Explores the poetry of the Renaissance, from Dunbar in the late 15th century to the Songs and Sonnets of John Donne in the early 17th. The book offers more than the wealth of literature discussed: it is a pioneering work in its own right, bringing the insights of contemporary literary and cultural theory to an overview of the period.

This fully-annotated anthology of sixteenth-century English verse features generous selections from the canonical poets, alongside judicious selections from lesser-known authors. Includes complete works or substantial extracts of longer poems wherever possible, including Book III of the ‘Faerie Queene’ and the whole of ‘Astrophil and Stella’. Covers a range of genres, including the love lyric, mythological narrative, sacred poetry and political poetry. Encourages readers to discover unusual and interesting connections and contrasts between poems and poets. Detailed annotations facilitate close reading of the poems.

Babysnatching is one thing but Babyswapping? Inspector Wexford had not previously encountered the phenomenon of one ginger haired baby in its pram being swapped for another of the opposite sex. But novelty was only one aspect of a crime which came eventually to reveal a far more sinister range of characteristics.Darkly imagined and beautifully observed,Ruth Rendells stories reveal her startling insights into the criminal mind.

Interdisciplinary in approach and methodologically sophisticated, this book explores the dynamic reception of Latin erotic elegy in Renaissance love poetry.

This comprehensive anthology contains selections from the work of twenty-five poets of the sixteenth century. Employing the original, rather than normalized, texts, the volume includes complete, non-excerpted poems by John Skelton, Philip Sidney and others. The selections - which include such works as 'The Steele Glas'. Richard S. Sylvester examines the evolution of English poetry through the century, tracing the development of the early Tudor poets through the eloquence of Surrey. English Sixteenth-century Verse provides a basic text for the poetry of the period.

In this anthology an effort has been made to include representative selections from the most significant sixteenth-century French poets. With the exception if a few longer works (mainly those of Ronsard, Du Bartas, and D'Aubigné), poems are given complete. In addition, the original spelling and punctuation have been retained as far as possible, except for the usual editorial modifications (differentiation of u and v, i and j, the addition of accents à, où, replacement of & by et, and so on). The sixteenth century is a period of tremendous poetic activity. It is a period closer in spirit to us in many ways than the intervening centuries, particularly the seventeenth and the eighteenth. Its poetry is still being rediscovered and re-assessed in a way that is just as exciting as the period of foment during which it was written.

Luigi Tansillo is one of the most interesting and representative of the Petrarchist poets active in Naples during the mid-sixteenth century. This study reconsiders his substantial lyric corpus from a variety of perspectives, opening with a survey of the textual tradition and previous critical work on his verse. Four of Tansillo's lyric collections are examined in depth, and read from narrative and thematic points of view. Particular emphasis is placed on the evolution of the collections, by exploring the ways in which very different types of narrative implying different underlying poetics can be constructed using often identical poems. Parallel to this is a consideration of Tansillo's place within the broader literary historical context, and his use of verse as a political and ideological tool in the service of the Spanish viceroy of Naples. These detailed studies of individual poetic sequences are complemented by an analysis of Tansillo's poetic language within the context of Neapolitan reactions to the questione della lingua, and of his contribution to creating a fixed iconology for the representation of jealousy in the Renaissance and Baroque lyric.

Commissioned by Prince Sultan Ibrahim Mirza in 1556, five Iranian court calligraphers devoted nine years to transcribing the poetic text of the great Persian classic, the Haft awrang (Seven Thrones), by the mystical poet Abdul-Rahman Jami. Then a team of gifted artists undertook the illumination and illustration of the manuscript. The masterpiece they created—housed today in the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and known as the Freer Jami—is a sumptuous volume of some three hundred folios of elegant cursive script with richly decorated margins, thousands of multicolored section dividers, nine illuminated headings and nine colophons that begin and end the main divisions of the text, and twenty-nine full-scale paintings. This gorgeous book reproduces to scale the Freer Jami paintings, discusses each in detail, and introduces the manuscript’s patron and the artist’s painting style and meaning. Marianna Shreve Simpson describes the cultural and artistic milieu in which Sultan Ibrahim Mirza’s great manuscript was created and explores the special style and imagery of the illustrations. She then considers the poetic content and mystical significance of the related passages, how the paintings interpret the passages, and the unique and innovative aspects of each painting. In the themes and images of the paintings, Simpson finds, are clues to the message of the manuscript as a whole. This book also includes a timeline of milestones in the prince’s life and in the production of his Haft awrang. Copublished with the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.