This landmark book of essays examines the development of women's letter writing from the late fifteenth to the early eighteen century. It is the first book to deal comprehensively with women's letter writing during the Late Medieval and Early Modern period and shows that this was a larger and more socially diversified area of female activity than has generally been assumed. The essays, contributed by many of the leading researchers active in the field, illustrate women's engagement in various activities, both literary and political, social and religious.

Language and Politics in the Sixteenth-Century History Play examines a key preoccupation of historical drama in the period 1538-1600: the threat presented by uncivil language. "Unlicensed" speech informs the presentation of political debate in Tudor history plays and it is also the subject of their most daring political speculations. By analysing plays by John Bale, Thomas Norton, Thomas Sackville, and Robert Greene, as well as Shakespeare, this study also argues for a more inclusive approach to the genre.

This collection explores the concept of civility in the early modern period. It addresses a range of writings in English and Scots - among them, conduct manuals, colonial tracts, diaries, letters, dialogues, poetry, drama, chronicles - by English, Welsh and Scots men and women in and about the Atlantic archipelago. It explores the many meanings of civility in the early modern period; it recovers some of the lost associations of civility as well as the complex use of the adjectives 'civil' and 'barbarous' in cultural and colonial encounters.

How did Renaissance literature affect readers' minds, bodies and souls? In what ways did the history of literary experience overlap with the history of humours and emotions? This book argues that a new aesthetic vocabulary based on the theory of the passions was formulated in the Renaissance to describe the affective power of literature.

Marlowe's Republican Authorship: Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime is the first attempt to situate Marlowe's well-known iconoclastic dissidence within the historical context of Elizabethan republican thought, revealing Marlowe to be the literary pioneer of a new form of republican art.

This book analyzes the political, aesthetic, moral and religious developments in the period 1606-1660 and discusses the works of Donne, Jonson, Milton and early modern women's writing. Brady combines Literary Theory, social and cultural History, Psychology and Anthropology to produce exciting and original readings of neglected source material.

Hamlin's study provides the first full-scale account of the reception and literary appropriation of ancient skepticism in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Offering abundant archival evidence as well as fresh treatments of Florio's Montaigne and Bacon's career-long struggle with the challenges of epistemological doubt, Hamlin's book explores the deep connections between skepticism and tragedy in plays ranging from Doctor Faustus and Troilus and Cressida to The Tragedy of Mariam, The Duchess of Malfi, and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore.

Many readers today associate the early modern history play with Shakespeare. While not wishing to ignore the influence of Shakespeare, this collection of essays explores other historical drama between 1500 and 1660, covering a wide range of different formats outside the canon of 1590s history cycles. An introduction provides a survey of current criticism, including both early modern and contemporary definitions of the 'history play'. Individual essays in chronological order explore genres that perform 'history' in different ways, such as shows, moralities or closet drama. In this way this...

This study explores why women in the English Renaissance wrote so few sonnet sequences, in comparison with the traditions of Continental women writers and of English male authors. In this focus on a single genre, Rosalind Smith examines the relationship between gender and genre in the early modern period, and the critical assumptions currently underpinning questions of feminine agency within genre.

Leading scholars in the field analyze Shakespeare's plays to show how their dramatic content shapes issues debated in conflicts arising from the creation and application of law. Individual essays focus on such topics such as slander, revenge, and royal prerogative; these studies reveal the problems confronting early modern English men and women.