he takes." Marxism Today "Always provocative, Mr. Eagleton does in print what directors regularly do on stage: change the century, stitch up new costumes, but preserve the story line and language." Herbert Mitgang, The New York TimesTable of ContentsPreface ix 1 Language: Macbeth, Richard II, Henry IV 1 2 Desire: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night 18 3 Law: The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida 35 4 ‘Nothing’: Othello, Hamlet, Coriolanus 64 5 Value: King Lear, Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra 76 6 Nature: As You Like It, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest 90 Conclusion 97 Notes 105 Index 109

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Book SynopsisIn Shakespeare and the Popular Voice Annabel Patterson challenges as counter-intuitive the common opinion that Shakespeare was anti-democratic, contemptuous of the crowd and an unfailing supporter of Elizabethan social hierarchy.Table of ContentsCaviar or the general - "Hamlet" and the Popular Theater; the peasant's toe - popular culture and popular pressure; bottom's up - festive theory; back by popular demand, the two versions of "Henry V"; What Matter who's speaking? "Hamlet" and "King Lear"; "Speak, speak!" - the popular voice and the Jacobean state; "Thought is Free" - "The Tempest".

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Book SynopsisProviding a close examination of Milton''s wide-ranging prose and poetry at each stage of his life, Barbara Lewalski reveals a rather different Milton from that in earlier accounts. Provides a close analysis of each of Milton''s prose and poetry works. Reveals how Milton was the first writer to self consciously construct himself as an ''author''. Focuses on the development of Milton''s ideas and his art. Trade Review"Lewalski's is easily the best single-volume life of Milton to date, and it is hard to imagine its being significantly bettered. Every reader will benefit from its insight and compression, and it will be the biography to which I direct my students." Times Higher Education Supplement "Arguably the most readable of modern Milton biographies, it reshapes our understanding of Milton the man, the thinker, political and religious activist, husband, parent, friend ...it is certain to be a classic among Milton studies" Reference Reviews "The Life of John Milton . . . combines lucidity with its formidable erudition." Terry Eagleton, The Observer Books of the Year, 2001 "A rigorous, up-to-date, yet surprisingly readable account of Milton's life and work… anyone concerned with the poet or the period will have to possess this book." The Independent "[Lewalski] has produced an outstanding biography, one that is reliable and readable. [...] It will be vaulable, not only to Milton specialists and students of English literature but to anyone who wants to learn about Milton's life and work." Virginia Quarterly Review "Lewalski's volume is immensely useful. In the process of discussing Milton's life and works, she gives the reader a believable figure facing major events and also the everyday business of moving through life. Such an appealing and readbale portrayal is welcome." Renaissance Quarterly "As a biography of Milton, Lewalski's Life is likely to remain the definitive work for decades to come." Church Times "The Life of John Milton is the magnum opus of Barbara K Lewalski, one of the leading Miltonists of the past half-century. [...] As an introduction to Milton's life and work it is likely to remain unequalled for years to come - that rare thing, a work of reference to be read with profit and pleasure from cover to cover." MLR "Her achievements scarcely need endorsement. Unsurprising, she once more surefootedly picks her way through the polemical prose while writing richly about the major poetry." Milton QuarterlyTable of ContentsList of Plates. Preface. Acknowledgments. List of Abbreviations. 1. ‘The childhood shews the man" (1608-1625). 2. "To Cambridge . . . for seven years" (1625-1632). 3. "Studious Retirement": Hammersmith and Horton (1632-1638). 4. "I became desirous . . . of seeing foreign parts, especially Italy" (1638-1639). 5. "All mouths were opened against . . . the bishops" (1639-1642). 6. "Domestic or Personal Liberty" (1642-1645). 7. "Service . . . Between Private Walls" (1645-1649). 8. "The so-called Council of State . . . desired to employ my services" (1649- 1652). 9. "Tireless . . . for the sake of Liberty" (1652-1654). 10. "I . . . still bear up and steer/ Right onward" (1654-1658). 11 "The last words of our expiring libertie" (1658-1660). 12 "In darknes, and with dangers compast round" (1660-1665). 13. "Higher Argument": Completing and Publishing Paradise Lost (1665-1669). 14. "To try, and teach the erring Soul" (1669-1674). Epilogue: "Something ... Written to Aftertimes.". Notes. Bibliography. Index.

