In 1602 and 1604 two collections of paradoxes, both entitled Four Paradoxes, authored by Thomas Scott, and Thomas and Dudley Digges, respectively, were published. Scott, a Protestant preacher, wrote four poems about art, law, war, and service. On the other hand, the diplomat and intellectual Dudley Digges published his father’s two paradoxes about the art of war together with his own two texts concerning the worthiness of war and warriors. What do these two collections of paradoxes have in common, and why publishing their critical edition together? Apparently, besides sharing the same title, the two works do not seem to have anything else in common. Nevertheless, this modern spelling critical edition of both texts aims at demonstrating that they share political, cultural, and genre-related features connected with the circulation of paradoxical discourse about war in early modern England.

This volume originates as a continuation of the previous volume in the CEMP series (1.1) and aims at furthering scholarly interest in the nature and function of theatrical paradox in early modern plays, considering how classical paradoxical culture was received in Renaissance England. The book is articulated into three sections: the first, “Paradoxical Culture and Drama”, is devoted to an investigation of classical definitions of paradox and the dramatic uses of paradox in ancient Greek drama; the second, “Paradoxes in/of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama” looks at the functions and uses of paradox in the play-texts of Shakespeare and his contemporaries; finally, the essays in “Paradoxes in Drama and the Digital” examine how the Digital Humanities can enrich our knowledge of paradoxes in classical and early modern drama.

This transhistorical, international and interdisciplinary work will be of interest to students, theater professionals and Shakespeare scholars.

An Archaeology of the British Atlantic World, 1600–1700 is the first book to apply the methods of modern-world archaeology to the study of the seventeenth-century English colonial world. Charles E. Orser, Jr explores a range of material evidence of daily life collected from archaeological excavations throughout the Atlantic region, including England, Ireland, western Africa, Native North America, and the eastern United States. He considers the archaeological record together with primary texts by contemporary writers. Giving particular attention to housing, fortifications, delftware, and stoneware, Orser offers new interpretations for each type of artefact. His study demonstrates how the archaeological record expands our understanding of the Atlantic world at a critical moment of its expansion, as well as to the development of the modern, Western world.

Reveals how commodity failure, as much as success, can shed light on aspirations, environment, and economic life in colonial societies.

Curtis Breight challenges the view that Renaissance English rulers could not dominate their domestic population. He argues, alternatively, that the Elizabethan state was controlled by the Cecilian faction, which maintained power by focusing English energies outwardly. Cecilians launched relentless assaults by land and sea against England's neighbours. By the 1590s their policies had enriched a few yet destroyed countless people, and this book reads the drama of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare in relation to ongoing national and international conflict.

Once upon a time 'The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century' was an innovative concept that inspired a stimulating narrative of how modern science came into the world. Half a century later, what we now know as 'the master narrative' serves rather as a strait-jacket - so often events and contexts just fail to fit in. No attempt has been made so far to replace the master narrative. H. Floris Cohen now comes up with precisely such a replacement. Key to his path-breaking analysis-cum-narrative is a vision of the Scientific Revolution as made up of six distinct yet narrowly interconnected, revolutionary transformations, each of some twenty-five to thirty years' duration. This vision enables him to explain how modern science could come about in Europe rather than in Greece, China, or the Islamic world. It also enables him to explain how half-way into the 17th century a vast crisis of legitimacy could arise and, in the end, be overcome.

The Invention of China in Early Modern England describes how several different English communities became aware of China. It begins by describing how early modern intellectuals used the utopian ideal of China to license all kinds of progressive innovation before chronicling how England’s growing commerce in southeast Asia radically changed China’s representation in the English discourse community. For the new community of English merchants proposing to trade in Chinese goods, China became the seminal example in the growing discourse community of English Orientalism. It was an absolute or arbitrary authoritarian state, associated with crooked business dealings, and cloaked in a rhetoric of secrecy and exclusion—a dangerous exception to the traditions, values, and identities of the emergent English speaking states. Finally, the book points out some of the ways that contemporary English language sources continue to represent this early modern English thought tradition, labelling the complexities of modern China with analytical vocabulary perhaps better suited to the pressing political anxieties of the seventeenth century.