The English Romance in Time is a study of English romance across the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It explores romance motifs - quests and fairy mistresses, passionate heroines and rudderless boats and missing heirs - from the first emergence of the genre in French and Anglo-Norman in the twelfth century down to the early seventeenth. This is a continuous story, since the same romances that constituted the largest and most sophisticated body of secular fiction in the Middle Ages went on to enjoy a new and vibrant popularity at all social levels in black-letter prints as the pulp fiction of the Tudor age. This embedded culture was reworked for political and Reformation propaganda and for the 'writing of England', as well as providing a generous reservoir of good stories and dramatic plots. The different ways in which the same texts were read over several centuries, or the same motifs shifted meaning as understanding and usage altered, provide a revealing and sensitive measure of historical and cultural change. The book accordingly looks at those processes of change as well as at how the motifs themselves work, to offer a historical semantics of the language of romance conventions. It also looks at how politics and romance intersect - the point where romance comes true. The historicizing of the study of literature is belatedly leading to a wider recognition that the early modern world is built on medieval foundations. This book explores both the foundations and the building. Similarly, generic theory, which previously tended to operate on transhistorical assumptions, is now acknowledging that genre interacts crucially with cultural context - with changing audiences and ideologies and means of dissemination. The generation into which Spenser and Shakespeare were born was the last to be brought up on a wide range of medieval romances in their original forms, and they could therefore exploit their generic codings in new texts aimed at both elite and popular audiences. Romance may since then have lost much of its cultural centrality, but the universal appeal of these same stories has continued to fuel later works from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress to C.S. Lewis and Tolkien.

Elizabethan Silent Language is an anatomy of an alternative or supplementary mode of communication in a culture prized for its literary contributions. Through the use of nonverbal media, Elizabethans coexpressed, enhanced, andøsometimes even subverted the medium of the written or spoken word. Besides written documents and works of art, extant material reveals new referents and deeper meaning for Elizabethan verbal expression. Funeral monuments, jewelry, costume, foodstuffs, protocol, sumptuary laws, portraits, architecture, management of public appearance, absence, and silence?all were forms of a silent language. The main elements of the semantic system of Elizabethan silent language were in many cases those of literal language, with resources in religion, in antiquity as translated through humanist tradition, in custom and law, in the Continental Renaissance, and in Tudor historiography?syntactic elements translated through word and practice and subject to personal inflection. Assumed as given values were the masculine norm, young adulthood, courtly service, discernment of ethical and aesthetic dimensions in all aspects of life, a comprehensive rule of decorum, and the preservation of religious, political, and social hierarchy. Elizabethan Silent Language is a unique book. Although Renaissance scholars have focused their attention on individual components of texts, such as ceremony, costume, architecture, protocol, and portrait, no other source synthesizes these components.

Featuring period drawings and prints of swordplay, this book examines and compares three Elizabethan fencing manuals written in English before 1600: Giacomo Di Grassi’s His True Arte of Defense (1594), Vincentio Saviolo’s His Practice in Two Bookes (1595), and George Silver’s Paradoxes of Defence and Bref Instructions upon My Paradoxes of Defence (1599). More than a technical manual on swordplay, this book explores the influence of a new form of violence introduced into Elizabethan culture by the invention of the rapier. The authors examine the rapier’s influence on the various social classes, the clash between the traditional English fencing masters and those embracing the new style, the growing concern with unregulated dueling, and the frequent references to rapier play in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. As producer Joseph Papp notes in his foreword, this is a book that "makes a difference in performance."

(Limelight). The ultimate guide to stage fighting technique and basic swordplay, this book covers everything an actor must do to give a dynamic and convincing performance as a stage combatant. "[This book] is more than a manual... A necessity! Richard Lane's concepts are vital...'Why' and 'When' are explained and make 'How' easier to understand and execute...Read this, pay heed and you will avoid sin and suffering...I raise my sword on high and salute you, Richard. Well done!" Oscar F. Kolombatovich, former Fencing Master, Metropolitan Opera, New York, and Executive Secretary, Historical Fencing Society

In the first major study of the genre, Joshua Scodel shows how English poets have used the poetic epitaph to express their views concerning the power and limitations of poetry as a response to human mortality.