The Aphrodysial is one of six plays written by William Percy (c. 1570-1648), brother of the Ninth Earl of Northumberland (1564-1632). This edition reproduces the copy of the text preserved in Huntington Library MS HM4, with a substantial collation of variants between it and the other extant version preserved in Alnwick Castle Library MS 509. This 'Marinall' is set at the underwater court of Oceanus. The action is concerned with piscatory and amatory pursuits that take place during Cytheraea's Aphrodysial feast-day. The play offers a retelling of the Hero and Leander story, Jupiter and Neptune's quest for Thetis's lost magic bracelet, and the comical attempts of some fishermen, led by Proteus, to capture a talking whale. The play is notable for its extensive stage directions, which envisage performance by boy actors and adult actors respectively. -- .

Researchers have neglected the cultural history of education and as a result women's educational works have been disparaged as narrowly didactic and redundant to the history of ideas. Mary Hilton's book serves as a corrective to these biases by culturally contextualising the popular educational writings of leading women moralists and activists including Sarah Fielding, Hester Mulso Chapone, Catherine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, Sarah Trimmer, Catharine Cappe, Priscilla Wakefield, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Marcet, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Carpenter, and Bertha von Marenholtz Bulow. Over a hundred-year period, from the rise of print culture in the mid-eighteenth century to the advent of the kindergarten movement in Britain in the mid-nineteenth, a variety of women intellectuals, from strikingly different ideological and theological milieux, supported, embellished, critiqued, and challenged contemporary public doctrines by positioning themselves as educators of the nation's young citizens. Of particular interest are their varying constructions of childhood expressed in a wide variety of published texts, including tales, treatises, explanatory handbooks, and collections of letters. By explicitly and consistently connecting the worlds of the schoolroom, the family, and the local parish to wider social, religious, scientific, and political issues, these women's educational texts were far more influential in the public realm than has been previously represented. Written deliberately to change the public mind, these texts spurred their many readers to action and reform.

Nicky Hallett has uncovered a major new source of material by and about English nuns living in exile in the Low Countries during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This volume presents the women's voices in unmediated form, direct in all their vibrancy, with an extensive introduction that provides historical and cultural contexts for an understanding of the Lives, their sources and their authors. Lives of Spirit draws upon several remarkable sets of papers compiled in enclosed convents between 1619 and 1794. These documents show that religious women developed an astute system of auto/biographical practice within a protean political situation, and that, even in exile and from within enclosure, they sought to shape a distinctive contribution to devotional change within a reforming church. This volume reveals how the women's Lives challenge, as well as affirm, notions of gendered spirituality, refiguring traditions of female life-writing that extend from Catherine of Siena (1347 - 80) through the work of the Carmelite reformer, Teresa of Avila (1515 - 82), into the later modern period. The newness of the material in this book allows a radical reappraisal of the self-representation of religious women and of paradigms of life-writing in, and beyond, the early modern period. This book is of significant interest to scholars interested in early modern women's writing, female spirituality, and auto/biography more widely as a genre.

Bringing together some of the best current practitioners of historical and formal criticism, Reading Renaissance Ethics assesses the ethical performance of renaissance texts as historical agents in their time and in ours.

Exploring the nature and mechanics of cultural agency, the book explains with greater clarity just what is at stake when canon-formation, aesthetic evaluation and curricular reform are questioned and revised. Taking seriously the question of what to read requires us to consider exactly what it is that we do when we read and when we write about our reading. Reading Renaissance Ethics asks what sorts of events took place when Renaissance texts were first read and how this differs from the way we read and teach them now.

This book describes the haunting of eighteenth-century England. It is the first in-depth study of the production, circulation and consumption of English ghost stories during the Age of Reason. This period saw the establishment of the ghost story as a literary genre. Handley combines close textual analysis with a broad conception of historical change. She examines a variety of mediums: ballads and chapbooks, newspapers, sermons, medical treatises and scientific journals, novels and plays. She relates the telling of ghost stories to wider changes associated with the Enlightenment, arguing that they played a key role in battles against atheism, republicanism, material excess and secularisation.

