Results by title
23 books match the query 'Tudor & Elizabethan Era (1485-1603)'
A Saltire in the German Lands
Scottish Benedictine Monasteries in Germany 1575-1862Thomas McInally
Aberdeen University Press, 2017
Both from the Ears and Mind
Thinking about Music in Early Modern EnglandLinda Phyllis Austern
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion
Playhouses and Playgoers in Elizabethan EnglandWilliam N. West
University of Chicago Press, 2021
What if going to a play in Elizabethan England was more like attending a football match than a Broadway show—or playing in one? In Common Understandings, Poetic Confusion, William N. West proposes a new account of the kind of participatory entertainment expected by the actors and the audience during the careers of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. West finds surprising descriptions of these theatrical experiences in the figurative language of early modern players and playgoers—including understanding, confusion, occupation, eating, and fighting. Such words and ways of speaking are still in use today, but their earlier meanings, like that of theater itself, are subtly, importantly different from our own. Playing was not confined to the actors on the stage but filled the playhouse, embracing audiences and performers in collaborative experiences that did not belong to any one alone but to the assembled, various crowd. What emerged in playing was a kind of thinking and feeling distributed across persons and times that were otherwise distinct. Thrown apples, smashed bottles of beer, and lumbering bears—these and more gave verbal shape to the physical interactions between players and playgoers, creating circuits of exchange, production, and consumption.
Elizabethan Poetry in Manuscript
An Edition of British Library Harley MS 7392(2)Edited by Jessica Edmondes
Iter Press, 2022
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.
English Society
1580-1680Wrightson, Keith
Rutgers University Press, 2003
Four Shakespearean Period Pieces
Margreta de Grazia
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Yet recent theoretical work has called for their reappraisal. Anachronisms, previously condemned as errors in the order of time, are being hailed as alternatives to that order. Conversely chronology and periods, its mainstays, are now charged with having distorted the past they have been entrusted to represent, and secularization, once considered the driving force of the modern era, no longer holds sway over the past or the present.
In light of this reappraisal, can Shakespeare studies continue unshaken? This is the question Four Shakespearean Period Pieces takes up, devoting a chapter to each term: on the rise of anachronism, the chronologizing of the canon, the staging of plays “in period,” and the use of Shakespeare in modernity’s secularizing project.
To read these chapters is to come away newly alert to how these fraught concepts have served to regulate the canon’s afterlife. Margreta de Grazia does not entirely abandon them but deftly works around and against them to offer fresh insights on the reading, editing, and staging of the author at the heart of our literary canon.
Fêting the Queen
Civic Entertainments and the Elizabethan ProgressJohn M Adrian
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
While previous scholars have studied Elizabeth I and her visits to the homes of influential courtiers, Fêting the Queen places a new emphasis on the civic communities that hosted the monarch and their efforts to secure much needed support. Case studies of the cities of Oxford, Canterbury, Sandwich, Bristol, Worcester, and Norwich focus on the concepts of hospitality and space—including the intimate details of the built environment.
Imagining Mary Tudor, Queen of France
JoAnn DellaNeva
University of Delaware Press, 2027
This book examines early modern texts that portray Mary Tudor’s girlhood and betrothal to a foreign prince, her brief marriage to the aging king of France, and her untimely widowhood, as well as retrospective accounts that depict her life in France, her relationships with her husband and his heir apparent, and her surreptitious romance and clandestine marriage to an English duke. Here, texts from England are put into conversation with a significant body of work that was written in French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin, culminating in an examination of a novel from North America that passed itself off as a genuine sixteenth-century memoir. Author JoAnn DellaNeva also examines a spectrum of extra-literary texts—such as dialogues, popular songs, letters, speeches, portraiture, tapestries, fashion, jewelry, and book illuminations—for the ways they too helped shape Mary’s image. In so doing, she analyzes the intersection of history and literature, demonstrating how porous the borders between these disciplines can be. Through a series of close readings that are informed by an examination of the cultural context behind these texts, Imagining Mary Tudor, Queen of France seeks to explain how Mary’s fictional biography proved to be so slippery, vacillating between portrayals of her as a virtuous, generally powerless woman and as a wily and wicked minx.
John Dee
The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English RenaissanceWilliam H. Sherman
University of Massachusetts Press, 1995
John Dygon's Proportiones practicabiles secundum Gaffurium
New Critical Text, Translation, Annotations, and Indices by Theodor Dumitrescu
University of Illinois Press, 2006
A rare example of musical scholarship from the Tudor period, in translation and fully annotated
John Dygon was the prior of St. Augustine’s monastery in Canterbury when Henry VIII boldly dissolved the English Catholic Church during the 1530s and reorganized it under royal control. Only a single copy of Dygon’s manuscript on music theory has survived, held by Trinity College, Cambridge. This volume will be the first publication of these two treatises, providing both a scholarly transcription and English translation.
