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Spenser Studies is devoted to the study of Edmund Spenser as well as the poetry of Renaissance England. Contributions examine Spenser’s place in literary history, the social and religious contexts of his writing, and the philosophical and conceptual problems he grapples with in his art. The journal also features work on Renaissance literary culture, broadly conceived. Past issues have published studies ranging from the diction of Stephen Hawes to female authorship in Mary Wroth’s Urania to the influence of English Renaissance sonneteers on William Butler Yeats.

Spenser Studies is devoted to the study of Edmund Spenser as well as the poetry of Renaissance England. Contributions examine Spenser’s place in literary history, the social and religious contexts of his writing, and the philosophical and conceptual problems he grapples with in his art. The journal also features work on Renaissance literary culture, broadly conceived. Past issues have published studies ranging from the diction of Stephen Hawes to female authorship in Mary Wroth’s Urania to the influence of English Renaissance sonneteers on William Butler Yeats.

This study uncovers how Saint Cecilia came to be closely associated with music and musicians.

Until the fifteenth century, Saint Cecilia was not connected with music. She was perceived as one of many virgin martyrs, with no obvious musical skills or interests. During the next two centuries, however, she inspired many musical works written in her honor and a vast number of paintings that depicted her singing or playing an instrument.
 
In this book, John A. Rice argues that Cecilia’s association with music came about in several stages, involving Christian liturgy, visual arts, and music. It was fostered by interactions between artists, musicians, and their patrons and the transfer of visual and musical traditions from northern Europe to Italy. Saint Cecilia in the Renaissance explores the cult of the saint in Medieval times and through the sixteenth century when musicians’ guilds in the Low Countries and France first chose Cecilia as their patron. The book then turns to music and the explosion of polyphonic vocal works written in Cecilia’s honor by some of the most celebrated composers in Europe. Finally, the book examines the wealth of visual representations of Cecilia especially during the Italian Renaissance, among which Raphael’s 1515 painting, The Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia, is but the most famous example. Thoroughly researched and beautifully illustrated in color, Saint Cecilia in the Renaissance is the definitive portrait of Saint Cecilia as a figure of musical and artistic inspiration.

Explores the deployment of racial thinking and racial formations in the visual culture of the pre-modern world.
 
The capacious visual archive studied in this volume includes a trove of materials such as annotated or illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance costume books and travel books, maps and cartographic volumes produced by Europeans as well as Indigenous peoples, mass-printed pamphlets, jewelry, decorative arts, religious iconography, paintings from around the world, ceremonial objects, festival books, and play texts intended for live performance.

Contributors explore the deployment of what coeditor Noémie Ndiaye calls “the racial matrix” and its interconnected paradigms across the medieval and early modern chronological divide and across vast transnational and multilingual geographies. This volume uses items from the Fall 2023 exhibition “Seeing Race Before Race”—a collaboration between RaceB4Race and the Newberry Library—as a starting point for an ambitious theoretical conversation between premodern race studies, art history, performance studies, book history, and critical race theory.

Binge drinking and illicit sex were just as common in the Dutch Golden Age as they are today, if not more so. Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll in the Dutch Golden Age is a compelling narrative about the generation of young men that came of age in the Dutch Republic during the economic boom of the early seventeenth century. Contrary to their parents' wishes, the younger generation grew up in luxury and wore extravagant clothing, grew their hair long, and squandered their time drinking and smoking. They created a new youth culture with many excesses; one that we today associate with the counterculture generation of the 1960s.

With his engaging storytelling style and humorous anecdotes, Roberts convincingly reveals that deviant male youth behavior is common to all times, especially periods when youngsters have too much money and too much free time on their hands.

The history of modern-day old clothes recycling begins with a thing called shoddy. Starting in the early 1800s, shoddy was the name given to a new material made from reclaimed wool, and to one of the earliest forms of industrial recycling. Old rags and leftover fabric clippings were ground to bits by a machine known as “the devil” and then re-used. Usually undisclosed, shoddy–also known as reworked wool–became suit jackets, army blankets, mattress stuffing, and much more. Shoddy is the afterlife of rags. And Shoddy, the book, reveals hidden worlds of textile intrigue.
 
In Shoddy: From Devil’s Dust to the Renaissance of Rags, Hanna Rose Shell takes readers on a journey to discover shoddy, from Haiti to the “shoddy towns” of West Yorkshire in England, to the United States, back in time to the British cholera epidemics and the American Civil War, and into agricultural fields, textile labs, and rag-shredding factories. Shell’s narrative is both literary and historical, drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, from court cases to military uniforms, mattress labels to medical textbooks, political cartoons to high art. Shoddy moves between genres, bringing richly drawn characters and unexpected objects to life. Along the way, shoddy becomes equally an evocative object and a portal into another world.
 
Almost since the time it first appeared, shoddy was both ubiquitous and controversial. In part because it was often so hard to detect, it was inherently suspicious. Public health experts worried about sanitation and disease—how could old clothes be disinfected? As well, the idea of wearing someone else’s old clothes so close to your own skin was discomforting in and of itself. Could you sleep peacefully knowing that your mattress was very likely to be stuffed with dead soldiers’ overcoats? The use of the term “virgin” wool, the idea of virginity in relation to clothes, in fact emerged as an effort by the wool industry to counter shoddy’s appeal: to make shoddy seem shoddy. Over time, shoddy would capture a host of personal, ethical, commercial, and societal failings. And yet, there was always, within shoddy, the alluring concept of regeneration, of what we today think of as conscious clothing, eco-fashion, sustainable textiles.
 
