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Accolades should be pouring in for this new, stimulating forum. Studies in Renaissance Literature offers investigations of topics in English literature focussed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; its scope extends from early Tudor writing, including works reflecting medieval concerns, to the Restoration period.
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The first complete, integrated corpus of Kyd and first critical edition of his collected works in over one hundred years, with major new discoveries of authorship and attribution.
Exploring a wide range of material including dramatic works, medieval morality drama, and lyric poetry, this book argues for the central significance of literary material to the history of emotions.
The first book-length biography of John Cruso of Norwich (b. 1592/3), a second-generation migrant poet, translator and military author, that explores ideas and practices of identity formation in the early modern period.
The Scottish poet George Lauder began as a "university wit", by imitating anti-papal satires popular in the Italian Renaissance. He set off for London as a young man, looking for patronage, but instead became an officer in the army, seeing service in France, the Low Countries, Germany, Denmark and Sweden -- an experience which provides the backdrop to the poetry of his mature years. At the Restoration he wrote a lengthy poem of advice to Charles II, and his final masterwork was a poetic conflation of the Gospel accounts of the life of Christ. Lauder was influenced by Ben Jonson, William Drummond, and by the Metaphysical and the Caroline styles. His personal library testifies to his wide range of interests, and to his acquaintance with European literature in neo-Latin and other languages.This volume traces Lauder's career, collects all his surviving verse (presented with full notes and commentary), and examines his interactions with certain of the greatest intellectuals of the Dutch Golden Age. Lauder was a British patriot and a loyal supporter of the House of Orange; above all, however, he is the author of a unique corpus of highly accomplished poetry.Alasdair A. MacDonald is Emeritus Professor of English Language and Literature of the Middle Ages, University of Groningen, Netherlands.
There is a great deal of kissing in Renaissance poetry, but modern critics do not generally recognise (as early readers did) that the literary conventions of the kiss were closely related to a fully-formed, lively and popular genre of Neo-Latin "kissing-poems". Beginning with the imitation of Catullus in fifteenth-century Italy, this specialised form was securely established in the next century by the Dutch poet Janus Secundus, whose elegant Basia ("Kisses") were an extraordinary international success. Secundus stimulated a long-lived tradition of Latin and vernacular "kisses", willfully repetitious and yet meticulously varied, which can tell us much about humanist poetics. This book offers a critical account of the Renaissance kiss-poem, using an abundance of vivid and often racy examples, many of them drawn from authors who are all but forgotten today. It shows that the genre had a sophisticated rationale and clear but flexible conventions. These include habits of irony, mood and structure that proved widely influential, and some slippery, self-conscious ways of dealing with masculine sexuality. Presenting new readings of English writers including Sidney, Shakespeare and Donne, the study also reminds us how important Neo-Latin writing was to the literary culture of early modern Britain. A number of well known texts are thus placed in a context unfamiliar to most modern scholars, in order to show how deftly their kisses engage with an international tradition of humanist poetry. Alex Wong is currently a Research Fellow in English literature at St John's College, University of Cambridge.
Thomas Traherne has all too often been defined and studied as a solitary thinker, "out of his time", and not as a participant in the complex intellectual currents of the period. The essays collected here take issue with this reading of him, placing Traherne firmly in his historical context and situating his work within broader issues in seventeenth-century studies and the history of ideas; they draw on recently published textual discoveries alongside manuscripts which still have yet to be published. They address major themes in Traherne studies, including Traherne's interpretation of spirit and his understanding of matter, his attitude towards happiness and holiness, his response to solitude and society, and his Anglican identity. As a wholle, the volume aims to re-ignite discussion on settled readings of Traherne's work, reconsider issues in Traherne scholarship which have long lain dormant, and supplement our picture of the man and his writings through new discoveries and insights.
Elizabeth S. Dodd lectures in theology, ministry, imagination and culture at Sarum College in Salisbury; Cassandra Gorman is lecturer in English at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Contributors: Jacob Blevins, Warren Chernaik, Phoebe Dickerson, Elizabeth S. Dodd, Ana Elena González-Trevino, Cassandra Gorman, Carol Ann Johnston, Alison Kershaw, Kathryn Murphy
‘A deeply original work of scholarship. Through fine close readings of primary and secondary texts, the author offers the fullest account we have of the related phenomena of pain, sympathy, and sensation in early modern culture.’ Michael Schoenfeldt, John R. Knott, Jr., Professor of English, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In late medieval Catholicism, pain was seen as a way of imitating Christ, and as an avenue to salvation. During the early modern period, Protestant theologians came to reject these assumptions, and attempted to redefine and circumscribe the spiritual meaning of suffering. The rethinking of the meaning of pain during the early modern era is the central theme of this book. The author pays particular attention to how literary writers explored the issue of pain, by placing their work in a broad context of devotional, theological, philosophical and medical texts on suffering. In detailed readings of Alabaster, Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Lanyer, Spenser, Milton and Montaigne, he shows that early modern culture located the meaning of pain in its capacity to elicit compassion in others - yet the nature of this compassion was also fiercely contested. Dr Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Leiden.
'James I and the Religious Culture of England' is a study of King James's influence, both direct and indirect, on various aspects of religious life in England during his reign; James emerges as more interested in religious matters than in any other aspect of English culture. It brings together literary, religious and political history to consider such topics as the poetic response to James's accession, prophetic poetry at court, the neo-Latin religious epigram, the politics of conversion, and the biblical iconography of peace-making applied to James; the short devotional lyric, religious narrative, philosophical or theological verse, works of religious satire and controversy, liturgical verse, and sermons are all examined, and relatively unstudied writers such as John Davies of Hereford, Joshua Sylvester, Andrew Melville, Joseph Hall, George Wither. Professor JAMES DOELMAN teaches in the Department of English at McMaster University.
This book provides a radical reassessment of Spenserian allegory, in particular of 'The Faerie Queene', in the light of contemporary historical and theoretical interests in space and material culture. It explores the ambiguous and fluctuating attention to materiality, objects, and substance in the poetics of 'The Faerie Queene', and discusses the way that Spenser's creation of allegorical meaning makes use of this materiality, and transforms it. It suggests further that a critical engagement with materiality [which has been so important to the recent study of early modern drama] must come, in the case of allegorical narrative, through a study of narrative and physical space, and in this context it goes on to provide a reading of the spatial dimensions of the poem - quests and battles, forests, castles and hovels - and the spatial characteristics of Spenser's other writings. The book reaffirms the need to place Spenser in his historical contexts - philosophical and scientific, military and architectural - in early modern England, Ireland and Europe, but also provides a critical reassessment of this literary historicism.Dr CHRISTOPHER BURLINSON is a Research Fellow in English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.