Concentrates on the fascinating life and work of Giles Fletcher, the elder (1546–1611) and his analysis of government and commonwealth, through the image of Russia. His account of Russia remains the most comprehensive early modern western European account of the 'barbaric' land on Christendom’s borders.

Exploring Russia in the Elizabethan Commonwealth tells the story of English relations with Russia, from the 'strange and wonderfull discoverie' of the land and Elizabeth I's correspondence with Ivan the Terrible, to the corruption of the Muscovy Company and the Elizabethan regime's censorship of politically sensitive representations of Russia. Focusing on the life and works of Giles Fletcher, the elder, ambassador to Russia in 1588, this work explores two popular themes in Elizabethan history: exploration, travel and trade and late Elizabethan political culture. By analysing the pervasive languages of commonwealth, corruption and tyranny found in both the Muscovy Company accounts and in Fletcher's writings on Russia, this monograph explores how Russia was a useful tool for Elizabethans to think with when they contemplated the nature of government and the changing face of monarchy in the late Elizabethan regime. It will appeal to academics and students of Elizabethan political culture and literary studies, as well as those of early modern travel and trade.

This portrait of Russia by an English ambassador to Muscovy is one of the most important works of Elizabethan travel literature and an indispensable source for the study of Russian history.

This significant reassessment of Jacobean political culture reveals how colonizing America transformed English civility in early seventeenth-century England. This title is also available as Open Access.

This volume details Sir Jerome Horsey’s account of his experiences in Russia and other countries. Horsey, who spent the better part of seventeen years in the country until leaving in 1591, was an employee of the Muscovy Company, but also operated as an unofficial ambassador for both the English and Russian governments. He was personally acquainted with such people as Ivan the Terrible, Tsar Fyodor I and Boris Godunov, and gives lively and interesting accounts of his interactions with them, as well as with many other prominent people, both Russian and English. Horsey has been accused of exaggeration, chicanery and self-advertisement, but his account is by far the most readable and enjoyable of the many books written by English people sojourning in Russia. It has been published only twice, both times in conjunction with Giles Fletcher’s contemporary and more “professional” account of the Russian state; this edition, with a full introduction and extensive notes, is the first to present Horsey’s book on its own. It is a travel-book, an adventure story and an autobiography of a controversial and significant figure.

Richard Stonley has all but vanished from history, but to his contemporaries he would have been an enviable figure. A clerk of the Exchequer for more than four decades under Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I, he rose from obscure origins to a life of opulence; his job, a secure bureaucratic post with a guaranteed income, was the kind of which many men dreamed. Vast sums of money passed through his hands, some of which he used to engage in moneylending and land speculation. He also bought books, lots of them, amassing one of the largest libraries in early modern London. In 1597, all of this was brought to a halt when Stonley, aged around seventy-seven, was incarcerated in the Fleet Prison, convicted of embezzling the spectacular sum of £13,000 from the Exchequer. His property was sold off, and an inventory was made of his house on Aldersgate Street. This provides our most detailed guide to his lost library. By chance, we also have three handwritten volumes of accounts, in which he earlier itemized his spending on food, clothing, travel, and books. It is here that we learn that on June 12, 1593, he bought "the Venus & Adhonay per Shakspere"—the earliest known record of a purchase of Shakespeare's first publication. In Shakespeare's First Reader, Jason Scott-Warren sets Stonley's journals and inventories of goods alongside a wealth of archival evidence to put his life and library back together again. He shows how Stonley's books were integral to the material worlds he inhabited and the social networks he formed with communities of merchants, printers, recusants, and spies. Through a combination of book history and biography, Shakespeare's First Reader provides a compelling "bio-bibliography"—the story of how one early modern gentleman lived in and through his library.