Shakespeare and the Question of Culture addresses the central issue of "culture" in early modern studies through both literary history and disciplinary critique. Bruster argues that the "culture" that critics investigate through the works of Shakespeare and other writers is largely a literary culture, and he examines what this necessary limitation of the scope of "cultural studies" means for the discipline of early modern studies.

Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture examines an important moment in the long history of the medical use and abuse of the human body. In early modern Protestant England, the fragmented corpse was processed, circulated, and ingested as a valuable drug in a medical economy underpinned by a brutal judicial system. In a meticulous engagement with an extensive range of medical, religious, and literary texts, Louise Noble shows how early modern writers became obsessed with medicinal cannibalism and its uncanny link to the contested Eucharist sacrament. In the...

This book posits that coins and their (especially literary) representations were inextricably bound with several key factors for English state formation within the period. After surveying various definitions and histories of the "state" within the first chapter, this book identifies five major dimensions of state formation which correspond to the five chapters of the book: centralized institutional developments; the limits and extent of state and monarchical authority according to custom, reason and natural law; the development and expansion of a legal framework, in particular statute law,...

Engaging with current debates about the "clash of civilizations," this book offers a novel challenge to the notion of a monolithic Islam in opposition to a monolithic West. The essays in this book analyze a range of genres-travel narrative, canonical and non-canonical drama, and prose romance-to consider geographical areas beyond the Ottoman Empire, including Mughal India, Safavid Persia, and the Muslim regions of Southeast and Central Asia. This collection deepens our post-Saidian understanding of the complexity of real and imagined "traffic" between England and the "Islamic worlds" it...

By examining competing depictions of combat in sixteenth-century texts such as Arthurian romance and early modern medical texts, this original study reveals both the importance of combat in understanding the humanist subject and the contours of the previously neglected pre-modern subject.

This dynamic volume explores the differences that separate man from other forms of life. Building on the increased attention paid in recent criticism to both plant and animal life in the Renaissance, as well as the instability of categories such as 'human' and 'animal, ' the essays in this engaging collection argue for recognition of the persistently indistinct nature of humans, who cannot be finally divided ontologically or epistemologically from other forms of matter

This critical study illuminates the neglected intersection of war, disease, and gender as represented in an important subgenre of World War I literature. It calls into question public versus private perceptions of time, mass media, urban spaces, emotion, and the increasingly uncertain status of the future.

This book""investigates literature's engagement with the social and gendered conflicts of early modern England by examining the narratives that seventeenth-century dramatists and women writers created to describe the lives of working women.

Research on European food culture has expanded substantially in recent years, telling us more about food preparation, ingredients, feasting and fasting rituals, and the social and cultural connotations of food.

At the First Table demonstrates the ways in which early modern Spaniards used food as a mechanism for the performance of social identity. People perceived themselves and others as belonging to clearly defined categories of gender, status, age, occupation, and religion, and each of these categories carried certain assumptions about proper behavior and appropriate...