Shell exposes an interwoven tale of industrial espionage, political infighting, scientific inquiry, ethnic prejudices, and war profiteering. Discarded clothes may make many journeys over the course of several lifetimes. Not only in your garments, but under your rug, in your mattress pads, piano blankets, in the peculiar confetti-like stuffing in your mailing envelopes, even in the insulation in your walls. Though it began with wool, over the past century the shredding “devil” has turned to synthetics from nylon stockings to Kevlar. Shoddy is likely connected to something you are wearing right now. After reading, you will never use the word shoddy or think about your clothes, the environment, sustainability, or the intermingled world around you the same way again.
 

This is volume 37 issue 1 of Spenser Studies. Spenser Studies is devoted to the study of Edmund Spenser as well as the poetry of Renaissance England. Contributions examine Spenser’s place in literary history, the social and religious contexts of his writing, and the philosophical and conceptual problems he grapples with in his art. The journal also features work on Renaissance literary culture, broadly conceived. Past issues have published studies ranging from the diction of Stephen Hawes to female authorship in Mary Wroth’s Urania to the influence of English Renaissance sonneteers on William Butler Yeats.

This is volume 38 issue 1 of Spenser Studies. Spenser Studies is devoted to the study of Edmund Spenser as well as the poetry of Renaissance England. Contributions examine Spenser’s place in literary history, the social and religious contexts of his writing, and the philosophical and conceptual problems he grapples with in his art. The journal also features work on Renaissance literary culture, broadly conceived. Past issues have published studies ranging from the diction of Stephen Hawes to female authorship in Mary Wroth’s Urania to the influence of English Renaissance sonneteers on William Butler Yeats.

This is volume 39 issue 1 of Spenser Studies. Spenser Studies is devoted to the study of Edmund Spenser as well as the poetry of Renaissance England. Contributions examine Spenser’s place in literary history, the social and religious contexts of his writing, and the philosophical and conceptual problems he grapples with in his art. The journal also features work on Renaissance literary culture, broadly conceived. Past issues have published studies ranging from the diction of Stephen Hawes to female authorship in Mary Wroth’s Urania to the influence of English Renaissance sonneteers on William Butler Yeats.

This is volume 40 issue 1 of Spenser Studies. Spenser Studies is devoted to the study of Edmund Spenser as well as the poetry of Renaissance England. Contributions examine Spenser’s place in literary history, the social and religious contexts of his writing, and the philosophical and conceptual problems he grapples with in his art. The journal also features work on Renaissance literary culture, broadly conceived. Past issues have published studies ranging from the diction of Stephen Hawes to female authorship in Mary Wroth’s Urania to the influence of English Renaissance sonneteers on William Butler Yeats.

Spenser Studies is devoted to the study of Edmund Spenser as well as the poetry of Renaissance England. Contributions examine Spenser’s place in literary history, the social and religious contexts of his writing, and the philosophical and conceptual problems he grapples with in his art. The journal also features work on Renaissance literary culture, broadly conceived. Past issues have published studies ranging from the diction of Stephen Hawes to female authorship in Mary Wroth’s Urania to the influence of English Renaissance sonneteers on William Butler Yeats.

Spenser Studies is devoted to the study of Edmund Spenser as well as the poetry of Renaissance England. Contributions examine Spenser’s place in literary history, the social and religious contexts of his writing, and the philosophical and conceptual problems he grapples with in his art. The journal also features work on Renaissance literary culture, broadly conceived. Past issues have published studies ranging from the diction of Stephen Hawes to female authorship in Mary Wroth’s Urania to the influence of English Renaissance sonneteers on William Butler Yeats.

Storytelling in Sixteenth-Century France is an innovative, interdisciplinary examination of parallels between the early modern era and the world in which we live today. Readers are invited to look to the past to see how then, as now, people turned to storytelling to integrate and adapt to rapid social change, to reinforce or restructure community, to sell new ideas, and to refashion the past. This collection explores different modalities of storytelling in sixteenth-century France and emphasizes shared techniques and themes rather than attempting to define narrow kinds of narrative categories. Through studies of storytelling in tapestries, stone, and music as well as distinct genres of historical, professional, and literary writing (addressing both erudite and more common readers), the contributors to this collection evoke a society in transition, wherein traditional techniques and materials were manipulated to express new realities. 

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

Syriac Christianity developed in the first centuries CE in the Middle East, where it continued to flourish throughout Late Antiquity and the Medieval period, while also spreading widely, as far as India and China. Today, Syriac Christians are found in the Middle East, in India, as well in diasporas scattered across the globe. Over this extended time period and across this vast geographic expanse, Syriac Christians have built impressive churches and monasteries, crafted fine pieces of art, and written and transmitted a sizable body of literature. Though often overlooked, neglected, and even persecuted, Syriac Christianity has been – and continues to be – an important part of the humanistic heritage of the last two millennia. The present volume brings together fourteen studies that offer fresh perspectives on Syriac Christianity, especially its literary texts and authors. The timeframes of the individual studies span from the second-century Syriac translation of the Hebrew Bible up to the thirteenth century with the end of the Syriac Renaissance. Several studies analyze key authors from Late Antiquity, such as Aphrahat, Ephrem, Narsai, and Jacob of Serugh. Others investigate translations into Syriac, both from Hebrew and from Greek, while still others examine hagiography, especially its formation and transmission. Reflecting a growing trend in the field, the volume also devotes significant attention to the Medieval period, during which Syriac Christians lived under Islamic rule. The studies in the volume are united in their quest to explore the richness, diversity, and vibrance of Syriac Christianity.