This book examines the overlap between early modern English attitudes to disease and to society and explores the cultural meaning of the image of the body at the interfaces of medicine, morality and politics in Tudor and early Stuart England. In particular, it demonstrates how the body politic's metaphorical "cankers" and "plagues" were increasingly attributed to allegedly pathological "foreign bodies" such as Jews, Catholics, and witches. One can glimpse the origins of not only modern xenophobic attitudes to foreigners as carriers of disease, but also "germ" theory in general. The...

Textual Intercourse brings together literary criticism, theater history, the study of printed books, and gender studies, to show how the writing of Renaissance drama was conceptualized in the languages of sex, gender, and eroticism. Jeffrey Masten argues that the plays of Shakespeare and others, and the way in which those plays were first printed, illustrates a shift from a model of collaboration to one of singular authorship. Using methods attuned to sexuality and gender, Masten illuminates questions of authorship and intellectual property.

When Hamlet complains that Guildenstern "would pluck out the heart of my mystery," he imagines an encounter that recurs insistently in the discourses of early modern England: the struggle by one man to discover the secrets in another's heart. Elizabeth Hanson examines the records of state torture, plays by Shakespeare and Jonson, "cony-catching" pamphlets and Francis Bacon's philosophical writing to demonstrate a reconceptualizing of the "subject" in both the political and philosophical sense of the term.

Early modern pamphlets serve as an important vehicle for examining the print culture of the time, and especially the developing entanglement between technology and capitalism. Combining close readings of pamphlets by Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Deloney and others with a discussion of the history and deployment of print technology, The Marketplace of Print is both a work of historical recovery and a reflection on the ongoing relationship between the marketplace and the public sphere.

Valerie Traub analyzes the representation of female-female love, desire, and eroticism in a range of early modern discourses, including poetry, drama, visual arts, pornography, and medicine. Contrary to the silence ascribed to lesbianism in the Renaissance, Traub argues that the early modern period witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of representations of such desire. As a contribution to the history of sexuality and to feminist and queer theory, the book addresses current theoretical preoccupations through the lens of historical inquiry.

Recent explanations of changes in early modern European thought speak much of a move from orality and emphasis on language to print culture and a "spatial" way of thinking. Timothy J. Reiss offers a more complex explanation for the massive changes in thought that occurred. He describes how, while teaching and public debate continued to be based in the language arts, scientific and artistic areas came to depend on mathematical disciplines, including music, for new means and methods of discovery, and as a basis for wider sociocultural renewal.

Here the author explores the dynamics of imitation among early modern European powers in literary and historiographical texts from sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Spain, Italy, England, and the New World. The book considers a broad sweep of material, including European representations of New World subjects and of Islam. It supplements the transatlantic perspective on early modern imperialism with an awareness of the situation in the Mediterranean and considers problems of reading and literary transmission; imperial ideology and colonial identities; counterfeits and forgery; and...

Writing before the institution of copyright, Renaissance authors were not recognized as owning their works. Yet, in an environment in which the written word could be variously marketed by printers or by acting companies, and in which authors could be held uncomfortably responsible for their writings, we can discover complex stirrings of possessiveness among such writers as Bacon, Heywood, Daniel, Shakespeare, Wither, and--most powerfully and interestingly--Ben Jonson. This book probes the literary and institutional history, the politics, and the psychology of possessive authorship.

Howard Marchitello's study of narrative techniques in Renaissance discourse analyzes imaginative conjunctions of literary texts, such as those by Shakespeare and Thomas Browne, with developments in scientific and technical writing. Narrative was used in the Renaissance as both a mode of discourse and an epistemology; it produced knowledge, but also dictated how that knowledge should be understood. Marchitello uses a wide range of cultural documents to illustrate the importance of narrative in constructing the Renaissance understanding of time and identity.

The poet Petrarch imagined that the hopeless but pure love of a woman could lead a man to heaven. In sixteenth-century England Edmund Spenser wrote poetry in the petrarchan tradition while heightening its dilemmas--flirting with a very different kind of feminine image. Dorothy Stephens shows that this flirtation emerges only in conditional language and situations, and that the eroticism the reader feels often belies a narrator's insistence that it is illusory. She goes on to look at responses to Spenser's eroticism among male and female writers in the seventeenth century.