The Records of Early English Drama (REED) series aims to establish the context for the great drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries by examining the historical manuscripts that provide external evidence of drama, secular music, and other communal entertainment and ceremony from the Middle Ages until Puritan legislation closed the London theatres in 1642. REED's sixteenth collection, Kent: Diocese of Canterbury contains the evidence of dramatic, musical, and ceremonial activity in the city of Canterbury and in the towns and parishes of the diocese of Canterbury, taken from the borough records, parish records, civil and ecclesiastical court records, and from personal papers such as wills, diaries, and letters. This collection includes over 4,000 payments to travelling players from the earliest recorded payment in 1272, when the monks of Christ Church, Canterbury, paid for entertainment on the feast day of St Thomas Becket, to the last recorded payment in 1641 in Puritan Canterbury for players not to play. It also features the Canterbury marching watch with pageants, including the pageant of St Thomas Becket; the New Romney passion play; numerous visits of nobility and royalty to Faversham, Canterbury, and Dover, being the main stops along Watling Street between London and the Continent; the activities of waits, drummers, and other civic musicians in the ancient towns and cities of Kent; and extensive evidence from court cases, borough ordinances, and chamberlains' payments of the suppression of dramatic activity during the Puritan years of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As with all the REED volumes, Kent Diocese of Canterbury is transcribed from the original sources, edited, and presented with explanatory notes, translations, and a general introduction. The resulting volume forms the largest collections thus far in the REED series.

Early Modern Kent offers an accessible but scholarly introduction to the country's history during a century of extraordinary change."--BOOK JACKET.

The writings of two influential Elizabethan thinkers testify to the influence of Old English law and literature on Tudor society and self-image. Full of fresh and illuminating insights into a way of looking at the English past in the sixteenth century... a book with the potential to deepen and transform our understanding of Tudor attitudes to ethnic identity and the national past. Philip Schwyzer, University of Exeter. Laurence Nowell (1530-c.1570), author of the first dictionary of Old English, and William Lambarde (1536-1601), Nowell's protégé and eventually the first editor of theOld English Laws, are key figures in Elizabethan historical discourses and in its political and literary society; through their work the period between the Germanic migrations and the Norman Conquest came to be regarded as a foundational time for Elizabethan England, overlapping with and contributing to contemporary debates on the shape of Elizabethan English language. Their studies took different strategies in demonstrating the role of early medieval history in Elizabethan national -- even imperial -- identity, while in Lambarde's legal writings Old English law codes become identical with the "ancient laws" that underpinned contemporary common law. Their efforts contradict the assumption that Anglo-Saxon studies did not effectively participate in Tudor nationalism outside of Protestant polemic; instead, it was a vital part of making history "English". Their work furthers our understanding of both the history of medieval studies and the importance of early Anglo-Saxon studies to Tudor nationalism. Rebecca Brackmann is Assistant Professor of English, Lincoln Memorial University.

This is the third volume of Anthony Emery's magisterial survey, Greater Medieval Houses of England and Wales, 1300–1500, first published in 2006. Across the three volumes Emery has examined afresh and re-assessed over 750 houses, the first comprehensive review of the subject for 150 years. Covered are the full range of leading homes, from royal and episcopal palaces to manor houses, as well as community buildings such as academic colleges, monastic granges and secular colleges of canons. This volume surveys Southern England and is divided into three regions, each of which includes a separate historical and architectural introduction as well as thematic essays prompted by key buildings. The text is complemented throughout by a wide range of plans and diagrams and a wealth of photographs showing the present condition of almost every house discussed. This is an essential source for anyone interested in the history, architecture and culture of medieval England and Wales.

In the seventeenth century antiquarianism was a well-respected profession and antiquarian works were in demand, particularly amongst the gentry, who were especially interested in establishing lineage and the descent of land tenure. Although intended primarily as a source of information about who owned what and where, they often contained fascinating descriptions of the English landscape. Charles Lancaster has examined the town and county surveys of this period and selected the most interesting examples to illustrate the variety and richness of these depictions. Organised by region, he has provided detailed introductions to each excerpt. Including such writers as John Stow, William Dugdale, Elias Ashmole, Daniel Defoe, Gilbert White and Celia Fiennes, this is a book that will appeal to anyone with an interest in both national and local history and to lovers of English scenery.

This book examines one of the most pervasive, but also perplexing, textual phenomena of the early modern world: the manuscript miscellany. Faced with multiple problems of definition, categorization, and (often conflicting) terminology, modern scholars have tended to dismiss the miscellany as disorganized and chaotic. Miscellaneous Order radically challenges that view by uncovering the various forms of organization and order previously hidden in early modern manuscript books. Drawing on original literary and historical research, and examining both the materiality of early modern manuscripts and their contents, this book sheds new light on the transcriptive and archival practices of early modern Britain, as well as on the broader intellectual context of manuscript culture and its scholarly afterlives. Based on extensive archival research, and interdisciplinary in both subject and matter, Miscellaneous Order focuses on the myriad kinds of manuscript compiled and produced in the early modern era. Showing that the miscellany was essential to the organization of knowledge across a range of genres and disciplines, from poetry to science, and from recipe books to accounts, it proposes a new model for understanding the proliferation of manuscript material in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By restoring attention to 'miscellaneous order' in this way, it shows that we have fundamentally misunderstood how early modern men and women read, wrote, and thought. Rather than a textual form characterized by an absence of order, the miscellany, it argues, operated as an epistemically and aesthetically productive system throughout the early modern period.