Annual volume of the best essays submitted to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference, this year with an emphasis on English drama and the cultural anxieties it expresses.

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.

Though Bartolomeo Scappi's Opera (1570), the first illustrated cookbook, is well known to historians of food, up to now there has been no study of its illustrations, unique in printed books through the early seventeenth century. In Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy, Krohn both treats the illustrations in Scappi's cookbook as visual evidence for a lost material reality; and through the illustrations, including several newly-discovered hand-colored examples, connects Scappi's Opera with other types of late Renaissance illustrated books. What emerges from both of these approaches is a new way of thinking about the place of cookbooks in the history of knowledge. Krohn argues that with the increasing professionalization of many skills and trades, Scappi was at the vanguard of a new way of looking not just at the kitchen-as workshop or laboratory-but at the ways in which artisanal knowledge was visualized and disseminated by a range of craftsmen, from engineers to architects. The recipes in Scappi's Opera belong on the one hand to a genre of cookery books, household manuals, and courtesy books that was well established by the middle of the sixteenth century, but the illustrations suggest connections to an entirely different and emergent world of knowledge. It is through study of the illustrations that these connections are discerned, explained, and interpreted. As one of the most important cookbooks for early modern Europe, the time is ripe for a focused study of Scappi's Opera in the various contexts in which Krohn frames it: book history, antiquarianism, and visual studies.

This collection brings together extended versions of papers delivered at the 2015 meeting of the Hungarian Society for the Study of English (HUSSE). The timeframe the papers deal with, starting with 15th century devotional texts, including Tudor interludes, Shakespearean plays and their adaptations, and ending in Milton, embraces three centuries of the history of English literature. As such, the contributions offer not only a variety of methodological approaches and disciplinary perspectives, but also highlight converging problems within this broad field, crystallized around three main topics of scholarship and constituting the three thematic parts of the volume, each containing three to four chapters. The first part, entitled “Medieval and Early Modern Experiments with Genre”, offers a set of readings that interpret texts in the light of their generic and thematic innovativeness. Attesting to the multiple ways in which Shakespeare is made our contemporary, the second part, “Shakespearean Texts and Adaptations—Our Contemporaries”, is comprised of essays on contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare and Renaissance theatre, taking the term “adaptation” in a broad sense. The contributions in the third part of the volume, “Perspectives on Milton”, all focus on John Milton, highlighting debates or underrepresented discourses in Milton studies. What connects the papers of the volume as a whole is the reinterpretation of traditional critical assumptions through innovative methods, including viewpoints integrated from other disciplines and discourses, such as theatre studies, digital humanities and social sciences, addressing the relevance of both traditional and innovative topics within English studies in a contemporary academic context.

Written by an eminent authority on the Renaissance, these classic essays deal not only with Paul Kristeller's specialty, Renaissance humanism and philosophy, but also with Renaissance theories of art. The focus of the collection is on topics such as humanist learning, humanist moral thought, the diffusion of humanism, Platonism, music and learning during the early Renaissance, and the modern system of arts in relation to the Renaissance. For this volume the author has written a new preface, a new essay, and an afterword.