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Although Ben Jonson's association with architecture is well known, comparatively little research has been devoted to the influence of architectural thinking on his literary work. This book sets out to explore the possibilities suggested by such an interrelationship. Using annotated architectural volumes surviving from Jonson's library as well as his published works, it surveys the evidence for Jonson's knowledge of, and theoretical agreement with, the architectural principles enunciated in the ‘De Architectura Libri Decem’ of the Roman architect Vitruvius. The book goes on to examine Jonson's poetry and the early masques in the light of his interest in architecture, finding in them forms that suggest a much closer proximity between Jonson's and Inigo Jones' aesthetic in the early years of the Jacobean period than has formerly been supposed. It argues that Jonson employed a form of literary Vitruvianism which was a potent force in the shaping of the early masques of his Catholic period, and was to remain an active influence on poetic composition throughout the succeeding century.

This book provides an account of the how the Bible was read and applied in early modern England, and maps the connection between these readings and various forms of writing. The Bible had a profound impact on early modern culture, and Bible-reading shaped the period’s drama, poetry, and life writings, as well as sermons and biblical commentaries. This book argues that literary writings bear the hallmarks of the period’s dominant exegetical practices, and do interpretative work. Tracing the impact of biblical reading across a range of genres and writers, the discussion demonstrates that literary reimaginings of, and allusions to, the Bible were common, varied, and ideologically evocative. The book explores how a series of popularly interpreted biblical narratives were recapitulated in the work of a diverse selection of writers, some of whom remain relatively unknown. In early modern England, the figures of Solomon, Job, and Christ’s mother, Mary, and the books of Song of Songs and Revelation, are enmeshed in different ways with contemporary concerns, and their usage illustrates how the Bible’s narratives could be turned to a fascinating array of debates. Showing the multifarious contexts in which biblical narratives were deployed, this book argues that Protestant interpretative practices both contribute to, and problematize, literary constructions of a range of theological, political, and social debates.

Scratch the surface of literary production from the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century in France, and a large number of the authors, translators, and editors turn out to be relatives of other authors, translators, and editors. Why was this? Why did some 200 families contain more than one literary producer and so exercise disproportionate influence over what people read in the period? The phenomenon ranged from poetry (the Marots, the Des Roches) to scholarship (the Scaligers), from history-writing (the Godefroys) to engineering (the Errards). It included not just fathers and sons but also mothers, daughters, siblings, uncles, cousins, grandchildren. One family, the Sainte-Marthes, took this so far that sixteen of its own became literary producers, rising to twenty-seven if one broadens the chronological parameters. The phenomenon was European rather than just French, as the Sidneys or the Tassos show. But it took distinctive forms in France, where it was often connected to royal office-holding, and where it eventually faltered only with the French Revolution. Literary production was for many families a way of representing, and so claiming, their own place in the world; a way, alongside others, of clutching at distinctiveness and social status; a way of generating sociocultural legacy within the family. Not that everything went to plan or that the plan was always precise. Family literature, as defined by this study, was orientated towards the future but was sometimes even rejected or parodied by descendants rather than imitated or venerated. Whether harmonious or disunited, families were central to the hierarchical social fabric out of which much literature and learning emerged. Restoring that centrality changes our understanding of the works produced.

This book interrogates standard narratives about national identity in early modern England by examining the ways Catholics from the reign of Mary Tudor to the early 17th century contested and shaped discourses of the nation, patriotism, and Englishness. Accused by their opponents of espousing an alien religion, one orchestrated from Rome and sustained by Spain, English Catholics fought back by developing their own self-representations that emphasized how the Catholic faith was an ancient and integral part of true Englishness. After the accession of the Protestant Elizabeth, the Catholic imagining of England was mainly the project of the exiles who had left their homeland in search of religious toleration and foreign assistance. English Catholics constructed narratives of their own religious heritage and identity, however, not only in response to Protestant polemic but also as part of intra-Catholic rivalries that pitted Marian clergy against seminary priests, secular priests against Jesuits, and exiled English Catholics against their co-religionists from other parts of Britain and Ireland. Drawing on recent reassessments of English Catholicism this study foregrounds the faultlines within and between the various Catholic communities of the Atlantic archipelago. The book examines a range of genres, texts, and documents both in print and manuscript, including ecclesiastical histories, polemical treatises, antiquarian tracts, and correspondence. The argument weaves together a rich historical narrative of people, events, and texts while also offering contextualized close readings of specific works by under-studied figures like Edmund Campion, Robert Persons, Thomas Stapleton, and Richard Verstegan.

