This valuable study illuminates the idea of nobility as display, as public performance, in Renaissance and seventeenth-century literature and society. Through detailed readings of major authors, including Castiglione, Montaigne, Bacon and Corneille, David Posner examines the tensions between literary or imaginative representations of "nobility," and the increasingly problematic historical position of the nobility themselves. Situated at the intersection of rhetorical and historical theories of interpretation, this book contributes significantly to our understanding of how literature can both...

Michael Schoenfeldt's fascinating study explores the close relationship between selves and bodies, psychological inwardness and corporeal processes, as they are represented in English Renaissance literature. After Galen, the predominant medical paradigm of the period envisaged a self governed by humors, literally embodying inner emotion by locating and explaining human passion within a taxonomy of internal organs and fluids. It thus gave a profoundly material emphasis to behavioral phenomena, giving the poets of the period a vital and compelling vocabulary for describing the ways in which...

This original study examines how Shakespeare and his contemporaries made the difficult transition from writing plays for the theater to publishing them as literary works. Douglas Brooks analyzes how and why certain plays found their way into print while many others failed to do so and looks at the role played by the Renaissance book trade in shaping literary reputations. Incorporating many finely-observed typographical illustrations, this book focuses on plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster, and Beaumont and Fletcher as well as reviewing the complicated publication history of Thomas...

Robert Weimann redefines the relationship between writing and performance, or "playing," in Shakespeare's theater. Through close reading and careful analysis Weimann offers a reconsideration and redefinition of Elizabethan performance and production practices. The study reviews the most recent methodologies of textual scholarship, the new history of the Elizabethan theater, performance theory, and film and video interpretation, and offers a new approach to understanding Shakespeare. Weimann examines a range of plays as well as other contemporary works. A major part of the study explores the...

In Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory Jones and Stallybrass argue that the making and transmission of fabrics and clothing were central to the making of Renaissance culture. Their examination explores the role of clothes as forms of memory transmitted from master to servant, from friend to friend, from lover to lover. This book offers a close reading of literary texts, paintings, textiles, theatrical documents, and ephemera to reveal how clothing and textiles were crucial to gender, sexuality, and religion in the Renaissance.

Robert Weimann redefines the relationship between writing and performance, or "playing," in Shakespeare's theater. Through close reading and careful analysis Weimann offers a reconsideration and redefinition of Elizabethan performance and production practices. The study reviews the most recent methodologies of textual scholarship, the new history of the Elizabethan theater, performance theory, and film and video interpretation, and offers a new approach to understanding Shakespeare. Weimann examines a range of plays as well as other contemporary works. A major part of the study explores the...

Wendy Wall argues that representations of housework in the early modern period helped to forge conceptions of national identity. With a detailed account of household practices, this study interprets plays on the London stage in reference to the first printed cookbooks in England. Working from original historical sources, Wall reveals that domesticity was represented as "familiar" as well as "exotic." She analyzes a wide range of plays including some now little-known as well as key works of the early modern period.

This book analyzes the discourses and practices that defined Renaissance theater, as related to the development of encyclopedic texts and vice versa. Looking at what "theater" meant to medieval and Renaissance writers and critics, William West sets Renaissance drama within one of its cultural and intellectual contexts. Although the study focuses on the Renaissance, it also draws on and analyzes substantial classical and medieval material. It is of equal interest to intellectual historians, theater historians and students of early literature.

This monograph documents the development of two cultures and disciplines: science and literature--through a shared aesthetic of knowledge. It brings together key works in early modern science and imaginative literature, ranging from the anatomy of William Harvey and the experimentalism of William Gilbert to the fiction of Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and Margaret Cavendish.

Tracing the cultural legacy of the Norman Conquest in England from 1350 to 1600, Deanne Williams demonstrates how English literature emerged out of a simultaneous engagement with, and resistance to, the presence of French language and culture in medieval and early modern England. Chapters on Chaucer, the Corpus Christi Plays, William Caxton, early Tudor poetry, and Shakespeare examine a variety of English responses to, and representations of, France and "the French."