'Writing After Sidney' examines the literary response to Sir Philip Sidney, author of the 'Arcadia, Astrophil and Stella' and 'The Defence of Poesy', and the influential writer of the Elizabethan period.

Mediatrix examines the roles women played as patrons, dedicatees, and readers, as well writers, in the English Renaissance, and the relationship between these literary activities and religious and political activism.

Renaissance poetry anthologies were crafted within the book trade and re-crafted through performance, transforming Early Modern cultures of recreation.

Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia has held a significant place in literary imagination since its inception over 430 years ago. Our four-volume set presents five re-imaginings of the text, as well as two short supplements that attempt to bridge the gap between Sidney’s original and revised versions of the work.

Presented in two volumes, The Ashgate Research Companion to The Sidneys, 1500-1700 assesses the current state of scholarship on members of the Sidney family and their impact, as historical and/or literary figures, in the period 1500-1700. Volume 2: Literature, begins with an exploration of the Sidneys' books and manuscripts and how they circulated, followed by an overview of the contributions of family members -Sir Philip Sidney; Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Lady Mary Wroth; Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester; and William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke - in the genres of prose romance, drama, poetry, psalms and prose. These essays outline major controversies and areas for further research, as well as conducting literary analysis.

Vocal music was at the heart of English Renaissance poetry and drama. Virtuosic actor-singers redefined the theatrical culture of William Shakespeare and his peers. Composers including William Byrd and Henry Lawes shaped the transmission of Renaissance lyric verse. Poets from Philip Sidney to John Milton were fascinated by the disorienting influx of musical performance into their works. Musical performance was a driving force behind the period's theatrical and poetic movements, yet its importance to literary history has long been ignored or effaced. This book reveals the impact of vocalists and composers upon the poetic culture of early modern England by studying the media through which—and by whom—its songs were made. In a literary field that was never confined to writing, media were not limited to material texts. Scott Trudell argues that the media of Renaissance poetry can be conceived as any node of transmission from singer's larynx to actor's body. Through his study of song, Trudell outlines a new approach to Renaissance poetry and drama that is grounded not simply in performance history or book history but in a more synthetic media history.

This study is concerned with Early Modern English psalm translations. It focusses on the connection between inspiration and formal perfection as it appears in George Wither's "A Preparation to the Psalter", Philip Sidney's "The Defence of Poesy", "The Sidney Psalter" and "The Bay Psalm Book". Taking into account theological, philosophical, and literary contexts of the time, it reveals the struggle to find a suitable language in praise of God as a main concern of Early Modern religious writers, and presents concepts which are highly relevant for the religious poetry of the time. Dissertation. (Series: Religion and Literature / Religion und Literatur, Vol. 5) [Subject: Religious Studies]

The Work of Form investigates ways of reading early modern poetry which unite historical and formal approaches. Essays explore a wide range of meanings of form, drawing on early modern literary theory as well as practice to expand definitions and understandings of early modern poetic form.

In this study, Michael Ullyot makes two new arguments about the rhetoric of exemplarity in late Elizabethan and Jacobean culture: first, that exemplarity is a recursive cycle driven by rhetoricians' words and readers' actions; and second, that positive moral examples are not replicable, but rather aspirational models of readers' posthumous biographies. For example, Alexander the Great envied Achilles less for his exemplary life than for Homer's account of it. Ullyot defines the three types of decorum on which exemplary rhetoric and imitation rely, and charts their operations through Philip Sidney's poetics, Edmund Spenser's poetry, and the dedications, sermons, elegies, biographies, and other occasional texts about Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, and Henry, Prince of Wales. Ullyot expands the definition of occasional texts to include those that criticize their circumstances to demand better ones, and historicizes moral exemplarity in the contexts of sixteenth-century Protestant memory and humanist pedagogy. The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England concludes that all exemplary subjects suffer from the problem of metonymy, the objection that their chosen excerpts misrepresent their missing parts. This problem also besets historicist literary criticism, ever subject to corrections from the archive, so this study concedes that its own rhetorical methods are exemplary.

Though well known as a shrine to the Virgin Mary and as a popular pilgrimage site, Walsingham has only recently received serious scholarly attention. This volume represents the first collection of multi-disciplinary essays on Walsingham's broader significance. Contributors focus on the hitherto neglected issue of Walsingham's cultural impact: the literary, historical, art historical and sociological significance that Walsingham has had since the later Middle Ages.