Dygon’s treatise provides a rare and important example of musical scholarship from the early Tudor period, demonstrating the status of music education at the time, the affiliations of English scholarship with music study in Europe, and the music that was actually performed in England. The treatises address questions of musical notation, especially regarding rhythmic proportions, as well as practical issues about performance. Theodor Dumitrescu’s introduction situates Dygon’s treatises within the larger history of European music, paying close attention to its borrowings from and adaptations of prior treatises.
Reading Practice
The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to PrintMelissa Reynolds
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Reading Practice tells the story of how ordinary people grew comfortable learning from commonplace manuscripts and printed books, such as almanacs, medical recipe collections, and herbals. From the turn of the fifteenth century to the close of the sixteenth century, these were the books English people read when they wanted to attend to their health or understand their place in the universe. Before then, these works had largely been the purview of those who could read Latin. Around 1400, however, medical and scientific texts became available in Middle English while manuscripts became less expensive. These vernacular manuscripts invited their readers into a very old and learned conversation: Hippocrates and Galen weren’t distant authorities whose word was law, they were trusted guides, whose advice could be excerpted, rearranged, recombined, and even altered to suit a manuscript compiler’s needs. This conversation continued even after the printing press arrived in England in 1476. Printers mined manuscripts for medical and scientific texts that they would publish throughout the sixteenth century, though the pressures of a commercial printing market encouraged printers to package these old texts in new ways. Without the weight of authority conditioning their reactions and responses to very old knowledge, and with so many editions of practical books to choose from, English readers grew into confident critics and purveyors of natural knowledge in their own right.
Melissa Reynolds reconstructs shifting attitudes toward medicine and science over two centuries of seismic change within English culture, attending especially to the effects of the Reformation on attitudes toward nature and the human body. Her study shows how readers learned to be discerning and selective consumers of knowledge gradually, through everyday interactions with utilitarian books.
Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars
A New Gallery of Tudor and Early Stuart Rogue Literature Exposing the Lives, Times, and Cozening Tricks of the Elizabethan UnderworldArthur F. Kinney
University of Massachusetts Press, 1990
In his introduction, Arthur F. Kinney discusses the significance of these works as protonovels and their influence on such writers as Shakespeare. He also explores the social, political, and economic conditions of a time that spawned a community of renegades who conned their way to fame, fortune, and, occasionally, the rope at Tyburn.
Selected Poetry, Prose, and Translations, with Contextual Materials
Anne Vaughan Lock
Iter Press, 2021
This volume provides a collection of Lock’s works presented in modern spelling, and it includes additional contemporary materials that place her voice in the larger context of the Tudor period, offering insight into the intertwined complexities of political, social, and religious life in sixteenth-century England.
Shakespeare Dwelling
Designs for the Theater of LifeJulia Reinhard Lupton
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Focusing on five works (Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale), Lupton remakes the concept of dwelling by drawing on a variety of sources, including modern design theory, Renaissance treatises on husbandry and housekeeping, and the philosophies of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. The resulting synthesis not only offers a new entry point into the contemporary study of environments; it also shows how Shakespeare’s works help us continue to make sense of our primal creaturely need for shelter.
Shakespeare and the Senses
Holly E. Dugan
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2024
Could something as seemingly natural as a smell, taste, sight, or sound be socially constructed and change over time? Shakespeare and the Senses argues that understanding the original conditions in which Shakespeare’s plays were performed allows us to explore the senses as both visceral, bodily experiences and constructed, social phenomena. As Ben Jonson famously wrote in the First Folio of 1623, Shakespeare can seem to be “not of an age, but for all time.” While this is clever marketing, Shakespeare did write his plays in a particular time and place far removed from our own. Many of his most powerful metaphors rely on sensory details—Aaron’s black hue; Cleopatra’s strange, invisible perfumes; Fluellen’s Welsh accent; Lady Macbeth’s overly scrubbed hands; Malvolio’s yellow stockings—which Elizabethan-era audiences may have understood very differently from us.
Shakespeare and the Senses draws on interdisciplinary research methods in the new field of sensory studies to expand our understanding of what Shakespeare meant to his first audiences.
Shakespearean Territories
Stuart Elden
University of Chicago Press, 2018
The Devonshire Manuscript
A Women's Book of Courtly PoetryLady Margaret Douglas and Others
Iter Press, 2012
—Jennifer Summit
Professor of English, Stanford University
The Experimental Fire
Inventing English Alchemy, 1300–1700Jennifer M. Rampling
University of Chicago Press, 2020
In medieval and early modern Europe, the practice of alchemy promised extraordinary physical transformations. Who would not be amazed to see base metals turned into silver and gold, hard iron into soft water, and deadly poison into elixirs that could heal the human body? To defend such claims, alchemists turned to the past, scouring ancient books for evidence of a lost alchemical heritage and seeking to translate their secret language and obscure imagery into replicable, practical effects.
