Cedric C. Brown - Böcker

Cedric C. Brown combines the study of literature and social history in order to recognize the immense importance of friendship bonds to early modern society. Drawing on new archival research, he acknowledges a wide range of types of friendship, from the intimate to the obviously instrumental, and sees these practices as often co-terminous with gift exchange. Failure to recognize the inter-connected range of a friendship spectrum has hitherto limited the adequacy of some modern studies of friendship, often weighted towards the intimate or gendered-related issues. This book focusses both on friendships represented in imaginative works and on lived friendships in many textual and material forms, in an attempt to recognize cultural environments and functions.In order to provide depth and coherence, case histories have been selected from the middle and later parts of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless many kinds of bond are recognized, as between patron and client, mentor and pupil, within the family, within marriage, in courtship, or according to fashionable refined friendship theory. Both humanist and religious values systems are registered, and friendships are configured in cross-gendered and same-sex relationships. Theories of friendship are also included. Apart from written documents, the range of 'texts' extends to keepsakes, pictures, funerary monument and memorial garden features. Figures discussed at length include Henry More and the Finch/Conway family, John Evelyn, Jeremy Taylor, Elizabeth Carey/Mordaunt, John Milton, Charles Diodati, Cyriac Skinner, Dorothy Osborne/Temple, William Temple, Lord Arlington, Sir Orlando Bridgeman, and Katherine Phillips and her circle, especially Anne Owen/Trevor and Sir Charles Cotterell.

For the first time in an approachable, affordable volume this study treats the whole literary career of England's most distinguished protestant-republican poet and writer, considering the miscellaneous output in the light of contexts and political functions. It highlights self-presentational and persuasive characteristics, pays attention to the sense of vocation and also describes Milton's distinctive achievement in social genres. Milton's competitive humanist training is seen to accomodate uneasily to the specific demands of some public works. The book features unfamiliar texts, whilst canonical texts are set in the story of his long endeavours during a turbulent period in English history.

This is a wide-ranging collection on the cultural placement and transmission of texts between 1520 and 1750. Material and historical conditions of texts are analyzed.

This text argues for the crucial place of the "monster" in the early modern imagination. Mark Thornton Burnett traces the metaphorical significance of "monstrous" forms across a range of early modern exhibition spaces - fairground displays, "cabinets of curiosity" and court entertainments - to contend that the "monster" finds its most intriguing manifestation in the investments and practices of contemporary theatre. The study's fresh readings of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson make a powerful case for the drama's contribution to debates about the "extraordinary body".

This book is a comprehensive account of Milton's two aristocratic entertainments, Arcades and Comus in the context of their original occasions and in the light of Milton's developing sense of vocation as a poet in the earlier part of his career. The book is especially original in the amount of socio-historical information it offers about the relationship between the independent and pastorly poet and his aristocratic patrons, and about the degree to which Milton was prepared to work within the constraints and decorum of the Caroline masque and country-house entertainment. A particular feature of the book is the analysis of changes in the texts of the two entertainments, from the earliest version in the Trinity College manuscript through to the first printings, considering Milton's changing manner of address to the different occasions of performance and publication. A degree of tension is discovered between the poet and the organisers of the Ludlow masque, and an explanation is given for a kind of censorship in the Bridgewater manuscript of Comus.

A deeply researched study of the social transmission and adaptation of poetry texts originating in pre-Civil War England, traced through the seventeenth century and sometimes beyond. Both manuscript and printed miscellanies are used, as well as other forms of publication, and case studies unusually span elite, popular and provincial audiences. As far as possible, texts are placed according to their original contexts and functions (“Directions”) then followed through various answerings, parodies, co-optings and social, commercial and political adaptations (“Re-directions”). Case studies choose examples which have not been fully researched, so that a large amount of new material is presented from poets writing in a variety of environments. Results are sometimes startling and often amusing, giving a vivid sense of how poems were read and used in material exchange and providing a picture of literary activity far removed from what traditional, canonical literary history has often assumed.

This is a wide-ranging, closely-researched collection, written by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, on the cultural placement and transmission of texts between 1520 and 1750. Material and historical conditions of texts are analysed, and the range of works is wide, including plays and the Lucrece of Shakespeare (with adaptations, and a discussion of 'reading' playtexts), Sidney's Arcadia, Greene's popular Pandosto (both discussed in the contexts of changing readerships and forms of fiction), Hakluyt's travel books, funerary verse, and the writings of Katherine Parr and Elizabethan Catholic martyrs.