This is an amazing book, a major achievement in the field of women's studies.--Renaissance Quarterly, reviewing Women's Writing in Italy, 1400-1650

"An elegant anthology. The specialist will not miss the quiet sophistication with which the music has been selected and prepared. Some of it is printed here for the first time, and much of it has been edited anew." "Notes" This treasury of 47 vocal works edited by Noah Greenberg, founder and former director of the New York Pro Musica Antiqua will delight all lovers of medieval and Renaissance music. Containing a wealth of both religious and secular music from the 12th to the 17th centuries, the collection covers a broad range of moods, from the hearty "Blow Thy Horne Thou Jolly Hunter" by William Cornysh to the reflective and elegiac "Cease Mine Eyes" by Thomas Morley. Of the religious works, nine were written for church services, including "Sanctus" by Henry IV and "Angus Dei" from a beautiful four-part mass by Thomas Tallis. Other religious songs in the collection come from England's rich tradition of popular religious lyric poetry, and include William Byrd's "Susanna Farye," the anonymously written "Deo Gracias Anglia" (The Agincort Carol), and Thomas Ravenscroft's "O Lord, Turne Now Away Thy Face" and "Remember O Thou Man." Approximately half of the songs are secular, some from the popular tradition and others from the courtly poets and musicians surrounding such musically inclined monarchs as Henry VIII who himself is represented in this collection with two charming songs, "With Owt Dyscorde" and "O My Hart." Among the notable composers of Tudor and Elizabethan England represented here are Orlando Gibbons, John Dowland, and Thomas Weelkes. "

The last of the literary genres to be incorporated into print culture, verse in the English Renaissance not only was published in anthologies, pamphlets, and folio editions, it was also circulated in manuscript. In this ground-breaking historical and cultural study of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century lyric poetry, Marotti examines the interrelationship between the two systems of literary transmission and shows how in England manuscript and print publication together shaped the emerging institution of literature. Surveying a wide range of manuscript and print poetry of the period, Marotti outlines the different social and institutional contexts in which poems were collected and transmitted. He focuses on the two kinds of verse that were circulated more commonly in manuscript than in print--the obscene and the political--and he considers the contributions of scribes and compilers, particularly in composing "answer poetry" and other verse. Analyzing the process through which print gradually replaced manuscript as the standard medium for lyric verse, he identifies four crucial events in the history of publication in England: the appearances of Tottel's Miscellany ( (1557), Sir Philip Sidney's works in the 1590s, Ben Jonson's folio Workes (1616), and the posthumous editions of the poems of Donne and of Herbert (both 1633). Marotti also considers how certain material features of the book determined the reception of poetry, and he explores how poets attempted to establish their authority in print in relation to publishers, patrons, and readers.

Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), scholar and critic, was one of the most admired Latinists of his day. The poems in this volume come from all periods of his life and reflect both his erudition and his wide-ranging friendships. This volume also includes the prose dialogue Etna, an account of Bembo's ascent of Mt. Etna in Sicily during his student days.

"An essential volume for medievalists and scholars of comparative literature, Medieval Lyric opens up a reconsideration of genre in medieval European lyric. Departing from a perspective that asks how medieval genres correspond with twentieth-century ideas of structure or with the evolution of poetry, this collection argues that the development of genres should be considered as a historical phenomenon, embedded in a given culture and responsive to social and literary change.".

In this collection of rhymed, metrical translations of selected poems by three of France's and Western literature's most gifted and prolific poets, Norman R. Shapiro presents English versions of works by Clement Marot (1496-1544), considered by some to be the last of the medieval poets; Joachim Du Bellay (1525-1560); and Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585). The original French poems - more than 150 in all - and their new English translations appear on facing pages. Some of the poems are very well known, while others will be a new pleasure for many readers. In these faithful translations of the poetry of the three most highly acclaimed French Renaissance poets, Shapiro maintains the rhyme and metre of the original works. He adheres to the message of each poem yet avoids a slavishly literal translation to offer creative and spirited equivalents. For students and general readers of this volume, Hope Gildden's introduction, along with notes she and Shapiro provide on the specific poems, seek to enhance appreciation and illuminate historical and linguistic issues relating to these lyric poems.

James Biester sees the shift in late Elizabethan England toward a witty, rough, and obscure lyric style--metaphysical wit and strong lines--as a response to the heightened cultural prestige of wonder. That same prestige was demonstrated in the search for strange artifacts and animals to display in the wonder-cabinets of the period. By embracing the genres of satire and epigram, poets of the Elizabethan court risked their chances for political advancement, exposing themselves to the danger of being classified either as malcontents or as jesters who lacked the gravitas required of those in power. John Donne himself recognized both the risks and benefits of adopting the "admirable" style, as Biester shows in his close readings of the First and Fourth Satyres. Why did courtier-poets adopt such a dangerous form of self-representation? The answer, Biester maintains, lies in an extraordinary confluence of developments in both poetics and the interpenetrating spheres of the culture at large, which made the pursuit of wonder through style unusually attractive, even necessary. In a postfeudal but still aristocratic culture, he says, the ability to astound through language performed the validating function that was once supplied by the ability to fight. Combining the insights of the new historicism with traditional literary scholarship, Biester perceives the rise of metaphysical style as a social as well as aesthetic event.