In this new study, Donna B. Hamilton offers a major revisionist reading of the works of Anthony Munday, one of the most prolific authors of his time, who wrote and translated in many genres, including polemical religious and political tracts, poetry, chivalric romances, history of Britain, history of London, drama, and city entertainments. Long dismissed as a hack who wrote only for money, Munday is here restored to his rightful position as an historical figure at the centre of many important political and cultural events in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. In Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560-1633, Hamilton reinterprets Munday as a writer who began his career writing on behalf of the Catholic cause and subsequently negotiated for several decades the difficult terrain of an ever-changing Catholic-Protestant cultural, religious, and political landscape. She argues that throughout his life and writing career Munday retained his Catholic sensibility and occasionally wrote dangerously on behalf of Catholics. Thus he serves as an excellent case study through which present-day scholars can come to a fuller understanding of how a person living in this turbulent time in English history - eschewing open resistance, exile or martyrdom - managed a long and prolific writing career at the centre of court, theatre, and city activities but in ways that reveal his commitment to Catholic political and religious ideology. Individual chapters in this book cover Munday's early writing, 1577-80; his writing about the trial and execution of Jesuit Edmund Campion; his writing for the stage, 1590-1602; his politically inflected translations of chivalric romance; and his writings for and about the city of London, 1604-33. Hamilton revisits and revalues the narratives told by earlier scholars about hack writers, the anti-theatrical tracts, the role of the Earl of Oxford as patron, the political-religious interests of Munday's plays, the implications of Mu

This edition of Anthony Munday's The first book of Primaleon of Greece (1595) includes an introduction, notes, glossary, and critical apparatus that will enable modern readers to enjoy and better appreciate Munday's translation of the Iberian romance already turned into Italian and French before reaching English readers. Munday translated François de Vernassal's L'Histoire de Primaleon de Grece continuant celle de Palmerin D'Olive (1550), out of which he produced two different titles devoted to Emperor Palmerin's sons, Palmendos and Primaleon. The present volume is especially devoted to the coming of age and tournament activity in Constantinople of the main protagonist, prince Primaleon, as well as to Prince Edward of England's adventures throughout European lands, and to their final encounter. These twenty-four chapters follow the previous thirty-two in Vernassal's edition, published by Munday in 1589 and already edited by Leticia Álvarez-Recio (The Honourable, Pleasant and rare Conceited Historie of Palmendos, 2022). It aims to allow those readers interested in romance or Renaissance culture to gain access to texts that have remained so far ignored, in spite of the popularity they once enjoyed.

After the accession of the Protestant Elizabeth, the Catholic imagining of England was mainly the project of the exiles who had left their homeland in search of religious toleration and foreign assistance."--BOOK JACKET.

Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans considers how the marginalized perspective of 16th-century English Catholic exiles and 17th-century English royalist exiles helped to generate a form of cosmopolitanism that was rooted in contemporary religious and national identities but also transcended those identities. Author Brian C. Lockey argues that English discourses of nationhood were in conversation with two opposing 'cosmopolitan' perspectives, one that sought to cultivate and sustain the emerging English nationalism and imperialism and another that challenged English nationhood from the perspective of those Englishmen who viewed the kingdom as one province within the larger transnational Christian commonwealth. Lockey illustrates how the latter cosmopolitan perspective, produced within two communities of exiled English subjects, separated in time by half a century, influenced fiction writers such as Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Anthony Munday, Sir John Harington, John Milton, and Aphra Behn. Ultimately, he shows that early modern cosmopolitans critiqued the emerging discourse of English nationhood from a traditional religious and political perspective, even as their writings eventually gave rise to later secular Enlightenment forms of cosmopolitanism.

This book considers the poetry written by converts between Catholic and Protestant churches within post-Reformation England.

Manuscript Matters illuminates responses to some of John Donne's most elusive texts by his contemporary audiences. Since examples of seventeenth-century literary criticism prove somewhat rare and frequently ambiguous, this book emphasizes a critical framework rarely used for exhibiting early readers' exegeses of literary texts: the complete manuscripts containing them. Many literary manuscripts that include poems by Donne and his contemporaries were compiled during their lifetimes, often by members of their circles. For this reason, and because various early modern poems and prose works satirize topical events and prominent figures in highly coded language, attempting to understand early literary interpretations proves challenging but highly valuable. Compilers, scribes, owners, and other readers–men and women who shared in Donne's political, religious, and social contexts–offer clues to their literary responses within a range of features related to the construction and subsequent use of the manuscripts. This study's findings call us to investigate more extensively and systematically how certain early manuscripts were constructed through analysis of such features as scripts, titles, sequence of contents, ascriptions, and variant diction. While such studies can throw light on many early modern texts, exploring artefacts containing Donne's works proves particularly useful because more of his poetry circulated in manuscript than did that of any other early modern poet. Manuscript Matters engages Donne's satiric, lyric, and religious poetry, as well as his prose paradoxes and problems. Analysing his texts within their manuscript contexts enables modern readers to interpret Donne's poetry and prose through an early modern lens.