The Inarticulate Renaissance explores the conceptual potential of the disabled utterance in the English literary Renaissance. What might it have meant, in the sixteenth-century "age of eloquence," to speak indistinctly; to mumble to oneself or to God; to speak unintelligibly to a lover, a teacher, a court of law; or to be utterly dumfounded in the face of new words, persons, situations, and things? This innovative book maps out a "Renaissance" otherwise eclipsed by cultural and literary-critical investments in a period defined by the impact of classical humanism, Reformation poetics, and the flourishing of vernacular languages and literatures. For Carla Mazzio, the specter of the inarticulate was part of a culture grappling with the often startlingly incoherent dimensions of language practices and ideologies in the humanities, religion, law, historiography, print, and vernacular speech. Through a historical analysis of forms of failed utterance, as they informed and were recast in sixteenth-century drama, her book foregrounds the inarticulate as a central subject of cultural history and dramatic innovation. Playwrights from Nicholas Udall to William Shakespeare, while exposing ideological fictions through which articulate and inarticulate became distinguished, also transformed apparent challenges to "articulate" communication into occasions for cultivating new forms of expression and audition.

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England is an international volume published annually

Shakespeare Unlearned dances along the borderline of sense and nonsense in early modern texts, revealing overlooked opportunities for understanding and shared community in words and ideas that might in the past have been considered too silly to matter much for serious scholarship. Each chapter pursues a self-knowing, gently ironic study of the lexicon and scripting of words and acts related to what has been called 'stupidity' in work by Shakespeare and other authors. Each centers significant, often comic situations that emerge -- on stage, in print, and in the critical and editorial tradition pertaining to the period -- when rigorous scholars and teachers meet language, characters, or plotlines that exceed, and at times entirely undermine, the goals and premises of scholarly rigor. Each suggests that a framing of putative 'stupidity' pursued through lexicography, editorial glossing, literary criticism, and pedagogical practice can help us put Shakespeare and semantically obscure historical literature more generally to new communal ends. Words such as 'baffle' in Twelfth Night or 'twangling' and 'jingling' in The Tempest, and characters such as Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Holofernes the pedant, might in the past have been considered unworthy of critical attention -- too light or obvious to matter much for our understanding of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Adam Zucker's meditation on the limits of learnedness and the opportunities presented by a philology of stupidity argues otherwise.

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.

In early modern culture, eating and reading were entangled acts. Our dead metaphors (swallowed stories, overcooked narratives, digested information) are all that now remains of a rich interplay between text and food, in which every element of dining, from preparation to purgation, had its equivalent in the literary sphere. Following the advice of the poet George Herbert, this essay collection "looks to the mouth", unfolding the charged relationship between ingestion and expression in a wide variety of texts and contexts. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, Text, Food and the Early Modern Reader: Eating Words fills a significant gap in our understanding of early modern cultural history. Situated at the lively intersection between literary, historical and bibliographical studies, it opens new lines of dialogue between the study of material textuality and the history of the body.

The Oxford History of Poetry in English is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. The series both synthesises existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the volumes. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry features a history of the birth moment of modern 'English' poetry in greater detail than previous studies. It examines the literary transitions, institutional contexts, artistic practices, and literary genres within which poets compose their works. Each chapter combines an orientation to its topic and a contribution to the field. Specifically, the volume introduces a narrative about the advent of modern English poetry from Skelton to Spenser, attending to the events that underwrite the poets' achievements: Humanism; Reformation; monarchism and republicanism; colonization; print and manuscript; theatre; science; and companionate marriage. Featured are metre and form, figuration and allusiveness, and literary career, as well as a wide range of poets, from Wyatt, Surrey, and Isabella Whitney to Ralegh, Drayton, and Mary Herbert. Major works discussed include Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Marlowe's Hero and Leander, and Shakespeare's Sonnets.