Bücher der Reihe Early Modern Literature in History

This book takes a close look at Shakespeare's engagement with the flurry of controversy and activity surrounding the concept of conversion in post-Reformation England. For playhouse audiences during the period, conversional thought encompassed a markedly diverse, fluid amalgamation of ideas, practices, and arguments centered on the means by which an individual could move from one category of identity to another. In an analysis that includes chapter-length readings of The Taming of the Shrew, Henry IV Part I, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Tempest, the book argues that Shakespearean drama made a unique and substantive intervention in public discourse surrounding conversion, and continues to speak meaningfully about conversional experience for audiences in the present age. It will be of particular benefit to students and scholars with an interest in theatrical history, performance theory, theology, cultural studies, race studies, and gender studies.

This book is a close taxonomic study of the pivotal role of games in early modern drama.

The Invention of China in Early Modern England describes how several different English communities became aware of China.

This book offers the first full study of the challenges posed to an emerging English nationalism that stemmed from the powerful appeal exerted by the leaders of the international Protestant cause.

As early modernists with an interest in the literary culture of Shakespeare's time, we work in a field that contains many significant losses: of texts, of contextual information, of other forms of cultural activity.

These public, indeed institutional accounts of biblical English changed the language: questions about the relation between Scripture and exegetical tradition that shaped post-Reformation hermeneutics bore strange fruit in secular literature that defined itself through varying forms of autonomy vis-a-vis prior tradition.

Old St Paul's and Culture is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that looks predominantly at the culture of Old St Paul's and its wider precinct in the early modern period, while also providing important insights into the Cathedral's medieval institution.

This book is a study of ghostly matters - of the soul - in literature spanning the tenth century and the age of Shakespeare.

This book argues that the early modern public/private boundary was surprisingly dynamic and flexible in early modern literature, drawing upon authors including Shakespeare, Anne Lock, Mary Wroth, and Aphra Behn, and genres including lyric poetry, drama, prose fiction, and household orders. An epilogue discusses postmodern privacy in digital media.

An in-depth study of early modern women's modesty rhetoric from the English Reformation to the Restoration. This book provides new readings of modesty's gendered deployment in the works of Anne Askew, Katharine Parr, Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer and Anne Bradstreet.

This collection examines early modern womenΓÇÖs contribution to the culturally central mode of complaint. Complaint has largely been understood as male-authored, yet, as this collection shows, early modern women used complaint across a surprising variety of forms from the early-Tudor period to the late-seventeenth century. They were some of the modeΓÇÖs first writers, most influential patrons, and most innovative contributors. Together, these new essays illuminate early modern womenΓÇÖs participation in one of the most powerful rhetorical modes in the English Renaissance, one which gave voice to political, religious and erotic protest and loss across a diverse range of texts.This volume interrogates new texts (closet drama, song, manuscript-based religious and political lyrics), new authors (Dorothy Shirley, Scots satirical writers, Hester Pulter, Mary Rowlandson), and new versions of complaint (biblical, satirical, legal, and vernacular). Its essays pay specific attention to politics, form, and transmission from complaintΓÇÖs first circulation up to recent digital representations of its texts. Bringing together an international group of experts in early modern womenΓÇÖs writing and in complaint literature more broadly, this collection explores womenΓÇÖs role in the formation of the mode and in doing so reconfigures our understanding of complaint in Renaissance culture and thought. 

As early modernists with an interest in the literary culture of Shakespeare's time, we work in a field that contains many significant losses: of texts, of contextual information, of other forms of cultural activity.

It argues for the importance of reading to early modern childhood and of childhood to early modern reading cultures by drawing together the fields of childhood studies, early modern literature and the history of reading.

This book is the first comparative study of early modern English and Dutch women writers.

This book is about the relationship of food and food practices to discourses and depictions of domestic and political governance in early modern women's writing.

Male Friendship and Testimonies of Love in Shakespeare's England reveals the complex and unfamiliar forms of friendship that existed between men in the late sixteenth century.

This is the first book-length study of early modern English approaches to Medea, the classical witch and infanticide who exercised a powerful sway over literary and cultural imagination in the period 1558-1688. It encompasses poetry, prose and drama, and translation, tragedy, comedy and political writing.

The Persian Empire in English Renaissance Writing, 1549-1622 studies the conception of Persia in the literary, political and pedagogic writings of Renaissance England and Britain. It argues that writers of all kinds debated the means and merits of English empire through their intellectual engagement with the ancient Persian empire.

Constructing 'Monsters' in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture argues for the crucial place of the 'monster' in the early modern imagination.

In 16th and 17th century England conversation was an embodied act that held the capacity to negotiate, manipulate and transform social relationships. Early Modern Women in Conversation illuminates the extent to which gender shaped conversational interaction and demonstrates the significance of conversation as a rhetorical practice for women.

Writing Early Modern London explores how urban community in London was experienced, imagined and translated into textual form. Ranging from previously unstudied manuscripts to major works by Middleton, Stow and Whitney, it examines how memory became a key cultural battleground as rites of community were appropriated in creative ways.

The first major socio-cultural study of manuscript letters and letter-writing practices in early modern England. Daybell examines a crucial period in the development of the English vernacular letter before Charles I's postal reforms in 1635, one that witnessed a significant extension of letter-writing skills throughout society.

Matei-Chesnoiu examines the changing understanding of world geography in sixteenth-century England and the concomitant involvement of the London theatre in shaping a new perception of Western European space. Fresh readings are offered of Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, Middleton, Dekker, Massinger, Marston, and others.