This is the first major collection of essays to look at the literature of the entire Tudor period, from the reign of Henry VII to the death of Elizabeth I. It pays particular attention to the years before 1580. Those decades saw, amongst other things, the establishment of print culture and growth of a reading public; the various phases of the English Reformation and process of political centralization that enabled and accompanied them; the increasing emulation of Continental and classical literatures under the influence of humanism; the self-conscious emergence of English as a literary...