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This expansive volume examines the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and other formations of identity in early modern representations of queens.

Race/Queer/Queens is a new intervention into the well-established field of queenship and royalty studies. Queens/(queans) are at once the epitome of royal power and the exemplum of gendered disenfranchisement. The essays in this volume address the interlocking methodologies of premodern critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, and queer and trans theory to shed light on how gendered negotiations of power, reproductive politics, and embodied performance are determined by and inscribed within a hierarchy of gender, race, class, religion, nationhood, and sexuality. Ranging across early modern drama, poetry, and prose by the likes of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Lucy Hutchinson, and Hester Pulter, the essays in Race/Queer/Queens offer new intersectional approaches to studies of early modern history, genealogy, embodiment, and the nation, including model methodologies and directions for future scholarship.

From 1932 to 1953, during the Black Chicago Renaissance, numerous literary events were held within and for the city’s Black community. In book clubs, public forums, print reviews, little magazines, local programming, and other public venues, Black women in particular debated the role of literature in racial uplift efforts, set literary standards, and acted as community gatekeepers for cultural production during a time known as the Black Chicago Renaissance. Through these inspiring efforts, a mix of publishers, well-known authors, and everyday readers significantly fostered a robust literary culture in the Windy City.

Reading the Renaissance constructs a reception history of the Black women who read and reviewed, published and promoted, and collected and curated literature of the era. Mary Unger interprets how local figures such as Vivian G. Harsh, Ora Morrow, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Browning, Fern Gayden, and Margaret Walker cultivated particular literary tastes through collective acts of reading and reception. She does so by recovering a network of readers, book clubs, literary magazines, civic programs, and book businesses that Black women created, led, and transformed during the early 1930s through the early 1950s in Bronzeville, Chicago’s predominantly Black South Side neighborhood.

This illuminating work includes close readings of texts alongside letters, scrapbooks, meeting minutes, reviews, and other ephemera of local reading practices to show how Black women facilitated diverse strategies of reading while instructing community members how to engage a variety of print cultures at the time. Unger demonstrates how Black women readers influenced individual authors as well as the norms and expectations of African American literature more broadly, becoming important (yet too often overlooked) players in American literary history.

In this fortieth volume of Renaissance Drama, we pause again, not with the idea that we could define, or even describe, what might be, ought to be, or is included in the study of Renaissance drama (or if it is even always or ever the Renaissance, or the drama, that we study). But this does not even seem to have been what moved the first conversations that became "Research Opportunities" and Renaissance Drama. Rather, as they seem to have felt, we want to look at where we are and where our studies might lead us, and we too think we might as well make a beginning. For this issue, the editors invited a number of scholars working on different kinds of Renaissance drama, in a variety of ways and in several languages, to contribute brief essays addressing the state of the field of Renaissance drama, "the field" being convenient shorthand for the practical but productive indefinition under which we carry out our research and publish Renaissance Drama. In particular we asked them to consider these questions:

• How and with what effects has the study of Renaissance drama (or early modern performance) changed over the past half-century?
• What now is Renaissance drama?　 What could Renaissance drama become?
• What do you see as the most exciting (or least productive) development in the field?
• How have other developments in literary studies, performance studies, or other historical periods affected work in the field?
• What is missing from work in the field that it would be desirable to include or revive?
• Are there strategies you would propose for working through the divisions in the field based on national boundaries, between languages and traditions, or between canonical figures like Shakespeare, Molière, and other kinds of work?　 What kinds of distinctions do you see in the field?　 How are they useful or misleading?
• What new avenues in the field should open up further?　 Where should we look now?
• What is the most important work being done, or remaining to be done?

The manuscript for Rivall Friendship was first acquired by the Newberry Library in 1937. At the time of the acquisition, the author of this seventeenth-century romance was anonymous. Scholar Jean R. Brink now suggests, based on dating of the manuscript and her analysis of its feminist themes, that the author was a woman. Specifically, Brink attributes the text to Bridget Manningham, who was the older sister of Thomas Manningham, a Jacobean and Caroline bishop, and the granddaughter of John Manningham, a diarist who recorded performances of Shakespeare’s plays. 

Rivall Friendship is a post–English Civil War romance that examines proto-feminist issues, such as patriarchal dominance in the family and marriage. Manningham is scrupulous about maintaining verisimilitude, and unlike more fantastical romances of the period that feature monsters, giants, and magic, this text aspires to a level of probability in its historical and geographical details. The text of Rivall Friendship is accessible to most modern readers, particularly to students and scholars accustomed to working with seventeenth-century texts.

Towering above printers of his time and their successors for many years afterward was the figure of Robert Estienne, the great French lexicographer of the sixteenth century, whose contribution to knowledge and its dissemination is the subject of this authoritative book. The span of Robert Estienne's life (1503–1559) encompassed the historical epochs and events which shaped his career: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the invention of printing by movable type. His keen interest in the revival of ancient literatures and languages and his training in the art of printing pointed the road he would travel, and the climate of opinion in the Reformation determined his destiny.

Robert Estienne promoted classical learning by printing the works of good authors; to spread knowledge of ancient literature he compiled dictionaries and grammars which were adopted by most of the universities of Europe. His dictionary of proper names of Biblical and classical origin, the Dictionarium historicum ac poeticum, became one of the great source books for later compilers of dictionaries and for authors. His influence on English writers was pervasive. Ben Jonson showed familiarity with his texts; Spenser and Milton sometimes set trarislations of his phraseology directly into their poetry. Perpetuation of the few errors he made is one sure proof that his dictionaries were used and copied.

An exemplar of learning in the classics and scripture, he searched in ancient manuscripts to avoid repeating the numerous errors that had crept into Bible translations over hundreds of years. For his efforts he was called a heretic by docteurs de theologie in the Sorbonne, but was protected by the royal favor of Francis I of France. Between attacks of theologians on the one side and the King's protection on the other, he became a "controversial" figure and after many years of calumny and persecution finally took refuge in Geneva.

Estienne established a family tradition of printing correct and beautiful books, and the printing establishments which made the name of Estienne celebrated throughout the world continued for 162 years.