What have poems and maps, law books and plays, ecclesiastical polemics and narratives of overseas exploration to do with one another? By most accounts, very little. They belong to different genres and have been appropriated by scholars in different disciplines. But, as Richard Helgerson shows in this ambitious and wide-ranging study, all were part of an extraordinary sixteenth- and seventeenth-century enterprise: the project of making England.
What have poems and maps, law books and plays, ecclesiastical polemics and narratives of overseas exploration to do with one another? By most acc...
To the Reader: This little book, reader, that we give you now has at once the taste of gall and honey mixed with salt. If it pleases your palate, come as a guest. This feast has been prepared for you. If not, please go away. I did not mean to invite you to the feast.
Joachim du Bellay (1522-60) was one of the most important poets of the Renaissance and remains a cornerstone of the French literary tradition. In this monumental bilingual edition Richard Helgerson collects The Regrets and The Antiquities of Rome, two sonnet sequences du Bellay wrote during the...
To the Reader: This little book, reader, that we give you now has at once the taste of gall and honey mixed with salt. If it pleases your pa...
In 1492 the Spanish humanist Antonio de Nebrija proclaimed that "language has always been the companion of empire." Taking as his touchstone a wonderfully suggestive sonnet that Garcilaso de la Vega wrote in 1535 from the neighborhood of ruined Carthage in North Africa, Richard Helgerson examines how the companionship of language and empire played itself out more generally in the "new poetry" of sixteenth-century Europe. Along with his friend Juan Boscan, Garcilaso was one of the great pioneers of that poetry, radically reforming Spanish verse in imitation of modern Italian and ancient Roman...
In 1492 the Spanish humanist Antonio de Nebrija proclaimed that "language has always been the companion of empire." Taking as his touchstone a wonderf...
