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This book offers an institutional and cultural history of books, the book trade, and the bibliographic ego. The author traces the emergence of possessive authorship from the establishment of a printing industry in England to the passage of the 1710 Statute of Anne, which provided the legal underpinnings for modern copyright. Along the way he demonstrates that the culture of books, including the idea of the author, is intimately tied to the practical trade of publishing those books. As the author shows, copyright is a form of monopoly that developed alongside a range of related protections such as commercial trusts, manufacturing patents, and censorship, and cannot be understood apart from them. The regulation of the press pitted competing interests and rival monopolistic structures against one another—guildmembers and nonprofessionals, printers and booksellers, authors and publishers. These struggles, in turn, crucially shaped the literary and intellectual practices of early modern authors, as well as early capitalist economic organization.

Catastrophizing argues that the seismic encounter between early modern culture and materialism (the view that the world is composed of nothing but matter) can be understood through a history of mental disasters. As early modern thinkers pondered the insensible causes and material stuff of the cosmos, they both conjured up disasters out of thin air and responded to those disasters as if they were befalling them. From Leonardo da Vinci’s imaginative experiments with nature’s destructive forces to the fevered fantasies of doomsday astrologers—from the self-fulfilling prophecies of Shakespeare’s great catastrophizers to the mental earthquakes that guided Kant toward his theory of the sublime—the book shows how and why the early modern mind reached for disaster when it ventured beyond the limits of the sensible. It also makes a case for the critical potential of thinking catastrophically in our own time.

The Corporate Commonwealth offers a provocative account of the origins of modernity’s most perplexing institution: the corporation. Drawing on the resources of economic and political history, literary analysis, and political philosophy, the book explores the genesis of corporations from the late medieval period to the seventeenth century, showing how a plurality of corporate associations were gradually narrowed to the commercial, for-profit corporations we know today, and how the joint-stock corporation, in turn, became both a template for the modern State and a political force that the State could no longer contain. Reading works by Thomas More, William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes, among many others, the book tracks the history of the corporation from the law courts to the stage, from commonwealth to colony, from the object of utopian fiction to the subject of a tragic violence. It provides a new theory of the corporation’s peculiar ontology as at once collective group and singular person, and it suggests ways in which corporations might be re-fashioned into a source of progressive and collective public action.

Our common definition of literacy is the ability to read and write in one language. But as this book reveals, this description is inadequate, because it fails to help us understand heated conflicts over literacy during the emergence of print culture. The fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, the author shows, were a contentious era of transition from Latin and other clerical modes of literacy toward more vernacular forms of speech and writing. The author's aim in this work is twofold: to show that what counted as more valuable among these competing literacies had much to do with notions of gender, and to demonstrate how debates about female literacy were critical to the emergence of imperial nations. Looking at writers whom she dubs the figurative daughters of the mythological figure Dido—builder of an empire that threatened to rival Rome—the author traces debates about literacy and empire in the works of Marguerite de Navarre, Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cary, and Aphra Behn, as well as male writers such as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Wyatt. The result is a study that sheds light on the crucial roles that gender and women played in the modernization of England and France.

Blood. Invention. Language. Resistance. World. Five ordinary words that do a great deal of conceptual work in everyday life and literature. This experiment in critical semantics considers how these five words changed over the course of the sixteenth century and what their changes indicate about broader forces in science, politics, and other disciplines. It discusses a broad swath of Renaissance and transatlantic literature—including Shakespeare, Cervantes, Camões, and Milton—in terms of the development of these words rather than works, careers, or histories. The book creates a method for describing and understanding the semantic changes that occur, extending his argument to other words which operate in the same manner. Aiming to shift the conversation around Renaissance literature from current approaches to riskier enterprises, it also challenges semantic-historicist scholars, proposing a method that takes advantage of digital resources such as full-text databases but still depends on the interpreter to fashion ideas out of ordinary language.

Epic poets of the Renaissance looked to emulate the poems of Greco-Roman antiquity, but doing so presented a dilemma: what to do about the gods? Divine intervention plays a major part in the epics of Homer and Virgil—indeed, quarrels within the family of Olympian gods are essential to the narrative structure of those poems—yet poets of the Renaissance recognized that the cantankerous Olympians could not be imitated too closely. The divine action of their classical models had to be transformed to accord with contemporary tastes and Christian belief. This book offers a comparative study of poetic approaches to the problem of epic divine action. Through readings of Petrarch, Vida, Ariosto, Tasso, and Milton the author describes the narrative and ideological consequences of the epic's turn from pagan to Christian. Drawing on scholarship in several disciplines—religious studies, classics, history, and philosophy, as well as literature—the book sheds light on two subjects of enduring importance in Renaissance studies: the precarious balance between classical literary models and Christian religious norms; and the role of religion in drawing lines between allies and others.

