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.

Essays on a wide range of topics including the role of early modern chess in upholding Aristotelian virtue; readings of Sidney, Wroth, Spenser, and Shakespeare; and several topics involving the New World.

The age of exploration exposed the limits of available universal histories. Everyday interactions with cultures and societies across the globe brought to light a multiplicity of pasts which proved difficult to reconcile with an emerging sense of unity in the world. Among the first to address the questions posed by this challenge were a handful of Renaissance historians. On what basis could they narrate the history of hitherto unknown peoples? Why did the Bible and classical works say nothing about so many visible traces of ancient cultures? And how far was it possible to write histories of the world at a time of growing religious division in Europe and imperial rivalry around the world? A study of the cross-fertilization of historical writing in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, The Globe on Paper reconstructs a set of imaginative accounts worked out from Mexico to the Moluccas and Peru, and from the shops of Venetian printers to the rival courts of Spain and England. The pages of this book teem with humanists, librarians, missionaries, imperial officials, as well as forgers and indigenous chroniclers. Drawing on information gathered—or said to have been gathered—from eyewitness reports, interviews with local inhabitants, ancient codices, and material evidence, their global narratives testify to an unprecedented broadening of horizons which briefly flourished before succumbing to the forces of imperial and religious reaction.