Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas was the most popular and widely-imitated poet in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and Scotland. C. S. Lewis felt that a reconsideration of his works' British reception was 'long overdue' back in the 1950s, and this study finally provides the first comprehensive account of how English-speaking authors read, translated, imitated, and eventually discarded Du Bartas' model for Protestant poetry. The first part shows that Du Bartas' friendship with James VI and I was key to his later popularity. Du Bartas' poetry symbolized a transnational Protestant literary culture in Huguenot France and Britain. Through James' intervention, Scottish literary tastes had a significant impact in England. Later chapters assess how Sidney, Spenser, Milton, and many other poets justified writing poetic fictions in reaction to Du Bartas' austere emphasis on scriptural truth. These chapters give equal attention to how Du Bartas' example offered a route into original verse composition for male and female poets across the literate population. Du Bartas' Legacy in England and Scotland responds to recent developments in transnational and translation studies, the history of reading, women's writing, religious literature, and manuscript studies. It argues that Du Bartas' legacy deserves far greater prominence than it has previously received because it offers a richer, more democratic, and more accurate view of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English, Scottish, and French literature and religious culture.

Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas was the most popular and widely-imitated poet in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and Scotland. C.S. Lewis felt that a reconsideration of his works' British reception was 'long overdue' back in the 1950s, and this study finally provides the first comprehensive account of how English-speaking poets read, translated, imitated, and eventually discarded Du Bartas' model for Protestant poetry. The first part shows that Du Bartas' friendship with James VI and I was a key factor in his popularity. Through James's intervention, Du Bartas' poetry symbolized a transnational Protestant literary culture in Huguenot France and Britain, and meant that Scottish literary tastes had a significant impact in England. Later chapters assess how Sidney, Spenser, Milton and many other poets justified writing poetic fictions in reaction to Du Bartas' austere emphasis on scriptural truth. Crucially, Du Bartas' example is essential for understanding the everyday creative activities of many men and women who wrote poetry away from centres of power. 0Du Bartas' Legacy in England and Scotland responds to recent developments in transnational and translation studies, the history of reading, women's writing, religious literature, and manuscript and print studies. It argues that Du Bartas' legacy deserves greater prominence because it offers a more accurate, diverse, and representative view of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English, Scottish, and French literature and religious culture.

The sixteenth-century French poets Pierre de Ronsard and Guillaume Du Bartas enjoyed a wide, immediate and long-lasting, but varied and mixed reception throughout early modern Europe. Ronsard and Du Bartas in Early Modern Europe is the first book-length volume to explore the transnational reception histories of both poets in conjunction with each other. It takes into account the great variety of their readerships, including translators, imitating poets, poetical theorists, illustrators and painters, both male and female (Marie de Gournay, Anne Bradstreet), some of them illustrious (Tasso, King James VI and I of Scotland and England, Opitz...), others less known, even obscure, but worth to be saved from oblivion (such as the French Marc-Antoine Chalon, the English Mary Roper, and the Dutch poet Philibert van Borsselen). This volume offers a fascinating insight into the different reception modes in Europe and their underlying political, religious and literary identities. Contributors include: Peter Auger, Denis Bjaï, Karel Bostoen †, Philippe Chométy, Paola Cosentino, Violaine Giacomotto-Charra, Alisa van de Haar, Pádraic Lamb, Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou, Elisabeth Rothmund, Paul J. Smith, and Caroline Trotot.

By drawing upon recent scholarship, original manuscript materials, and previously unpublished sources, this new biography presents an analytical narrative of King James VI & I’s life from his birth in 1566 to his accession to the throne of England and Ireland in 1603. The only son of Mary Stuart and heir (apparent but not uncontested) to Elizabeth I, James VI of Scotland was, from the moment of his birth, a focal point of countervailing hopes and fears for the confessional and dynastic future of the kingdoms of the British Isles. This study examines material from across the UK and beyond, as well as the newly deciphered letters of Mary, Queen of Scots, to reveal James as a highly capable, resourceful, deeply provocative and ruthless political actor. Analysis of James’s own writings is integrated within the narrative, providing fresh insights into the king’s inventive tactical engagement in the politics of publicity. Through a chronological approach, the events of his life are linked to wider issues associated with the early modern court, government, religion, and political and ideological conflict. James VI, Britannic Prince is of interest to all scholars of Scottish and British history in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

