Renaissance Papers 2025

Published annually since 1954, Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference.Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The 2025 volume features essays from the conference held at the University of South Carolina, as well as essays submitted directly to the journal. The volume opens with a post-Covid romp detailing the relationship of running and religion in early modern England. It pivots to Peter Lely's 1665 painting Lady with an Orange with an essay that attempts to solve the mystery of the lady's identity and determine why the portrait is absent from most lists of his works. An essay on the role of sculpture in the verse dramas of Calderón de la Barca provides a second art-historical investigation. The next essay elucidates the importance of cheap, often clandestine print in sixteenth-century France and is followed by an equally provocative reconsideration of the English epyllion and an essay that makes the unsettling claim that John Lane's continuation of Chaucer's "Squire's Tale" (1616) deserves a place in the Stuart literary canon. The penultimate work promotes Edmund Spenser to the rank of Poet-Magus, while the lengthy essay that concludes the volume, "The Call to Glory," muses about what Spenser's Faerie Queene might have looked like had he finished it.