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Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 12 is a predominantly Welsh-language miscellany that also contains texts in Middle English and Latin. On folio 79v is the inscription ‘Llyfr Hugh Evans yw hwn Anno 1583’, that is ‘This is Hugh Evans’s book, in the year 1583’. As a miscellany the manuscript is of interest as much for what it suggests about the process of compilation as for its contents, for while it is in one sense of the late 16th century, a number of significant parts are gatherings from medieval manuscripts, both Welsh and English. The evidence of the process of compilation that the manuscript yields has much to suggest about the interplay between Welsh-language and English-language culture over a broad historical perspective, and this raises questions about the linguistic and cultural history of medieval and early modern Wales.

For a significant part of the early modern period, England was the most active site of recipe publication in Europe and the only country in which recipes were explicitly addressed to housewives.Recipes for Thoughtanalyzes, for the first time, the full range of English manuscript and printed recipe collections produced over the course of two centuries. Recipes reveal much more than the history of puddings and pies: they expose the unexpectedly therapeutic, literate, and experimental culture of the English kitchen. Wendy Wall explores ways that recipe writing-like poetry and artisanal culture-wrestled with the physical and metaphysical puzzles at the center of both traditional humanistic and emerging \"scientific\" cultures. Drawing on the works of Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, and others to interpret a reputedly \"unlearned\" form of literature, she demonstrates that people from across the social spectrum concocted poetic exercises of wit, experimented with unusual and sometimes edible forms of literacy, and tested theories of knowledge as they wrote about healing and baking. Recipe exchange, we discover, invited early modern housewives to contemplate the complex components of being a Renaissance \"maker\" and thus to reflect on lofty concepts such as figuration, natural philosophy, national identity, status, mortality, memory, epistemology, truth-telling, and matter itself. Kitchen work, recipes tell us, engaged vital creative and intellectual labors.

Becoming Christian argues that romance narratives of Jews and Muslims converting to Christianity register theological formations of race in post-Reformation England. The medieval motif of infidel conversion came under scrutiny as Protestant theology radically reconfigured how individuals acquire religious identities. Whereas Catholicism had asserted that Christian identity begins with baptism, numerous theologians in the Church of England denied the necessity of baptism and instead treated Christian identity as a racial characteristic passed from parents to their children. The church thereby developed a theology that both transformed a nation into a Christian race and created skepticism about the possibility of conversion. Race became a matter of salvation and damnation. Britton intervenes in critical debates about the intersections of race and religion, as well as in discussions of the social implications of romance. Examining English translations of Calvin, treatises on the sacraments, catechisms, and sermons alongside works by Edmund Spenser, John Harrington, William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, and Phillip Massinger, Becoming Christian demonstrates how a theology of race altered a nation's imagination and literary landscape.

Animal Bodies, Renaissance Cultureexamines how the shared embodied existence of early modern human and nonhuman animals challenged the establishment of species distinctions. The material conditions of the early modern world brought humans and animals into complex interspecies relationships that have not been fully accounted for in critical readings of the period's philosophical, scientific, or literary representations of animals. Where such prior readings have focused on the role of reason in debates about human exceptionalism, this book turns instead to a series of cultural sites in which we find animal and human bodies sharing environments, mutually transforming and defining one another's lives. To uncover the animal body's role in anatomy, eroticism, architecture, labor, and consumption, Karen Raber analyzes canonical works including More'sUtopia, Shakespeare'sHamletandRomeo and Juliet, and Sidney's poetry, situating them among readings of human and equine anatomical texts, medical recipes, theories of architecture and urban design, husbandry manuals, and horsemanship treatises. Raber reconsiders interactions between environment, body, and consciousness that we find in early modern human-animal relations. Scholars of the Renaissance period recognized animals' fundamental role in fashioning what we call \"culture,\" she demonstrates, providing historical narratives about embodiment and the cultural constructions of species difference that are often overlooked in ecocritical and posthumanist theory that attempts to address the \"question of the animal.\"

Using both canonical and underappreciated texts, Alien Albion argues that early modern England was far less unified and xenophobic than literary critics have previously suggested. Juxtaposing literary texts from the period with legal, religious, and economic documents, Scott Oldenburg uncovers how immigrants to England forged ties with their English hosts and how those relationships were reflected in literature that imagined inclusive, multicultural communities. Through discussions of civic pageantry, the plays of dramatists including William Shakespeare, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Middleton, the poetry of Anne Dowriche, and the prose of Thomas Deloney, Alien Albion challenges assumptions about the origins of English national identity and the importance of religious, class, and local identities in the early modern era.