This book explores the complex and contested relationships that existed between class, patronage, and poetry in Hanoverian England by examining the life and work of Stephen Duck, the ‘famous Threshing Poet’. In 1730, Duck became the most famous agricultural labourer in the nation when his writing won him the patronage of Queen Caroline. The man, and the writing he produced, intrigued contemporaries. How was it possible, they asked, for an agricultural labourer to become a poet? What would a thresher write? Did he really deserve royal patronage, and what would he do with such an honour? How should he be supported? And was he an isolated prodigy, or were there others like him, equally deserving of support? Duck’s remarkable story reveals the tolerances, and intolerances, of the Hanoverian social order. This book sheds new light on the poet’s early life, revealing how the farm labourer developed an interest in poetry; how he wrote his most famous poem, ‘The Thresher’s Labour’; how his public identity as the ‘famous Threshing Poet’ took shape; and how he came to be positioned as a figurehead of labouring-class writing. It explores how the patronage Duck received shaped his writing; how he came to reconceive his relationship with land, labour, and leisure; and how he made use of his newly acquired classical learning to develop new friendships and career opportunities. And it reveals how, after Duck’s death, rumours about his suicide came to overshadow the achievements of his life. Both in life, and in death, this book argues, Duck provided both opportunity and provocation for thinking through the complex interplay of class, patronage, and poetry in Hanoverian England.

This book attempts to see the development of literary culture in sixteenth-century England as a whole and to explain the relationship between the Reformation and the literary renaissance of the Elizabethan period. Its central theme is ‘the common’ in its double sense of something shared and something base, and it argues that making common the work of God is at the heart of the English Reformation, just as making common the literature of antiquity and of early modern Europe is at the heart of the English Renaissance. The book addresses the central question of why the Renaissance in England arrived so late in terms of the relationship between humanism and Protestantism and the tensions between democracy and the imagination which persist throughout the century. The first part of the book establishes a social dimension for literary culture in the period by exploring the associations of ‘commonwealth’ and related terms. It then addresses the role of Greek in the period before and during the Reformation in disturbing the old binary of elite Latin and common English. It argues that the Reformation principle of making common is coupled with a hostility towards fiction, which has the effect of closing down the humanist renaissance of the earlier decades. The final part of the book discusses the Elizabethan literary renaissance and deals in turn with poetry, short prose fiction, and the drama written for the common stage. In between, the middle part of the book presents translation as the link between Reformation and Renaissance.

In what tense should we refer to the dead? The question has long been asked, from Cicero to Julian Barnes. Answering it is partly a matter of grammar and stylistic convention. But the hesitation, annoyance, even distress that can be caused by the ‘wrong’ tense suggests that more may be at stake: our very relation to the dead. This book investigates how tenses were used in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France (especially in French but also in Latin) to refer to dead friends, lovers, family members, enemies, colleagues, writers, officials, monarchs—and to those who had died long before, whether Christ, the saints, or the ancient Greeks and Romans who posthumously filled the minds of Renaissance humanists. Did tenses refer to the dead in ways that contributed to granting them differing degrees of presence (and absence)? Did tenses communicate dimensions of posthumous presence (and absence) that partly eluded more concept-based affirmations? The investigation ranges from funerary and devotional writing to Eucharistic theology, from poetry to humanist paratexts, from Rabelais’s prose fiction to Montaigne’s Essais. Primarily a work of literary and cultural history, it also draws on early modern grammatical thought and on modern linguistics (with its concept of aspect and its questioning of ‘tense’), while arguing that neither can fully explain the phenomena studied. The book briefly compares early modern usage with tendencies in modern French and English in the West, asking whether changes in belief about posthumous survival have been accompanied by changes in tense-use.

Descartes’s Fictions traces common movements in early modern philosophy and literary method. This volume reassesses the significance of Descartes’s writing by bringing his philosophical output into contact with the literary treatises, exempla, and debates of his age. Arguing that humanist theorizing about the art of poetry represents a vital intellectual context for Descartes’s work, the volume offers readings of the controversies to which this poetic theory gives rise, with particular reference to the genre of tragicomedy, the question of verisimilitude, and the figures of Guez de Balzac and Pierre Corneille. Drawing on what Descartes says about, and to, his many contemporaries and correspondents embedded in the early modern republic of letters, this volume shows that poetics provides a repository of themes and images to which he returns repeatedly: fortune, method, error, providence, passion, and imagination, amongst others. Like the poets and theorists of the early modern period, Descartes is also drawn to the forms of attention that people may bring to his work. This interest finds expression in the mature Cartesian metaphysics of the Meditations, as well as, later, in the moral philosophy of his correspondence with Elisabeth of Bohemia or the Passions of the Soul. Some of the tropes of modern secondary criticism—a comparison of Descartes and Corneille, or the portrayal of Descartes as a ‘tragic’ figure—are also re-evaluated. This volume thus bridges the gap between Cartesian criticism and late-humanist literary culture in France.

