When we speak of the English Renaissance, what is it that we are naming, what are we recognizing reborn? As the essays in this latest collection from the English Institute demonstrate, our basic notions of the period have themselves been reconceived. In Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce, seven critics defamiliarize the images of the Renaissance -to permit the repressed to return, to acknowledge the presence of the unassimilable ghost the mark of difference of an age that is at once self and 'other'.-

John Hollander discovers a -hidden undersong- in the Spenserian lyric, while...