Tracing the development of alchemy in England over four hundred years, from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the end of the seventeenth, Jennifer M. Rampling illuminates the role of alchemical reading and experimental practice in the broader context of national and scientific history. Using new manuscript sources, she shows how practitioners like George Ripley, John Dee, and Edward Kelley, as well as many previously unknown alchemists, devised new practical approaches to alchemy while seeking the support of English monarchs. By reconstructing their alchemical ideas, practices, and disputes, Rampling reveals how English alchemy was continually reinvented over the space of four centuries, resulting in changes to the science itself. In so doing, The Experimental Fire bridges the intellectual history of chemistry and the wider worlds of early modern patronage, medicine, and science.
The Lisle Letters
Edited by Muriel St. Clare Byrne
University of Chicago Press, 1981
The Politics of Courtly Dancing in Early Modern England
Skiles Howard
University of Massachusetts Press, 1998
Skiles Howard examines the social and semiotic complexities of dancing as it changed over time and performed different work in court, city, and playhouse. She shows how dancing reflected and shaped wider social changes: the performance of gender roles facilitated the formation of the patriarchal family, the execution of physical tropes of hierarchy supported the rise of a centralized state, and rehearsals of spatial mastery assisted the project of national expansion. As a visual and kinetic discourse by which social norms were circulated, dancing inevitably became a site of contestation; as elite and popular practices collided, interacted, and were transformed, countervailing social forces found expression through the medium of dancing.
Interdisciplinary in its approach, this study draws on court masque and popular drama, dancing manuals, Puritan pamphlets, and educational and medical treatises to explore issues of power and the body, gender and rank, popular culture and European expansion.
The Story of the Death of Anne Boleyn
A Poem by Lancelot de CarleEdited, Translated, and with Essays by JoAnn DellaNeva
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2021
The Story of the Death of Anne Boleyn is a critical edition and translation of a long narrative poem written by the secretary to the French ambassador in London within two weeks of Anne Boleyn’s execution. It was intended as a diplomatic dispatch, relating the astonishing news of the queen’s demise (along with that of five alleged lovers). Uniquely among diplomatic correspondence, this dispatch was written in verse form. It thus straddles the domains of literature and history, of chronicle and fiction.
The base text for this edition is a previously unstudied manuscript housed at the British Library. Variants are given from all other known manuscripts found in Europe, including several key verses that were previously unpublished and that shed new light on the interpretation of the poem. The book features a sense-for-sense translation into modern English in free verse form, along with extensive explanatory notes. It also provides a study focusing on the historical background to the poem, an essay on the poet and the reception of his work, and a literary analysis of the poem.
The Victoria History of Herefordshire
CradleyAnastasia Stylianou and Fergus Eskola-Oakes
University of London Press, 2025
Scenic and rural, the parish of Cradley stretches down westwards from the Malvern Hills, bordered by Worcestershire to the north and east. It is one of the largest parishes in Herefordshire, and from the medieval period to the nineteenth century was populous and prosperous. Cradley manor was a valuable holding of the medieval bishops of Hereford. The ecclesiastical benefice, Anglo-Saxon in origin, was equally lucrative, frequently passing nepotistically to well-connected young priests; however, such connections did not prevent one thirteenth-century rector being outlawed for murder! The expanding number of manors in the parish, from the thirteenth century onwards, resulted in a fragmented model of land ownership and the development of a powerful body of wealthy yeomanry, shaping the distinctive character of the parish and its governance in the early modern period.
Drawing extensively on local archival sources, this volume analyses, among other topics, the centrality of agriculture to the parish's story, charting Cradley's socio-economic growth from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, before its subsequent decline. As such, this book constitutes an important contribution to English local history, exploring the prosperity that could be enjoyed by parishes in fertile Eastern Herefordshire, and the impact of changes in the national economy upon rural, agrarian communities.
Witchcraft in England, 1558-1618
Barbara Rosen
University of Massachusetts Press, 1991
Anyone interested in manifestations of witchcraft in Elizabethan and Jacobean England will find this book an invaluable source. Barbara Rosen has gathered and edited a rare collection of documents—pamphlets, reports, trial accounts, and other material—that describes the experience, interpretation, and punishment of witchcraft in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
In her introduction, Rosen explores the full range of practices and beliefs associated with witchcraft and situates these phenomena in historical context. She explains how ignorance of science and medicine combined with social circumstance and religious ideology to shape popular perceptions and superstitions. Distinguishing between English and Continental forms of witchcraft, she also examines the legal definitions, disciplines, and punishments applied to wizards, witches, wise women, and conjures in the Elizabethan age.
The pamphlets and other original texts have been modernized in certain respects to make them more accessible to general readers. But the book retains its value for scholars: omissions are detailed in the notes and additions marked; obsolete words and grammar are explained in the glossary.
Originally published in England in 1970 under the title Witchcraft, this book appears now for the first time in paperback and includes a new preface by the editor.