In early modern culture, eating and reading were entangled acts. Our dead metaphors (swallowed stories, overcooked narratives, digested information) are all that now remains of a rich interplay between text and food, in which every element of dining, from preparation to purgation, had its equivalent in the literary sphere. Following the advice of the poet George Herbert, this essay collection "looks to the mouth", unfolding the charged relationship between ingestion and expression in a wide variety of texts and contexts. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, Text, Food and the Early Modern Reader: Eating Words fills a significant gap in our understanding of early modern cultural history. Situated at the lively intersection between literary, historical and bibliographical studies, it opens new lines of dialogue between the study of material textuality and the history of the body.

In early modern culture, eating and reading were entangled acts. Our dead metaphors (swallowed stories, overcooked narratives, digested information) are all that now remains of a rich interplay between text and food, in which every element of dining, from preparation to purgation, had its equivalent in the literary sphere. Following the advice of the poet George Herbert, this essay collection "looks to the mouth", unfolding the charged relationship between ingestion and expression in a wide variety of texts and contexts. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, Text, Food and the Early Modern Reader: Eating Words fills a significant gap in our understanding of early modern cultural history. Situated at the lively intersection between literary, historical and bibliographical studies, it opens new lines of dialogue between the study of material textuality and the history of the body.

This collection brings together established scholars and new names in the field of Tudor drama studies. Through a range of traditional and theoretical approaches, the essays address the neglected early and mid-Tudor period before the rise of the 'mature' drama of Marlowe and Shakespeare in the 1590s. New Ideas for research topics and pedagogical methods are discussed in the essays, which each provide original arguments about specific texts and/or performances while also providing an advanced introduction to a concentrated area of Tudor drama studies. While the continuation of mystery play performances and morality plays through the first three-quarters of the sixteenth century have been discussed with some consistency in the academy, other types of drama (e.g. folk or school plays) have received short shrift, and critical theory has been slow in coming to this scholarship. This collection begins to fill in these deficiencies and suggest fruitful directions for a twenty-first century revival in pre-Shakespearean Tudor drama studies.

Richard Stonley has all but vanished from history, but to his contemporaries he would have been an enviable figure. A clerk of the Exchequer for more than four decades under Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I, he rose from obscure origins to a life of opulence; his job, a secure bureaucratic post with a guaranteed income, was the kind of which many men dreamed. Vast sums of money passed through his hands, some of which he used to engage in moneylending and land speculation. He also bought books, lots of them, amassing one of the largest libraries in early modern London. In 1597, all of this was brought to a halt when Stonley, aged around seventy-seven, was incarcerated in the Fleet Prison, convicted of embezzling the spectacular sum of GBP13,000 from the Exchequer. His property was sold off, and an inventory was made of his house on Aldersgate Street. This provides our most detailed guide to his lost library. By chance, we also have three handwritten volumes of accounts, in which he earlier itemized his spending on food, clothing, travel, and books. It is here that we learn that on June 12, 1593, he bought "the Venus & Adhonay per Shakspere"-the earliest known record of a purchase of Shakespeare's first publication. In Shakespeare's First Reader, Jason Scott-Warren sets Stonley's journals and inventories of goods alongside a wealth of archival evidence to put his life and library back together again. He shows how Stonley's books were integral to the material worlds he inhabited and the social networks he formed with communities of merchants, printers, recusants, and spies. Through a combination of book history and biography, Shakespeare's First Reader provides a compelling "bio-bibliography"-the story of how one early modern gentleman lived in and through his library.

This book offers an innovative reassessment of one of the most colourful denizens of the English Renaissance court, Sir John Harington (1560-1612). Based upon a wealth of new evidence, it shows how Harington used his writings to play the patronage system, reconstructing his complex and often devious designs.