Containing an urgently needed archival database of historical evidence, this volume includes both a consolidated presentation of the documentary records of black people in Tudor and Stuart England, and an interpretive narrative that confirms and significantly extends the insights of current theoretical excursus on race in early modern England. Here, for the first time, Imtiaz Habib collects the scattered references to black people - whether from Africa, India or America - in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and arranges them into a systematic, chronological descriptive index. He offers an extended historical and theoretical interpretation of the records in six chapters, which serve as an introductory guide to the index even as they articulate a specific argument about the meaning of the records. Both the archival information and interpretive scholarship provide a strong framework from which future historical debates on race in early modern England can proceed.

This title was first published in 2002: Combining the approaches of historic scholarship and post-structural, feminist psychoanalytic theory to late 16th- and early 17th-century poetry by women, this book aims to make a unique contribution to the field of the study of early modern women's writings. One of the first to concentrate exclusively on early modern women's poetry, the full-length critical study to applies post-Lacanian French psychoanalytic theory to the genre. The strength of this study is that it merges analysis of socio-political constructions affecting early modern women poets writing in England with the psychoanalytic insights, specific to women as subjects, of post-Lacanian theorists Luce Irigaray, Helen Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Rosi Braidotti.

Milton, Music and Literary Interpretation: Reading through the Spirit constructs a musical methodology for interpreting literary text drawn out of John Milton's poetry and prose. Analyzing the linkage between music and the Holy Spirit in Milton's work, it focuses on harmony and its relationship to Milton's theology and interpretative practices. Linking both the Spirit and poetic music to Milton's understanding of teleology, it argues that Milton uses musical metaphor to capture the inexpressible characteristics of the divine. The book then applies these musical tools of reading to examine the non-trinitarian union between Father, Son, and Spirit in Paradise Lost, argues that Adam and Eve's argument does not break their concord, and puts forward a reading of Samson Agonistes based upon pity and grace.

Miton and Early Modern Devotional Culture analyses the representation of public and private prayer in John Milton's poetry and prose, paying particular attention to the ways seventeenth-century prayer is imagined as embodied in sounds, gestures, postures, and emotional responses. Naya Tsentourou demonstrates Milton's profound engagement with prayer, and how this is driven by a consistent and ardent effort to experience one's address to God as inclusive of body and spirit and as loaded with affective potential. The book aims to become the first interdisciplinary study to show how Milton participates in and challenges early modern debates about authentic and insincere worship in public, set and spontaneous prayers in private, and gesture and voice in devotion.

Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth Century Theatre provides a comprehensive examination of this aesthetic theory. The author investigates this aesthetic history as a form of artistic creation, philosophical investigation, a way of representing and manipulating ideas about gender and a way of acknowledging, reinforcing and making a critique of social values for the still and moving, the permanent and elapsing. The book's analysis covers the entire seventeenth-century with chapters on the work of Ben Jonson, John Milton, the pamphletheatre, Aphra Behn, John Vanbrugh and Jeremy Collier and will be of interest to scholars in the areas of literary and performance studies.

Based on the true story of the murder of Thomas Arden by his wife, her lover and accomplices in 1551, Arden of Faversham is one of the earliest domestic tragedies and a play which has continued to thrill audiences since its first staging. This comprehensive edition situates the play in its social, cultural and political context while exploring its performance and critical history through a range of historical and contemporary productions, including William Poel's Lilies That Fester (1897) and the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2014 production. Throughout, the edition aims to reanimate the play's engagement with the material culture of domestic life, using little-known evidence for the objects and spaces implicated in the murder. The introduction also accounts for recent new thinking about the play's likely authorship, including claims that Shakespeare was a key co-author. The comprehensive, illustrated introduction combined with detailed on-page commentary notes and glosses make this an ideal edition for students and teachers.