The Oxford History of Poetry in English (OHOPE) is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. OHOPE both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the fourteen volumes. By taking as its purview the full seventeenth century, 1603-1700, this volume re-draws the existing literary historical map and expands upon recent rethinking of the canon. Placing the revolutionary years at the centre of a century of poetic transformation, and putting the Restoration back into the seventeenth century, the volume registers the transformative effects on poetic forms of a century of social, political, and religious upheaval. It considers the achievements of a number of women poets, not yet fully integrated into traditional literary histories. It assimilates the vibrant literature of the English Revolution to what came before and after, registering its long-term impact. It traces the development of print culture and of the literary marketplace, alongside the continued circulation of poetry in manuscript. It places John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish, and Katherine Philips and other mid-century poets into the full century of specifically literary development. It traces continuity and change, imitation and innovation in the full-century trajectory of such poetic genres as sonnet, elegy, satire, georgic, epigram, ode, devotional lyric, and epic. The volume's attention to poetic form builds on the current upswing in historicist formalism, allowing a close focus on poetry as an intensely aesthetic and social literary mode. Designed for maximum classroom utility, the organization is both thematic and (in the authors section) chronological. After a comprehensive Introduction, organizational sections focus on Transitions; Materiality, Production, and Circulation; Poetics and Form; Genres; and Poets.

Beginning with the last years of the reign of Elizabeth I and ending late in the seventeenth century, this volume traces the growth of the literary marketplace, the development of poetic genres, and the participation of different writers in a century of poetic continuity, change, and transformation.

This collection examines early modern women’s contribution to the culturally central mode of complaint. Complaint has largely been understood as male-authored, yet, as this collection shows, early modern women used complaint across a surprising variety of forms from the early-Tudor period to the late-seventeenth century. They were some of the mode’s first writers, most influential patrons, and most innovative contributors. Together, these new essays illuminate early modern women’s participation in one of the most powerful rhetorical modes in the English Renaissance, one which gave voice to political, religious and erotic protest and loss across a diverse range of texts. This volume interrogates new texts (closet drama, song, manuscript-based religious and political lyrics), new authors (Dorothy Shirley, Scots satirical writers, Hester Pulter, Mary Rowlandson), and new versions of complaint (biblical, satirical, legal, and vernacular). Its essays pay specific attention to politics, form, and transmission from complaint’s first circulation up to recent digital representations of its texts. Bringing together an international group of experts in early modern women’s writing and in complaint literature more broadly, this collection explores women’s role in the formation of the mode and in doing so reconfigures our understanding of complaint in Renaissance culture and thought.

James VI and I was arguably the most successful ruler of the Stewart Dynasty in Scotland, and the first king of a united Great Britain. His ableness as a monarch, it has been argued, stemmed largely from his Scottish upbringing. This book is the first in-depth scholarly study of those formative years. It tries to understand exactly when in James' 'long apprenticeship' he seized political power and retraces the incremental steps he took along the way. It also poses new answers to key questions about this process. What relationship did he have with his mother Mary Queen of Scots? Why did he favour his kinsman Esmé Stuart, ultimately Duke of Lennox, to such an extent that it endangered his own throne? And was there a discernible pattern of intent to the alliances he made with the various factions at court between 1578 and 1585? This book also analyses James' early reign as an important case study of the impact of the Reformation on the monarchy of early modern Europe, and examines the cultural activity at James' early court.

More than fifty specialists have contributed to this new edition of volume 1 of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The design of the original work has established itself so firmly as a workable solution to the immense problems of analysis, articulation and coordination that it has been retained in all its essentials for the new edition. The task of the new contributors has been to revise and integrate the lists of 1940 and 1957, to add materials of the following decade, to correct and refine the bibliographical details already available, and to re-shape the whole according to a new series of conventions devised to give greater clarity and consistency to the entries.