Shakespeare's Schoolroomplaces moments of considerable emotional power in Shakespeare's poetry-portraits of what his contemporaries called \"the passions\"-alongside the discursive and material practices of sixteenth-century English pedagogy. Humanist training in Latin grammar and rhetorical facility was designed to intervene in social reproduction, to sort out which differences between bodies (male and female) and groups (aristocrats, the middling sort, and those below) were necessary to producing proper English \"gentlemen.\" But the method adopted by Lynn Enterline in this book uncovers a rather different story from the one schoolmasters invented to promote the social efficacy of their pedagogical innovations. Beginning with the observation that Shakespeare frequently reengaged school techniques through the voices of those it excluded (particularly women), Enterline shows that when his portraits of \"love\" and \"woe\" betray their institutional origins, they reveal both the cost of a Latin education as well as the contradictory conditions of genteel masculinity in sixteenth-century Britain. In contrast to attempts to explain early modern emotion in relation to medical discourse, Enterline uncovers the crucial role that rhetoric and the texts of the classical past play in Shakespeare's passions. She relies throughout on the axiom that rhetoric has two branches that continuously interact: tropological (requiring formal literary analysis) and transactional (requiring social and historical analysis). Each chapter moves between grammar school archives and literary canon, using linguistic, rhetorical, and literary detail to illustrate the significant difference between what humanists claimed their methods would achieve and what the texts of at least one former schoolboy reveal about the institution's unintended literary and social consequences. When Shakespeare creates the convincing effects of character and emotion for which he is so often singled out as a precursor of \"modern\" subjectivity, he signals his debt to the Latin institution that granted him the cultural capital of an early modern gentleman precisely when undercutting the socially normative categories schoolmasters invoked as their educational goal.

This book examines writing in English, Irish, and Spanish by women living in Ireland and by Irish women living on the continent between the years 1574 and 1676. This was a tumultuous period of political, religious, and linguistic contestation that encompassed the key power‐struggles of early modern Ireland. This study brings to light the ways in which women contributed; they strove to be heard and to make sense of their situations, forging space for their voices in complex ways and engaging with native and new language‐traditions. The book investigates the genres in which women wrote: poetry, nuns' writing, petition‐letters, depositions, biography, and autobiography. It argues for a complex understanding of authorial agency that centres on the act of creating or composing a text, which does not necessarily equate with the physical act of writing. The Irish, English, and European contexts for women's production of texts are identified and assessed. The literary traditions and languages of the different communities living on the island are juxtaposed in order to show how identities were shaped and defined in relation to each other. The book elucidates the social, political, and economic imperatives for women's writing, examines the ways in which women characterized female composition, and describes an extensive range of cross‐cultural, multilingual activity.

Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature explores the early modern interest in conversation as a newly identified art. Conversation was widely accepted to have been inspired by the republican philosopher Cicero. Recognizing his influence on courtesy literature - the main source for 'civil conversation' - Jennifer Richards uncovers alternative ways of thinking about humanism as a project of linguistic and social reform. She argues that humanists explored styles of conversation to reform the manner of association between male associates; teachers and students, buyers and sellers, and settlers and colonial others. They reconsidered the meaning of 'honesty' in social interchange in an attempt to represent the tension between self-interest and social duty. Richards explores the interest in civil conversation among mid-Tudor humanists, John Cheke, Thomas Smith and Roger Ascham, as well as their self-styled successors, Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser.

Blotted Lines rebuffs centuries of mythologization about the creative process-the idea that William Shakespeare \"never blotted out line\"-to argue that by studying how early modern writers faced the challenges of writing poetry, instructors today can empower their students' approaches to critical writing. Adhaar Noor Desai offers deeply researched accounts of how poetic labor intersected with early modern rhetorical theory, material culture, and social networks. Tracing the productive struggles of such writers as George Gascoigne, Philip Sidney, John Davies of Hereford, Lady Anne Southwell, and Shakespeare across their manuscripts, Desai identifies in their work instances of discomposition: frustration, hesitation, self-doubt, and insecurity. Inspired to unmake their poems so that they might remake them, these poets welcomed discomposition because it catalyzed ongoing thinking and learning. Blotted Lines brings literary scholarship into conversation with modern composition studies, challenging early modern literary studies to treat writing as both noun and verb and foregrounding the ways poetry and criticism alike can model for students the cultivation of patience, collaboration, and risk in their writing.

Tradition, translation, and transcription in Henrician verse functioned together in systems of communally created, coded position-taking. Understanding this system as an extensive network of production and reception in which women took on many roles allows for new readings of Henrician verse that emphasize the interpretive range available to contemporary reading and writing communities. This restoration demasculinizes our approach to Henrician verse not only through a more equitable consideration of gender's functions in that social world, but also in de-emphasizing individualized self-fashioning or authorial intent in favor of an engagement with communal production and shared sociopolitical engagement. The creation in this system is not of a code, but of systems for coding and recognizing position-taking. These communal systems offer a site for the intersection of reader and writer, of transcriber and composer, and of King and courtier in a space that questions, creates, and troubles power in the Henrician court.