In this thought-provoking study Mardock looks at Ben Jonson's epigrams, prose, and verse satire in order to focus on Jonson's theatrical appropriations of London space both in and out of the playhouse. Through this critical analysis, the author argues that the strategies of authorial definition that Jonson pursued throughout his career as a poet and playwright were in large part determined by two intersecting factors: first, his complicated relationship with London's physical places and its institutional topography, and secondly--challenging commonplace assumptions about Jonson's anti-theatricality--the distinctly theatrical model of spatial practice that he brought to bear on his representation of the urban experience. Although much criticism has focused on Jonson's role in the emergence of modern definitions of authorship, most has focused on the material contexts of the book trade, on the politics of Jonson's patronage, or on Jonson's self-construction as a neoclassical and primarily textual poet. Mardock engages with all these considerations, but with a focus on the dramatic practices of urban space--a growing concern among scholars of early-modern drama--as a consistent factor in Jonson's authorial claims.

Written by an international group of highly regarded scholars and rooted in the field of intermedial approaches to literary studies, this volume explores the complex aesthetic process of "picturing" in early modern English literature. The essays in this volume offer a comprehensive and varied picture of the relationship between visual and verbal in the early modern period, while also contributing to the understanding of the literary context in which Shakespeare wrote. Using different methodological approaches and taking into account a great variety of texts, including Elizabethan sonnet sequences, metaphysical poetry, famous as well as anonymous plays, and court masques, the book opens new perspectives on the literary modes of "picturing" and on the relationship between this creative act and the tense artistic, religious and political background of early modern Europe. The first section explores different modes of looking at works of art and their relation with technological innovations and religious controversies, while the chapters in the second part highlight the multifaceted connections between European visual arts and English literary production. The third section explores the functions performed by portraits on the page and the stage, delving into the complex question of the relationship between visual and verbal representation. Finally, the chapters in the fourth section re-appraise early modern reflections on the relationship between word and image and on their respective power in light of early-seventeenth-century visual culture, with particular reference to the masque genre.

Based in records and iconography, this book surveys medieval festival playing in Britain more comprehensively than any other work to date. The study presents an inclusive view of the drama in the British Isles, from Kilkenny to Great Yarmouth, from Scotland to Cornwall. It offers detailed readings of individual plays-including the York Creed Play, Pentecost and Corpus Christi plays and the little studied Bodley plays, among others - as well as a summary of what is known of their production. Clifford Davidson here extends the usual chronological range to include work typically categorized as early modern, enabling a juxtaposition of earlier plays with later plays to yield a better understanding of both. Complementing documentary evidence with iconographic detail and citation of music, he pinpoints a number of common misconceptions about medieval drama. By organizing the study around the rituals of the liturgical seasons, he clarifies the relationship between liturgical feast and dramatic celebration.

These essays throw new light on the complex relations between science, literature and rhetoric as avenues to discovery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds examine the agency of early modern poets, playwrights, essayists, philosophers, natural philosophers and artists in remaking their culture and reforming ideas about human understanding. Analyzing the ways in which the works of such diverse writers as Shakespeare, Bacon, Hobbes, Milton, Cavendish, Boyle, Pope and Behn related to contemporary epistemological debates, these essays move us toward a better understanding of interactions between the sciences and the humanities during a seminal phase in the emergence of modern Western thought.

This title was first published in 2003. 'The art of suffering' is one of many strands of literature on suffering published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This book explores through the art of suffering the way in which the meaning for suffering, which the seventeenth century inherited from the Middle Ages and which centres on the role of suffering as a manifestation of the hand of God in the process of salvation, is refined and enhanced by successive puritan writers only to crumble under the impact of emerging anti-providential thought. It goes on to explore the challenge which the absence of meaning for suffering presents to the Judaeo-Christian concept of an omnipotent and infinitely good God, and the ways in which themes and doctrines already present in the literature on suffering are reshaped and recombined to defend the omnipotence and infinite goodness of God.

