How did the new developments of the Renaissance affect the way women were understood by men and the way they understood themselves? Addressing a wide range of issues across Renaissance culture--humanism, technology, science, anatomy, literacy, theater, domesticity, colonialism, and sex--this collection of essays attempts to answer that question. In doing so, the authors discover that the female subject of the Renaissance shares a surprising amount of conceptual territory with her postmodern counterpart.

Slander constitutes a central social, legal and literary concern of early modern England. M. Lindsay Kaplan reveals it to be an effective, if unstable, means of repudiating one's opposition, and shows how it was deployed by rulers and poets including Spenser, Jonson and Shakespeare. Her study challenges recent claims that the state controlled poets' criticisms by means of censorship, arguing instead that power relations between poets and the state are more accurately described in terms of the reversible charge of slander.

Slander constitutes a central social, legal and literary concern of early modern England. M. Lindsay Kaplan reveals it to be an effective, if unstable, means of repudiating one's opposition, and shows how it was deployed by rulers and poets including Spenser, Jonson and Shakespeare. Her study challenges recent claims that the state controlled poets' criticisms by means of censorship, arguing instead that power relations between poets and the state are more accurately described in terms of the reversible charge of slander.