Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The theme of this year's volume is "sacred places, secular spaces." It begins with a "who is it" mystery, examining two portraits by Raphael that embody the sacred and the profane, respectively. The next essay engages both the sacred and pictorial innovationsin Holbein's predella The Dead Christ; while the following one views the sacred through the critical lens of race, arguing that Northern European churchmen normalized views on race by strategically placing racialized artifacts in their churches. The scene then shifts to 16th century Venice, where the Greek community contended with local authorities over the right to establish a sacred site for interring their dead. The next two essays swing the pendulum toward the secular: an essay on ecocriticism suggests that the early modern period expelled the sacred from nature and presents a Rabelaisian antidote, while an essay on Spenser's The Faerie Queene presents it as a blueprint for colonization. The volume concludes with Contributors: Julie Fox-Horton, Lorenz A. Hindrichsen, Heather Hirschfeld, Elizabeth Lisot-Nelson, Jesse Russell, Victor Velázquez, John N. Wall, Jennifer Wu. The journal is edited by Jim Pearce of North Carolina Central University and Ward Risvold of Georgia College and State University.

Essays on a wide range of topics including the role of early modern chess in upholding Aristotelian virtue; readings of Sidney, Wroth, Spenser, and Shakespeare; and several topics involving the New World. Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The present volume opens with an essay on early modern chess, arguing that it covertly upheld an Aristotelian concept of virtue against the destabilizing ethical views of writers such as Machiavelli. This provocative opening is followed by iconoclastic discussions of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, Wroth's Urania, and Spenser's Fairie Queen. The next essay investigates the mystery surrounding editorship of the 1571 printing of The Mirror for Magistrates. The essays then pivot into the exotic world of Hermetic "statue magic" in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale and the even more exotic worlds of alchemy, Aztec war gods, and conversion in sixteenth-century Mexico. Two further essays remain in the New World, the first examining the representational connections between the twelve Caesars and the twelve Inca kings, the second taking stock of Thomas Harriot's contribution to the understanding of Amerindian languages. The penultimate essay looks at Holbein's depiction of Henry VIII's ailing body, and the volume concludes with a complex analysis of guilt and shame in Moliere's L'Ecole des Femmes. Contributors: Jean Marie Christensen, William Coulter, Christopher Crosbie, Shepherd Aaron Ellis, Scott Lucas, Fernando Martinez-Periset, Timothy Pyles, Rachel Roberts, Jesse Russell, Janet Stephens, Weiao Xing. The journal is edited by Jim Pearce of North Carolina Central University and Ward Risvold of Georgia College and State University.

Sixty-sixth annual volume, taking in a range of topics relating to the literature of the period, from the power of naming to Shakespeare and Spenser, Herbert, Margaret Tyler and Margaret Cavendish, and Ben Jonson. Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The 2019 volume, the sixty-sixth annual, features essays from the conference held at North Carolina StateUniversity, as well as essays submitted directly to the journal. The volume opens with an essay on the power of naming in creating early modern subjectivities, followed by a pair of provocative discussions of Shakespeare's plays:the first addresses temporal gaps in A Winter's Tale; the second is a reading of misogyny in The Taming of the Shrew in which Petruchio is no longer seen as "the true tamer." The two essays at the epicenter of thisyear's volume focus on religious topics, with a consideration of the mystical, specifically the notion of ascesis, in the work of Shakespeare and Spenser, followed by a more sublunary presentation of religious themes in George Herbert's estate poems. The next essay proposes a novel source for Margaret Tyler's reference to "the Jews" in her "Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood" and is followed by a reconsideration of the variety of epitaphic subgenres available in the seventeenth century. The penultimate essay addresses Margaret Cavendish, Ben Jonson, and humanist dramaturgy, and the essay that concludes the journal examines Jonson's attempts to construct a hierarchy of literaryvalue within the complex constraints of the early modern marketplace.