Exploring Edmund Spenser's writings within the historical and aesthetic context of colonial agricultural reform in Ireland, his adopted home, this study demonstrates how Irish events and influences operate in far more of Spenser's work than previously suspected. Thomas Herron explores Spenser's relation to contemporary English poets and polemicists in Munster, such as Sir Walter Raleigh, Ralph Birkenshaw and Parr Lane, as well as heretofore neglected Irish material in Elizabethan pageantry in the 1590s, such as the famously elaborate state performances at Elvetham and Rycote. New light is shed here on the Irish significance of both the earlier and later Books of The Fairie Queene. Herron examines in depth Spenser's adaptation of the paradigm of the laboring artist for empire found in Virgil's Georgics, which Herron weaves explicitly with Spenser's experience as an administrator, property owner and planter in Ireland. Taking in history, religion, geography, classics and colonial studies, as well as early modern literature and Irish studies, this book constitutes a valuable addition to Spenser scholarship.

Performing Maternity in Early Modern England features essays that share a common concern with exploring maternity's cultural representation, performative aspects and practical consequences in the period from 1540-1690. The essays interrogate how early modern texts depict fertility, conception, delivery and gendered constructions of maternity by analyzing a wealth of historical documents and images in conjunction with dramatic and non-dramatic literary texts. They emphasize that the embodied, repeated and public nature of maternity defines it as inherently performative and ultimately central to the production of gender identity during the early modern period.

This title was first published in 2003. The aim of The Crisis of 1614 and The Addled Parliament is to bring literary historians together with constitutional and state historians to reflect on the political and ideological upheavals of Britain in 1614 from various perspectives. In the aftermath of new historicism and 'revisionist' Stuart historiography the time seems right for the detailed study of highly specific historical moments and localities, and 1614 seemed particularly in need of renewed attention because few traditional historians have seriously addressed the constitutional crisis of the ill-fated parliament of that year. Literary historians, too, seemed to have failed to bring this significant political moment into focus, despite the fact that there were many literary interventions in contemporary debates of the period. The volume investigates a number of key issues of this decisive political watershed - and examines not only the disastrous parliament, but also wider problems connected to commerce and economics and the freedom of political debate.

This title was first published in 2003. In this new socio-cultural study of the history of the theatre in early modern England, author Paola Pugliatti investigates the question of why, in the Tudor and early Stuart period, unregulated and unlicensed theatrical activities were equated by the English law to unregulated and unlicensed begging. Starting with English vagrancy statutes and in particular from the fact that, from 1545 on, players were listed as vagrants, the book discusses from an entirely new perspective the reasons for the equation, in the early modern mind, of beggary with performing. Pugliatti identifies in players' aptitude for disguise and in the fear raised by their proteiform skills the issues which encouraged the assimilation of beggars and players; she argues that at the core of provisions against vagrancy was an attempt to marginalize people who, because of their instability in location and role (that is, in their theatrical quintessence), were seen as embodying potential for subversion. Placing the topic in a European context and relying on the reading of primary documents in several languages, Pugliatti discusses efforts to control beggary from Justinian's Codex to seventeenth-century statutes, locates the origin of anti-vagrancy and antitheatrical writings in anxieties about idleness and disguise, and analyzes the ways in which various kinds of representation demonized both beggars and players. Finally, by carefully distinguishing between the traditions of rogue pamphlets, conny-catching pamphlets and the picaresque, she offers fresh readings of a number of texts which appear to have been entirely disregarded by recent scholarship, such as pamphlets by Walker, Harman, Greene and Dekker.

This title was first published in 2003. This collection of essays presents a variety of new approaches to the oeuvre of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, one of the most influential and controversial women writers of the seventeenth century. Reflecting the full range of Cavendish's output - which included poetry, drama, prose fictions, orations, and natural philosophy - these essays re-assess Cavendish's place in seventeenth- century literature and philosophy. Whilst approaching Cavendish's work from a range of critical (and disciplinary) perspectives, the authors of these essays are united in their commitment to recovering her writings from their frequent characterisation as "eccentric" or "idiosyncratic", and aim to present her work as historically legible within the cultural contexts in which they were written. The "Mad Madge" of literary legend and tradition is re-written as a bold, innovative and experimental creator of a female authorial voice, and as a thinker vitally in contact with the intellectual currents of her age.

