From Shakespeare to Jonson, Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture looks at both the literature and culture of the early modern period. This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Considering literature alongside theatre, popular culture, race, gender, ecology, space, and other subjects, titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics.
Edited
By Gail Kern Paster, Nick Moschovakis
August 19, 2024
This volume convenes eight noted scholars with varied positions at the interface of formal and historical literary criticism. The editors’ introduction—a far-reaching account of how both methods have intersected in studies of early modern English texts since the 1990s—is the first such survey in ...
Edited
By William David Green, Anna L. Hegland, Sam Jermy
April 02, 2024
This volume celebrates Thomas Middleton’s legacy as a dramatist, marking the 400th anniversary of Middleton’s final and most contentious work for the public theatres, A Game at Chess (1624). The collection is divided into three sections: ‘Critical and Textual Reception’, ‘Afterlives and Legacies’, ...
By Michael Slater
April 02, 2024
Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution: Forms of Proof argues that the rise of mechanical science in the seventeenth century had a profound impact on both language and literature. To the extent that new ideas about things were accompanied by new attitudes toward words, what we commonly ...
By David A. Harper
December 20, 2023
Paradise Lost and the Making of English Literary Criticism identifies the early reception of Paradise Lost as a site of contest over the place of literature in political and religious controversy. Milton’s earliest readers and critics (Dryden, Addison, Dennis, Hume, and Bentley) confronted a poem ...
By Marie H. Loughlin
September 25, 2023
Focusing on Mary Sidney Herbert and Mary Sidney Wroth’s use of the figures of origin, descent, and inheritance in their poetry and prose, this book examines how these central women writers situated themselves in terms of early modern England’s rich ancestral cultures, employing these and other ...
Edited
By Isabel Jaén, Julien Jacques Simon
June 30, 2023
This book explores the work of Cervantes in relation to the ideas about the mind that circulated in early modern Europe and were propelled by thinkers such as Juan Luis Vives, Juan Huarte de San Juan, Oliva Sabuco, Andrés Laguna, Andrés Velásquez, Marsilio Ficino, and Gómez Pereira. The editors ...
By Sofie Kluge
May 31, 2023
Golden Age departures in historiography and theory of history in some ways prepared the ground for modern historical methods and ideas about historical factuality. At the same time, they fed into the period’s own "aesthetic-historical culture" which amalgamated fact and fiction in ways modern ...
By Alice Equestri
May 31, 2023
Fools and clowns were widely popular characters employed in early modern drama, prose texts and poems mainly as laughter makers, or also as ludicrous metaphorical embodiments of human failures. Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England: Folly, Law and Medicine, 1500–1640 pays ...
By Allison L. Steenson
May 31, 2023
This book explores the unedited material contained in the Hawthornden manuscripts of William Fowler, a Scottish poet attached to the court of Queen Anna of Denmark between 1590 and 1612. The material is representative of Fowler’s ephemeral and occasional production, largely unknown to modern ...
Edited
By Mandy Green, Sharihan Al-Akhras
May 31, 2023
This volume of essays reconfigures the reception history of Milton and his works by bringing to the fore women reading, writing, and rewriting Milton, bringing together in conversation a range of voices from diverse historical, cultural, religious, and social contexts across the globe and through ...
By Rosamund Paice
April 25, 2023
This book is about the multiple loves of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained: sanctioned loves and outlawed loves, sincere loves and false loves, Christian loves, classical loves, humanist loves, and love as emotion. In showing how these loves motivate the most significant actions of the Paradise ...
By Erika D'Souza
November 04, 2022
Robert Sidney, the first Earl of Leicester (1563–1626), serves as an exemplar of an Elizabethan nobleman who had in his collection a body of work pertinent to the subject of masculine honour in the private realm. Understanding the nuances and evolution of the term private honour as it is ...