This book begins and ends with the intellectual and imaginative pleasures of narrative wandering. ‘To digress’ in early modern England carried a range of associations with authority and gender, from amplitude and escape to deviance and transgression. The book argues that writers classically trained in verbal contest used the liberty of digression to create a complex form of underground writing and self-definition in some of the richest non-dramatic texts of 17th-century England; such a pointed use of digressiveness in the period has not been recognized. Within these textual mazes writers captured the ambiguities of political occasion and patronage, while they anatomized enemies and mourned personal loss. The narrator of each text addresses a specter of speechlessness as well as loss of self through a figurative descent to an unstable underworld associated with a female or effeminate weakness. In fresh readings of Donne's Anniversaries, Marvell's Upon Appleton House, Sir Thomas Browne's The Garden of Cyrus, Milton's Paradise Lost, Dryden's The Hind and the Panther and A Discourse of Satire, and Swift's A Tale of a Tub, the book draws attention to the expansiveness of many of the period's literary forms, such as country-house poem, literary anatomy, dedicatory epistle, beast fable, and epic. Turning current sensitivity toward the silenced voice in a new direction, the book argues that rhetorical amplitude might suggest anxieties about speech and silence for early modern men forced to be competitive yet circumspect to make their voices heard.

This book examines the glossing of a variety of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century texts by authors including Lydgate, Douglas, Chaloner, Baldwin, Bullein, Harington, and Nashe. It is concerned particularly with the use of glosses as a means of authorial reflection on the writing process, and with the emergence of the gloss as a self-consciously literary mode. One of the main questions it addresses is to what extent the advent of print affects glossing practices. To this end, it traces the transmission of a number of glossed texts in both manuscript and print, but also examines glossing that is integral to texts written with print production in mind. With the latter, it focuses particularly on a little-remarked-upon but surprisingly common category of gloss: glossing that is ostentatiously playful, diverting rather than directing its readers. Setting this in the context of emerging print conventions and concerns about the stability of print, it argues that—like self-glossing in manuscript—such diverting glosses shape as well as reflect contemporary ideas of authorship and authority, and are thus genuinely experimental. The book reads across medieval-renaissance and manuscript-print boundaries in order to trace the emergence of the gloss as a genre and the way in which theories of authorship are affected by the material processes of writing and transmission.

In 1589 the Privy Council encouraged the Archbishop of Canterbury to take steps to control the theatres, which had offended authority by putting on plays which addressed ‘certen matters of Divinytie and of State unfitt to be suffred’. How had questions of divinity and state become entangled? The Reformation had invested the English Crown with supremacy over the Church, and religious belief had thus been transformed into a political statement. In the plentiful chronicle literature of the sixteenth century, questions of monarchical legitimacy and religious orthodoxy became intertwined as a consequence of that demand for a usable national past created by the high political developments of the 1530s. Divinity and State explores the consequences of these events in the English historiography and historical drama of the sixteenth century. It is divided into four parts. In the first, the impact of reformed religion on narratives of the national past is measured and described. Part II examines how the entanglement of the national past and reformed religion was reflected in historical drama from Bale to the early years of James I, and focuses on two paradigmatic characters: the sanctified monarch and the martyred subject. Part III considers Shakespeare's history plays in the light of the preceding discussion, and finds that Shakespeare's career as a historical dramatist shows him eventually re-shaping the history play with great audacity. Part IV corroborates this reading of Shakespeare's later history plays by reference to the dramatic ripostes they provoked.

The poet and preacher John Donne (1572–1631) was one of the most influential authors of early modern England. This book examines his response to an iconic figure in the history of Western religious thought: Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430). This book argues that Renaissance culture saw not only a revival of the classics, but was equally indebted to the intellectual and literary legacy of the Church Fathers. The study recovers an Augustinian tradition of interpretation which permeated the religious world of the period, but which has until now been largely overlooked. It presents a comprehensive re-evaluation of Donne's writings, ranging from the poems to less familiar prose works, situates him carefully in the poetic, intellectual, and political contexts which frame his works, and engages with recent developments in both literary and historical studies. This book is the first sustained study of Donne's reading practices, and of the theological sources which shaped his thought. It discovers a range of medieval and early modern texts which transformed the imagination of literary writers in the period but which have been neglected so far: devotional manuals, Scripture commentaries, and religious commonplace books (often in Latin). The study pays close attention to the intellectual and political conditions which informed the reception of Augustine's works, and offers detailed readings of Donne's texts which illuminate the literary aspects of his patristic heritage.

Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England focuses on early modern publishers’ efforts to identify and accommodate new readers of verse that had previously been restricted to particular social networks in manuscript. Focusing on the period between the maturing of the market for printed English literature in the 1590s and the emergence of the professional poet following the Restoration, this study shows that poetry was shaped by—and itself shaped—strong print publication traditions. By reading printed editions of poems by William Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, and others, this book shows how publishers negotiated genre, gender, social access, reputation, literary knowledge, and the value of English literature itself. It uses literary, historical, bibliographical, and quantitative evidence to show how publishers’ strategies changed over time. Ultimately, Doubtful Readers argues that although—or perhaps because—publishers’ interpretive and editorial efforts are often elided in studies of early modern poetry, their interventions have had an enduring impact on our canons, texts, and literary histories.

