Catherine Bates is Research Professor in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. She was Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and Peterhouse, Cambridge, before moving to Warwick in 1995. She specialises in the poetry and poetics of sixteenth-century English poetry, with a focus on lyric, epic, and romance. She has published five monographs on Renaissance literature, including Masculinity and the Hunt: Wyatt to Spenser, and
On Not Defending Poetry: Defence and Indefensibility in Sidney's 'Defence of Poesy'. She is editor of The Cambridge Companion to The Epic, and A Companion to Renaissance Poetry.
Patrick Cheney is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Penn State University, where he specialises in English Renaissance poetry and drama, with a focus on literary authorship. He has published seven monographs on Renaissance literature, including The Collected Poems of Christopher Marlowe, Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, and Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion. He is General Editor of the 14-volume Oxford
History of Poetry in English.