Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture
About the Book Series
From Shakespeare to Jonson, Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture looks at both the literature and culture of the early modern period. This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Considering literature alongside theatre, popular culture, race, gender, ecology, space, and other subjects, titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics.
Paradise Lost and the Making of English Literary Criticism
1st Edition
By David A. Harper
May 05, 2025
Paradise Lost and the Making of English Literary Criticism identifies the early reception of Paradise Lost as a site of contest over the place of literature in political and religious controversy. Milton’s earliest readers and critics (Dryden, Addison, Dennis, Hume, and Bentley) confronted a poem ...
Early Modern Women Writers of Venice: Looking for Happiness
1st Edition
By Kathleen French
April 22, 2025
Early Modern Women Writers of Venice: Looking for Happiness explores the ways in which five women used their writing to challenge misogynistic views about female inferiority, develop a sense of agency, and form meaningful interpersonal relationships that would enable them to find happiness. They ...
Human Insufficiency: Natural Slavery and the Racialization of Vulnerability in Early Modern England
1st Edition
By Jeffrey B. Griswold
January 30, 2025
Human Insufficiency argues that early modern writers depict the human political subject as physically vulnerable in order to naturalize slavery. Representations of Man as a weak creature—“poor” and “bare” in King Lear’s words—strategically portrayed English bodies as needing care from people who ...
Printed Drama and Political Instability in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Britain: The Literary Politics of Resistance and Distraction in Plays and Entertainments, 1649–1658
1st Edition
By Christopher Orchard
November 28, 2024
Printed Drama and Political Instability in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Britain: The Literary Politics of Resistance and Distraction in Plays and Entertainments, 1649–1658 describes the function of printed drama in 1650s Britain. After the regicide of 1649, printed plays could be interpreted by royalist...
Milton's Loves: From Amity to Caritas in the Paradise Epics
1st Edition
By Rosamund Paice
October 08, 2024
This book is about the multiple loves of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained: sanctioned loves and outlawed loves, sincere loves and false loves, Christian loves, classical loves, humanist loves, and love as emotion. In showing how these loves motivate the most significant actions of the Paradise ...
Dante Alive: Essays on a Cultural Icon
1st Edition
Edited
By Francesco Ciabattoni, Simone Marchesi
May 27, 2024
The essays collected here join in, and contribute to, the current reflection on Dante’s vitality today in a critical, multidisciplinary vein. Their intervention comes at a particularly sensitive juncture in the history of Dante’s global reception and cultural reuse. Dante today is as alive as ever....
Private Honour and Noble Masculine Image in Early Modern England: Sir Robert Sidney and His Contemporaries
1st Edition
By Erika D'Souza
May 27, 2024
Robert Sidney, the first Earl of Leicester (1563–1626), serves as an exemplar of an Elizabethan nobleman who had in his collection a body of work pertinent to the subject of masculine honour in the private realm. Understanding the nuances and evolution of the term private honour as it is ...
Early Modern Women Writers Engendering Descent: Mary Sidney Herbert, Mary Sidney Wroth, and their Genealogical Cultures
1st Edition
By Marie H. Loughlin
September 25, 2023
Focusing on Mary Sidney Herbert and Mary Sidney Wroth’s use of the figures of origin, descent, and inheritance in their poetry and prose, this book examines how these central women writers situated themselves in terms of early modern England’s rich ancestral cultures, employing these and other ...
From Narcissism to Nihilism: Self-Love and Self-Negation in Early Modern Literature
1st Edition
By Anthony Archdeacon
September 25, 2023
This book explores how the myth of Narcissus, which is at once about self-love and self-destruction, desire and death, beauty and pain, became an ambivalent symbol of humanistic endeavour, and articulated the conflicts of early modern authorship. In early modern literature, there were expressions ...
Cervantes and the Early Modern Mind
1st Edition
Edited
By Isabel Jaén, Julien Jacques Simon
June 30, 2023
This book explores the work of Cervantes in relation to the ideas about the mind that circulated in early modern Europe and were propelled by thinkers such as Juan Luis Vives, Juan Huarte de San Juan, Oliva Sabuco, Andrés Laguna, Andrés Velásquez, Marsilio Ficino, and Gómez Pereira. The editors ...
Literature and Historiography in the Spanish Golden Age: The Poetics of History
1st Edition
By Sofie Kluge
May 31, 2023
Golden Age departures in historiography and theory of history in some ways prepared the ground for modern historical methods and ideas about historical factuality. At the same time, they fed into the period’s own "aesthetic-historical culture" which amalgamated fact and fiction in ways modern ...
Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England: Folly, Law and Medicine, 1500-1640
1st Edition
By Alice Equestri
May 31, 2023
Fools and clowns were widely popular characters employed in early modern drama, prose texts and poems mainly as laughter makers, or also as ludicrous metaphorical embodiments of human failures. Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England: Folly, Law and Medicine, 1500–1640 pays ...