The state is at its most volatile when supreme power changes hands. This book studies five such moments of transfer in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, from Henry VIII to the English Revolution, with particular attention to the political function and agency of drama in smoothing the transition. Masques and civic pageants served as an art form by which incoming authority could declare its power, and subjects could express their willing subordination to the new regime. The book contains vivid case studies of these dramatic works, some of which have never before been identified, and the circumstances for which they were written: the use of London street theatre in 1535 to promote Henry VIII's arrogation of Royal Supremacy; the aggressively Protestant court masque of 1559 which marked the accession of Elizabeth I, and the censorship which resulted when the same mode of dramatic discourse spread to more plebeian stages; the court masques and progress entertainments of James I's initial year on the English throne, through which the new Stuart dynasty asserted its legitimacy and individual courtiers made their bids for influence; and the formal coronation entry to London, furnished with dramatic pageants, which London paid for but Charles I refused to undertake. The final chapter describes how, in 1642, a very different incoming regime planned to ignore drama altogether, until some surprisingly contingent circumstances forced its hand.

Focusing on early modern plays that stage encounters between peoples of different cultures, this book asks how a sense of geographical location was created in early modern theatres that featured minimal scenery. While previous studies have stressed these plays’ connections to a historical Mediterranean in which England was increasingly involved, this book demonstrates how their dramatic geography was shaped through a literary and theatrical heritage. Reading canonical plays including The Merchant of Venice, The Jew of Malta, and The Tempest alongside lesser-known dramas such as Soliman and Perseda, Guy of Warwick, and The Travels of the Three English Brothers, Dramatic Geography illustrates, first, how early modern dramatists staging foreign worlds drew upon a romance tradition dating back to the medieval period, and second, how they responded to one another’s plays to create an ‘intertheatrical geography’. These strategies, the book argues, shape the plays’ wider meanings in important ways, and could only have operated within the theatrical environment peculiar to early modern London: one in which playwrights worked in close proximity, in one instance perhaps even living together while composing Mediterranean dramas, and one where they could expect audiences to respond to subtle generic and intertextual negotiations. In reassessing this group of plays, the book brings into conversation scholarship on theatre history, cultural encounter, and literary geography; it also contributes to current debates in early modern studies regarding the nature of dramatic authorship, the relationship between genre and history, and the continuities that run between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This book asks why Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights were so preoccupied with drugs and poisons, and why both critics and supporters of the theater as well as playwrights themselves so frequently adopted a chemical vocabulary to describe the effects of the theater on audiences. Drawing on original medical and literary research, it is shown that the potency of the link between drugs and plays in the period demonstrates a model of drama radically different than our own — a model in which plays exert an immediate impact on spectators’ bodies as well as minds. Early modern physiology held that the imagination and emotions were part of the body and exerted a material impact on it, yet scholars of medicine and drama alike have not recognized the consequences of this idea. Plays, which alter our emotions and thought, simultaneously change us physically. This book argues that the power of the theater in Shakespeare’s England as well as the striking hostility to it stems from the widely held contemporary idea that drama acted upon the body as well as the mind. In yoking together pharmacy and theater, this book offers a new model for understanding the relationship between texts and bodies. Just as bodies are constituted in part by the imaginative fantasies they consume, the theater’s success (and notoriety) depends on its power over spectators’ bodies.

Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas (1544–90) is an essential figure for understanding the diversity and strength of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poetry. His works were read, translated, and imitated more widely than any other non-biblical literary work in early modern England and Scotland, leading Scottish and French literary culture to shape the development of English epic poetry and inspire new kinds of popular devotional verse. Thanks to James VI and I’s support, Du Bartas’ scriptural poems became emblems of international Protestantism that were cherished even more highly in England and Scotland than on the continent. His creative vision helped inexperienced devotional writers to find a voice as well as providing a model that Protestant poets (like Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Anne Bradstreet, John Milton, and Lucy Hutchinson) would resist, transform, and, ultimately, reject. This long-needed book examines Du Bartas’ legacy in England and Scotland, sensitive to the different cultural situations in which his works were read, discussed, and creatively imitated. The first part shows how James VI of Scotland played a decisive role in the Huguenot poet’s reception history, culminating in Josuah Sylvester’s translation Devine Weekes and Workes (1605). The second examines seventeenth-century divine epic, religious narrative, and popular devotional verse forms that reworked Du Bartas’ poetic structures to introduce meditative and figurative components that provided new possibilities for imaginative expression.