Eleven essays invite us to rethink not only what constitutes an environment but also where the environment ends and selfhood begins. The essays examine the dynamic and varied mediations early modern writers posited between microcosm and macrocosm, ranging from discourses on the ecology of passions to striking examples of distributed cognition.

Geographies of Embodiment in Early Modern England gathers essays from prominent scholars of English Renaissance literature and history who have made substantial contributions to the study of early modern embodiment, historical phenomenology, affect, cognition, memory, and natural philosophy. It provides new interpretations of the geographic dimensions of early modern embodiment, emphasizing the transactional and dynamic aspects of the relationship between body and world. The geographies of embodiment encompass both cognitive processes and cosmic environments, and inner emotional states as well as affective landscapes. Rather than always being territorialized onto individual bodies, ideas about early modern embodiment are varied both in their scope and in terms of their representation. Reflecting this variety, this volume offers up a range of inquiries into how early modern writers accounted for the exchanges between the microcosm and macrocosm. It engages with Gail Kern Paster's groundbreaking scholarship on embodiment, humoralism, the passions, and historical phenomenology throughout, and offers new readings of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Thomas Nashe, John Milton, and others. Contributions consider the epistemiologies of navigation and cartography, the significance of geohumoralism, the ethics of self-mastery, theories of early modern cosmology, the construction of place memory, and perceptions of an animate spirit world.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment brings together 40 of the most important scholars and intellectuals writing on the subject today. Extending the purview of feminist criticism, it offers an intersectional paradigm for considering representations of gender in the context of race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and religion. In addition to sophisticated textual analysis drawing on the methods of historicism, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and posthumanism, a team of international experts discuss Shakespeare's life, contemporary editing practices, and performance of his plays on stage, on screen, and in the classroom. This theoretically sophisticated yet elegantly written Handbook includes an editor's Introduction that provides a comprehensive overview of current debates.

Exploiting a link between early modern concepts of the medical and the literary, David Houston Wood suggests that the recent critical attention to the gendered, classed, and raced elements of the embodied early modern subject has been hampered by its failure to acknowledge the role time and temporality play within the scope of these admittedly crucial concerns. Wood examines the ways that depictions of time expressed in early modern medical texts reveal themselves in contemporary literary works, demonstrating that the early modern recognition of the self as a palpably volatile entity, viewed within the tenets of contemporary medical treatises, facilitated the realistic portrayal of literary characters and served as a structuring principle for narrative experimentation. The study centers on four canonical, early modern texts notorious among scholars for their structural- that is, narrative, or temporal- difficulties. Wood displays the cogency of such analysis by working across a range of generic boundaries: from the prose romance of Philip Sidney's Arcadia, to the staged plays of William Shakespeare's Othello and The Winter's Tale, to John Milton's stubborn reliance upon humoral theory in shaping his brief epic (or closet drama), Samson Agonistes. As well as adding a new dimension to the study of authors and texts that remain central to early modern English literary culture, the author proposes a new method for analyzing the conjunction of character emotion and narrative structure that will serve as a model for future scholarship in the areas of historicist, formalist, and critical temporal studies.

This collection considers issues that have emerged in Early Modern Studies in the past fifteen years relating to understandings of mind and body in Shakespeare’s world. Informed by The Body in Parts, the essays in this book respond also to the notion of an early modern ‘body-mind’ in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries are understood in terms of bodily parts and cognitive processes. What might the impact of such understandings be on our picture of Shakespeare’s theatre or on our histories of the early modern period, broadly speaking? This book provides a wide range of approaches to this challenge, covering histories of cognition, studies of early modern stage practices, textual studies, and historical phenomenology, as well as new cultural histories by some of the key proponents of this approach at the present time. Because of the breadth of material covered, full weight is given to issues that are hotly debated at the present time within Shakespeare Studies: presentist scholarship is presented alongside more historically-focused studies, for example, and phenomenological studies of material culture are included along with close readings of texts. What the contributors have in common is a refusal to read the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries either psychologically or materially; instead, these essays address a willingness to study early modern phenomena (like the Elizabethan stage) as manifesting an early modern belief in the embodiment of cognition.

