Encompassing the study of manuscripts produced in the British Isles between the Conquest and the end of the seventeenth century, this series provides a forum for the interdisciplinary investigation of both medieval and Renaissance manuscripts.

This volume includes contributions from international scholars on topics such as: The Duke of Buckingham Masque, The Gower Manuscripts of Poems by Thomas Carew and A Newly Discovered Songbook in Poland with works by Henry Lawes and His Contemporaries.

The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare presents a broad sampling of current historical scholarship on the period of Shakespeare's career that will assist and stimulate scholars of his poems and plays. Rather than merely attempting to summarize the historical 'background' to Shakespeare, individual chapters seek to exemplify a wide variety of perspectives and methodologies currently used in historical research on the early modern period that can inform close analysis of literature. Different sections examine political history at both the national and local levels; relationships between intellectual culture and the early modern political imagination; relevant aspects of religious and social history; and facets of the histories of architecture, the visual arts, and music. Topics treated include the emergence of an early modern 'public sphere' and its relationship to drama during Shakespeare's lifetime; the role of historical narratives in shaping the period's views on the workings of politics; attitudes about the role of emotion in social life; cultures of honour and shame and the rituals and literary forms through which they found expression; crime and murder; and visual expressions of ideas of moral disorder and natural monstrosity, in printed images as well as garden architecture.

Essays by leading scholars explore the work, life and times of the notorious libertine poet John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester.

Throughout the seventeenth century, early modern play readers and playgoers copied dramatic extracts into their commonplace books, verse miscellanies, diaries, and songbooks. This is the first book to examine these often overlooked texts, which reveal what early modern audiences and readers took, literally and figuratively, from plays.

English Manuscript Studies is an annual periodical reflecting the growing level of scholarly interest in manuscript sources for literature and intellectual history from medieval to modern times. Contributors for Volume 8 include Hilton Kelliher on "Beaumont, Fletcher and Field: New Biographical Light from Cambridge Records", James Knowles on "The Duke of Buckingham Masque", Peter Beal on "The Gower Manuscript of Poems by Thomas Carew", Scott Nixon on "The Manuscript Sources of Thomas Carew's Poetry", Richard Charteris on "A Newly Discovered Songbook in Poland with Works by Henry Lawes and his Contemporarie"s. Shorter articles include "Donne Manuscripts in Cheshire" by Dennis Flynn, "'Not the Worst part of my wretched life': Three New Letters by Rochester" by Keith Walker, " A New Dating of Rochester's Artemiza to Chloe" by Nicholas Fisher, and A S G Edwards on "Manuscripts at Auction January 1997 to December 1998".

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.