A detailed examination of the poet John Skelton's satirical assault upon Cardinal Wolsey.

Introduces Skelton and his work to readers unfamiliar with the poet, gathers together the vibrant strands of existing research, and opens up new avenues for future studies.

Emotion in the Tudor Court is a transdisciplinary work that uses Renaissance and modern scientific models of emotion to analyze the literary cultures of Tudor-era English court society, providing a robust new analysis of the emotional dynamics of sixteenth-century England.

This handbook of English Renaissance literature serves as a reference for both students and scholars, introducing recent debates and developments in early modern studies. Using new theoretical perspectives and methodological tools, the volume offers exemplary close readings of canonical and less well-known texts from all significant genres between c. 1480 and 1660. Its systematic chapters address questions about editing Renaissance texts, the role of translation, theatre and drama, life-writing, science, travel and migration, and women as writers, readers and patrons. The book will be of particular interest to those wishing to expand their knowledge of the early modern period beyond Shakespeare.

What is modernity? Where are modernitys points of origin? Where are its boundaries? And what lies beyond those boundaries? Allegory and Enchantment explores these broad questions by considering the work of English writers at the threshold of modernity, and by considering,in particular, the cultural forms these writers want to leave behind. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, many English writers fashion themselves as engaged in breaking away from an array of old idols: magic, superstition, tradition, the sacramental, the medieval. Many of these writers persistently use metaphors of disenchantment, of awakening from a broken spell, to describe their self-consciously modern orientation toward a medieval past. And many of them associate that repudiated past with the dynamics and conventions of allegory. In the hands of the major English practitioners of allegorical narrativeWilliam Langland, John Skelton, Edmund Spenser, and John Bunyanallegory shows signs of strain and disintegration. The work of these writers seems to suggest a story of modern emergence in which medieval allegory, with its search for divine order in the material world, breaks down under the pressure of modern disenchantment. But these four early modern writers also make possible other understandings of modernity. Each of them turns to allegory as a central organizing principle for his most ambitious poetic projects. Each discovers in the ancient forms of allegory a vital, powerful instrument of disenchantment. Each of them, therefore, opens up surprising possibilities: that allegory and modernity are inescapably linked; that the story of modern emergence is much older than the early modern period; and that the things modernity has tried to repudiatethe old enchantmentsare not as alien, or as absent, as they seem.

This book brings unusually brings together work on 15th century and the 16th century Scottish history, asking questions such as: How far can medieval themes such as OCylordshipOCO function in the late 16th-century world of Reformation and state formation? How"e;

Essays on topics of literary interest crossing the boundaries between the medieval and early modern period.

This book recasts one of the most well-studied and popularly-beloved eras in history: the tumultuous span from the 1485 accession of Henry VII to the 1603 death of Elizabeth I. Though many have gravitated toward this period for its high drama and national importance, the book offers a new narrative by focusing on another facet of the British past that has exercised an equally powerful grip on audiences: imperialism. It argues that the sixteenth century was pivotal to the making of both Britain and the British Empire. Unearthing over a century of theorizing about and probing into the world beyond England’s borders, Tudor Empire shows that foreign enterprise at once mirrored, responded to, and provoked domestic politics and culture, while decisively shaping the Atlantic World. Demonstrating that territorial expansion abroad and national consolidation and identity formation at home were concurrent, intertwined, and mutually reinforcing, the author examines some of the earliest ventures undertaken by the crown and its subjects in France, Scotland, Ireland, and the Americas. Tudor Empire is a thought-provoking, essential read for those interested in the Tudors and the British Empire that they helped create.

A detailed study of the interaction between drama and politics in the reign of Henry VIII. The subject is addressed both in general terms and through a series of case-studies of individual early Tudor plays. Through its innovative use of dramatic texts as historical source material, the book provides illuminating insights into the political and cultural history of the Henrician period, and into the perceived character of the King himself. It focuses on the troubled religious and political history of the reign, the culture of the Court, and the personality and governmental style of its head. In doing so the book argues for a reassessment of the reign, which places the King once more at the centre of affairs, and acknowledges the determining effect which this egotistical, charismatic but, above all, pragmatic monarch exercised on the artistic culture, as much as on the politics, of the Court. The book also demonstrates the close and specific links between the drama and the politics of the reign, through a detailed study of a number of key works, links which have hitherto been viewed only as general or peripheral.

This book consists of twelve interdisciplinary essays on the ideas, images, and rituals of Tudor and early Stuart society. Through the exploitation of new manuscript material, or hitherto untapped artistic sources, the authors open up new perspectives on the ideas, institutions, and rituals of political society. The evidence of art and literature, and new techniques for the discovery of lost mentalities, are used to explore key aspects of Tudor political culture, including royal iconography, funereal symbolism, parliamentary elections, political vocabularies, kinship and family at court and in the country, and the architecture of urban authority. In his Introduction the editor uses the example of Henry VIII's historic break with Rome to suggest the seamless links between politics and political culture by presenting it against the backdrop of early-Tudor memories of Henry V, the cult of chivalry and the invasion of France (1513), and the pre-Reformation imagery of 'imperial' kingship.