Sixty-fifth annual volume, focusing notably on Shakespearean drama and the poetry of early modern England but with essays on a variety of other topics relevant to the period. Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The 2018 volume features essays presented at the conference at Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina, as well as essays submitted directly to the journal. The volume opens with four essays on Shakespearean drama, offering readings ranging from the heteroglossia in Henry VIII to the limits of language in King Lear, social networks in Anthony and Cleopatra, and epiphanic excursions in the Shakespearean corpus. The next essays look at iconology, agency, and alterity on the early modern stage and colonial Peruvian art. The journal then returns us to the poetry of early modern England. The first of this group explores the perils of poor reading in The Countess of Montgomery's Uriana and is followed by essays investigating the aesthetic connection between Spenser and Catullus and the sacred circularities in John Donne's "Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward." The volume concludes with an extended consideration of meritocracy and misogyny in the works of Ben Jonson. Contributors: Nathan Dixon, Lisandra Estevez, Melissa J. Rack, Robert Lanier Reid, Rachel M. De Smith Roberts, Deneen Senasi, Jonathon Shelley, Kendall Spillman, John Wall, and Don E. Wayne. The journal is edited by Jim Pearce of North Carolina Central University and Ward Risvold of the University of California, San Diego.

Renaissance Papers collects the best essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. In the 2007 volume, two essays focus on Shakespeare's Roman plays: one on Lavinia's death and Roman suicide in Titus Andronicus, the other on the rhetorical construction of masculinity in Julius Caesar. Five essays address the literary implications of seventeenth-century religious belief and practice, considering the influence of the timing and delivery of sermons on John Donne, the impact of godly reforms on Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, the effect of Scottish on English Presbyterianism during the 1640s, the critique of reformist utopianism in Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, and the implications of Paradise Lost's lack of a frontispiece. Two essays on sixteenth-century poetry look at the literary voices of commoners and of kings: one focuses on the portraits of women and commoners in A Mirror for Magistrates, while the other examines the political implications of King James VI/I's metrical translations of David's Psalms.BR Contributors: Reid Barbour, Nora L. Corrigan, William A. Coulter, Julie Fann, Robert Kilgore, Sonya Freeman Loftis, Christopher Hair, Jim Pearce, and John N. Wall M. Thomas Hester is Professor of English at North Carolina State University, and Christopher Cobb is Assistant Professor of English at Saint Mary's College.

Collection of the best scholarly essays from the 2020 Southeastern Renaissance Conference plus essays submitted directly to the journal. Topics run from the epic to influence studies to the perennial problem of love and beyond. Renaissance Papers 2020 features essays from the conference held virtually at Mercer University, as well as essays submitted directly to the journal. The volume opens with an essay that discusses the "ultimate story," the epic, and argues, pointing to the Henriad and The Faerie Queen, that some of the most ambitious remain unfinished; an essay on "just war" and Henry V follows, suggesting why such epic inconclusion may not be such a bad thing. A trio of influence studies investigate post-Marian virginity, Miltonic environmentalism, and cross-dressing knights. Three essays then interrogate the perennial problem of love: in popular ballads, in Hero and Leander, and in The Rape of Lucrece. An essay argues counterintuitively for Amelia Lanyer and Margaret Cavendish as exemplars of the Cavalier Ideal of the Bonum Vitae; it is followed by an equally provocative reconsideration of the role of Claudio D'Arezzo's rhetorical works for Sicilian national identity. The last essay analyzes the formal signatures of three sixteenth-century queens and how they sought to represent themselves on the public stage.

The near future is a world in which scientists and their AI got it wrong. Rising temperatures have caused fires that burned landmasses, and the ash from these fires block out the sun. The resulting cold is extreme, like a nuclear winter, and was a mass extinction event for human beings the world over. Electricity grids, communications and services all failed. Societies collapsed. Humanity is reduced to small groups of survivors, scraping by however they can. Resources are scarce, and bands of survivors resort to violence to obtain enough food and fuel to survive. A man and his family group have survived the cruel winter by hiding in a house in Surrey, but when a roaming gang starts to ravage the area, they are forced to run. As they flee to safety, the cohesion and tolerance that had kept them going for so long starts to fracture...