Examines literary engagement with immateriality since the 'material turn' in early modern studiesProvides six case studies of works by Shakespeare, Donne, and Herbert, offering new readings of important literary texts of the English Renaissance alongside detailed chapters outlining attitudes towards immateriality in works of natural philosophy, medicine, and theologyEmploys an innovative organization around three major areas in which problem of immaterial was particularly pitched: Ontology, Theology, and Psychology (or Being, Believing, and Thinking)Includes wide-ranging references to early modern literary, philosophical, and theological textsDemonstrates how innovations in natural philosophy influenced thought about the natural world and how it was portrayed in literatureEngages with current early modern scholarship in the areas of material culture, cognitive literary studies, and phenomenologyImmateriality and Early Modern English Literature explores how early modern writers responded to rapidly shifting ideas about the interrelation of their natural and spiritual worlds. It provides six case studies of works by Shakespeare, Donne and Herbert, offering new readings of important literary texts of the English Renaissance alongside detailed chapters outlining attitudes towards immateriality in works of natural philosophy, medicine and theology. Building on the importance of addressing material culture in order to understand early modern literature, Knapp demonstrates how the literary imagination was shaped by changing attitudes toward the immaterial realm.

In romances—Renaissance England’s version of the fantasy novel—characters often discover books that turn out to be magical or prophetic, and to offer insights into their readers’ selves. The Immaterial Book examines scenes of reading in important romance texts across genres: Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and The Tempest, Wroth’s Urania, and Cervantes’ Don Quixote. It offers a response to “material book studies” by calling for a new focus on imaginary or “immaterial” books and argues that early modern romance authors, rather than replicating contemporary reading practices within their texts, are reviving ancient and medieval ideas of the book as a conceptual framework, which they use to investigate urgent, new ideas about the self and the self-conscious mind.

The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama is the first book to present a detailed examination of early modern theatrical properties informed by the complexity of post-Reformation religious practice. Although English Protestant reformers set out to destroy all vestiges of Catholic idolatry, public theater companies frequently used stage properties to draw attention to the remnants of traditional religion as well as the persistent materiality of post-Reformation worship. The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama explores the relationship between popular culture and theatrical performance by considering the social history and dramatic function of these properties, addressing their role as objects of devotion, idolatry, and remembrance on the professional stage. Rather than being aligned with identifiably Catholic or Protestant values, the author reveals how religious stage properties functioned as fulcrums around which more subtle debates about the status of Christian worship played out. Given the relative lack of existing documentation on stage properties, The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama employs a wide range of source materials-including inventories published in the Records of Early English Drama (REED) volumes-to account for the material presence of these objects on the public stage. By combining historical research on popular religion with detailed readings of the scripts themselves, the book fills a gap in our knowledge about the physical qualities of the stage properties used in early modern productions. Tracing the theater's appropriation of highly charged religious properties, The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama provides a new framework for understanding the canonization of early modern plays, especially those of Shakespeare.

This volume convenes eight noted scholars with varied positions at the interface of formal and historical literary criticism. The editors’ introduction—a far-reaching account of how both methods have intersected in studies of early modern English texts since the 1990s—is the first such survey in more than 15 years, making it invaluable to scholars entering this area. Three essays address foundational questions about genre, fictionality, and formlessness; five feature close readings of texts or passages ranging from the more canonical (Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton) to the less so (an official record of the 1604 Hampton Court Conference). For scholars and students alike, the book thus models a variety of ways both to conceptualize and to analyze the value of literature at the formal–historical interface. Encompassing drama, lyric, satirical and polemical prose, and metrical as well as rhetorical and logical forms, the collection closes with an afterword by theorist Caroline Levine.

Daniel Wakelin introduces and reinterprets the misunderstood and overlooked craft practices, cultural conventions and literary attitudes involved in making some of the most important manuscripts in late medieval English literature. In doing so he overturns how we view the role of scribes, showing how they ignored or concealed irregular and damaged parchment; ruled pages from habit and convention more than necessity; decorated the division of the text into pages or worried that it would harm reading; abandoned annotations to poetry, focusing on the poem itself; and copied English poems meticulously, in reverence for an abstract idea of the text. Scribes' interest in immaterial ideas and texts suggests their subtle thinking as craftspeople, in ways that contrast and extend current interpretations of late medieval literary culture, 'material texts' and the power of materials. For students, researchers and librarians, this book offers revelatory perspectives on the activities of late medieval scribes.

