A Stanford University Press classic.

How do the formal properties of early modern texts, together with the materials that envelop and shape them, relate to the cultural, political, and social world of their production? Formal matters: Reading the materials of English Renaissance literature answers this question by linking formalist analysis with the insights of book history. It thus represents the new English Renaissance literary historiography tying literary composition to the materials and material practices of writing. The book combines studies of familiar and lesser known texts, from the poems and plays of Shakespeare to jests and printed commonplace books. Its ten studies make important, original contributions to research on the genres of early modern literature, focusing on the involvement of literary forms in the scribal and print cultures of compilation, continuation, translation, and correspondence, as well as in matters of political republicanism and popular piety, among others. Taken together, the collection’s essays exemplify how an attention to form and matter can historicise writing without abandoning a literary focus.

This lively and stimulating book guides students through the historical contexts, key figures, texts, themes and issues in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English literature. The English Renaissance, 1500-1620 sets out the historical and cultural contexts of Renaissance England, highlighting the background voices and events which influenced literary production, including the Reformation, the British problem, perceptions of other cultures and the voyages to the Americas. A series of short biographical essays on the key writers of the period explain their significance, and explore a variety of perspectives with which to approach them. In-depth analyses of a number of well-studied texts are also provided, indicating why each text is important and suggesting ways in which each might usefully be read. Texts featured include Astrophil and Stella, Othello, Utopia, Dr Faustus, The Tragedy of Miriam, The Unfortunate Traveller and the Faerie Queene. The volume charts the intricacies of English Renaissance literature, taking in a variety of themes including women, gender and the question of homosexuality; the stage; printing and censorship; humanism and education and rhetoric. Attention is also drawn to current debates in Renaissance criticism such as New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, thus the book provides students with an unparalleled foundation for further study. Fully cross-referenced, with a useful chronology, glossary and suggestions for further reading, this much-needed guide conveys the excitement of reading Renaissance literature.

Dreaming the English Renaissance examines ideas about dreams, actual dreams people had and recorded, and the many ways dreams were used in the culture and politics of the Tutor/Stuart age in order to provide a window into the mental life and the most profound beliefs of people of the time.

The articles selected for this anthology of travel and colonial writing in the English Renaissance period represent the world-picture of 16th and 17th century English readers. The extracts are grouped geographically and prefaced by headnotes.

This is a one volume, up-to-date collection of more than fifty wide-ranging essays which will inspire and guide students of the Renaissance and provide course leaders with a substantial and helpful frame of reference. Provides new perspectives on established texts. Orientates the new student, while providing advanced students with current and new directions. Pioneered by leading scholars. Occupies a unique niche in Renaissance studies. Illustrated with 12 single-page black and white prints.

Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature argues that, ironically, custom was a supremely generative literary force for a range of Renaissance writers. Custom took on so much power because of its virtual synonymity with English common law, the increasingly dominant legal system that was also foundational to England's constitutionalist politics. The strange temporality assigned to legal custom, that is, its purported existence since 'time immemorial', furnished it with a unique and paradoxical capacity—to make new and foreign forms familiar. This volume shows that during a time when novelty was suspect, even insurrectionary, appeals to the widespread understanding of custom as a legal concept justified a startling array of fictive experiments. This is the first book to reveal fully the relationship between Renaissance literature and legal custom. It shows how writers were able to reimagine moments of historical and cultural rupture as continuity by appealing to the powerful belief that English legal custom persisted in the face of conquests by foreign powers. Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature thus challenges scholarly narratives in which Renaissance art breaks with a past it looks back upon longingly and instead argues that the period viewed its literature as imbued with the aura of the past. In this way, through experiments in rhetoric and form, literature unfolds the processes whereby custom gains its formidable and flexible political power. Custom, a key concept of legal and constitutionalist thought, shaped sixteenth-century literature, while this literature, in turn, transformed custom into an evocative mythopoetic.