Bøger i Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture serien

Before Orientalism examines early Anglo-Indian cultural relations through trade (with the establishment of the East India Company), tourism and diplomacy, and illuminates important differences between the reports of travellers and the representations of the London press and stage.

Laura Levine examines the ways in which Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson addressed a generation's anxieties about gender and the stage and identifies the way the same 'magical thinking' informed documents we much more readily associate with extreme forms of cultural paranoia.

Through examining some of the everyday items that helped establish a person's masculinity or femininity, such as codpieces, handkerchiefs, beards, and hair, Materializing Gender offers a new analysis of gender identity in early modern English literature and culture. The book includes close readings of literary and theatrical texts.

The struggle by one man to discover the secrets in another's heart is central to early modern discourse. Elizabeth Hanson examines the records of state torture, plays by Shakespeare and Jonson, 'cony-catching' pamphlets and Francis Bacon's philosophical writing to demonstrate a reconceptualizing of the 'subject' in both the political and philosophical sense of the term.

A full-length study of the use of dialogue form in Italy, from the early sixteenth century to the age of Galileo, which draws on a wide range of literary, philosophical and scientific sources to examine the genre's unrivalled popularity as a vehicle for polemic.

In this 2003 book, West explores what 'theatre' meant to medieval and Renaissance writers and places Renaissance drama within one of its most powerful intellectual contexts, the encyclopedic texts being written and produced at the time. West analyses these connections and provides a fascinating picture of the cultural life.

In early modern England, boys and girls learned to be masculine or feminine as they learned to read and write. This 1999 book explores how gender differences, instilled through specific methods of instruction in literacy, were scrutinised in the English public theatre.

This book studies the lively interplay between popular romances and colonial narratives during a crucial period of English and colonial history. Joan Pong Linton shows how the different ideals of masculinity proposed by these texts reveals both the 'romance of empire' and the impact of the New World on English identity.

This book examines the overlap between early modern English attitudes to disease and society and explores the cultural meaning of the image of the body. One can detect the origins of not only modern xenophobic attitudes to foreigners as carriers of disease, but also 'germ' theory in general.

This interesting study examines plays, historical narratives and biographical accounts, to discover how people coped with the exigencies of credit, debt, mortgaging and capital ventures in early modern England. Plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries are paired with writings about the finances of royalty, aristocrats, privateers, theatrical entrepreneurs and debtors.

Traces the cultural legacy of the Norman Conquest in England from 1350 to 1600; how English literature emerged out of the presence of French language and culture in medieval and early modern England. Includes chapters on Chaucer, the Corpus Christi Plays, William Caxton, early Tudor poetry, and Shakespeare.

Claire McEachern's 1996 study examines the formation of English national identity during the early modern period. She shows how the representation of faith, fatherland and crown in Tudor Texts continually personified English political institutions. McEachern examines the way in which the English nation was inscribed as an imaginary force in the work of Spenser, Shakespeare and Drayton.

Christopher Warley argues that the formal tensions of the Renaissance sonnet sequence allowed poets to describe and invent new kinds of social distinction. Warley examines the social assumptions embedded in sonnet sequences, and offers a valuable contribution to the study of the social and cultural resonances of lyric forms.

Rich with a detailed account of household practices, Staging Domesticity reads plays on the London stage in light of their representations of domestic life in the early modern period and analyses a range of the repertoire, including little-known plays, as well as key works by Shakespeare and others.

Brings together key works in early modern science and literature (from the anatomy of William Harvey and the experimentalism of William Gilbert to the fictions of Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Margaret Cavendish) to explore how two cultures and disciplines, science and literature, developed through a shared aesthetic of knowledge.

The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England explores the growing cultural signification of sadness in Renaissance England, and considers what the wide-ranging writings of self-described melancholics tell us about the era in which they lived.

Douglas Bruster's provocative study of English Renaissance drama explores its links with Elizabethan and Jacobean economy and society, looking at the status of playwrights such as Shakespeare and the establishment of commercial theatres.

The experience of powerful emotion is central to dramatic presentation and audience response. T. G. Bishop examines ways in which wonder has been used by playwrights as an integral part of theatre, both in classical and medieval drama and in the plays of Shakespeare. His study offers an alternative approach to understanding plays.

This 1999 book examines Shakespeare's engagement with the forms of deprivation which threatened domestic security in early modern England. Burglary, the loss of home, and the early deaths of parents emerge as central to Shakespeare's best-known plays and poems, related here to contemporary social problems (notably crime), and early modern cultural texts.

The literary biography, or 'life of the poet', is vital to an understanding of the historical emergence of the author. Kevin Pask offers the first full-scale history of the cultural construction of literary authority in early modern England, and studies the early life-narratives of Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, Donne and Milton.

Slander constitutes a central social, legal and literary concern of early modern England. M. Lindsay Kaplan reveals it to be an effective, if unstable, means of repudiating those perceived to be foes, and shows how it was deployed by rulers and poets including Spenser, Jonson and Shakespeare.

Timothy J. Reiss argues that the massive changes in thought in early modern Europe occurred, not because of a move from orality to print culture, but rather because the means and methods of discovery came to depend on the mathematical disciplines, including music, instead of the language arts.

Spenser's Secret Career is an interesting study of the interplay of secrets and secrecy in Spenser's poetic texts and his careerist negotiations, as well as in conceptions of gender, power and subjecthood in Renaissance culture.

In this engaging book, John Gillies explores Shakespeare's geographic imagination, and discovers an intimate relationship between Renaissance geography and theatre arising from a shared dependence on the opposing impulses of taboo-laden closure and hubristic expansiveness.

This 2001 book explores the dynamics of imitation among early modern European powers in literary and historiographical texts from sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spain, Italy, England and the New World. The author considers problems of reading and literary transmission; imperial ideology and colonial identities; counterfeits and forgery; and piracy.

The early modern period saw an evolving understanding of social identity in England. This book offers four illuminating case studies, centred on the work of women writers in the act of self-definition, illustrating the evolving relationships between public and private selves and the increasing role of gender in determining male and female identities.

This valuable study illuminates the idea of nobility as display, as public performance, in Renaissance and seventeenth-century literature and society. Through detailed readings of major authors, David Posner examines the tensions between literary or imaginative representations of 'nobility', and the increasingly problematic historical position of the noble classes themselves.

Michael Schoenfeldt's fascinating study explores the close relationship between selves and bodies, psychological inwardness and corporeal processes, as they are represented in English Renaissance literature. The notion of bodily humors in Galenic medicine provides poets with a compelling vocabulary for describing the ways in which selves inhabit and experience bodies.

Petrarch imagined that the hopeless but pure love of a woman could lead a man to heaven. In sixteenth-century England Edmund Spenser wrote poetry in the Petrarchan tradition while flirting with a very different kind of feminine image, creating an alternative form of eroticism to which later writers responded.

Writing before the institution of copyright, Renaissance authors were not recognized as owning their works, yet the written word could be marketed by printers or acting companies and authors held responsible for their writings. This 2002 book probes the literary and institutional history, the politics and the psychology of possessive authorship.