Uses the idea of the box in early modern England to develop a new direction in book history and material culture.

Written by an international group of highly regarded scholars and rooted in the field of intermedial approaches to literary studies, this volume explores the complex aesthetic process of "picturing" in early modern English literature. The essays in this volume offer a comprehensive and varied picture of the relationship between visual and verbal in the early modern period, while also contributing to the understanding of the literary context in which Shakespeare wrote. Using different methodological approaches and taking into account a great variety of texts, including Elizabethan sonnet sequences, metaphysical poetry, famous as well as anonymous plays, and court masques, the book opens new perspectives on the literary modes of "picturing" and on the relationship between this creative act and the tense artistic, religious and political background of early modern Europe. The first section explores different modes of looking at works of art and their relation with technological innovations and religious controversies, while the chapters in the second part highlight the multifaceted connections between European visual arts and English literary production. The third section explores the functions performed by portraits on the page and the stage, delving into the complex question of the relationship between visual and verbal representation. Finally, the chapters in the fourth section re-appraise early modern reflections on the relationship between word and image and on their respective power in light of early-seventeenth-century visual culture, with particular reference to the masque genre.

This book uses textual and material evidence -- in poetry, prayers, physiologies, sermons, church buildings and monuments, manuscript diaries and notebooks -- to explore how material things held spiritual meaning in George Herbert's poetry, and to reflect on scholarly approaches to matter and form in devotional poetry.

The typographic imaginary is an aesthetic linking authors from William Caxton to Alexander Pope, this study centrally contends. Early modern English literature engages imaginatively with printing and this book both characterizes that engagement and proposes the typographic imaginary as a framework for its analysis. Certain texts, Rachel Stenner states, describe the people, places, concerns, and processes of printing in ways that, over time, generate their own figurative authority. The typographic imaginary is posited as a literary phenomenon shared by different writers, a wider cultural understanding of printing, and a critical concept for unpicking the particular imaginative otherness that printing introduced to literature. Authors use the typographic imaginary to interrogate their place in an evolving media environment, to assess the value of the printed text, and to analyse the roles of other text-producing agents. This book treats a broad array of authors and forms: printers’ manuals; William Caxton’s paratexts; the pamphlet dialogues of Robert Copland and Ned Ward; poetic miscellanies; the prose fictions of William Baldwin, George Gascoigne, and Thomas Nashe; the poetry and prose of Edmund Spenser; writings by John Taylor and Alexander Pope. At its broadest, this study contributes to an understanding of how technology changes cultures. Located at the crossroads between literary, material, and book historical research, the particular intervention that this work makes is threefold. In describing the typographic imaginary, it proposes a new framework for analysis of print culture. It aims to focus critical engagement on symbolic representations of material forms. Finally, it describes a lineage of late medieval and early modern authors, stretching from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, that are linked by their engagement of a particular aesthetic.

In this timely new study, Borlik reveals the surprisingly rich potential for the emergent "green" criticism to yield fresh insights into early modern English literature. Deftly avoiding the anachronistic casting of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors as modern environmentalists, he argues that environmental issues, such as nature’s personhood, deforestation, energy use, air quality, climate change, and animal sentience, are formative concerns in many early modern texts. The readings infuse a new urgency in familiar works by Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Ralegh, Jonson, Donne, and Milton. At the same time, the book forecasts how ecocriticism will bolster the reputation of less canonical authors like Drayton, Wroth, Bruno, Gascoigne, and Cavendish. Its chapters trace provocative affinities between topics such as Pythagorean ecology and the Gaia hypothesis, Ovidian tropes and green phenomenology, the disenchantment of Nature and the Little Ice Age, and early modern pastoral poetry and modern environmental ethics. It also examines the ecological onus of Renaissance poetics, while showcasing how the Elizabethans’ sense of a sophisticated interplay between nature and art can provide a precedent for ecocriticism’s current understanding of the relationship between nature and culture as "mutually constructive." Situating plays and poems alongside an eclectic array of secondary sources, including herbals, forestry laws, husbandry manuals, almanacs, and philosophical treatises on politics and ethics, Borlik demonstrates that Elizabethan and Jacobean authors were very much aware of, and concerned about, the impact of human beings on their natural surroundings.