Renaissance Papers is a collection of the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. Organized and sponsored in the early 1950s by Duke University and the universities of South Carolina and North Carolina, the annual meeting is now hosted by various colleges and universities across the southeastern United States. The conference accepts papers on all subjects relating to the Renaissance -- music, art, history, literature, etc. -- from scholars all over North America and Europe. This is the forty-seventh volume of Renaissance Papers. It includes articles on 15th-c. Florentine wedding chests, called cassoni, on Isabella Whitney, on Spenser's 'April' woodcut, on Cervantes' El Trato del Argel, on Thomas Nashe's Christ's Tears over Jerusalem, on the crone as type in English Renaissance drama, on female speech and disempowerment in Marlowe's Tamberlane I, on Shakespeare's Richard II and Marlowe's Edward II, on Chaucer's contribution to The Tempest, and on echoes of Ovid in Donne's elegies. T. H. HOWARD-HILL and PHILIP ROLLINSON are professors of English at the University of South Carolina.

Renaissance Papers is a collection of the best scholarly essays on all aspects of the Renaissance submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference, organized originally in the early 1950s by scholars at Duke University and the universities of North and South Carolina. This year's annual volume, the forty-sixth to be published by the Conference and the fourth by Camden House, is the most substantial ever, containing twelve articles. Five articles on Shakespeare range from alchemy and hermaphroditism in Sonnet 20 to Leontes and skepticism in The Winter's Tale. There are two pieces on Milton, one involving his feminine representation of himself as author, the other attempting a breakthrough in interpretation of Samson Agonistes. There are also literary studies of Mucedorus, the most popular play in the English Renaissance, and of Spenser's two female protagonists, Britomart and Amoret. There are also an examination of the power struggles in an Italian convent, a new assessment of Stephen Gardiner's role in the Counter-Reformation in England, and a study of the early characteristics of Cromwell in the press of the English Civil War.