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.

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.

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.