First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Approaching the Renaissance from many perspectives-historicism, genre studies, close reading, anthropology, feminism, new historicism, cultural materialism and postmodernism-these original essays explore the boundaries between genre and gender, languages and literatures, reading and criticism, the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, the early modern and the post-modern, world and theater. They offer a new way of looking at the Renaissance and at literature and history generally-through the lens of cultural pluralism, which reflects the changing nature of Western society. The collection reveals that the study of literature should take into account its cultural context and that it is enriched by an examination of other literatures.

Reading the Renaissance, first published in 1996, is a collection of essays discussing the literature, drama, poetics and culture of the Renaissance period. This book is ideal for students of literature and theatre studies.

First published in 1985, The Subject of Tragedy takes the drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the starting point for an analysis of the differential identities of man and woman. Catherine Belsey charts, in a range of fictional and non-fictional texts, the production in the Renaissance of a meaning for subjectivity that is identifiably modern. The subject of liberal humanism – self-determining, free origin of language, choice and action – is highlighted as the product of a specific period in which man was the subject to which woman was related.

Reading the Renaissance, first published in 1996, is a collection of essays discussing the literature, drama, poetics and culture of the Renaissance period. The Renaissance, which extends from about 1300 to 1700 depending on the country, was originally a rebirth of the arts but has also come to apply to the wider cultural change in the face of modernization. The essays represent a plural Renaissance and explore the boundaries between genre and gender, languages and literatures, reading and criticism, the Renaissance and the medieval, the early modern and the postmodern, world and theatre. There is also a plurality of methods that is fitting for the variety of topics and the richness of the Renaissance. This book is ideal for students of literature and theatre studies.

In this title, first published in 1985, Michael Bristol draws on several theoretical and critical traditions to study the nature and purpose of theatre as a social institution: on Marxism, and its revisions in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin; on the theories of Emile Durkheim and their adaptations in the work of Victor Turner; and on the history of social life and material culture as practiced by the Annales school. This valuable work is an important contribution to literary criticism, theatre studies and social history and has particular importance for scholars interested in the dramatic literature of Elizabethan England.

First published in 1996, this volume asked the question: who – and what – was Christopher Marlowe? Dramatist, poet, atheist and possible spy, he was a man in contrast with his time. The authors here gather to explore Marlowe on the four hundredth anniversary of his death. They include significant interdisciplinary elements and focus on dramaturgy, textual criticism and biography. It is hoped that the diversity of approaches can further debates on both Marlowe and Renaissance culture.

First published in 1989, this title explores the relationship between theater and power in the English Renaissance. Shakespeare’s Henry V, Richard II, and Macbeth are examined alongside a range of cultural materials, including philosophical and historical accounts of sovereignty, royal portraiture and representations of treason and punishment. Renaissance theater was far more than a vehicle for the expression of a political content: it played a constitutive role in forming the distinctive theory of sovereignty and the distinctive political subjectivity of the era. By reading Shakespeare’s plays in conjunction with other, ideologically charged forms of representation, the book continues new-historicist efforts to uncover the complex relations between literary texts and cultural contexts. Providing an interesting and detailed analysis, this reissue will be of value to students of Shakespeare and the English Renaissance, and those concerned with exploring the intersection between cultural analysis, post-structuralism, and psychoanalytic interpretation.

The perception that the early sixteenth century saw a culmination of the Renaissance classical revival - only to degrade into mannerism shortly after Raphael's death in 1520 - has been extremely tenacious; but many scholars agree that this tidy narrative is deeply problematic. Exploring how we can reconceptualize the High Renaissance in a way that reflects how we research and teach today, this volume complicates and deepens our understanding of artistic change. Focusing on Rome, the paradigmatic centre of the High Renaissance narrative, each essay presents a case study of a particular aspect of the culture of the city in the early sixteenth century, including new analyses of Raphael's stanze, Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and the architectural designs of Bramante. The contributors question notions of periodization, reconsider the Renaissance relationship with classical antiquity, and ultimately reconfigure our understanding of 'high Renaissance style'.

The central proposition of this book is that the great anatomists of the Renaissance, from Vesalius to Fabricius and Harvey - the forebears of modern scientific biology and medicine - consciously resurrected not merely the methods but also the research projects of Aristotle and other Ancients. The Moderns' choice of topics and subjects, their aims, and their evaluation of their investigations were all made in a spirit of emulation, not rejection, of their distant predecessors. First published in 1997, Andrew Cunningham’s masterly analysis of the history of the ’scientific renaissance' - a history not of things found, but of projects of enquiry - provoked a reappraisal of the intellectual roots of the Renaissance as well as illuminating debates on the history of the body and its images.