Ladan Niayesh – författare

This volume brings together three little-known works by key playwrights from the late sixteenth-century golden age of English drama. All three convey the public theatre’s fascination with travel and adventure through the popular genre of heroic romance, while reflecting the contemporaries’ wide range of responses to cross-cultural contacts with the Muslim East and the Mediterranean challenges posed by the Ottoman empire.The volume presents the first modern-spelling editions of the three plays, with extensive annotations catering for specialised scholars while also making the texts accessible to students and theatre-goers. A detailed introduction discusses issues of authorship, dates and sources, and sets the plays in their historical and cultural contexts, offering exciting insights on Elizabethan performance strategies, printing practices, and the circulation of knowledge and stereotypes related to ethnic and religious difference.

The so-called Travels of Sir John Mandeville (c. 1356) was one of the most popular books of the late Middle-Ages. Translated into many European languages and widely circulating in both manuscript and printed forms, the pseudo English knight’s account had a lasting influence on the voyages of discovery and durably affected Europe’s perception of exotic lands and peoples.The early modern period witnessed the slow erosion of Mandeville’s prestige as an authority and the gradual development of new responses to his book. Some still supported the account’s general claim to authenticity while questioning details here and there, and some openly denounced it as a hoax. After considering the general issues of edition and reception of Mandeville in an opening section, the volume moves on to explore theological and epistemological concerns in a second section, before tackling literary and dramatic reworkings in a final section.Examining in detail a diverse range of texts and issues, these essays ultimately bear witness to the complexity of early modern engagements with a late medieval legacy which Mandeville emblematises.

The concept of resonance collapses the binary between subject and object, perceiver and perceived, evoking a sound or image that is prolonged and augmented by making contact with another surface.