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Book SynopsisIn this fresh alternative to traditional Shakespeare studies, Dympna Callaghan, Lorraine Helms, and Jyotsna Singh address Shakespeare''s works in terms of, amongst other things, the feminist history of sexuality, the ideology of romantic love, and feminist interventions in performance. Their objective is to produce new interpretations of the plays by locating them at the intersections of a range of contemporary critical, theoretical, and cultural practices.Trade Review"This is a fine book. An important and original contribution to feminist Shakespeare studies." Phyllis Rackin, University of Pennsylvania "This is a fresh book, which will have an invigorating effect on Shakespeare studies. Nothing quite like it exists, and I imagine a wide audience among Shakespeare scholars and students." Jean Howard, Columbia UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction. 1. The Interventions of History: Narratives of Sexuality: Jyotsna Singh. 2. The Ideology of Romantic Love: The Case of Romeo and Juliet: Dympna Callaghan. 3. Acts of Resistance: The Feminist Player: Lorraine Helms. Index.

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Book SynopsisThe Life of William Shakespeare is a fascinating and wide-ranging exploration of Shakespeare''s life and works focusing on oftern neglected literary and historical contexts: what Shakespeare read, who he worked with as an author and an actor, and how these various collaborations may have affected his writing. Written by an eminent Shakespearean scholar and experienced theatre reviewer Pays particular attention to Shakespeare''s theatrical contemporaries and the ways in which they influenced his writing Offers an intriguing account of the life and work of the great poet-dramatist structured around the idea of memory Explores often neglected literary and historical contexts that illuminate Shakespeare''s life and works Trade Review“Two of the Mighty dead have been brought back to life in exemplary fashion: Shakespeare in Lois Potter’s The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography, which very cleverly uses expert theatre-knowledge as a way of making her enigmatic subject seem plausibly substantial; and Keats in Nicholas Roe’s John Keats: A New Life, which puts the poet properly in his place.” (The Guardian, 24 November 2012) “This study will have wide appeal to readers who wish to expand their appreciation of the works of William Shakespeare. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.” (Choice, 1 November 2012) “These form the narrative spine of this richly suggestive, undogmatic book in which Lois Potter ranges across the entire canon and the period that helped produce it.” (Around the Globe, 1 October 2012) “Lois Potter’s Life of William Shakespeare, ranks with the most distinguished examples of its kind … Her achievement lies in her catholicity, her simultaneous commitment to matters personal, historical, theatrical, literary, cultural. She exhibits an absolute command of the available facts, a lifetime’s acquaintance with the works gained in teaching and playgoing, an unparalleled familiarity with theatrical history from 1567 to the present, and a talent for connecting the fictional and the actual.” (Times Literary Supplement, 10 August 2012)Table of ContentsList of Illustrations vi Preface and Acknowledgments vii List of Abbreviations x The Shakespeare Family Tree xii 1 “Born into the World”: 1564–1571 1 2 “Nemo SibiNascitur”: 1571–1578 21 3 “Hic et Ubique”: 1578–1588 40 4 “This Man’s Art and That Man’s Scope”: 1588–1592 64 5 “Tigers’ Hearts”: 1592–1593 86 6 “The Dangerous Year”: 1593–1594 106 7 “Our Usual Manager of Mirth”: 1594–1595 134 8 “The Strong’st and Surest Way to Get”: Histories, 1595–1596 162 9 “When Love Speaks”: Tragedy and Comedy, 1595–1596 181 10 “You Had a Father; Let Your Son Say So”: 1596–1598 201 11 “Unworthy Scaffold”: 1598–1599 231 12 “These Words Are Not Mine”: 1599–1601 258 13 “Looking Before and After”: 1600–1603 277 14 “This Most Balmy Time”: 1603–1605 300 15 “Past the Size of Dreaming”: 1606–1609 330 16 “Like an Old Tale”: 1609–1611 360 17 “The Second Burden”: 1612–1616 384 18 “In the Mouths of Men”: 1616 and After 414 Bibliography 443 Index 475

