In this, the first comprehensive study of post-Reformation provincial English portraiture, Robert Tittler investigates the growing affinity for secular portraiture in Tudor and early Stuart England, a cultural and social phenomenon which can be said to have produced a 'public' for that genre. He breaks new ground in placing portrait patronage and production in this era in the broad social and cultural context of post-Reformation England, and in distinguishing between native English provincial portraiture, which was often highly vernacular, and foreign-influenced portraiture of the court and metropolis, which tended towards the formal and 'polite'. Tittler describes the burgeoning public for portraiture of this era as more than the familiar court-and-London based presence, but rather as a phenomenon which was surprisingly widespread, both socially and geographically, throughout the realm. He suggests that provincial portraiture differed from the 'mainstream', cosmopolitan portraiture of the day in its workmanship, materials, inspirations, and even vocabulary, showing how its native English roots continued to guide its production. Innovative chapters consider the aims and vocabulary of English provincial portraiture, the relationship of portraiture and heraldry, the painter's occupation in provincial (as opposed to metropolitan) England, and the contrasting availability of materials and training in both provincial and metropolitan areas. The work as a whole contributes to both art history and social history: it speaks to admirers and collectors of painting as well as to curators and academics.

Queen Elizabeth’s bloody rule over Ireland is examined in this “richly-textured, impressively researched and powerfully involving” history (Roy Foster, author of Modern Ireland, 1600–1972). England’s violent subjugation of Ireland in the sixteenth century under Queen Elizabeth I was one of the most consequential chapters in the long, tumultuous relationship between the two countries. In this engaging and scholarly history, James C. Roy tells the story of revolt, suppression, atrocities, and genocide in the first colonial “failed state”. At the time, Ireland was viewed as a peripheral theater, a haven for Catholic heretics, and a potential “back door” for foreign invasions. Tormented by such fears, lord deputies sent by the queen reacted with an iron hand. These men and their subordinates—including great writers such as Edmund spencer and Walter Raleigh—would gather in salons to pore over the “Irish Question”. But such deliberations were rewarded by no final triumph, only debilitating warfare that stretched across Elizabeth’s long rule.

This original analysis of the representation and self-representation of women in literature and visual arts revolves around multiple early modern senses of "painting": the creation of visual art in the form of paint on canvas and the use of cosmetics to paint women's bodies. Situating her study in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, France, and England, Patricia Phillippy brings together three distinct actors: women who paint themselves with cosmetics, women who paint on canvas, and women and men who paint women—either with pigment or with words. Phillippy asserts that early modern attitudes toward painting, cosmetics, and poetry emerge from and respond to a common cultural history. Materially, she connects those who created images of women with pigment to those who applied cosmetics to their own bodies through similar mediums, tools, techniques, and exposure to toxic materials. Discursively, she illuminates historical and social issues such as gender and morality with the nexus of painting, painted women, and women painters. Teasing out the intricate relationships between these activities as carried out by women and their visual and literary representation by women and by men, Phillippy aims to reveal the delineation and transgression of women's creative roles, both artistic and biological. In Painting Women, Phillippy provides a cross-disciplinary study of women as objects and agents of painting.