Literary Form After Matter 1550–1700

Katherine Hunt is Lecturer in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Literature at the University of East Anglia. Her work has been widely published in edited collections and journals including English Literary Renaissance and Renaissance Studies, and she is completing a book about bronze, writing, and processes of making in early modern English literature. Dianne Mitchell is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her book Paper Intimacies in the Early Modern Lyric (2026) explores the strange forms of closeness that emerge at the intersections of poetic form and Renaissance manuscript culture. She has published articles in Modern Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, English Literary Renaissance, and Studies in Philology as well as essays on gender and material culture in several recent collections.

A new generation of scholarship that explodes assumptions about the neutrality of close reading! Influenced by work on colonialism, disability, queer and trans histories, women’s writing, and more, these essays unmask the ethical stakes of methodology, revealing textual analysis as deeply embedded in actions and affects, labour and lived experiences.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsSeries Editors' Preface1. Introduction: Close Reading Form and MatterKatherine Hunt and Dianne MitchellPart I. Embodying Form and Matter2. 'Perfection in a Womans worke is rare’: Mary Oxlie’s Poetic LifeElizabeth Scott-Baumann3. Transmaterialities and Transformations in John Lyly’s The Woman in the MoonGillian Knoll4. ‘I write this in an Alehouse’: The Engraved Title Page of Sir William Cornwallis’s Essayes (1632) and the Making of the Early Modern EssaySophie Butler5. Travel Writing, Textiles, and ThingsNatalya Din-Kariuki6. Forms of Reading Crip Time: Look About You and Jjjjjerome Ellis’s transCRIPted (2020)Katherine Schaap WilliamsPart II. Attention and Obstruction7. ‘I / Will petrify: Queering Influence in Early Modern LyricGabriel Bloomfield8. Robert Hooke’s Literary PointWhitney Sperrazza9. Poetic Freedom and the Stakes of Close Reading: Hester Pulter’s ‘Solitary Complaint’Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich10. ‘Let it be the thought’: Lancelot Andrewes, William James, Charles Sanders PeirceEsther Osorio Whewell11. ‘Flye into thistles Tharsis’: Material Spirituality in the Poetry of Lady Anne SouthwellDanielle Clarke12. Forming Beauty in Shake-speares SonnetsL. Bellee Jones-PiercePart III. Effaced and Enduring Forms13. The Affordability of Matter: Access, Equity, and Digital TechnologyHannah August14. Lost Letters, Found Forms: Reading Library FragmentsMegan Heffernan15. A Common Matter? The Manuscript of Robert HassallDouglas Clark16. Historical Views and Spenserian Form: A View of the Present State of Ireland in Time and MatterAli Madani17. Idols of the Cave: Voices and Texts in Philip Sidney’s Old ArcadiaThomas Ward18. ‘Disjointed by Candle-Light’Alice Wickenden19. ‘Their first matter’: Pasteboard Giants in Early Modern WritingLucy Razzall20. AfterwordAdam SmythNotes on ContributorsBibliographyIndex