The Revolution in France of 1789 provoked a major 'pamphlet war' in Britain as writers debated what exactly had happened, why it had happened, and where events were now headed. Jane Hodson's book explores the relationship between political persuasion, literary style, and linguistic theory in this war of words, focusing on four key texts: Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, and William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. While these texts form the core of Hodson's project, she ranges far beyond them to survey other works by the same authors; more than 50 contemporaneous books on language; and pamphlets, novels, and letters by other writers. The scope of her study permits her to challenge earlier accounts of the relationship between language and politics that lack historical nuance. Rather than seeing the Revolution debate as a straightforward conflict between radical and conservative linguistic practices, Hodson argues that there is no direct correlation between a particular style or linguistic concept and the political affiliation of the writer. Instead, she shows how each writer attempts to mobilize contemporary linguistic ideas to lend their texts greater authority. Her book will appeal to literature scholars and to historians of language and linguistics working in the Enlightenment and Romantic eras.

This book is the first to engage with the full range of American travel writing about nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine, and the first to acknowledge the influence of the late-eighteenth-century Barbary captivity narrative on nineteenth-century travel writing about the Middle East. Brian Yothers argues that American travel writing about the Holy Land forms a coherent, if greatly varied, tradition, which can only be fully understood when works by major writers such as Twain and Melville are studied alongside missionary accounts, captivity narratives, chronicles of religious pilgrimages, and travel writing in the genteel tradition. Yothers also examines works by lesser-known authors such as Bayard Taylor, John Lloyd Stephens, and Clorinda Minor, demonstrating that American travel writing is marked by a profound intertextuality with the Hebrew and Christian scriptures and with British and continental travel narratives about the Holy Land. His concluding chapter on Melville's Clarel shows how Melville's poem provides an incisive critique of the nascent imperial discourse discernible in the American texts with which it is in dialogue.

This title was first published in 2000: The printed writings of the most important authors of the sixteenth century are characterised by frequent references to current affairs. This collection brings together essays by literary scholars and historians of the era to discuss various ways in which those writing in the vernacular during the early sixteenth century responded to contemporary events. The papers in this volume also demonstrate how the spread of literacy was of fundamental significance for the economics of book production, and for ways in which political power was exercised and expressed, as well as for the development of new literary forms of critical and occasional writing.

In 1767, more than a century before Germany was incorporated as a modern nation-state, the city of Hamburg chartered the first Deutsches Nationaltheater. What can it have meant for a German playhouse to have been a national theater, and what did that imply about the way these theaters operated? Michael Sosulski contends that the idea of German nationhood not only existed prior to the Napoleonic Wars but was decisive in shaping cultural production in the last third of the eighteenth century, operating not on the level of popular consciousness but instead within representational practices and institutions. Grounding his study in a Foucauldian understanding of emergent technologies of the self, Sosulski connects the increasing performance of body discipline by professional actors, soldiers, and schoolchildren to the growing interest in German national identity. The idea of a German cultural nation gradually emerged as a conceptual force through the work of an influential series of literary intellectuals and advocates of a national theater, including G. E. Lessing and Friedrich Schiller. Sosulski combines fresh readings of canonical and lesser-known dramas, with analysis of eighteenth-century theories of nationhood and evolving acting theories, to show that the very lack of a strong national consciousness in the late eighteenth century actually spurred the emergence of the German Nationaltheater, which were conceived in the spirit of the Enlightenment as educational institutions. Since for Germans, nationality was a performed identity, theater emerged as an ideal space in which to imagine that nation.

The work of Stanley Cohen over four decades has come to acquire a classical status in the fields of criminology, sociology, and human rights. His writing, research, teaching, and practical engagement in these fields have been rigorously analytical and intellectually inspiring. It amounts to a unique contribution, immensely varied yet with several unifying themes, having made and continuing to make a lasting impact around the world. His work thus has a protean character and scope which transcend time and place. This book of essays in Stanley Cohen's honor builds upon and reflects some of his many-sided contributions. Crime, Social Control and Human Rights with the Forward by Noam Chomsky contains chapters by some of the world's leading thinkers as well as the rising generation of scholars and practitioners whose approach has been shaped in significant respects by Stanley Cohen. The book examines the main themes Stanley Cohen has explored and developed.

