Slander constitutes a central social, legal and literary concern of early modern England. A category of discourse which transgresses the law, it offers a more historically grounded and fluid account of power relations between poets and the state than that offered by the commonly accepted model of official censorship. An investigation of slander reveals it to be an effective, unstable and reversible means of repudiating one's opposition that could be deployed by rulers or poets. Spenser, Jonson and Shakespeare each use the paradigm of slander to challenge official criticism of poetry, while contemporary legal theory associates slander with poetry. However, even as rulers themselves make use of slander in the form of propaganda to demonize those they perceive to be their foes, ultimately they are unable to contain completely the threat posed by slanderous accusations against the state.

This book examines slander in early modern England as a gendered and theatrical cultural practice. Habermann explores oral defamation – the negative fashioning of others – in language and rhetoric, social interaction and the law, literature and authorship as well as religion, subjectivity and the body. Since the 'slander triangle', which requires an accuser, an audience and a victim, is inherently theatrical, the dramatic representation of slander forms a central concern of the study. Focusing on sexual slander in particular, Habermann shows how femininity was fashioned between praise and slander, and how the 'slandered heroine' emerged as an influential fantasy of femininity – a linguistic, legal and social mechanism that lends itself to masculine self-fashioning through the display of eloquence but that is also subject to resignification by female authors. As theatre and the law mutually influence each other, drama offers a poetic inquiry into the gendered subject and the social life of the community.

The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England explores how attitudes toward, and explanations of, human emotions change in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Typically categorized as 'literary' writers Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Robert Burton and John Milton were all active in the period's reappraisal of the single emotion that, due to their efforts, would become the passion most associated with the writing life: melancholy. By emphasising the shared concerns of the 'non-literary' and 'literary' texts produced by these figures, Douglas Trevor asserts that quintessentially 'scholarly' practices such as glossing texts and appending sidenotes shape the methods by which these same writers come to analyse their own moods. He also examines early modern medical texts, dramaturgical representations of learned depressives such as Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the opposition to materialistic accounts of the passions voiced by Neoplatonists such as Edmund Spenser.

This study considers the figure of the bastard in the context of analogies of the family and the state in early modern England. The trope of illegitimacy, more than being simply a narrative or character-driven issue, is a vital component in the evolving construction and representation of British national identity in prose and drama of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Through close reading of a range of plays and prose texts, the book offers readers new insight into the semiotics of bastardy and concepts of national identity in early modern England, and reflects on contemporary issues of citizenship and identity. The author examines play texts of the period including Bale's King Johan, Peele's The Troublesome Reign of John, and Shakespeare's King John, Richard II, and King Lear in the context of a selection of legal, religious, and polemical texts. In so doing, she illuminates the extent to which the figure of the bastard and, more generally the trope of illegitimacy, existed as a distinct discourse within the wider discursive framework of family and nation.

Howard Marchitello's 1997 study of narrative techniques in Renaissance discourse analyses imaginative conjunctions of literary texts, such as those by Shakespeare and Browne, with developments in scientific and technical writing. In Narrative and Meaning in Early Modern England he explores the relationship between a range of early modern discourses, such as cartography, anatomy and travel writing, and the developing sense of the importance of narrative in producing meaning. Narrative was used in the Renaissance as both a mode of discourse and an epistemology; it not only produced knowledge, it also dictated how that knowledge should be understood. Marchitello uses a wide range of cultural documents to illustrate the importance of narrative in constructing the Renaissance understanding of time and identity. By highlighting the inherent textual element in imaginative and scientific discourses, his study also evaluates a range of contemporary critical practices and explores their relation to narrative and the production of meaning.

This text provides a critical overview of the new social history of politics in early modern England. It examines the shifting place of popular politics within the polity, focusing in particular on collective disorder.