Your Search Results

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        October 2025

        Early modern drama and the theatre of war

        Militarism, conflict and disruption in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries

        by Bronwen Price, Hilary Hinds

        This volume explores the disruptive effects of militarism, war and social unrest in early modern drama. Engaging with Simon Barker's seminal work on dramatic representations of war and militarism, contributors highlight what often lies hidden beneath the surface of martial narratives, treating them as formative interventions in contemporary discourses, whether in justifying war, excluding dissident voices or shaping cultural identities. Discussions include new examinations of militarism, the figure of the soldier and early modern theories of war in Shakespearean tragedy, history and comedy, alongside antimasque and dramatic satire by lesser-known playwrights. The essays investigate how ideas of war underpin emerging concepts of gender, leadership, marriage and the family, as well as the continuing mobilisation of Shakespearean drama in the context of modern armed conflict. Together, they offer rich new contributions to the current lively critical debates on this topic.

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        February 2020

        The senses in early modern England, 1558–1660

        by Simon Smith, Jacqueline Watson, Amy Kenny

        Considering a wide range of early modern texts, performances and artworks, the essays in this collection demonstrate how attention to the senses illuminates the literature, art and culture of early modern England. Examining canonical and less familiar literary works alongside early modern texts ranging from medical treatises to conduct manuals via puritan polemic and popular ballads, the collection offers a new view of the senses in early modern England. The volume offers dedicated essays on each of the five senses, each relating works of art to their cultural moments, whilst elsewhere the volume considers the senses collectively in particular cultural contexts. It also pursues the sensory experiences that early modern subjects encountered through the very acts of engaging with texts, performances and artworks. This book will appeal to scholars of early modern literature and culture, to those working in sensory studies, and to anyone interested in the art and life of early modern England.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        July 2015

        The senses in early modern England, 1558–1660

        by Edited by Simon Smith, Jackie Watson and Amy Kenny

        Considering a wide range of early modern texts, performances and artworks, the essays in this collection demonstrate how attention to the senses illuminates the literature, art and culture of early modern England. Examining canonical and less familiar literary works alongside early modern texts ranging from medical treatises to conduct manuals via puritan polemic and popular ballads, the collection offers a new view of the senses in early modern England. The volume offers dedicated essays on each of the five senses, each relating works of art to their cultural moments, whilst elsewhere the volume considers the senses collectively in particular cultural contexts. It also pursues the sensory experiences that early modern subjects encountered through the very acts of engaging with texts, performances and artworks. This book will appeal to scholars of early modern literature and culture, to those working in sensory studies, and to anyone interested in the art and life of early modern England. ;

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        July 2021

        Old Fortunatus

        By Thomas Dekker

        by David McInnis

        With its fantasy of magical travel and inexhaustible riches, Thomas Dekker's Old Fortunatus is the quintessential early modern journeying play. The adventures of Fortunatus and his sons, aided by a magical purse and wishing-hat, offers the period's most overt celebration of the pleasures of travel, as well as a sustained critique of the dangers of intemperance and prodigality. Written following a period of financial difficulty for Dekker, the play is also notable for its fascination with the symbolic, mercantile and ethical uses of gold. This Revels Plays edition is the first fully annotated, single-volume critical edition of Old Fortunatus. It offers scholarly discussion of the play's performance and textual history, including attention to the German version printed and performed in the early seventeenth century. It provides a long overdue critical reappraisal of this unjustly neglected play.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 2002

        Sodomy in early modern Europe

        by Joseph Bergin, Tom Betteridge, Penny Roberts, Bill Naphy

        This fascinating collection of essays reflects closely the main areas of debate within gay historiography. For the last twenty years scholars have argued over the nature of early modern sodomy, responding in a number of different and contradictory ways. Questions addressed in the book include: was early modern sodomy the same as modern homosexuality? Were there homosexuals in early modern Europe? Did men who had sex with each other in this period regard their behaviour as determining their identity? What was the relationship between the grave sin of sodomy and the homoerotic images that fill Renaissance culture?. The volume includes essays on sodomy in English Protestant history writing, in Calvin's Geneva, in early modern Venice and the trial of sodomy in Germany. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2005