Though modern readers no longer believe in the four humors of Galenic naturalism—blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm—early modern thought found in these bodily fluids the key to explaining human emotions and behavior. This book proposes a new way to read the emotions of the early modern stage so that contemporary readers may recover some of the historical particularity in early modern expressions of emotional self-experience. Using notions drawn from humoral medical theory to untangle passages from important moral treatises, medical texts, natural histories, and major plays of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the book identifies a historical phenomenology in the language of affect by reconciling the significance of the four humors as the language of embodied emotion. It urges modern readers to resist the influence of post-Cartesian abstraction and the disembodiment of human psychology lest they miss the body-mind connection that still existed for Shakespeare and his contemporaries and constrained them to think differently about how their emotions were embodied in a premodern world.

For centuries readers have struggled to fuse the seemingly scattered pieces of John Donne's works into a complete image of the poet and priest. This book offers a way to read Donne as a writer who returned again and again to a single great subject, one that connected to his deepest intellectual and emotional concerns. Reappraising Donne's oeuvre in pursuit of the struggles and commitments that connect his most disparate works, the author shows that Donne believed throughout his life in the mutual necessity of body and soul. In chapters that range from his earliest letters to his final sermon, the author reveals that Donne's obsessive imagining of both the natural union and the inevitable division between body and soul is the most continuous and abiding subject of his writing.

From William Shakespeare's “green-eyed monster” to the “green thought in a green shade” in Andrew Marvell's “The Garden,” the color green was curiously prominent and resonant in English culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among other things, green was the most common color of household goods, the recommended wall color against which to view paintings, the hue that was supposed to appear in alchemical processes at the moment base metal turned to gold, and the color most frequently associated with human passions of all sorts. This book considers the significance of the color in the literature, visual arts, and popular culture of early modern England. Contending that color is a matter of both sensation and emotion, it examines Renaissance material culture—including tapestries, clothing, and stonework, among others—as well as music, theater, philosophy, and nature through the lens of sense perception and aesthetic pleasure. At the same time, this book aims to offer a meditation on the nature of consciousness, perception, and emotion. Like the key to a map, the book provides a guide for looking, listening, reading, and thinking that restores the aesthetic considerations to criticism.

This book offers a radical rethinking of a familiar narrative: the rise of materialism in early modern Europe. It begins by taking up the ancient philosophical notion that the world is composed of two fundamental opposites: atoms, as the philosopher Epicurus theorized, intrinsically unchangeable and moving about the void; and the void itself, or nothingness. The book considers the fact that this strain of ancient Greek philosophy survived and was transmitted to the Renaissance primarily by means of a poem that had seemingly been lost—a poem insisting that the letters of the alphabet are like the atoms that make up the universe. By tracing this elemental analogy through the fortunes of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things, it argues that, long before it took on its familiar shape during the Scientific Revolution, the philosophy of atoms and the void reemerged in the Renaissance as a story about reading and letters—a story that materialized in texts, in their physical recomposition, and in their scattering. From the works of Virgil and Macrobius to those of Petrarch, Poliziano, Lambin, Montaigne, Bacon, Spenser, Gassendi, Henry More, and Newton, the book recovers a forgotten history of materialism in humanist thought and scholarly practice, and asks us to reconsider one of the most enduring questions of the period: what does it mean for a text, a poem, and philosophy to be “reborn”?

In this book, libraries are more than inert storehouses of written tradition; they are volatile spaces that actively shape the meanings and uses of books, reading, and the past. Considering the two-hundred-year period between 1431, which saw the foundation of Duke Humfrey's famous library, and 1631, when the great antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton died, the book revises the history of the modern library by focusing on its origins in medieval and early modern England. The author argues that the medieval sources that survive in English collections are the product of a Reformation and post-Reformation struggle to redefine the past by redefining the cultural place, function, and identity of libraries. By establishing the intellectual dynamism of English libraries during this crucial period of their development, the book demonstrates how much current discussions about the future of libraries can gain by reexamining their past.

