The first essay collection on A Mirror for Magistrates, the most popular work of English literature in the Shakespearean age.

Situates the often neglected collection of English Renaissance narrative poems A Mirror for Magistrates in the cultural context of its production, locating it not as a primitive form of tragedy, but as the epitome of the de casibus literary tradition.

A detailed exploration of a significant work of Tudor literature, The Mirror for Magistrates. The volume shows how the text is more than a moralistic collection of poems and how it is concerned with the transmission of national history, and the ways in which the past can be distorted, misremembered, misinterpreted, or lost.

Lucas presents the earliest poems of 'A Mirror for Magistrates' to the troubled context of their production. Lucas's study also reveals how, in later poems, the 'Mirror' authors issued oblique appeals to Queen Elizabeth's officers, demanding that they allow the realm of 'the literary' to stand as a discursive arena of public controversy.

Marginalia in early modern and medieval texts – printed, handwrit- ten, drawn, scratched, colored, and pasted in – offer a glimpse of how people, as individuals and in groups, interacted with books and manu- scripts over often lengthy periods of time. The chapters in this volume build on earlier scholarship that established marginalia as an intellec- tual method (Grafton and Jardine), as records of reading motivated by cultural, social, theological, and personal inclinations (Brayman [Hackel] and Orgel), and as practices inspired by material affordances particular to the book and the pen (Fleming and Sherman). They further the study of the practices of marginalia as a mode – a set of ways in which material opportunities and practices overlap with intellectual, social, and personal motivations to make meaning in the world. They introduce us to a set of idiosyncratic examples such as the trace marks of objects left in books, deliberately or by accident; cut-and-pasted additions to printed volumes; a marriage depicted through shared book ownership. They reveal to us in case studies the unique value of mar- ginalia as evidence of phenomena as important and diverse as religious change, authorial self-invention, and the history of the literary canon. The chapters of this book go beyond the case study, however, and raise broad historical, cultural, and theoretical questions about the strange, marvelous, metamorphic thing we call the book, and the equally mul- tiplicitous, eccentric, and inscrutable beings who accompany them through history: readers and writers.

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