Hannah Crawforth

Russ Leo

In 1994, Debora K. Shuger published her field-changing study, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice and Subjectivity. Shuger’s book offers a wide-reaching and intellectually ambitious exploration of the centrality of the inter-connected discourses of literature and theology in the period. Throughout, Shuger troubles prevailing assumptions about religion and its purview by expanding the archive of "religious writing" far beyond the devotional poetry and prose that had so long been the province of literary history. Shuger deftly traces the connections between biblical scholarship and the histories of politics, nations and peoples, languages, and law, as well as to the most important literary forms of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance: tragedy (ancient and modern), "mythology," and the genres of affective devotion that depict Christ’s inestimable suffering. The Renaissance Bible discovers how early modern readers rendered the worlds of Scripture intelligible, even palpable, and how they located themselves and their endeavors in a history they shared with classical and biblical antecedents alike. The essays collected here lay bare the extraordinary powers and resources of The Renaissance Bible, with contributions by leading scholars of early modernity: Anthony Grafton, Brian Cummings, Russ Leo, Beth Quitslund, and Achsah Guibbory. The chapters in this book were originally published in Reformation.

The Renaissance Bible Today

Scholarship, Sacrifice and Subjectivity

Sarah Dustagheer

Jennifer Young

An innovative book looking at how London influenced Shakespeare's drama and how it is so often the true city at the heart of his plays, be it Venice, Rome or even Prospero's Island.

Shakespeare in London

Elizabeth Scott-Baumann

Clare Whitehead

Shakespeare's Sonnets both generate and demonstrate many of today's most pressing debates about Shakespeare and poetry. They explore history and aesthetics, gender and society, time and memory, and continue to invite divergent responses from critics and poets. This freeze-frame volume showcases the range of current debate and ideas surrounding these still startling poems. Each chapter has been carefully selected for its originality and relevance to the needs of students, teachers, and researchers. Key themes and topics covered include: Textual issues and editing the sonnets Reception, interpretation and critical history of the sonnets The place of the sonnets in teaching Critical approaches and close reading Memorialisation and monument-making Contemporary poetry and the Sonnets All the essays offer new perspectives and combine to give readers an up-to-date understanding of what is exciting and challenging about Shakespeare's Sonnets. The approach, based on an individual poetic form, reflects how the sonnets are most commonly studied and taught.

The Sonnets: The State of Play

Sarah Lewis

This book considers the ways that family relationships (parental, marital, sibling or other) mimic, and stand in for, political ones in the Early Modern period, and vice versa. Bringing together leading international scholars in literary-historical fields to produce scholarship informed by the perspective of contemporary politics, the volume examines the ways in which the family defines itself in transformative moments of potential crisis – birth and death, maturation, marriage – moments when the family is negotiating its position within and through broader cultural frameworks, and when, as a result, family ‘politics’ become most apparent.

Family Politics in Early Modern Literature

How did authors such as Jonson, Spenser, Donne and Milton think about the past lives of the words they used? Hannah Crawforth shows how early modern writers were acutely attuned to the religious and political implications of the etymology of English words. She argues that these lexically astute writers actively engaged with the lexicographers, Anglo-Saxonists and etymologists who were carrying out a national project to recover, or invent, the origins of English, at a time when the question of a national vernacular was inseparable from that of national identity. English words are deployed to particular effect – as a polemical weapon, allegorical device, coded form of communication, type of historical allusion or political tool. Drawing together early modern literature and linguistics, Crawforth argues that the history of English as it was studied in the period radically underpins the writing of its greatest poets.

Hannah Crawforth

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