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Book SynopsisProvides work by fifty poets in texts freshly credited from contemporary sources. Offers much fuller annotation than customarily available. Includes canonical poets and works as well as works of writers rarely anthologised.Table of ContentsIndex of Topics. Alphabetical List of Authors. Acknowledgements. Preface. Goerg Chapman (1559-1634). Michael Drayton (1563-1631). Thomas Campion (1567-1620). Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645). John Donne (1572-1631). Be3n Jonson (1572-1637). Martha Moulsworth (1578-1646). Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648). William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649). Lady Mry Wroth (1587-c.1653). Robert Herrick (1591-1674). Henry King (1592-1669). Francis Quarles (1592-1633). Thomas Carew (1595-1640). Owen Felltham (1602-1668). Thomas Randolph (1605-1654). Edmund Waller (1606-1687). Sir Richard Fanshawe (1608-1666). John Milton (1608-1674). Sir John Suckling (1609-1642). Richard Crawshaw (1612-1649). Samuel Butler (1613-1680). John Cleveland (1613-1658). Sir John Denham (1615-1669). Richard Lovelace (1618-1658). Abraham Cowley (1618-1667). Lucy Hutchinson (1620-1681). Andrew Marvell (1621-1678). Henry Vaughan (1622-1695). Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastel (1624-1674). Charles Cotton (1630-1687). John Dryden (1631-1700). Katherine Philips (1632-1664). Thomas Traherne (1637-1674). Aphra Behn (1640-1689). John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1674-1680). John Oldham (1653-1683). Anne Wharton (1659-1685). Index of Authors Cited. Index of Titles and First Lines.

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Book Synopsisaeo Contains 28 newly commissioned essays written by the most distinguished historians and literary scholars. aeo Situates Shakespeare in the historical and cultural conditions in which he wrote.Trade Review"This collection of 28 essays provides a historical overview of the conditions of Shakespeare's world." Library Journal "No playgoer, reader, teacher or scholar should be without this elegant and indispensable guide to Shakespeare. It brings together the best in recent scholarship on the social history, contemporary reading, and institutions and material practices of writing, playing and printing in early modern England. Kastan has assembled a collection of essays with his peers and presented them with his characteristic intelligence and grace. The definitive Companion to Shakespeare." Karen Newman, Brown University "A worthy companion indeed - every serious student of Shakespeare should carry this adroitly compiled collection of specialist essays on essential background constantly with them. Kastan has brought together a star cast of experts to help us to hear Shakespeare's distinctive voice, with all its historical and intellectual resonances, in a fresh and sharply clarified context." Lisa Jardine, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London "Literally indispensable for anyone interested in Shakespeare." Patricia Parker, University of Stanford "David Kastan has put together a dazzling collection of essays on Shakespeare. And one doesn't expect to be dazzled by that rather sedate animal, a Companion. This Companion represents the very best in recent scholarship and is at the same time lively, accessible, and often surprising. It is indeed indispensible." Peter Stallybrass, University of Pennsylvania "Between them these specialist writers have assembled a series of essays which represent, for the time being at least, the last word in Shakespearean scholarship and research. It is difficult to think of any aspect of the dramatist's life, times and work which is not covered by this companion." "This companion can be confidently recommended as a paragon of Shakespearean research." K.C.Harrison, Reference Reviews "The publication [...] of the monumental Companion to Shakespeare, edited by David Scott Kastan, is a major event and one that should be celebrated for the breadth and depth of scholarship the book makes available to students." Year's Work In English StudiesTable of ContentsIllustrations viii Notes on Contributors ix Part One Introduction Part Two Shakespeare I Part Three Living Part Four Reading Part Five Writing Part Six Playing Part Seven Printing Part Eight Shakespeare II Index 503

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Book SynopsisThis Guide steers students through the critical writing on Shakespeare's tragedies from the sixteenth century to the present day. Guides students through four centuries of critical writing on Shakespeare's tragedies. Covers both significant early views and recent critical interventions. Substantial editorial material links the articles and places them in context. Annotated suggestions for further reading allow students to investigate further. Table of ContentsIntroduction. Part I: Criticism 1592-1904:. Part II: Twentieth-Century Criticism:. 1. Genre. Overview. 2. Dollimore, King Lear and Essential Humanism. Cavell, Coriolanus and Interpretations of Politics. Character. Overview. 3. Holland, The Resources of Characterisation in Othello. Leverena, The Woman in Hamlet: An Interpersonal View. Language. Overview. 4. Kermode, Anthony and Cleopatra. Evans, Imperfect Speakers. Gender and Sexuality. Overview. 5. Kahn, The Daughter’s Seduction in Titus Andronicus. Newman, Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello. History and Politics. Overview. 6. Kastan, Macbeth and the Name of King. Wilson, Is this a holiday? Shakespeare’s Roman Carnival. Texts. Overview. 7. Warren, Quarto and Folio King Lear. Marcus, Bad Taste and Bad Hamlet. Performance. Overview. 8. Cox, Titus Andronicus. Loehlin, Baz Luhrmann’s Millenial Shakespeare. Bibliography. Index.

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