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. John Cruso of Norwich (b. 1592/3), the eldest son of Flemish migrants, was a man of many parts: Dutch and English poet, translator, military author, virtuoso networker, successful merchant and hosier, Dutch church elder and militia captain. This first book-length biography, making extensive use of archival and literary sources, reconstructs the life and work of this multi-talented, self-made man, whose literary oeuvre is marked by its polyvocality. Cruso's poetry includes a Dutch amplificatio on Psalm 8, some 221 Dutch epigrams, and elegies (one of which frames the most important Anglo-Dutch literary moment in the seventeenth century, a collection of Dutch and Latin elegies which marked the death of the London Dutch church minister, Simeon Ruytinck, and included verses by Constantijn Huygens and Jacob Cats). As a military author, Cruso published five works, in English, including two translations from the French. These works display his knowledge of the canon of classical and Renaissance literature, which, in turn, allowed him to fashion himself as a miles doctus, a learned soldier, and make a contribution to military science in England prior to and during the English Civil Wars. In focusing on the rich and varied life and works of John Cruso, this book also explores ideas and practices of identity formation in the early modern period, as well as allowing Cruso's life to shed further light on the migrant experience in seventeenth-century Norwich. Joby shows how a second-generation migrant could successfully integrate himself into English society, whilst continuing to engage with his Low Countries heritage.

Reissuing 15 works originally published between 1934 and 1991, this diverse set offers an outstanding collection of scholarship devoted to Renaissance Drama. Routledge Library Editions: Renaissance Drama provides an extensive study of performance history and criticism of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, as well as volumes dedicated to the playwrights Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. These volumes present together a lively picture of the development of British theatre and will be of interest to students of literature, drama and performance.

This is a collection of previously published essays on late medieval and early modern literature, designed to act as a companion to "Chaucer to Spenser: An Anthology of Writings in English 1375 -1575," edited by Derek Pearsall (1999).

The object of the accompanying anthology is to provide representation of a variety of kinds of prose and verse, including some not traditionally regarded as canonically "literary," and also to trespass beyond the boundaries of the conventional medieval/early modern divide. This new volume provides some of the critical backing for those decisions about the canon and about periodization, and also give evidence of the vigor of opinion and debate in the field in general.

Most of the essays are from the last 20 years, and some are very recent, though space is also found for some earlier classics. The collection pays particular attention to those critics who have had the most powerful recent impact on our reading of the texts of the period: they are selected for their excellence and importance, whether in themselves or as representatives of an influential critical approach, and not for their adherence to any one school of interpretation. They will provide a companion to the texts in the anthology, a commentary and counterpoint to the views expressed in the editor's headnotes and explanatory notes, and a perspective on the best that has been thought and said about the writing of these two extraordinary centuries of creativity, consolidation and seed-sowing.

Alongside Spenser, Sidney and the early Donne, Shakespeare is the major poet of the 16th century, largely because of the status of his remarkable sequence of sonnets. Professor Cousins' new book is the first comprehensive study of the Sonnets and narrative poems for over a decade. He focuses in particular on their exploration of self-knowledge, sexuality, and death, as well as on their ambiguous figuring of gender. Throughout he provides a comparative context, looking at the work of Shakespeare's contemporaries. The relation between Shakespeare's non-dramatic verse and his plays is also explored.

This book chronicles the rise of goddess worship in the region of Bengal from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. Focusing on the goddesses Kali and Uma, McDermott examines lyrical poems written by devotees from Ramprasad Sen (ca. 1718-1775) to Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976).

This anthology of 18th-century English poetry is extensively annotated for a new generation of readers. It combines the scope of a period anthology with the detailed annotations of an authoritative single-author edition. Selected poets include John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope and William Cowper. The guiding principle of the annotation is one of thoroughness: the editors concentrate on works where the meanings have changed, on primary allusions and on relevant details of social and political history.

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.

This collection of multi-authored essays not only refashions and revises critical understandings of the early modern dramatist Ben Jonson and his canon of work, but is also self-reflexive about the process. It includes original essays by both established and emergent Jonson scholars, and employs materialist, feminist and queer theory in the production of its readings of Jonsonian playtexts and masques, familiar and otherwise. It is intended to encourage new approaches by students to this central figure from the Renaissance.

Explores the process involved in reading William Blake's poems. The poems include on the same pages, verbal and visual texts that often seem to be at odds with one another or even, at times, to be entirely unrelated. Because reading verbal and visual texts involves different asthetic assumptions and operations, Blake's texts make different demands on their readers which further complicates the reading activity. The author attempts to outline some of the ways in which the intellectual and imaginative transaction proceeds between author and reader via the medium of the illuminated text as a physical artifact.