Focusing on eighteenth-century constructions of symbolic femininity and eighteenth-century women's writing in relation to contemporary utopian discourse, this volume adjusts our understanding of the utopia of the Enlightenment, placing a unique emphasis on colonial utopias. These essays reflect on issues related to specific configurations of utopias and utopianism by considering in detail English and French texts by both women (Sarah Scott, Sarah Fielding, Isabelle de Charriere) and men (Paltock and Montesquieu). The contributors ask the following questions: In the influential discourses of eighteenth-century utopian writing, is there a place for 'woman, ' and if so, what (or where) is it? How do 'women' disrupt, confirm, or ground the utopian projects within which these constructs occur? By posing questions about the inscription of gender in the context of eighteenth-century utopian writing, the contributors shed new light on the eighteenth-century legacies that continue to shape contemporary views of social and political progress

"Presentist Shakespeares "constitutes the first extended exposition and exploration of the principles and the practice of presentism. Although an emphasis on history or historical context has been very important in recent Shakespeare scholarship, no critic is able to make direct contact with a past uncontaminated by their own contemporary concerns. By the same token, all experience of the present is moulded by the past. "Presentism," as elaborated in this volume, takes account of the never-ending dialogue between past and present, scrupulously seeking out salient aspects of the present as a crucial trigger for its investigations and arguing that an intrusive, shaping awareness of ourselves deserves our closest attention.
The distinguished team of contributors to this volume demonstrate the way in which presentist readings make possible a fuller engagement with the ironies generated by our inescapable involvement in time. These ironies, the contributors argue, are a fruitful, necessary and inescapable aspect of any text's being, which also function as agents of change, flowing unstoppably back into the events of the past, coloring how we perceive them, modifying our sense of what they signify. In respect of Shakespeare, they point to shades of implication suddenly available here and now within the wide range of plays examined, subtly challenging, changing and adding to our sense of what they are able to tell us. Perhaps, it is suggested, they offer the only effective purchase on these texts that we are able to make.
Presentist criticism is an open-ended and on-going project, located at a particularly interesting and demanding juncture in modern Shakespeare studies. Its boundariesremain to be defined. It is envisaged, however, that the new essays of this collection will establish a landmark: one which reflects, develops and even rejoices in this indeterminacy.

Early modern prose fiction had a huge impact on the social and economic fabric of the time. It created a new culture of reading and writing for pleasure which became accessible to those previously excluded from such activities (primarily women and the working classes), resulting in a significant challenge to existing class structures.
Each of the essays in this exciting collection considers the reciprocal relation of early modern prose fiction to class distinctions, examining factors such as:
- The impact of prose fiction on the social, political and economic fabric of early modern England
- The way in which a growing emphasis on literacy allowed for increased class mobility and newly flexible notions of class
- How the popularity of reading and the subsequent demand for books led to the production and marketing of books as an industry
- Complications for critics of prose fiction, as it began to be considered an inferior and trivial art form
- The development of the genre of romance fiction and the emerging sense of 'nation' and 'nationalism' that accompanied it
Emphasizing the significance of early modern prose fiction as a hybrid genre that absorbed cultural, ideological, and historical strands of the age, this fascinating study brings together an outstanding cast of critics including: Sheila T. Cavanaugh, Stephen Guy-Bray, Mary Ellen Lamb, Joan Pong Linton, Steve Mentz, Constance C. Relihan, Goran V. Stanivukovic with an afterword from Arthur Kinney.

The first full-length and comprehensive study of the illustrations of Sterne's work, this book explores the ability of Sterne's texts to inspire the visual imagination. It helps to explain why scores of editions of his fiction have been illustrated, some profusely: to fulfill the reader's desire, as well as the artist's compulsion, to visualize Sterne's words. Gerard places his subject in a clear and innovative theoretical framework which opens the field to general word and image studies. The author begins by examining the distinct varieties of pictorialism in Sterne's texts. The remainder of the study takes into account three remarkable series of illustrations-representing Trim reading the sermon, didactic sentimentalism in A Sentimental Journey and Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling, and the many and diverse portrayals of 'poor Maria' - to demonstrate the ways in which culture projects these texts differently through the various artists.