How did gender figure in understandings of spatial realms, from the inner spaces of the body to the furthest reaches of the globe? How did women situate themselves in the early modern world, and how did they move through it, in both real and imaginary locations? How do new disciplinary and geographic connections shape the ways we think about the early modern world, and the role of women and men in it? These are the questions that guide this volume, which includes articles by a select group of scholars from many disciplines: Art History, Comparative Literature, English, German, History, Landscape Architecture, Music, and Women's Studies. Each essay reaches across fields, and several are written by interdisciplinary groups of authors. The essays also focus on many different places, including Rome, Amsterdam, London, and Paris, and on texts and images that crossed the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, or that portrayed real and imagined people who did. Many essays investigate topics key to the ’spatial turn’ in various disciplines, such as borders and their permeability, actual and metaphorical spatial crossings, travel and displacement, and the built environment.

Grounded in the literary history of early modern England, this study explores the intersection of cultural attitudes and material practices that shape the acquisition, circulation, and consumption of resources at the turn of the seventeenth century. Considering a formally diverse and ideologically rich array of texts from the period - including drama, poetry, and prose, as well as travel narrative and early modern political and literary theory - this book shows how ideas about what is considered 'enough' adapt to changing material conditions and how cultural forces shape those adaptations. Literature and Moral Economy in the Early Modern Atlantic traces how early modern English authors improvised new models of sufficiency that pushed back the threshold of excess to the frontier of the known world itself. The book argues that standards of economic sufficiency as expressed through literature moved from subsistence toward the increasing pursuit of plenty through plunder, trade, and plantation. Author Hillary Eklund describes what it means to have enough in the moral economies of eating, travel, trade, land use and public policy.

Literary geographies is an exciting new area of interdisciplinary research. Innovative and engaging, this book applies theories of landscape, space and place from the discipline of cultural geography within an early modern historical context. Different kinds of drama and performance are analysed: from commercial drama by key playwrights to household masques and entertainment performed by families and in semi-official contexts. Sanders provides a fresh look at works from the careers of Ben Jonson, John Milton and Richard Brome, paying attention to geographical spaces and habitats like forests, coastlines and arctic landscapes of ice and snow, as well as the more familiar locales of early modern country estates and city streets and spaces. Overall, the book encourages readers to think about geography as kinetic, embodied and physical, not least in its literary configurations, presenting a key contribution to early modern scholarship.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy offers critical and contemporary resources for studying Shakespeare's comic enterprises. It engages with perennial, yet still urgent questions raised by the comedies and looks at them from a range of new perspectives that represent the most recent methodological approaches to Shakespeare, genre, and early modern drama. Several chapters take up firmly established topics of inquiry such Shakespeare's source materials, gender and sexuality, hetero- and homoerotic desire, race, and religion, and they reformulate these topics in the materialist, formalist, phenomenological, or revisionist terms of current scholarship and critical debate. Others explore subjects that have only relatively recently become pressing concerns for sustained scholarly interrogation, such as ecology, cross-species interaction, and humoral theory. Some contributions, informed by increasingly sophisticated approaches to the material conditions and embodied experience of theatrical practice, speak to a resurgence of interest in performance, from Shakespeare's period through the first decades of the twenty-first century. Others still investigate distinct sets of plays from unexpected and often polemical angles, noting connections between the comedies under inventive, unpredicted banners such as the theology of adultery, early modern pedagogy, global exploration, or monarchical rule. The Handbook situates these approaches against the long history of criticism and provides a valuable overview of the most up-to-date work in the field.

Charting the ruthless rise and fall of the villainous king, Richard III remains one of Shakespeare's most enduringly discussed and oft-performed plays. Assembled by leading scholars, this guide provides a comprehensive survey of major issues in the contemporary study of the play. Throughout the book survey chapters explore such issues as the play's critical reception from Dr Johnson to postmodern readings in the 21st century; the performance history of the play, from Shakespeare's day to more recent stagings by Laurence Olivier and Ian McKellen; key themes in current scholarship, from disability to gender and nationalism; Richard III on film, including Al Pacino's Looking for Richard. Richard III: A Critical Guide also includes a complete guide to resources available on the play - including critical editions, online resources and an annotated bibliography - and how they might be used to aid both the teaching and study of Shakespeare's play.