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1. England in the Age of Shakespeare focuses on Shakespeare's plays (not the poetry) and explores everything from everyday life to the political, scientific, and religious climate of the era. 2. The topics covered are of perennial interest both in schools as well as for general audiences interested in learning more about what real life was like in Elizabethan England. Author Jeremy Black is a master of the sweeping introduction written for a general audience. 3. This book would be ideal for use in high school or college course adoption. The language throughout is aimed at a general reader, the pacing is quick, and the content is not loaded down with too many footnotes or academic digressions. How did it feel to hear Macbeth's witches chant of \"double, double toil and trouble\" at a time when magic and witchcraft were as real as anything science had to offer? How were justice and forgiveness understood by the audience who first watchedKing Lear; how were love and romance viewed by those who first sawRomeo and Juliet? InEngland in the Age of Shakespeare, Jeremy Black takes readers on a tour of life in the streets, homes, farms, churches, and palaces of the Bard's era. Panning from play to audience and back again, Black shows how Shakespeare's plays would have been experienced and interpreted by those who paid to see them. From the dangers of travel to the indignities of everyday life in teeming London, Black explores the jokes, political and economic references, and small asides that Shakespeare's audiences would have recognized. These moments of recognition often reflected the audience's own experiences of what it was to, as Hamlet says, \"grunt and sweat under a weary life.\" Black's clear and sweeping approach seeks to reclaim Shakespeare from the ivory tower and make the plays' histories more accessible to the public for whom the plays were always intended.

Humanism and America provides a major study of the impact of the Renaissance and Renaissance humanism upon the English colonization of America. The analysis is conducted through an interdisciplinary examination of a broad spectrum of writings on colonization, ranging from the works of Thomas More to those of the Virginia Company. Andrew Fitzmaurice shows that English expansion was profoundly neo-classical in inspiration, and he excavates the distinctively humanist tradition that informed some central issues of colonization: the motivations of wealth and profit, honour and glory; the nature of and possibilities for liberty; and the problems of just title, including the dispossession of native Americans. Dr Fitzmaurice presents a colonial tradition which, counter to received wisdom, is often hostile to profit, nervous of dispossession and desirous of liberty. Only in the final chapters does he chart the rise of an aggressive, acquisitive and possessive colonial ideology.

Investigates Lipsian ideas in the moral, political, and literary culture of late 16nth- and early 17th-century England through examination of the writings and activities of Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Fulke Greville, Ben Jonson, and Joseph Hall.

InFair Copies, Matthew Zarnowiecki argues that poetic production was re-envisioned during this period, which was rife with models of copying and imitation, to include reproduction as one of its inherent attributes.

Exploiting Erasmusexamines the legacy of Erasmus in England from the mid-sixteenth century to the overthrow of James II in 1688 and studies the various ways in which his works were received, manipulated, and used in religious controversies that threatened both church and state.

This book explores the streets, shops, back alleys, and gardens of Elizabethan London, where a boisterous and diverse group of men and women shared a keen interest in the study of nature. These assorted merchants, gardeners, barber-surgeons, midwives, instrument makers, mathematics teachers, engineers, alchemists, and other experimenters Deborah Harkness contends formed a patchwork scientific community whose practices set the stage for the Scientific Revolution. While Francis Bacon has been widely regarded as the father of modern science, scores of his London contemporaries also deserve a share in this distinction. It was their collaborative, yet often contentious, ethos that helped to develop the ideals of modern scientific research. The book examines six particularly fascinating episodes of scientific inquiry and dispute in sixteenth-century London, bringing to life the individuals involved and the challenges they faced. These men and women experimented and invented, argued and competed, waged wars in the press, and struggled to understand the complexities of the natural world. Together their stories illuminate the blind alleys and surprising twists and turns taken as medieval philosophy gave way to the empirical, experimental culture that became a hallmark of the Scientific Revolution.

Outlining the full range of practises that publishers performed, including the acquisition of copy and titles, compiling, alteration to texts, and reissuing,Elizabethan Publishing and the Makings of Literary Cultureconsiders links between the book trade and the literary culture of Elizabethan England.

Thomas More is a complex and controversial figure who has been regarded as both saint and persecutor, leading humanist and a representative of late medieval culture. His religious writings, with their stark and at times violent attacks on what More regarded as heresy, have been hotly debated. In Writing Faith and Telling Tales , Thomas Betteridge sets More's writings in a broad cultural and chronological context, compares them to important works of late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century vernacular theology, and makes a compelling argument for the revision of existing histories of Thomas More and his legacy. Betteridge focuses on four areas of More's writings: politics, philosophy, theology, and devotion. He examines More's History of King Richard III as a work of both history and political theory. He discusses Utopia and the ways in which its treatment of reason reflects More's Christian humanism. By exploring three of More's lesser known works, The Supplication of Souls , The Confutation , and The Apology , Betteridge demonstrates that More positioned his understanding of heresy within and against a long tradition of English anti-heretical writing, as represented in the works of Hoccleve, Lydgate, and Love. Finally, Betteridge focuses on two key concepts for understanding More's late devotional works: prayer and the book of Christ. In both cases, Betteridge claims, More seeks to develop a distinctive position that combines late medieval devotionalism with an Augustinian emphasis on the ethics of writing and reading. Writing Faith and Telling Tales poses important questions concerning periodization and confessionalization and will influence future work on the English Reformation and humanist writing in England.

This book is a unique study of a neglected period of English writing. It places mid-Tudor literature within the context of important debates about English nationhood, the nature of the English Reformation and English humanism, the growth of the political nation, and how Renaissance writers constructed authorial identities in manuscript and print.

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.