'Conversation is the beginning and end of knowledge', wrote Stephano Guazzo in his Civil Conversation. Like Guazzo's, this is a book dedicated to the Renaissance concept of conversation, a concept that functioned simultaneously as a privileged literary and rhetorical form (the dialogue), an intellectual and artistic program (the humanists' interactions with ancient texts), and a political possibility (the king's council, or the republican concept of mixed government). In its varieties of knowledge production, the Renaissance was centrally concerned with debate and dialogue, not only among scholars, but also, and perhaps more importantly, among and with texts. Renaissance reading practices were active and engaged: such conversations with texts were meant to prepare the mind for political and civic life, and the political itself was conceived as fundamentally conversational. The humanist idea of conversation thus theorized the relationships among literature, politics, and history; it was one of the first modern attempts to locate cultural production within a specific historical and political context. The essays in this collection investigate the varied ways in which the Renaissance incorporated textual conversation and dialogue into its literary, political, juridical, religious, and social practices. They focus on the importance of conversation to early modern understandings of ethics; on literary history itself as an ongoing authorial conversation; and on the material and textual technologies that enabled early modern conversations.

"Presentist Shakespeares "constitutes the first extended exposition and exploration of the principles and the practice of presentism. Although an emphasis on history or historical context has been very important in recent Shakespeare scholarship, no critic is able to make direct contact with a past uncontaminated by their own contemporary concerns. By the same token, all experience of the present is moulded by the past. "Presentism," as elaborated in this volume, takes account of the never-ending dialogue between past and present, scrupulously seeking out salient aspects of the present as a crucial trigger for its investigations and arguing that an intrusive, shaping awareness of ourselves deserves our closest attention.
The distinguished team of contributors to this volume demonstrate the way in which presentist readings make possible a fuller engagement with the ironies generated by our inescapable involvement in time. These ironies, the contributors argue, are a fruitful, necessary and inescapable aspect of any text's being, which also function as agents of change, flowing unstoppably back into the events of the past, coloring how we perceive them, modifying our sense of what they signify. In respect of Shakespeare, they point to shades of implication suddenly available here and now within the wide range of plays examined, subtly challenging, changing and adding to our sense of what they are able to tell us. Perhaps, it is suggested, they offer the only effective purchase on these texts that we are able to make.
Presentist criticism is an open-ended and on-going project, located at a particularly interesting and demanding juncture in modern Shakespeare studies. Its boundariesremain to be defined. It is envisaged, however, that the new essays of this collection will establish a landmark: one which reflects, develops and even rejoices in this indeterminacy.

This New Mermaids anthology brings together the four most popular and widely studied of Christopher Marlowe's plays: Tamburlaine, Parts 1 and 2, The Jew of Malta, Edward II and Dr Faustus. The new introduction by Brian Gibbons explores the plays in the context of early modern theatre, culture and politics, as well as examining their language, characters and themes. On-page commentary notes guide students to a better understanding and combine to make this an indispensable student edition ideal for study and classroom use from A Level upwards.

The first decade of the Jacobean age witnessed a sudden profusion of comedies satirizing city life; among these were comedies by Ben Jonson, John Marston and Thomas Middleton, as well as the bulk of the repertory of the newly-established children's companies at Blackfriars and Paul's. The playwrights self-consciously forged a new genre which attracted London audiences with its images of folly and vice in Court and City, and hack-writing dramatists were prompt to cash in on a new theatrical fashion. This study, first published in 1980, examines ways in which the Jacobean city comedy reflect on the self-consciousness of audiences and the concern of the dramatists with Jacobean society. This title will be of interest of students of Renaissance Drama, English Literature and Performance.

Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" is one of the major texts of the eighteenth century, and its satire of contemporary events and debates raises questions of genre, philosophy and politics.
Taking the form of a sourcebook, this guide to Swift's novel offers:
- extensive introductory comment on the contexts, critical history and interpretations of the text, from publication to the present
- annotated extracts from key contextual documents, reviews, critical works and the text itself
- cross-references between documents and sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism
- suggestions for further reading.
Part of the "Routledge Guides to Literature "series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of "Gulliver's Travels "and seeking not only a guide to the novel, but a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds Swift's text.

'An Intrepid Scot' makes an important new contribution to the growing literature on the perceptions of the Islamic world and the 'Orient' in early modern Europe, at the same time as illuminating the attitudes of a Protestant from Northern Europe towards the Catholic South. In this book Edmund Bosworth looks at the life and career of William Lithgow, a tough and opinionated Scots Protestant, who had a seemingly insatiable Wanderlust and who managed to survive various misadventures and near-death experiences in the course of his travels. These took him through a dangerously Catholic Southern Europe to a dangerously Muslim Greece and Istanbul en route for his pilgrimage destination of the Holy Land; on another occasion he went through North Africa and returned circuitously via Central and Eastern Europe; but he was stopped in his tracks whilst endeavouring to reach the court of Prester John in Ethiopia, when he fell into the hands of the Spanish Inquisition and narrowly escaped a horrible death. Lithgow was one of several men of his time who journeyed eastwards, some as far as Persia and India, but unlike many others, he has not been the subject of a special study. Bosworth now places him within the context of the present interest in perceptions of the Islamic world and of the 'Orient' and 'Orientals' in early modern Europe. In addition to the entertainment of the travel narrative, the book shows how one Westerner of the time interpreted the alien East for his readers, and how the Ottoman Empire and its apparently unstoppable might both fascinated and struck fear into the hearts of those outside it.

William Percy's Mahomet and His Heaven (1601) is extraordinary. Not only is it the only early modern play purportedly based upon the Qur'an, but it is also the first to place the Prophet Muhammad on the stage. While there existed a remarkable range of texts concerning Islamic characters and themes in Renaissance England, from chronicles and pamphlets to popular drama, the publication of this edition of Mahomet and His Heaven represents a major step forward in the study of Islam on the early modern stage. Roughly contemporary with Shakespeare's Othello, William Percy makes the remarkable and potentially highly provocative gesture of locating the Prophet as its central character, presiding over an apocalyptic drought to chastise the sins of mankind. The play takes place in around the mosques of 'Medina' and the action mirrors early Christian 'translations' of the Qur'an, the Islamic holy text that was rarely available in England at the time. Furthermore, the play provides a fascinating insight into the way that Islamic characters were portrayed on the early modern stage, containing as it does remarkably detailed stage directions, stipulating for example that the Prophet wears 'all greene and greene his Turban' and that his Angels are 'rainbow powdered'. Such details offer an entirely new perspective upon this aspect of early modern stagecraft. Matthew Dimmock presents here the play in its entirety, with a critical introduction which introduces some of its key themes, and places it in a textual and social context. A section of detailed explanatory scholarly notes follow the play, containing a full translation of the short Latin sections and references to the many political and literary parallels. This book should be required reading for historians, literary scholars and students dealing with notions of race, religion, magic, astrology and stagecraft in early modern England.

This book accounts for the previously inadequately explained transformation in the meaning of equity in sixteenth century England, a transformation which, intriguingly, first comes to light in literary texts rather than political or legal treatises. The book address the two principal literary works in which the transformation becomes apparent, Thomas More's Utopia and Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, and sketches the history of equity to its roots in the Greek concept of epieikeia, uncovering along the way both previously unexplained distinctions, and a long-obscured esoteric meaning. These rediscoveries, when brought to bear upon the Utopia and Faerie Queene, illuminate critical though relatively neglected textual passages that have long puzzled scholars.

