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.

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 is a collection of the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The nine articles in this volume reflect a wide range of approaches to Renaissance literary performance and theory. The first four essays seek reasons for the success of various Renaissance plays: Christopher Cobb examines how Thomas Heywood casts heroic action in a positive light in his romantic dramas, whereas Lucas Erne urges that Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy owes its success to its Christian portrait of Heironimo's unsuccessful attempt to recognize a benevolent deity. Robert Reeder looks at Renaissance educational manuals in order to clarify views on precocity in Richard III, Bartholomew Fair, and Twelfth Night; and Thomas L. Martin and Duke Pesta investigate and refute postmodern claims about a "transvestite stage." Scott Lucas shows how several sonnets of Fulke Greville's Caelica disorient the reader, underscoring the poet's doubts about human reason and perception; and Pamela Macfie illustrates how Marlowe's ghostly allusions to Ovid's Heroides in Hero and Leander darken the portrayal of the tragic lovers' frustration. The final three essays concern the 17th-century literary giants Donne and Milton: Jay Stubblefield shows Donne's 1619 sermon to the Virginia Company to be a uniquely Thomistic commentary on the conflicting motives behind England's exploits in the New World; and John Wall and John T. Shawcross explore the effects of John Milton's poems on Renaissance and modern readers. M. Thomas Hester is professor of English at North Carolina State University.

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.