In the late Renaissance and Early Modern period, man's relationship to nature changed dramatically. An important part of this change occurred in the way that beauty was perceived in the natural world and in the particular features which became privileged objects of aesthetic gratification. This study explores the shift in aesthetic attitude towards the mountain that took place between 1450 and 1750. Over the course of these 300 years the mountain transformed from a fearful and ugly place to one of beauty and splendor. Accepted scholarly opinion claims that this change took place in the vernacular literature of the early and mid-18th century. Based on previously unknown and unstudied material, this volume now contends that it took place earlier in the Latin literature of the late Renaissance and Early Modern period. The aesthetic attitude shift towards the mountain had its catalysts in two broad spheres: the development of an idea of 'landscape' in the geographical and artistic traditions of the 16th century on the one hand, and the increasing amount of scientific and theological investigation dedicated to the mountain on the other, reaching a pinnacle in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The new Latin evidence for the change in aesthetic attitude towards the mountain unearthed in the course of this study brings material to light which is relevant for the current philosophical debate in environmental aesthetics. The book's concluding chapter shows how understanding the processes that produced the late Renaissance and Early Modern shift in aesthetic attitude towards the mountain can reveal important information about the modern aesthetic appreciation of nature. Alongside a standard bibliography of primary literature, this volume also offers an extended annotated bibliography of further Latin texts on the mountains from the Renaissance and Early Modern period. This critical bibliography is the first of its kind and constitutes an essential tool for further study in the field.

Did the Stuart queens create their own courts, and can these courts shed new light on women's poetry, drama and performance? This book investigates the literature, theater, patronage and commissioning of the courts of Anna of Denmark (1603-19) and Henrietta Maria (1625-42). Unearthing the neglected history of the Stuart queens, these essays look afresh at the early modern European female elite to create a new picture of femininity for students and scholars of early modern culture.

This book studies the uses of orality in Italian society, across all classes, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, with an emphasis on the interrelationships between oral communication and the written word. The Introduction provides an overview of the topic as a whole and links the chapters together. Part 1 concerns public life in the states of northern, central, and southern Italy. The chapters examine a range of performances that used the spoken word or song: concerted shouts that expressed the feelings of the lower classes and were then recorded in writing; the proclamation of state policy by town criers; songs that gave news of executions; the exercise of power relations in society as recorded in trial records; and diplomatic orations and interactions. Part 2 centres on private entertainments. It considers the practices of the performance of poetry sung in social gatherings and on stage with and without improvisation; the extent to which lyric poets anticipated the singing of their verse and collaborated with composers; performances of comedies given as dinner entertainments for the governing body of republican Florence; and a reading of a prose work in a house in Venice, subsequently made famous through a printed account. Part 3 concerns collective religious practices. Its chapters study sermons in their own right and in relation to written texts, the battle to control spaces for public performance by civic and religious authorities, and singing texts in sacred spaces.

The essays in this book analyze a range of genres and considers geographical areas beyond the Ottoman Empire to deepen our post-Saidian understanding of the complexity of real and imagined "traffic" between England and the "Islamic worlds" it encountered and constructed.

Womersley examines Gibbon's conflict with his critics, in particular the spokesmen for religious orthodoxy. By considering the sequence of interactions between the historian and his readership, he illuminates what might be called Gibbon's experience of himself, at the same time deepening our understanding of the conditions of English authorship during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

This series reprints classic works illustrating the cultural and intellectual life of Scotland during one of its most creative and dynamic periods: the second half of the eighteenth century. It was the age of the mature Scottish Enlightenment, when Scotland, to the surprise of most Europeans, became one of the leading cultural and intellectual centres of the western world. Although the writings of some eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers, such as David Hume and Adam Smith, are widely available, many others are scarce. This series will regularly publish groups of thematically connected titles, most of which have not been reprinted for a century or more, many with specially commissioned new introductions.

This bold and wide-ranging study takes a fresh look at a controversial question: what do the acts and shows of grief performed in early modern drama tell us about the religious culture of the world in which they were historically staged? Many rites of mourning shown in the theatre held Catholic resonances, but how did such memories of traditional worship work in post-Reformation England? Drawing on performance studies, this book provides detailed readings of major playtexts, Shakespearean and others, to explore the politics, pathologies, physiologies and parodies of mourning.

