By examining these competing depictions of combat that coexist in sixteenth-century texts ranging from Arthurian romance to early modern medical texts, this study reveals both the importance of combat in understanding the humanist subject and the contours of the previously neglected pre-modern subject.

Munday's translation is based on a Spanish original entitled Primaleon de Grecia I (Salamanca, 1512). This Spanish romance, the second book in the Palmerin cycle, soon became a best-seller in the Spanish market, with several editions published between 1512 and 1588. The work was also translated into many continental languages. Anthony Munday translated his Palmendos from the French version by Francois de Vernassal late in 1588. The Historie of Palmendos comprised the first thirty-two chapters of the French text and focused on the adventures of Palmendos on his journey to Constantinople. It was reprinted in 1653 and 1663 with slight alterations from the 1589 version. This is an original-spelling edition that produces a most reliable text, as close as possible to the author's original manuscript.

This is the first book-length biography of Tudor writer, soldier, and courtier Thomas Churchyard (c.1529-1604), a figure well-known yet long neglected in early modern studies, who lived, wrote, and fought under five different monarchs and enjoyed an unrivalled fifty-year literary career.

Scholars and Poets Talk About Queens is a lively and erudite collection, unusual in an especially appealing way. This collection of essays shows how queens were represented in the Middle Ages and Renaissance through primary accounts, chronicles, and literary representations. The book also contains modern poetry and short plays about these same queens, allowing readers to understand and appreciate them both intellectually and emotionally. Contributors study a wide range of queens including such famous and fascinating women as Queen Elizabeth I, Cleopatra, Hecuba, the Empress Matilda, Mary Stuart, Margaret of Anjou, Catherine of Aragon, and the pirate queen Grace O'Malley. By pairing scholarly essays with contemporary poems about them, the collection demonstrates the continued relevance and immediacy of these powerful and fascinating women.

This book considers the representation of disability and knighthood in Malory’s Morte Darthur. The study asserts that Malory’s unique definition of knighthood, which emphasizes the unstable nature of the knight’s physical body and the body of chivalry to which he belongs, depends upon disability. As a result, a knight must perpetually oscillate between disability and ability in order to maintain his status. The knights’ movement between disability and ability is also essential to the project of Malory’s book, as well as its narrative structure, as it reflects the text’s fixation on and alternation between the wholeness and fragmentation of physical and social bodies. Disability in its many forms undergirds the book, helping to cohere the text’s multiple and sometimes disparate chapters into the "hoole book" that Malory envisions. The Morte, thus, construes disability as an as an ambiguous, even liminal state that threatens even as it shores up the cohesive notion of knighthood the text endorses.

Uses adaptation and appropriation studies to explore early modern textual and theatrical metamorphoses of OvidApplies contemporary theoretical approaches, such as gender/queer/trans studies, feminist ecostudies, hauntology, rhizomatic adaptation, transmedialityUses adaptation studies in analyzing early modern transformations of OvidFocuses on the appropriations of "e;Ovid"e; (as an umbrella term for "e;all things Ovidian"e;) on the early modern English stageIncludes chapters on Shakespeare and Marlowe as well as other early modern dramatistsDid you know that Ovid was a multifaceted icon of lovesickness, endless change, libertinism, emotional torment and violence in early modern England? This is the first collection to use adaptation studies in connection with other contemporary theoretical approaches in analysing early modern transformations of Ovid. It provides innovative perspectives on the 'Ovids' that haunted the early modern stage, while exploring intersections between adaptation theory and gender/queer/trans studies, ecofeminism, hauntology, transmediality, rhizomatics and more. This book examines the multidimensional, ubiquitous role that Ovid and Ovidian adaptations played in English Renaissance drama and theatrical performance.

This book explores the possibilities and limitations of violence on the Early Modern stage and in the Early Modern world. This collection is divided into three sections: History-cal Violence, (Un)Comic Violence, and Revenge Violence. This division allows scholars to easily find intertextual materials; comic violence may function similarly across multiple comedies but is vastly different from most tragic violence. While the source texts move beyond Shakespeare, this book follows the classic division of Shakespeare’s plays into history, comedy, and tragedy. Each section of the book contains one chapter engaging with modern dramatic practice along with several that take textual or historical approaches. This wide-ranging approach means that the book will be appropriate both for specialists in Early Modern violence who are looking across multiple perspectives, and for students or scholars researching texts or approaches.

Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama investigates the cultural work done by early modern theatrical performances of disability. Proffering an expansive view of early modern disability in performance, the contributors suggest methodologies for finding and interpreting it in unexpected contexts. The volume also includes essays on disabled actors whose performances are changing the meanings of disability in Shakespeare for present-day audiences. By combining these two areas of scholarship, this text makes a unique intervention in early modern studies and disability studies alike. Ultimately, the volume generates a conversation that locates and theorizes the staging of particular disabilities within their historical and literary contexts while considering continuity and change in the performance of disability between the early modern period and our own.

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 brings together new work by scholars across the globe, from some of the founding figures in early modern women's writing to those early in their careers and defining the field now. It investigates how and where women gained access to education, how they developed their literary voice through varied genres including poetry, drama, and letters, and how women cultivated domestic and technical forms of knowledge from recipes and needlework to medicines and secret codes. Chapters investigate the ways in which women's writing was an integral part of the intellectual culture of the period, engaging with male writers and traditions, while also revealing the ways in which women's lives and writings were often distinctly different, from women prophetesses to queens, widows, and servants. It explores the intersections of women writing in English with those writing in French, Spanish, Latin, and Greek, in Europe and in New England, and argues for an archipelagic understanding of women's writing in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England. Finally, it reflects on--and challenges--the methodologies which have developed in, and with, the field: book and manuscript history, editing, digital analysis, premodern critical race studies, network theory, queer theory, and feminist theory. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 captures the most innovative work on early modern women's writing in English at present.

When we engage with the writings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, we encounter a culture radically unfamiliar to us at the start of the twenty-first century. The past is a foreign country, and so too are many of its texts. This readable and provocative book seeks to enhance our understanding of early modern literature by recovering the contexts in which it was originally produced and consumed. Taking us back to the courts, theatres and marketplaces of early modern England, Jason Scott-Warren reveals the varied ways in which literary texts dovetailed with everyday experience, unlocking the distinctive social practices, economic structures and modes of behaviour that gave them meaning. He shows how the periods most beguiling writings were conditioned by long-forgotten notions of knowledge, nationhood, sexuality and personal identity. Bringing an anthropologists eye to his materials, he offers richly detailed new readings of works from within and beyond the canon, covering a span that stretches from Erasmus and More to Milton and Behn. Resisting any notion of the period as merely transitional a staging post on the road leading from the medieval to the modern world Scott-Warren reveals the distinctiveness of its literary culture, and equips the reader for fresh encounters with its extraordinary textual legacy. Any undergraduate student of the period will find it an essential guide, while scholars will find its fresh approach invigorating.