Wendy Wall is Associate Professor of English Literature at Northwestern University and a scholar of early modern literature and culture. She is the author of The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Cornell University Press, 1993) and co-editor of the journal Renaissance Drama. Wall has published widely on print technology, voyeurism, women's writing, poetry, housework, and early modern culture.

"Wall's book usefully complicates and deepens the field...[Wall] produces illuminating interpretations of the dramatic texts she scrutinizes and also of the gendered social dynamics of early modern England." Renaissance Quarterly

• List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction: in the nations' kitchen; 1. Familiarity and pleasure in the English household guide, 1500–1700; 2. Needles and birches: pedagogy, domesticity, and the advent of English comedy; 3. Why does Puck sweep? Shakespearean fairies and the politics of cleaning; 4. The erotics of milk and live food, or, ingesting early modern Englishness; 5. Tending to bodies and boys: queer physic in Knight of the Burning Pestle; 6. Blood in the kitchen: service, taste, and violence in domestic drama; Notes; Bibliography; Index.