The theater of early modern England was a disastrous affair. The scant record of its performance demonstrates as much, for what we tend to remember today of the Shakespearean stage and its history are landmark moments of dissolution: the burning down of the Globe, the forced closure of playhouses during outbreaks of the plague, and the abolition of the theater by its Cromwellian opponents. This book is a study of these catastrophes and the theory of performance they convey. The book argues that the various disasters that afflicted the English theater during its golden age were no accident but the promised end of a practice built on disappearance and erasure—a kind of fatal performance that left nothing behind but its self-effacing poetics. Bringing together dramatic theory, performance studies, and theatrical, religious, and cultural history, the book reveals the period's radical take on the history and the future of the stage to show just how critical the relation was between early modern English theater and its public.

We have become used to looking at art from a stance of detachment. In order to be objective, we create a “mental space” between ourselves and the objects of our investigation, separating internal and external worlds. This detachment dates back to the early modern period, when researchers in a wide variety of fields tried to describe material objects as “things in themselves”—things, that is, without the admixture of imagination. Generations of scholars have heralded this shift as the Renaissance “discovery” of the observable world. This book explores how poetry responded to this new detachment by becoming a repository for a more complex experience of the world. The book focuses on ekphrasis, the elaborate literary description of a thing, as a form that resisted this new empirical objectivity. Poets like Petrarch, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare crafted artful descriptions that provided a home for the threatened subjective experience of the material world. In so doing, these poets reflected on the emergence of objectivity itself as a process that was often darker and more painful than otherwise acknowledged. This book reclaims subjectivity as an irreplaceable way of grasping the material world and, at the same time, makes a case for understanding art objects as fundamentally unlike any other kind of objects.

Political theology is a distinctly modern problem, one that takes shape in some of the most important theoretical writings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But its origins stem from the early modern period, in medieval iconographies of sacred kinship and the critique of traditional sovereignty mounted by Hobbes and Spinoza. This book assembles established and emerging scholars in early modern studies to examine the role played by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and thought in modern conceptions of political theology. It explores texts by Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Milton, and others that have served as points of departure for such thinkers as Schmitt, Strauss, Benjamin, and Arendt. Written from a spectrum of positions ranging from renewed defenses of secularism to attempts to reconceive the religious character of collective life and literary experience, these chapters probe moments of productive conflict, disavowal, and entanglement in politics and religion as they pass between early modern and modern scenes of thought. This book aims to answer not only how Renaissance and baroque literature help explain the persistence of political theology in modernity and postmodernity, but also how the re-emergence of political theology as an intellectual and political problem deepens our understanding of the early modern period.

Poor Tom offers a new model of Shakespearean life, and a new reading of King Lear. It is arranged in two interweaving modes: first, moment by moment analyses of the Edgar-part’s scenes; second, meditations upon possibilities—philosophical, theological, political—generated by the action. Edgar-Tom is a figure without conventional limits, the personification of Shakespeare’s restless, species-traversing craft: at once the distillation and explosion of Shakespearean forms. Poor Tom epitomizes this, as a non-being that possesses the most alarming reality, and in doing so pushes the possibilities of theatrical life far beyond what is customarily allowed. The part incarnates the split-and-spliced, here-not-here morphology of both playtext and playworld. It takes on historical possibility, past and coming, as its own ever-mutating burden: at once a boundary-haunter at life’s extremities, wired for alarming advents, and directly at the cultural center, suffering the world’s necessities. Edgar/Tom becomes a figure of uncanny modernity, indeed futurity, a political and existential potential brought into relief by comparison with various analogues from scripture, art, theology, and philosophy both ancient and modern. He becomes Shakespeare’s most intimate sensor of what cannot be known, and yet may exist; or what cannot exist, and yet may be known. Edgar/Tom thus heralds the limitations of conventional theater. This is a world of echoes, intervals, hauntings, telepathy, irruptiveness, to which the daily senses are never adequate. Its possibilities are discovered only through trusting to voices, and paying sleepless attention. Edgar-Tom alone knows what it means to live—and survive—King Lear.

Posthumous Love explores the boundaries that Renaissance English poets drew between earthly and heavenly love. The idea that love would transcend mortality was central to the Italian tradition that English authors had inherited. Dante and Petrarch each envisioned their future encounters in the afterlife—Dante with Beatrice, and Petrarch with Laura—and Neoplatonic philosophers described in great detail the ladder of love that gently ascended from the earthly beloved to the heavens above. When English poets begin to grapple seriously with this Italian legacy in the early sixteenth century, they almost unanimously refused the idea that love might transcend the grave. The consequence of this insistently mortal conception of love was a new emphasis on endings, and on the pleasure, as well as the pain, that temporal limits bring. Imagining erotic love as mortal produced a range of poetic responses, from tragic dramas to exuberant carpe diem lyrics. But whatever the spirit or mood of the individual work, the inevitability of love’s ending was a nearly universal feature of this period’s literature. The result was not simply a void or lack where there had once been something positive and affirming. Instead, negation brought forth a new mode of poetics that derived its emotional and aesthetic power from its insistence upon love’s mortality. Posthumous Love ultimately shows what English poetry gained by regarding love as finite.

