From the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Shorter Eleventh Edition, showcases exciting new authors, works, and textual clusters that demonstrate the relevance of literature to contemporary students and trace the creative arc that has yielded the ever-changing and ever-fascinating body of material called English literature. This anthology offers the experience of literature as part of the world—not apart from it. It is also now available in ebook format for the complete anthology. The Norton Ebook Reader provides an active reading environment that equips students with tools for placing works within their social and historical contexts.

Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production in Early Modern England considers the roles women played as literary patrons, dedicatees, readers, and writers in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, and the intimate relationship between these literary activities and what has often been called 'politically active' humanism. Focusing on the interrelated communities centered on Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Lady Margaret Hoby; Lucy Harrington Russell, Countess of Bedford; and Lady Mary Wroth, Mediatrix argues that women played integral roles not only in the production of some of the most renowned literary texts in the period, including Philip Sidney's Arcadia, John Donne's poetry, and Mary Wroth's Urania, but also in wider networks of intellectual, religious, and political activism. Each of the communities discussed was concerned with the cause loosely identified as international or militant Protestantism and frequently mediated through the circulation of texts of all kinds. Illuminating women's constitutive involvement in everything from the genres of the texts produced - romances, verse letters, texts of religious controversy - to the places in which those texts were produced and circulated - -the estates of Wilton, Penshurst, Hackness, Twickenham, and Loughton - and the conditions in and hermeneutics by which they were read, Mediatrix offers an account of early modern English literary production with women at the center and political activism as one of its primary, rather than merely topical, concerns.

Women, Politics, and Literary Production in Early Modern England considers the roles women played as literary patrons, dedicatees, readers, and writers in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, and the intimate relationship between these literary activities and what has often been called 'politically active' humanism. Focusing on the interrelated communities centered on Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Lady Margaret Hoby; Lucy Harrington Russell, the Countess of Bedford; and Lady Mary Wroth, Mediatrix argues that women played integral roles not only in the production of some of the most renowned literary texts in the period, including Philip Sidney's Arcadia, John Donne's poetry, and Mary Wroth's Urania, but also in wider networks of intellectual, religious and political activism. Each of the communities discussed was concerned with the cause loosely identified as international or militant Protestantism and frequently mediated through the circulation of texts of all kinds. Illuminating women's constitutive involvement in everything from the genres of the texts produced - romances, verse letters, texts of religious controversy - to the places in which those texts were produced and circulated - -the estates of Wilton, Penshurst, Hackness, Twickenham, and Loughton - and the conditions and hermeneutics by which they were read, Mediatrix offers an account of early modern English literary production with women at the center and political activism as one of its primary, rather than merely topical, concerns.

In post-Reformation England, "monster" could mean both a horrible aberration and a divine embodiment or revelation. In "Marvelous Protestantism, " Julie Crawford examines accounts of monstrous births and the strikingly graphic illustrations accompanying them in popular pamphlets, demonstrating how Protestant reformers used these accounts to guide their public through the spiritual confusion and social turmoil of the time.

Traditionally, accounts of monstrous births and other marvelous occurrences have been analyzed in relationship to the tabloid press or the rise of modern science. Crawford focuses instead on the ways in which broadsheets and pamphlets served a new religion desperately trying to establish clear guidelines for religious and moral behavior during a period of political uncertainty. Perceptively showing how monstrous births implicated women as reproductive forces, Crawford demonstrates how women were responsible for the reproduction of Protestantism itself, whether robust or grotesquely misconceived.

Through its examination of the nature of propaganda and early modern reading practices, and of the central role women played in Protestant reform, "Marvelous Protestantism" establishes a new approach to interpreting post-Reformation English culture.