This study describes a variety of ways of thinking about place in the Renaissance and in Paradise Lost. Despite coming from different perspectives, they have in common the idea that the difficulty of the relationship of reciprocity that poetic subjects often expect from their environment destabilizes those subjects' understanding, not only of environment, but of themselves.

The study explores destabilization as it affects aspects of the poem from Adam's sense of the landscape of Eden and the meaning of the Fall itself, to the relationship the ambiguous landscapes of Paradise Lost create between Adam and Eve, the poet and the reader; all of whom are struggling to make sense of the same problematically described places.

To a surprisingly large extent, the description of prelapsarian Eden and the events that go on within it have in common a failed attempt to understand the nature of the surroundings. In observing the centrality and difficultly of this poetic discourse of place, the problem of place is found at the very heart of the Fall.

Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era explores a fascinating connection between two seemingly unrelated Romantic-era discourses, outlining the extent to which eighteenth and early nineteenth century theories of sympathy were generated by crises of state finance. Through readings of authors such as David Hume, Adam Smith, William Wordsworth, and P.B. Shelley, this volume establishes the ways in which crises of state finance encouraged the development of theories of sympathy capable of accounting for both the fact of "social systems" as well as the modes of emotional communication by means of which such systems bound citizens to one another. Employing a methodology that draws on the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, Michel Serres, and Giovanni Arrighi, as well as Gilles Deleuze's theories of time and affect, this book argues that eighteenth and early nineteenth century philosophies of sympathy emerged as responses to financial crises. Individual chapters focus on specific texts by David Hume, Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ann Yearsley, William Wordsworth, and P.B. Shelley, but Mitchell also draws on periodicals, pamphlets, and parliamentary hearings to make the argument that Romantic era theories of sympathy developed new discourses about social systems intended both to explain, as well as contain, the often disruptive effects of state finance and speculation.

Katherine Philips was a major seventeenth-century poet and playwright who became widely known for her innovative use of Donnean poetics to express passionate female friendship, her occasional verses on private friends and public figures, and her moral and political acuity. She had the mixed fortune of being enshrined in posthumous volumes that both celebrated and misrepresented her achievement. Fortunately recent research has clarified our understanding of who Philips was and how she conducted her literary career.

Located at the intersection of new historicism and the 'new formalism', historical formalism is one of the most rapidly growing and important movements in early modern studies: taking seriously the theoretical issues raised by both history and form, it challenges the anti-formalist orthodoxies of new historicism and expands the scope of historicist criticism. Shakespeare and Historical Formalism is the first volume devoted exclusively to collecting and assessing work of this kind. With essays on a broad range of Shakespeare's works and engaging topics from performance theory to the emergence of 'the literary' and from historiography to pedagogy, the volume demonstrates the value of historical formalism for Shakespeare studies and for literary criticism as a whole. Shakespeare and Historical Formalism begins with an introduction that describes the nature and potential of historical formalism and traces its roots in early modern literary theory and its troubled relationship with new historicism. The volume is then divided into two sections corresponding to the two chief objectives of historical formalism: a historically informed and politically astute formalism, and a historicist criticism revitalized by attention to issues of form. The first section, 'Historicizing Form', explores from a variety of perspectives the historical and political sources, meanings and functions of Shakespeare's dramatic forms. The second section, 'Re-Forming History', uses questions of form to rethink our understanding of historicism and of history itself, and in doing so challenges some of our fundamental literary-critical, pedagogical and epistemological assumptions. Concluding with suggestions for further reading on historical formalism and related work, Shakespeare and Historical Formalism invites scholars to rethink the familiar categories and principles of formal and historical criticism.