This ground-breaking study explores the treatment of the boundaries between poetry and history in three epic literary works: Spenser's Faerie Queene, Samuel Daniel's Civil Wars, and Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion. David Galbraith argues that each of the three national poems enters into a dialogue with classical and more contemporary predecessors and that this relationship has profound implications for understanding the English Renaissance. He explores the importance for each poem of various aspects of the relationship between England and Rome and the significance of the...

A prolific author and founding member of the Royal Society, John Evelyn (1620-1706) was one of the most remarkable intellectuals in late seventeenth-century English society. While his diary has long been considered second only to that of Samuel Pepys in importance, until quite recently his papers were inaccessible to scholars.

The Letterbooks of John Evelyn, a 2-volume collection of more than eight hundred letters selected by Evelyn himself, constitutes an essential new resource for scholars of seventeenth-century England. The two books in this set give modern readers...