French Books III & IV complete a comprehensive bibliographical survey of all books published in France in the first age of print. It lists over 40,000 editions printed in France in languages other than French during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries together with bibliographical references, an introduction and indexes. It draws on the analysis of over 3,000 collections situated in libraries throughout the world. French Books will be an invaluable research tool for all students and scholars interested in the history, culture and literature of France, as well as historians of the early modern book world. For vols. I & II please go to French Vernacular Books.

This study examines representations of early modern female consorts and regnants via extra-literary emblematics such as paintings, jewelry, miniature portraits, carvings, placards, masques, funerary monuments, and imprese.

This volume brings together five translations of Aesopian fables that range from the beginning to the end of the English Renaissance. At the centre of the volume is an edition of the entirety of Arthur Golding’s manuscript translation of emblematic fables, A Morall Fabletalke (c. 1580s). By situating Golding’s text alongside William Caxton’s early printed translation from French (1485), Richard Smith’s English version of Robert Henryson’s Middle-Scots Moral Fabillis (1577), John Brinsley’s grammar school translation (1617), and John Ogilby’s politicized fables translated at the end of the English Civil War (1651), this book shows the wide-ranging forms and functions of the fable during this period.

Ovid transformed English Renaissance literary ideas about love, erotic desire, embodiment, and gender more than any other classical poet. Ovidian concepts of femininity have been well served by modern criticism, but Ovid's impact on masculinity in Renaissance literature remains underexamined. This volume explores how English Renaissance writers shifted away from Virgilian heroic figures to embrace romantic ideals of courtship, civility, and friendship. Ovid's writing about masculinity, love, and desire shaped discourses of masculinity across a wide range of literary texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including poetry, prose fiction, and drama. The book covers all major works by Ovid, in addition to Italian humanists Angelo Poliziano and Natale Conti, canonical writers such as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and John Milton, and lesser-known writers such as Wynkyn de Worde, Michael Drayton, Thomas Lodge, Richard Johnson, Robert Greene, John Marston, Thomas Heywood, and Francis Beaumont. Individual essays examine emasculation, abjection, pacifism, female masculinity, boys' masculinity, parody, hospitality, and protean Jewish masculinity. Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature demonstrates how Ovid's poetry gave vigour and vitality to male voices in English literature - how his works inspired English writers to reimagine the male authorial voice, the male body, desire, and love in fresh terms.

This volume investigates emblematic and art-historical issues in Lavinia Fontana’s mythological paintings. Fontana is the first female painter of the sixteenth century in Italy to depict female nudes, as well as mythological and emblematic paintings associated with concepts of beauty and wisdom. Her paintings reveal an appropriation of the antique, a fusion between patronage and culture, and a humanistic pursuit of Mannerist conceits. Fontana’s secular imagery provides a challenging paragone with the male tradition of history painting during the sixteenth century and paves the way for new subjects to be depicted and interpreted by female painters of the seventeenth century.

With this volume, Jane Chance concludes her monumental study of the history of mythography in medieval literature. Her focus here is the advent of hybrid mythography, the transformation of mythological commentary by blending the scholarly with the courtly and the personal. No other work examines the mythographic interrelationships among these poets and their unique and personal approaches to mythological commentary.

This volume explores the early modern manuals on travelling (Artes apodemicae), a new genre of advice literature that originated in the sixteenth century, when it became communis opinio among intellectuals that travelling was an important means of acquiring knowledge and experience, and that an extended tour abroad was a vital, if not indispensable part of humanist, academic and political education. In this volume, the formation of this new genre, between 1550 and 1700, is studied in its historical, social and cultural context. Furthermore, the volume examines the impact of this new genre on the acquisition and collection of knowledge in the early modern period, empirical or otherwise. Contributors: Justin Stagl, Karl Enenkel, Jan Papy, Thomas Haye, Robert Seidel, Gabor Gelléri, Bernd Roling, Harald Hendrix, Jan L. de Jong, Kerstin Maria Pahl, Johanna Luggin, Marc Laureys, and Justina Spencer.

Hercules and the King of Portugal investigates how representations of masculinity figure in the fashioning of Spanish national identity, scrutinizing ways that gender performances of two early modern male icons—Hercules and King Sebastian—are structured to express enduring nationhood. The classical hero Hercules features prominently in Hispanic foundational fictions and became intimately associated with the Hapsburg monarchy in the early sixteenth century. King Sebastian of Portugal (1554–78), both during his lifetime and after his violent death, has been inserted into his own land’s charter myth, even as competing interests have adapted his narratives to promote Spanish power. The hybrid oral and written genre of poetic Spanish theater, as purveyor and shaper of myth, was well situated to stage and resolve dilemmas relating both to lineage determined by birth and performance of masculinity, in ways that would ideally uphold hierarchy. Dian Fox’s ideological analysis exposes how the two icons are subject to political manipulations in seventeenth-century Spanish theater and other media. Fox finds that officially sanctioned and sometimes popularly produced narratives are undercut by dynamic social and gendered processes: “Hercules” and “Sebastian” slip outside normative discourses and spaces to enact nonnormative behaviors and unreproductive masculinities.