First major study of the representation of Minerva in the Middle Ages, giving insights into classical reception. Images of Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, appear frequently in medieval literature, derived from antique culture and literature; redemptress, mistress of the liberal arts, patroness of princes, idol, and Venus' ally. Throughout the high to late Middle Ages, Peter Abelard, Guido delle Colonne, John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Christine de Pizan, among others, drew on and developed these images, but they are particularly prevalent in a number of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century English and Scots allegorical and dream-vision poems, including John Lydgate's Reson and Sensuallyte and Temple of Glas, the anonymous Court of Sapience and Assembly of Gods, James I's Kingis Quair, Charles d'Orleans' Fortunes Stabilnes, and William Dunbar's Golden Targe. This book offers the first full-length examination of these depictions, bringing out the receptionof classical culture. Via close readings of the various poets, it enables us to understand how her figure was used, and also, and most importantly, to interpret and transform the poetic and cultural traditions from which she springs. WILLIAM F. HODAPP is Professor of English and Coordinator of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at The College of St. Scholastica, Duluth, Minnesota.

Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality is a powerful reassessment of cultural materialism as a way of understanding textuality, history and culture, by one of the founding figures of this critical movement. Alan Sinfield examines cultural materialism both as a body of ongoing argument and as it informs particular works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, especially in relation to sexuality in early-modern England and queer theory. The book has several interlocking preoccupations: theories of textuality and reading the political location of Shakespearean plays and the organisation of literary culture today the operation of state power in the early-modern period and the scope for dissidence the sex/gender system in that period and the application of queer theory in history. These preoccupations are explored in and around a range of works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Throughout the book Sinfield re-presents cultural materialism, framing it not as a set of propositions, as has often been done, but as a cluster of unresolved problems. His brilliant, lucid and committed readings demonstrate that the 'unfinished business' of cultural materialism - and Sinfield's work in particular - will long continue to produce new questions and challenges for the fields of Shakespeare and Renaissance Studies.

Arguing for renewed attention to covert same-sex-oriented writing (and to authorial intention more generally), this study explores the representation of female and male homosexuality in late sixteenth- through mid-eighteenth-century British and French literature. The author also uncovers and analyzes long-term continuities in the representation of same-sex love, sex, and desire between the classical, early modern, eighteenth-century, and even modern periods. Among the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors and texts examined here are Mme de Murat, Les Memoires De Madame La Comtesse De M*** (1697); John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748-49); Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748); Nicolas Chorier and Jean Nicolas, L'Academie des dames (1680); Delarivier Manley, The New Atalantis (1709); and Isaac de Benserade, Iphis et Iante (1637). Classical texts brought into the discussion include Juvenal's Satires, Lucian's Erotes, and, most importantly, Ovid's Metamorphoses. Casting its net broadly yet exploring deeply-poems, plays, novels, and more; from the serious to the satiric, the polite to the pornographic; well-known and little-known; written in English, French, and Latin; published in early modern and eighteenth-century Britain and France; plus key classical texts-this study engages with the historiography of sexuality as a whole.

An investigation into the ways in which early modern books were advertised, this study argues that those means of advertisement both record and help to shape social interactions between people and books. These interactions are not only fascinating in themselves, but also demonstrably linked to larger social phenomena, such as human commodification, the development of English nationalism, the increasingly unruly proliferation of literacy, and changing conceptions of literature. Within the context of recent developments of new textualism and new economic criticism, Saenger's approach makes use of formalist strategies of genre recognition as well as new historicist connections between social history and art. In this study Saenger illustrates his general account of the formal properties of front matter-titles and subtitles, prefatory epistles, and commendatory verses-with engaging readings of specific examples, including Feltham's Resolves, A Myrrovre for Magistrates, and Sidney's Arcadia. He explores the several ways in which paratextual authors sought to involve the reader in various active roles vis A vis the main text, whether those books were prose fiction or translated continental sermons. Some particular attention is devoted to printed drama, both because dramatic texts present printers with a unique set of challenges and because those texts have often been misread in recent criticism. This book offers a much-needed analysis of profound transformations-not only to the book trade as an industry, but also to the very concepts of reading and authorship-in an age which saw the relatively brief coincidence of ancient marketing strategies and systems and the burgeoning market of the mechanically reproduced text.

