The 120 years that separate the first publication of John Stow's famous Survey of London in 1598 from John Strype's enormous new edition of the same work in 1720 witnessed London's transformation into a sprawling augustan metropolis, very different from the compact medieval city so lovingly charted in the pages of Stow. Imagining Early Modern London takes Stow's classic account of the Elizabethan city as a starting point for an examination of how generations of very different Londoners - men and women, antiquaries, merchants, skilled craftsmen, labourers and beggars - experienced and understood the dramatically changing city. A series of interdisciplinary essays explore the ways in which Londoners interpreted and memorialized their past: how individuals located themselves mentally, socially and geographically within the city, and how far the capital's growth was believed to have a moral influence upon its inhabitants.

A collection of major articles examining Stuart politics through the career of Thomas Wentworth.

For Rebecca Bushnell, English gardening books tell a fascinating tale of the human love for plants and our will to make them do as we wish. These books powerfully evoke the desires of gardeners: they show us gardeners who, like poets, imagine not just what is but what should be. In particular, the earliest English garden books, such as Thomas Hill's The Gardeners Labyrinth or Hugh Platt's Floraes Paradise, mix magical practices with mundane recipes even when the authors insist that they rely completely on their own experience in these matters. Like early modern "books of secrets," early gardening manuals often promise the reader power to alter the essential properties of plants: to make the gillyflower double, to change the lily's hue, or to grow a cherry without a stone. Green Desire describes the innovative design of the old manuals, examining how writers and printers marketed them as fiction as well as practical advice for aspiring gardeners. Along with this attention to the delights of reading, it analyzes the strange dignity and pleasure of garden labor and the division of men's and women's roles in creating garden art. The book ends by recounting the heated debate over how much people could do to create marvels in their own gardens. For writers and readers alike, these green desires inspired dreams of power and self-improvement, fantasies of beauty achieved without work, and hopes for order in an unpredictable world--not so different from the dreams of gardeners today.

The ideological underpinnings of early modern theories of contagion are dissected in this volume by an integrated team of literary scholars, cultural historians, historians of medicine and art historians. Even today, the spread of disease inspires moralizing discourse and the ostracism of groups thought responsible for contagion; the fear of illness and the desire to make sense of it are demonstrated in the current preoccupation with HIV, SARS, 'mad cow' disease, West Nile virus and avian flu, to cite but a few contemporary examples. Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe explores the nature of understanding when humanity is faced with threats to its well-being, if not to its very survival.

Interpreting textual mediations of history in early modernity, this volume adds nuance to our understanding of the contributions fiction and fictionalizing make to the shape and texture of versions of and debates about history during that period. Geographically, the scope of the essays extends beyond Europe and England to include Asia and Africa. Contributors take a number of different approaches to understand the relationship between history, fiction, and broader themes in early modern culture. They analyze the ways fiction writers use historical sources, fictional texts translate ideas about the past into a vernacular accessible to broad audiences, fictional depictions and interpretations shape historical action, and the ways in which nonfictional texts and accounts were given fictional histories of their own, intentionally or not, through transmission and interpretation. By combining the already contested idea of fiction with performance, action, and ideas/ideology, this collection provides a more thorough consideration of fictional histories in the early modern period. It also covers more than two centuries of primary material, providing a longer perspective on the changing and complex role of history in forming early modern national, gendered, and cultural identities.

During the early modern period, western Europe was transformed by the proliferation of new worlds—geographic worlds found in the voyages of discovery and conceptual and celestial worlds opened by natural philosophy, or science. The response to incredible overseas encounters and to the profound technological, religious, economic, and intellectual changes occurring in Europe was one of nearly overwhelming wonder, expressed in a rich variety of texts. In the need to manage this wonder, to harness this imaginative overabundance, Mary Baine Campbell finds both the sensational beauty of early scientific works and the beginnings of the divergence of the sciences—particularly geography, astronomy, and anthropology—from the writing of fiction. Campbell's learned and brilliantly perceptive new book analyzes a cross section of texts in which worlds were made and unmade; these texts include cosmographies, colonial reports, works of natural philosophy and natural history, fantastic voyages, exotic fictions, and confessions. Among the authors she discusses are André Thevet, Thomas Hariot, Francis Bacon, Galileo, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn. Campbell's emphasis is on developments in England and France, but she considers works in languages other than English or French which were well known in the polyglot book culture of the time. With over thirty well-chosen illustrations, Wonder and Science enhances our understanding of the culture of early modern Europe, the history of science, and the development of literary forms, including the novel and ethnography.

