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This volume presents the first printed edition of a late sixteenth-century poetic miscellany and provides invaluable insight into understanding the literature of the period. Its owner and principal scribe, Humfrey Coningsby, drew on texts circulating in manuscript , predominantly by contemporary writers of the time—including Philip Sidney, Edward Dyer, Arthur Gorges, Walter Ralegh, Elizabeth I, the Earl of Oxford, Nicholas Breton, George Peele, and Thomas Watson. Coningsby also added at least two of his own compositions, along with anonymous poems not found in any other manuscripts or printed books.

This edition preserves the appearance, spelling, and punctuation of the original manuscript while expanding antiquated contractions to provide an easily readable text. Textual notes appear on the page, and in-depth contextual notes and word glosses are provided in the commentary section. The analyses add to our knowledge of early modern manuscript culture and literary manuscript transmission, and a substantial introduction provides context for the compilation of the anthology.

England's Asian Renaissance explores how Asian knowledges, narratives, and customs inflected early modern English literature. Just as Asian imports changed England's tastes and enriched the English language, Eastern themes, characters, and motifs helped shape the country's culture and contributed to its national identity. Questioning long-standing dichotomies between East and West and embracing a capacious understanding of translatio as geographic movement, linquistic transformation, and cultural grafting, the collection gives pride of place to convergence, approximation, and hybridity, thus underscoring the radical mobility of early modern culture. In so doing, England's Asian Renaissance also moves away from entrenched narratives of Western cultural sovereignty to think anew England's debts to Asia.

Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

English Mercuries examines war and literature through the writings of veterans who came home from their deployments to pursue literary careers. From their often neglected writings emerges a new picture of the Elizabethan world at war. For centuries Elizabethan England has been characterized by booming patriotism and martial energy, and the literature of this period, epitomized in works like Shakespeare's Henry V, has been seen as celebrating a proud and defiant kingdom unified around its wars with Spain. Beneath this patriotic veneer, however, was a country withering under the costs of seemingly endless military commitments and ripped apart by doubts about the purpose of war and mistrust of state officials who advanced their own political interests through war at the expense of the people who had to fight and pay for it.

These misgivings are a powerful undercurrent in much of the literature of the period, even the most ostensibly patriotic works, but it is in the writings on war by soldier poets where they are most clearly pronounced. Fashioning themselves as servants of both Mars and Mercury (the god of war and the god of writing), Elizabethan soldier poets focused their war stories on the gritty realities of military campaigning, the price individuals paid for serving the state, and the difficulties of returning to civilian life. The book reconsiders some familiar writers like John Donne and Ben Jonson in the context of their military experiences and provides comprehensive studies of some important but underappreciated soldier poets like Thomas Churchyard, George Gascoigne, and John Harington.

Explores what an object tells us about the culture that created it. If certain objects work well, no one notices them. As with "black boxes," their success may be gauged by their relative invisibility-and this was the indirect goal of the objects that Julian Yates considers here: the portrait miniature, the relic, the privy (flush toilet), the printed text, and the priest-hole (a secret hiding place for Catholic priests in Protestant England). Because each of these contrivances was prone to error, misuse, and sometimes catastrophic failure, they become in Yates's analysis an occasion for recasting the history of the English Renaissance as object lessons-"knowing from the point of view of the known." It is through such lapses-the texts and stories generated to explain away a relic that is too easily faked, a miniature that is too curiously real, the stench of a failing privy, a book that persistently sheds its pages, or the presence of so much "papist trash" in an ostensibly reformed England-that Yates recovers the silent work of "things" in cultural production. Drawing object lessons from failing technological devices, Error, Misuse, Failure plumbs the foundations of Renaissance culture in England, recovering a curious language of mistakes, dirt, and parasitism that associates the failures of these "things" with the figures of Rome, Catholicism, and Sodom. Yates offers a mode of historical inquiry rooted in material culture, sensitive to the way humans induct nonhumans (animals, plants, and manufactured things) into their communities. Historically, the book offers a new set of stories about the rise of printing, the development of domestic architecture, and England's Catholic community-stories that remind readers of the ways in which attending to the history of nonhumans requires a radical rethinking of historical landmarks and boundaries. Julian Yates is associate professor of English at the University of Delaware.