Bücher der Reihe Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture

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

It identifies the early reception of Paradise Lost as a site of contest over the place of literature in political and religious controversy and explains how it prompted its earliest readers and critics to innovate new critical strategies

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

Visiting memory and erotics in the early modern period, this volume brings together two vibrant areas of Renaissance studies: the study of memory and the study of sexuality. Essays explore how memory re-shapes the concerns of queer studies, including the unhistorical, the experience of desire, and the limits of the body, and how the erotic revises the dominant trends of memory studies, from the rhetoric of the medieval memory arts to the formation of collective pasts. Showing that Shakespeare and contemporaries were deeply interested in the interoperability of memory and sexuality, the volume suggests that both undergird the fraught constructions of social identity in early modern England.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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