This is a wide-ranging, closely-researched collection, written by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, on the cultural placement and transmission of texts between 1520 and 1750. Material and historical conditions of texts are analysed, and the range of works is wide, including plays and the Lucrece of Shakespeare (with adaptations, and a discussion of 'reading' playtexts), Sidney's Arcadia, Greene's popular Pandosto (both discussed in the contexts of changing readerships and forms of fiction), Hakluyt's travel books, funerary verse, and the writings of Katherine Parr and Elizabethan Catholic martyrs.

A detailed study of the domestic life of the early modern, non-elite household

This book combines book history and literary criticism to explore how early modern books were richer things than previously imagined.

Written by leading authorities, the volume can be considered a standard work on seventeenth-century English social history. A tribute to the work of Keith Wrightson, Remaking English Society re-examines the relationship between enduring structures and social change in early modern England. Collectively, the essays in the volume reconstruct the fissures and connections that developed both within and between social groups during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Focusing on the experience of rapid economic and demographic growth and on related processesof cultural diversification, the contributors address fundamental questions about the character of English society during a period of decisive change. Prefaced by a substantial introduction which traces the evolution of early modern social history over the last fifty years, these essays (each of them written by a leading authority) not only offer state-of-the-art assessments of the historiography but also represent the latest research on a variety of topics that have been at the heart of the development of 'the new social history' and its cultural turn: gender relations and sexuality; governance and litigation; class and deference; labouring relations, neighbourliness and reciprocity; and social status and consumption. STEVE HINDLE is W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. ALEXANDRA SHEPARD is Reader in History, University of Glasgow. JOHN WALTER is Professor of History, University of Essex. Contributors: Helen Berry, Adam Fox, H. R. French, Malcolm Gaskill, Paul Griffiths, Steve Hindle, Craig Muldrew, Lindsay O'Neill, Alexandra Shepard, Tim Stretton, Naomi Tadmor, John Walter, Phil Withington, Andy Wood

A study of the representation of reading in early modern Englishwomen's writing, this book exists at the intersection of textual criticism and cultural history. It looks at depictions of reading in devotional works, maternal advice books, poetry, fiction, and manuscripts for evidence of ways in which women conceived of reading in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Among the texts considered are Katherine Parr, Lamentation of a Sinner; Anne Askew, The Examinations of Anne Askew; Dorothy Leigh, The Mothers Blessing; Elizabeth Grymeston, Miscelanea Meditations Memoratives; Anne Cornwallis's commonplace book (Folger MS V.a.89); Aemelia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum; The Death and Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Bodleian MS Don.e.17), and Mary Wroth, The First Part of The Countess of Montgomery's Urania.

The eleven essays in this volume explore the complex interactions in early modern England between a technologically advanced culture of the printed book and a still powerful traditional culture of the spoken word, spectacle, and manuscript. Scholars who work on manuscript culture, the history of printing, cultural history, historical bibliography, and the institutions of early modern drama and theater have been brought together to address such topics as the social character of texts, historical changes in notions of literary authority and intellectual property, the mutual influence and tensions between the different forms of "publication," and the epistemological and social implications of various communications technologies. Although canonical literary writers such as Shakespeare, Jonson, and Rochester are discussed, the field of writing examined is a broad one, embracing political speeches, coterie manuscript poetry, popular pamphlets, parochially targeted martyrdom accounts, and news reports. Setting writers, audiences, and texts in their specific historical context, the contributors focus on a period in early modern England, from the late sixteenth through the late seventeenth century, when the shift from orality and manuscript communication to print was part of large-scale cultural change. Arthur F. Marotti's and Michael D. Bristol's introduction analyzes some of the sociocultural issues implicit in the collection and relates the essays to contemporary work in textual studies, bibliography, and publication history.

This book is a study of English conversion narratives between 1580 and 1660. Focusing on the formal, stylistic properties of these texts, it argues that there is a direct correspondence between the spiritual and rhetorical turn. Furthermore, by focusing on a comparatively early period in the history of the conversion narrative the book charts for the first time writers’ experimentation and engagement with rhetorical theory before the genre’s relative stabilization in the 1650s. A cross confessional study analyzing work by both Protestant and Catholic writers, this book explores conversion’s relationship with reading; the links between conversion, eloquence, translation and trope; the conflation of spiritual movement with literal travel; and the use of the body as a site for spiritual knowledge and proof.