English law underwent rapid transformation in the sixteenth century, in response to the Reformation and also to heightened litigation and legal professionalization. As the common law became more comprehensive and systematic, the principle of jurisdiction came under particular strain. When the common law engaged with other court systems in England, when it encountered territories like Ireland and France, or when it confronted the ocean as a juridical space, the law revealed its qualities of ingenuity and improvisation. In other words, as this book argues, jurisdictional crisis made visible the law's resemblance to the literary arts. The book shows how Renaissance writers engaged the practical and conceptual dynamics of jurisdiction, both as a subject for critical investigation and as a frame for articulating literature's sense of itself. Reassessing the relation between English literature and law from Thomas More to William Shakespeare, it argues that where literary texts attend to jurisdiction, they dramatize how boundaries and limits are the very precondition of law's power, even as they clarify the forms of intensification that make literary space a reality. Tracking cultural responses to Renaissance jurisdictional thinking and legal centralization, the book makes theoretical, literary-historical, and methodological contributions that set a new standard for law and the humanities, and for the cultural history of early modern law and literature.

The crises of faith that traumatized Reformation Europe precipitated crises of individual and collective identity. Structures of feeling and structures of belief underwent a lasting transformation; there was a reformation of social emotions—a necessary recalibration of community—as well as a Reformation of faith. It is an informing belief of this study that our most lasting and moving works of culture are what they are—lasting and moving—because they are so deeply rooted in the soil of their times, complexly engaged with what is at risk in the historical moment and unsettled in the collective identity. This is especially true of theater, one of the most social of the arts. As a public and performative art, theater provides public and performative cultures with a means of thinking about themselves, especially when other methods and media fail. This book argues that Elizabethan popular drama served as a form of embodied social and affective thought, challenging the first generation born into the Elizabethan Protestant Settlement—Shakespeare, Kyd, and Marlowe’s generation—to confront its fault lines and differences in social thinking, feeling, and belief. A lasting example of art at its most engaged, early modern Reformation drama was also a critical phenomenon in the way that theory, an etymologically related term for seeing, is critical: a far from harmonious and not always therapeutic way of thinking and feeling, by means of actual bodies on stage and in the audience, about the larger, traumatized social body.

In 1345, when Petrarch recovered a lost collection of letters from Cicero to his best friend Atticus, he discovered an intimate Cicero, a man very different from either the well-known orator of the Roman forum or the measured spokesman for the ancient schools of philosophy. It was Petrarch's encounter with this previously unknown Cicero and his letters that this book argues fundamentally changed the way Europeans from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries were expected to read and write. This book explores the way ancient epistolary theory and practice were understood and imitated in the European Renaissance. The book draws chiefly upon Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca—but also upon Plato, Demetrius, Quintilian, and many others—to show how the classical genre of the “familiar” letter emerged centuries later in the intimate styles of Petrarch, Erasmus, and Montaigne. Along the way, it reveals how the complex concept of intimacy in the Renaissance—leveraging the legal, affective, and stylistic dimensions of its prehistory in antiquity—pervades the literary production and reception of the period and sets the course for much that is modern in the literature of subsequent centuries.

We take it for granted today that the study of poetry belongs in school—but in sixteenth-century England, making Ovid or Virgil into pillars of the curriculum was a revolution. This book explores how poets reacted to the new authority of humanist pedagogy, and how they transformed a genre to express their most radical doubts. It investigates what it meant for a book to teach as it traces the rivalry between poet and schoolmaster in the works of John Lyly, Philip Sydney, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton. Drawing deeply on the era's pedagogical literature, the book explores the links between humanist strategies of instruction and romance narrative, rethinking such concepts as experience, sententiousness, example, method, punishment, lessons, and endings. In scrutinizing this pivotal moment in the ancient, intimate contest between art and education, this book offers a view of one of the most unconsidered—yet fundamental—problems in literary criticism: poetry's power to please and instruct.