Now in a completely revised edition, this book describes the English language between the years 1500 and 1700 - the different varieites of the language, the attitudes of its speakers towards it, and its pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. It will be useful to serious students of the history of English and takes full account of those readers who are mainly interested in the literature of the period by providing plenty of references to literary works and authors.

A comprehensive account of Early Modern English considers writing and orthography, phonetics and phonology, syntax and the lexicon, and includes a valuable anthology of culturally oriented texts from a wide range of sources.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

This volume provides a comprehensive account of Early Modern English, organized by linguistic level. The volume not only presents detailed outlines of the traditional language levels, it also explores key questions and debates, such as do-periphrasis, the Great Vowel Shift, pronouns and relativization, literary language (including the language of Shakespeare), and sociolinguistics, including contact and standardization.

A definitive collection of critical essays on the literary and cultural impact of the early modern rogue

This is the first book to demonstrate how mnemotechnic cultural commonplaces can be used to account for the look, style, and authorized content of some of the most influential books produced in early modern Britain. In his hybrid role as stationer, publisher, entrepreneur, and author, John Day, master printer of England’s Reformation, produced the premier navigation handbook, state-approved catechism and metrical psalms, Book of Martyrs, England’s first printed emblem book, and Queen Elizabeth’s Prayer Book. By virtue of finely honed book trade skills, dogged commitment to evangelical nation-building, and astute business acumen (including going after those who infringed his privileges), Day mobilized the typographical imaginary to establish what amounts to—and still remains—a potent and viable Protestant Memory Art.

Marginalia in early modern and medieval texts – printed, handwrit- ten, drawn, scratched, colored, and pasted in – offer a glimpse of how people, as individuals and in groups, interacted with books and manu- scripts over often lengthy periods of time. The chapters in this volume build on earlier scholarship that established marginalia as an intellec- tual method (Grafton and Jardine), as records of reading motivated by cultural, social, theological, and personal inclinations (Brayman [Hackel] and Orgel), and as practices inspired by material affordances particular to the book and the pen (Fleming and Sherman). They further the study of the practices of marginalia as a mode – a set of ways in which material opportunities and practices overlap with intellectual, social, and personal motivations to make meaning in the world. They introduce us to a set of idiosyncratic examples such as the trace marks of objects left in books, deliberately or by accident; cut-and-pasted additions to printed volumes; a marriage depicted through shared book ownership. They reveal to us in case studies the unique value of mar- ginalia as evidence of phenomena as important and diverse as religious change, authorial self-invention, and the history of the literary canon. The chapters of this book go beyond the case study, however, and raise broad historical, cultural, and theoretical questions about the strange, marvelous, metamorphic thing we call the book, and the equally mul- tiplicitous, eccentric, and inscrutable beings who accompany them through history: readers and writers.