Robinson Crusoe explores Defoe's story, the legend it captured, the universal desire which underlies the myth and a range of modern re-writings which reveal a continued fascination with the problematic character of this narrative. Whether envisaged as an heroic rejection of the old world order, a piece of pre-colonialist propaganda or a tale raising archetypal problems of 'otherness' and 'inequality', the mythic value of Crusoe has become a pretext over many centuries for an examination of some of the fundamental problems of existence. This collection of essays examines, from a wide range of critical and philosophical perspectives, the cultural manifestations of Robinson Crusoe in different centuries, in different media, in different genres.

New essays on Thomas Traherne challenge traditional critical readings of the poet. 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, 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 will soon be published for the first time. They address major themes in Traherne studies, including Traherne's understanding of matter and spirit, his attitude towards happiness and holiness, his response to solitude and society, and his Anglican identity. As a whole, the volume aims to re-ignite discussion on settled readings of Traherne's work, to reconsider issues in Traherne scholarship which have long lain dormant, and to supplement our picture of the man and his writings through new discoveries and insights. Elizabeth S. Dodd is programme leader for the MA in theology, ministry and mission and lecturer in theology, imagination and culture at Sarum College, Salisbury; Cassandra Gorman is lecturer in English at Trinity College, Cambridge. Contributors: Jacob Blevins, Warren Chernaik, Phoebe Dickerson, Elizabeth S. Dodd, Ana Elena Gonzalez-Trevino, Cassandra Gorman, Carol Ann Johnston, Alison Kershaw, Kathryn Murphy

Dominic Rainsford examines ways in which literary texts may seem to comment on their authors' ethical status. Its argument develops through readings of Blake, Dickens, and Joyce, three authors who find especially vivid ways of casting doubt on their own moral authority, at the same time as they expose wider social ills. The book combines its interest in ethics with post-structuralist scepticism, and thus develops a type of radical humanism with applications far beyond the three authors immediately discussed.

Fleming masterfully demonstrates Camoes's debt to, and participation in, the long and continuing traditions of "spiritual" or allegorical scriptural exegesis in the European Middle Ages and Renaissance. Second in its fame only to the Lusiads within Camoes's large body of poetry, "Sobolos rios" ("Babylon and Zion") in redondilhas is a philosophically ambitious masterwork of Christian humanism that draws from the psalm Super flumina Babylonis both a general theory of poetry and an intensely focused meditation upon the shape of an individual poet's career. Bringing to bear upon the poem the several learned traditions the poet demands, Fleming's study relates the poem to the traditions of allegorical scriptural exegesis characteristic of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Specific subjects include the centrality of the psalms and the image of David to European poets, therelation of pagan myth to biblical truth, the complexity and purposefulness of Camoes's intertextual strategies, the underappreciated influence on Camoes of Juan Boscan, the exegetical control of the poem's elaborate numerological schemes, and the concept of palinode as literary genre and personal moral statement. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature emeritus at Princeton University.

This first critical edition is one of few reprints of a book which was originally published in 1680, two years after The Pilgrim's Progress, when it was described by Bunyan as 'the Life and Death of the Ungodly, and their travel from this world to Hell', in contrast to Christian's journey to heaven. In fact, Badman is not a true sequel to the great allegory; rather, it is a very different book, a dark, coarse, vigorous delineation of provincial vice. From his apprenticeship until he becomes a prosperous shopkeeper, Badman gives free rein to greed, lust, and the exploitation of others, including his virtuous wife. Puritan moral abstraction is almost buried under realistic detail in a work which looks both back to the medieval homily and forward to the novel. It is an indispensable work for the study of seventeenth-century Puritan society and its mythology; as with the same editors' The Holy War, it contains a full introduction and commentary.

Many readers today associate the early modern history play with Shakespeare. While not wishing to ignore the influence of Shakespeare, this collection of essays explores other historical drama between 1500 and 1660, covering a wide range of different formats outside the canon of 1590s history cycles. An introduction provides a survey of current criticism, including both early modern and contemporary definitions of the 'history play'. Individual essays in chronological order explore genres that perform 'history' in different ways, such as shows, moralities or closet drama. In this way this collection establishes alternative paradigms of early modern historical drama.

After theory and the new historicism, what might a self-conscious turn to formal analysis in Renaissance literary studies look like today? The essays address this question from a variety of critical perspectives, embodying a renewed engagement with questions of form.

Eighteenth-century philosophy owes much to the early novel. Using the figure of the romance reader this book tells a new story of eighteenth-century reading. The impressionable mind and mutable identity of the romance reader haunt eighteenth-century definitions of the self, and the seductions of fiction insist on making an appearance in philosophy.