This 2003 book is a full-scale history of early modern English literature, offering perspectives on English literature produced in Britain between the Reformation and the Restoration. While providing the general coverage and specific information expected of a major history, its twenty-six chapters address recent methodological and interpretive developments in English literary studies. The book has five sections: 'Modes and Means of Literary Production, Circulation, and Reception', 'The Tudor Era from the Reformation to Elizabeth I', 'The Era of Elizabeth and James VI', 'The Earlier Stuart Era', and 'The Civil War and Commonwealth Era'. While England is the principal focus, literary production in Scotland, Ireland and Wales is treated, as are other subjects less frequently examined in previous histories, including women's writings and the literature of the English Reformation and Revolution. This history is an essential resource for specialists and students.

In Ink, Stink Bait, Revenge, and Queen Elizabeth, Steven W. May and Arthur F. Marotti present a recently discovered "household book" from sixteenth-century England. Its main scribe, John Hanson, was a yeoman who worked as a legal agent in rural Yorkshire. His book, a miscellaneous collection of documents that he found useful or interesting, is a rare example of a middle-class provincial anthology that contains, in addition to works from the country’s cultural center, items of local interest seldom or never disseminated nationally. Among the literary highlights of the household book are unique copies of two ballads, whose original print versions have been lost, describing Queen Elizabeth’s procession through London after the victory over the Spanish Armada; two poems attributed to Elizabeth herself; and other verse by courtly writers copied from manuscript and print sources. Of local interest is the earliest-known copy of a 126-stanza ballad about a mid-fourteenth-century West Yorkshire feud between the Eland and Beaumont families. The manuscript’s utilitarian items include a verse calendar and poetic Decalogue, model legal documents, real estate records, recipes for inks and fish baits, and instructions for catching rabbits and birds. Hanson combined both professional and recreational interests in his manuscript, including material related to his legal work with wills and real estate transactions. As May and Marotti argue in their cultural and historical interpretation of the text, Hanson’s household book is especially valuable not only for the unusual texts it preserves but also for the ways in which it demonstrates the intersection of the local and national and of popular and elite cultures in early modern England.

This long-awaited and masterfully edited volume contains nearly all of the writings of Queen Elizabeth I: the clumsy letters of childhood, the early speeches of a fledgling queen, and the prayers and poetry of the monarch's later years. The first collection of its kind, Elizabeth I reveals brilliance on two counts: that of the Queen, a dazzling writer and a leading intellect of the English Renaissance, and that of the editors, whose copious annotations make the book not only essential to scholars but accessible to general readers as well. "This collection shines a light onto the character and experience of one of the most interesting of monarchs. . . . We are likely never to get a closer or clearer look at her. An intriguing and intense portrait of a woman who figures so importantly in the birth of our modern world."—Publishers Weekly "An admirable scholarly edition of the queen's literary output. . . . This anthology will excite scholars of Elizabethan history, but there is something here for all of us who revel in the English language."—John Cooper, Washington Times "Substantial, scholarly, but accessible. . . . An invaluable work of reference."—Patrick Collinson, London Review of Books "In a single extraordinary volume . . . Marcus and her coeditors have collected the Virgin Queen's letters, speeches, poems and prayers. . . . An impressive, heavily footnoted volume."—Library Journal "This excellent anthology of [Elizabeth's] speeches, poems, prayers and letters demonstrates her virtuosity and afford the reader a penetrating insight into her 'wiles and understandings.'"—Anne Somerset, New Statesman "Here then is the only trustworthy collection of the various genres of Elizabeth's writings. . . . A fine edition which will be indispensable to all those interested in Elizabeth I and her reign."—Susan Doran, History "In the torrent of words about her, the queen's own words have been hard to find. . . . [This] volume is a major scholarly achievement that makes Elizabeth's mind much more accessible than before. . . . A veritable feast of material in different genres."—David Norbrook, The New Republic

"The book trade, she argues, created many intriguing and paradoxical uses for anonymity, even as the authorial name became more marketable. Among ecclesiastical debates, for instance, anonymity worked to conceal identity, but it could also be used to identify the moral character of the author being concealed. In court and coterie circles, meanwhile, authors turned name suppression into a tool for the preservation of social boundaries. Finally, in both print and manuscript, anonymity promised to liberate an authentic female voice, and yet it made it impossible to authenticate the gender of an author. In sum, the writers and book producers who helped to create England's literary culture viewed anonymity as a meaningful and useful practice."--BOOK JACKET.

For at least a generation, scholars have asserted that privacy barely existed in the early modern era. The divide between the public and private was vague, they say, and the concept, if it was acknowledged, was rarely valued. In Privacy in the Age of Shakespeare, Ronald Huebert challenges these assumptions by marshalling evidence that it was in Shakespeare’s time that the idea of privacy went from a marginal notion to a desirable quality. The era of transition begins with More’s Utopia (1516), in which privacy is forbidden. It ends with Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), in which privacy is a good to be celebrated. In between come Shakespeare’s plays, paintings by Titian and Vermeer, devotional manuals, autobiographical journals, and the poetry of George Herbert and Robert Herrick, all of which Huebert carefully analyses in order to illuminate the dynamic and emergent nature of early modern privacy.

Music and musical entertainments are here shown to be used for different ends, by both monarch and courtiers.