How the story of Noah's Flood was central to the development of a global environmental consciousness in early modern Europe. Winner, Morris D. Forkosch Prize, Journal of the History of Ideas Many centuries before the emergence of the scientific consensus on climate change, people began to imagine the existence of a global environment: a natural system capable of changing humans and of being changed by them. In After the Flood, Lydia Barnett traces the history of this idea back to the early modern period, when the Scientific Revolution, the Reformations, the Little Ice Age, and the overseas expansion of European empire, religion, and commerce gave rise to new ideas about nature, humanity, and their intersecting histories. Recovering a forgotten episode in the history of environmental thought, Barnett brings to light the crucial role of religious faith and conflict in the emergence of a global environmental consciousness. Following Noah's Flood as a popular topic of debate through long-distance networks of knowledge from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, Barnett reveals how early modern earth and environmental sciences were shaped by gender, evangelism, empire, race, and nation.

Early seventeenth-century London playwrights used actual locations in their comedies while simultaneously exploring London as an imagined, ephemeral, urban space. Producing Early Modern London examines this tension between representing place and producing urban space. In analyzing the theater's use of city spaces and places, Kelly J. Stage shows how the satirical comedies of the early seventeenth century came to embody the city as the city embodied the plays. Stage focuses on city plays by George Chapman, Thomas Dekker, William Haughton, Ben Jonson, John Marston, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster. While the conventional labels of "city comedy" or "citizen comedy" have often been applied to these plays, she argues that London comedies defy these genre categorizations because the ruptures, expansions, conflicts, and imperfections of the expanding city became a part of their form. Rather than defining the "city comedy," comedy in this period proved to be the genre of London. As the expansion of London's social space exceeded the strict confines of the "square mile," the city burgeoned into a new metropolis. The satiric comedies of this period became, in effect, playgrounds for urban experimentation. Early seventeenth-century playwrights seized the opportunity to explore the myriad ways in which London worked, taking the expected--a romance plot, a typical father-son conflict, a cross-dressing intrigue--and turning it into a multifaceted, complex story of interaction and proximity.

How were cultural, political, and social identities formed in the early modern period? How were they maintained? What happened when they were contested? What meanings did “community” have? This path-breaking book looks at how individuals were bound into communities by religious, professional, and social networks; the importance of place--ranging from the Parish to communities of crime; and the value of rhetoric in generating community--from the King’s English to the use of “public” as a rhetorical community. The essays offer an original, comparative, and thematic approach to the many ways in which people utilized communication, space, and symbols to constitute communities in early modern England.

In early modern Europe, international law emerged as a means of governing relations between rapidly consolidating sovereign states, purporting to establish a normative order for the perilous international world. However, it was intrinsically fragile and uncertain, for sovereign states had no acknowledged common authority that would create, change, apply, and enforce legal norms. In Imagining World Order, Chenxi Tang shows that international world order was as much a literary as a legal matter. To begin with, the poetic imagination contributed to the making of international law. As the discourse of international law coalesced, literary works from romances and tragedies to novels responded to its unfulfilled ambitions and inexorable failures, occasionally affirming it, often contesting it, always uncovering its problems and rehearsing imaginary solutions. Tang highlights the various modes in which literary texts—some highly canonical (Camões, Shakespeare, Corneille, Lohenstein, and Defoe, among many others), some largely forgotten yet worth rediscovering—engaged with legal thinking in the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In tracing such engagements, he offers a dual history of international law and European literature. As legal history, the book approaches the development of international law in this period—its so-called classical age—in terms of literary imagination. As literary history, Tang recounts how literature confronted the question of international world order and how, in the process, a set of literary forms common to major European languages (epic, tragedy, romance, novel) evolved.