Sir Paul Rycaut (1629-1700) was a diplomat, poet, translator and administrator. His Present State of the Ottoman Empire was the most important and influential work on its topic produced by an Englishman in the seventeenth century, and it served as a reference point for others writing on the same subject for nearly two hundred years. Rycaut's book was considered the most informative and accurate text on its subject, and was widely-read in Europe as well as in England. It contains extensive discussions of Ottoman government, religion, and military matters, and may also be read as a...

The Poetry of Burchiello: Deep-fried Nouns, Hunchbacked Pumpkins, and Other Nonsense is the first complete English translation of the poetry of Domenico di Giovanni, nicknamed il Burchiello (ca. 1404-1449). A highly influential Florentine poet of the fifteenth century, and a barber by trade, Burchiello composed poetry that inspired numerous imitators and influenced writers for centuries afterwards. Ironically, however, he specialized in a nonsensical style that destabilized semantic meaning and that continues to baffle readers. In this bilingual edition of Burchiello's...

This edition makes available for the first time a recently discovered and provocative work by the English historian Edmund Bolton. Composed in the years 1629-1634, Averrunci or The Skowrers aims at exposing Tacitus' (alleged) anti-monarchical bias in Annals 1-6 and at rehabilitating the character and reign of the emperor Tiberius. The Introduction discusses the manuscript in the context of Bolton's life and other works,...