Part One -- Medieval Twilight: 1399 to1485. Part Two -- Rebuilding Society, Tudor Style: 1485 to1547. Part Three -- Uneasy Equilibrium: 1547 to1603. Part Four -- The Demise of the Tudor State: 1603-1660. Part Five -- Society Restyled: 1660 to 1688.

Is history more than (in Boswell's words) a `chronological series of remarkable events'? Does it have a pattern? Is it fraught with `meaning'? Can we discern its trends? What determines its course? In short, can a substantial and coherent philosophy of history be devised that offers answers to these questions? These issues, which have intrigued -and bedeviled - historians for centuries, are explored in this thoughtful book.

The last decade has witnessed a spate of high-profile presentations of The Merchant of Venice: the 2004 Michael Radford film, 2010’s New York City “Shakespeare in the Park” production, as well as the play’s Tony Award-nominated 2010-11 Broadway run. Likewise, new scholarly works such as Kenneth Gross’s Shylock is Shakespeare (2006) and Janet Adelman’s Blood Relations (2008) have offered poignant insights into this play. Why has this drama garnered so much attention of late? What else can we learn from this contentious comedy? How else can we read the drama’s characters? Where do studies of The Merchant of Venice go from here? This collection offers readers sundry answers to these questions by showcasing a sampling of ways this culturally arresting play can be read and interpreted. The strength of this monograph lies in the disparate approaches its contributors offer – from a feminist view of Portia and Nerissa’s friendship to psychoanalytic readings of allegories between the play and Shakespeare’s Pericles to a reading of a Manga comic book version of The Merchant of Venice. Each essay is supported by a strong basis in traditional close reading practices. Our collection of scholars then buttresses such work with the theoretical or pedagogical frameworks that reflect their area of expertise. This collection offers readers different critical lenses through which to approach the primary text. Although Shakespeare scholars and graduate students will no doubt appreciate and employ the work of this collection, the primary audience of this anthology is undergraduate students and the professors who work with them. Many budding scholars have had the experience of checking out a monograph from the library and then finding it was a waste of time because the author spends three hundred pages discussing a perspective of which they have no interest. With this collection, students will not only see how multi-faceted interpretations of the play can be but they also are more likely to find essays that appeal to their own research interests.

Marys Master provides observations and interpretations of the English colonization of the area presently known as southern New England. This is a critical review of some of the English writings and quotes regarding those interactions that were contemporary to the time that the English were colonizing the area. The major event that defined this time was King Philips War from 1675 through 1676 which resulted in the crushing defeat of the natives who lived in that part of New England. The primary story in Marys Master centers upon the captivity of one of the English women during that war, Mary Rowlandson. Her narrative is considered to be the most widely read American captivity story ever written. The accounts of other English captives reveal behavior by the natives that shows humanity in great contrast with the savagery attributed to them by most contemporary writers. Mary Rowlandsons master is, Quanopin, a Narragansett sachem whom Mary admires despite all the anti-Indian rhetoric she has been exposed to by others. While their time together is brief, it is exceptional because she expresses an admiration for him not conveyed toward any other Indian, which was unusual for those times and still is today.