        Early modern women's manuscript poetry

        by Jill Millman, Gillian Wright

        'Early modern women's manuscript poetry' is an anthology of texts by fourteen women poets writing between 1589 and 1706. It is the only currently available anthology of early modern women's writing which focuses exclusively on manuscript material. Authors include Mary Sidney, Lucy Hutchinson and Katherine Philips; central figures in the emerging canon of early modern women writers, but whose work appears in a fresh and very different light in the manuscript context emphasised by this anthology. The volume also includes substantial excerpts from a recently discovered verse paraphrase of Genesis, thought to be by the previously unknown seventeenth-century writer Mary Roper, as well as selections from the unjustly neglected poet, Hester Pulter. The mix of canonical and non-canonical writers makes this book ideal for use on undergraduate and early postgraduate courses, while specialists will be particularly interested in the sophisticated and varied material taken from less familiar sources. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2023

        The supernatural in early modern Scotland

        by Julian Goodare, Martha McGill

        This book is about other worlds and the supernatural beings, from angels to fairies, that inhabited them. It is about divination, prophecy, visions and trances. And it is about the cultural, religious, political and social uses to which people in Scotland put these supernatural themes between 1500 and 1800. The supernatural consistently provided Scots with a way of understanding topics such as the natural environment, physical and emotional wellbeing, political events and visions of past and future. In exploring the early modern supernatural, the book has much to reveal about how men and women in this period thought about, debated and experienced the world around them. Comprising twelve chapters by an international range of scholars, The supernatural in early modern Scotland discusses both popular and elite understandings of the supernatural.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 2026

        Visual arts and medicine in early modern Europe and beyond

        A collection of essays and sources

        by Robert Brennan, Fabian Jonietz, Romana Sammern

        This book opens up new perspectives on the relationship between art, medicine, and science in late-medieval and early modern Europe. Looking beyond the traditional nexus of art, anatomy, and optics, the volume sheds light on a broader array of connections between artists and physicians: collaborations between painters and doctors on colour charts, handwork skills common to sculptors and surgeons, the transmission of art theory through medical texts long before the emergence of art writing itself as an independent genre, and the kinship of medical diagnosis with early modes of connoisseurship. Reconfiguring the histories of art, medicine, and science, the book also traverses conventional boundaries between physical and mental health, religious and medical modes of healing, menial and exalted forms of knowledge and labour, as well as vernacular and scientific understandings of human difference, including gender, race, and neurodiversity.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2021

        Religion and life cycles in early modern England

        by Caroline Bowden, Emily Vine, Tessa Whitehouse

        Religion and life cycles in early modern England assembles scholars working in the fields of history, English literature and art history to further our understanding of the intersection between religion and the life course in the period c. 1550-1800. Featuring chapters on Catholic, Protestant and Jewish communities, it encourages cross-confessional comparison between life stages and rites of passage that were of religious significance to all faiths in early modern England. The book considers biological processes such as birth and death, aspects of the social life cycle including schooling, coming of age and marriage and understandings of religious transition points such as spiritual awakenings and conversion. Through this inclusive and interdisciplinary approach, it seeks to show that the life cycle was not something fixed or predetermined and that early modern individuals experienced multiple, overlapping life cycles.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        July 2025

        Strange matter

        Medieval disruptions of time

        by Martin Bleisteiner, Jan-Peer Hartmann, Andrew James Johnston

        Medieval and early modern texts reflect a fascination with material objects, from ancient heirlooms to ingenious automata. Often imbued with power or beauty, these objects carry an uncanny sense of otherness, their mysterious origins evoking wonder and suggesting temporal and spatial distance. Acting as repositories of temporal alterity, such artefacts bridge the past and present in profound ways. This volume, featuring contributions from experts in literature and art history, explores how texts from these periods use material objects to engage with temporal otherness. From everyday items to marvellous creations, objects challenge distinctions between human and material, natural and cultural. Whether examining the hybrid status of Hector's body in Lydgate's Troy Book or the temporal agency of humble bubbles, the chapters illuminate the vibrant networks connecting people and objects. By highlighting the 'hybridity' of matter, the book offers fresh insights into Bruno Latour's critique of nature-culture divides.

      • Trusted Partner
        History of medicine
        November 2011

        Women's medical work in early modern France

        by Susan Broomhall

        Women have long been crucial to the provision of medical services, both in the treatment of sickness and in maintaining health. In this study, Susan Broomhall situates the practices and perceptions of women's medical work in France in the context of the sixteenth century and its medical evolution and innovations. She argues that early modern understandings of medical practice and authority were highly flexible and subject to change. She furthermore examines how a focus on female practitioners, who cut across most sectors of early modern medical practice, can reveal the multifaceted phenomenon of these negotiations for authority. This new paperback edition of Women's medical work in early modern France skilfully combines detailed research with a clear presentation of the existing literature of women's medical work, making it invaluable to students of gender and medical history.

      Subscribe to our

      newsletter