Situating itself in a long tradition of studies of Anglo-Italian literary relations in the Renaissance, this book consists of an analysis of the representation of women in the extant Elizabethan translations of the three major Italian Renaissance epic poems (Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata), as well as of the influence of these works on Elizabethan Literature in general, in the form of creative imitation on the part of poets such as Edmund Spenser, Peter Beverley, William Shakespeare and Samuel Daniel, and of prose writers such as George Whetstone and George Gascoigne. The study emphasises the importance of European writers' influence on English Renaissance Literature and raises questions pertaining to the true essence of translation, adaptation and creative imitation, with a specific emphasis on gender issues. Its originality lies in its exhaustiveness, as well as in its focus on the epics' female figures, both as a source of major modifications and as an evident point of interest for the Italian works' 'translatorship'.

A fresh perspective on women translators in the early modern period, with particular focus on the relatively underexplored culture of translation in Germany.

In Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England, Liz Oakley-Brown considers English versions of the Metamorphoses - a poem concerned with translation and transformation on a multiplicity of levels - as important sites of social and historical difference from the fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. Through the exploration of a range of canonical and marginal texts, from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus to women's embroideries of Ovidian myths, Oakley-Brown argues that translation is central to the construction of national and gendered identities.

Featuring contributions by established and upcoming scholars, Shakespeare and the Translation of Identity in Early Modern England explores the ways in which Shakespearean texts engage in the social and cultural politics of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century translation practices. Framed by the editor's introduction and an Afterword by Ton Hoenselaars, the authors in this collection offer new perspectives on translation and the fashioning of religious, national and gendered identities in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and The Tempest.

Virginia Woolf described fictions as 'grossly material things', rooted in their physical and economic contexts. This book takes Woolf's hint as its starting point, asking who made the books of the English Renaissance. It recovering the ways in which women participated as co-authors, editors, translators, patrons, printers, booksellers, and readers.

In Women and Curiosity in Early Modern England and France, the rehabilitation of female curiosity between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries is thoroughly investigated for the first time, in a comparative perspective that confronts two epistemological and religious traditions. In the context of the early modern blooming “culture of curiosity”, women’s desire for knowledge made them both curious subjects and curious objects, a double relation to curiosity that is meticulously inquired into by the authors in this volume. The social, literary, theological and philosophical dimensions of women’s persistent association with curiosity offer a rich contribution to cultural history.

Reading Material in Early Modern England rediscovers the practices and representations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English readers. By telling their stories and insisting upon their variety, Brayman Hackel displaces both the singular 'ideal' reader of literacy theory and the elite male reader of literacy history.