This collection of 13 original essays addresses how properly to define the intersection between the sacred and profane in early modern English literature. These essays cover a variety of works published in 16th and 17th century England, as well as a variety of genres.

Featuring entries composed by leading international scholars, The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature presents comprehensive coverage of all aspects of English literature produced from the early 16th to the mid 17th centuries. Comprises over 400 entries ranging from 1000 to 5000 words written by leading international scholars Arranged in A-Z format across three fully indexed and cross-referenced volumes Provides coverage of canonical authors and their works, as well as a variety of previously under-considered areas, including women writers, broadside ballads, commonplace books, and other popular literary forms Biographical material on authors is presented in the context of cutting-edge critical discussion of literary works. Represents the most comprehensive resource available for those working in English Renaissance literary studies Also available online as part of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature, providing 24/7 access and powerful searching, browsing and cross-referencing capabilities

This examination of the fate of lost ideas after the Protestant reformation explores what might be called the pathology of the Renaissance. The first part of the book treats Spenser's Faerie Queene and Milton's Paradise Lost, concentrating on vacant cultural spaces and abandoned icons to trace the gap between sacred and secular life, between poetry and belief. The second part focuses on Shakespeare's Hamlet and Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam to investigate the eschatological implications of this gap, the ways that history is disentangled from memory and nostalgia severed from experience. The book challenges readings of Renaissance culture as an increasingly secular one, proposing that sacred symbols and practices still powerfully organized the English moral imagination, oriented behaviors and arranged perceptions, and specified the limits of the known world.

The courtly love tradition had a great influence on the themes of religious poetry—just as an absent beloved could be longed for passionately, so too could a distant God be the subject of desire. But when authors began to perceive God as immanently available, did the nature and interpretation of devotional verse change? Ryan Netzley argues that early modern religious lyrics presented both desire and reading as free, loving activities, rather than as endless struggles or dramatic quests. Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist analyzes the work of prominent early modern writers—including John Milton, Richard Crashaw, John Donne, and George Herbert—whose religious poetry presented parallels between sacramental desire and the act of understanding written texts. Netzley finds that by directing devotees to crave spiritual rather than worldly goods, these poets questioned ideas not only of what people should desire, but also how they should engage in the act of yearning. Challenging fundamental assumptions of literary criticism, Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist shows how poetry can encourage love for its own sake, rather than in the hopes of salvation.

This volume, the ninth in the series of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, presents newly edited critical texts of 25 love lyrics. Based on an exhaustive study of the manuscripts and printed editions in which these poems have appeared, Volume 4.2 details the genealogical history of each poem, accompanied by a thorough prose discussion, as well as a General Textual Introduction of the Songs and Sonets collectively. The volume also presents a comprehensive digest of the commentary on these Songs and Sonets from Donne's time through 1999. Arranged chronologically within sections, the material for each poem is organized under various headings that complement the volume's companions, Volume 4.1 and Volume 4.3.

A major study of ideas of truth and falsehood in early modern England from the advent of the Reformation to the aftermath of the failed Gunpowder Plot.

This volume gathers together, for the first time, Mary Sidney Herbert’s Antonius (1592) and Thomas Kyd’s Cornelia (1594), two significant and inter-related responses to Robert Garnier’s Roman plays, Marc Antoine (1578) and Cornélie (1574). As a unique diptych the translated plays offer invaluable insight into the often ghostly presence of French literature in Elizabethan culture. They also mark an important chapter in the development of early modern neoclassical drama, with Sidney Herbert and Kyd creatively engaging, each in their own way, with Garnier’s learned, Senecan tragedies. This edition offers a critical introduction situating the plays in the rapidly shifting context of the 1590s and discussing their critical reception as translations. The footnotes aim to illuminate Sidney Herbert’s and Kyd’s distinctive translation practices by signaling significant amendments to Garnier’s text and by tracing the web of intertextual allusions that connects each translation, not only with Elizabethan practices of patronage, readership, and text circulation, but also with the wider intellectual and political debates of the late European Renaissance. Also featuring textual notes, a list of neologisms, and a glossary, this edition documents each text’s material and editorial history, as well as their joint contribution to the linguistic creativity of the Elizabethan age. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; color: #ffffff}

Based on an exhaustive study of the manuscripts and printed editions in which these poems have appeared, the eighth in the series of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne presents newly edited critical texts of thirteen Divine Poems and details the genealogical history of each poem, accompanied by a thorough prose discussion. Arranged chronologically within sections, the material is organized under the following headings: Dates and Circumstances; General Commentary; Genre; Language, Versification, and Style; the Poet/Persona; and Themes. The volume also offers a comprehensive digest of general and topical commentary on the Divine Poems from Donne's time through 2012.

Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance features essays questioning the extent to which education, an activity pursued in the home, classroom, and the church, led to, mirrored, and was perhaps even transformed by moments of instruction on stage. This volume argues that along with the popular press, the early modern stage is also a key pedagogical site and that education”performed and performative”plays a central role in gender construction. The wealth of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printed and manuscript documents devoted to education (parenting guides, conduct books, domestic manuals, catechisms, diaries, and autobiographical writings) encourages examination of how education contributed to the formation of gendered and hierarchical structures, as well as the production, reproduction, and performance of masculinity and femininity. In examining both dramatic and non-dramatic texts via aspects of performance theory, this collection explores the ways education instilled formal academic knowledge, but also elucidates how educational practices disciplined students as members of their social realm, citizens of a nation, and representatives of their gender.