This book examines the literary, religious, and political aspects of the radical movements and various sects of the English Civil War. Featuring a chapter on John Milton, this book also addresses the legal problems that engaged the early modern radical reformers, the issue of radical religion as a negotiating tool and the limits of radical liberal thought.

First published in 1995, David Nokes' major biography of John Gay (1685-1732) was the first full-length life of Gay for over fifty years, and drew on hitherto unpublished letters. Presenting Gay as a complex character, torn between the hopes of court preferment and the assertion of literary independence, Nokes offers both a lively and accessible read for the non-specialist and a comprehensive scholarly study. Best-known for The Beggar's Opera, Gay is here revealed as a contradictory figure. Nokes argues that Gay's self-effacing and self-mocking literary persona was largely responsible for perpetuating an image of himself as a genial literary non-entity. Often cast as a neglected genius, dependent on others, he in fact left a considerable fortune after his death. Depicted by his friends as both a childlike innocent and a rakish ladies' man, he produced the most successful and subversive theatrical satire of his generation, and volumes of bestselling Fables.

Dissent and Authority in Early Modern Ireland: The English Problem from Bale to Shakespeare examines the problems that beset the Tudor administration of Ireland through a range of selected 16th century English narratives. This book is primarily concerned with the period between 1541 and 1603. This bracket provides a framework that charts early modern Irish history from the constitutional change of the island from lordship to kingdom to the end of the conquest in 1603. The mounting impetus to bring Ireland to a "complete" conquest during these years has, quite naturally, led critics to associate England's reform strategies with Irish Otherness. The preoccupation with this discourse of difference is also perceived as the "Irish Problem," a blanket term broadly used to describe just about every aspect of Irishness incompatible with the English imperialist ideologies. The term stresses everything that is "wrong" with the Irish nation-Ireland was a problem to be resolved. This book takes a different approach towards the "Irish Problem." Instead of rehashing the English government's complaints of the recalcitrant Irish and the long struggle to impose royal authority in Ireland, I posit that the "Irish Problem" was very much shaped and developed by a larger "English Problem," namely English dissent within the English government. The discussions in this book focuse on the ways in which English writers articulated their knowledge and anxieties of the "English Problem" in sixteenth-century literary and historical narratives. This book reappraises the limitations of the "Irish Problem," and argues that the crown's failure to control dissent within its own ranks was as detrimental to the conquest as the "Irish Problem," if not more so, and finally, it attempts to demonstrate how dissent translate into governance and conquest in early modern Ireland.

Namesake princes and presidents; stolen thrones and elections; plutocrats and insurgents; campaign trails and war-mongering; waning monarchy and imperilled democracy; and revengers, early modern and postmodern: these themes drive this provocative study of Shakespeare's legacy in contemporary American and British politics.
Linked by focused readings o"f Hamlet and the Henriad, "the essays follow Shakespeare's two most famous royal sons, the Princes Hamlet and Hal, as they haunt contemporary political psychology in the early years of a new millennium, and especially in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Between devolution in Britain and the new "doctrine" of pre-emptive strike in the United States, our contemporary Hamlets and Hals epitomize a debate-as fraught now as in Shakespeare's day-about the cost of spin-doctoring legacies. In exploring how current political culture inherits Shakespeare, Hamlet's Heirs challenges scholarly assumptions about historical periodicity, modernity, and the uses of Shakespeare in present-day contexts.
Speaking to readers in a voice that is adventurous rather than authoritative, innovative rather than institutional, and speculative rather than orthodox, Charnes reveals that when it comes to legacy we are all, in one way or another, Hamlet's heirs.