Laura Lunger Knoppers – författare

Bringing together literary criticism, historical bibliography, and religious, political, and print history, this volume offers a definitive scholarly edition of John Milton's Paradise Regain'd and Samson Agonistes. The scrupulously-edited text is based on extensive collation of the 1671 and 1680 volumes. Drawing on new archival sources and up-to-date historiography, a detailed Introduction sets out the cultural, religious, and political contexts of 1670-71, including continuing opposition to the Restoration regime and the major contribution made to that opposition by publishers and print. While the meanings of the 1671 poems have been much discussed and debated, print and publishing history has been little addressed in teaching editions or scholarship. New archival materials on Milton's publisher, John Starkey, and his printer, John Macock, open up the radical print networks in which Milton's poems were produced, published, and circulated. The Textual Introduction and Headnote also provide a thorough discussion of the contributions of the printing house to the text. Reconstruction of the octavo sheets used in printing the text shows that multiple compositors worked on the text and thus helps to explain variant spelling and address longstanding issues of dating. A discussion of Milton's bold transformation of classical epic and tragedy provides literary historical context. This edition also breaks new ground by including materials on early owners and readers, who actively shaped the texts with corrections, annotations, and references to biblical and classical sources. As an aid for students and scholars alike, Textual Commentary provides precise OED word definitions, identifies biblical, classical, historical, and geographical references, and explains Latin, Greek, and Hebrew usages. This volume will be of interest to scholars of Milton, of Renaissance literature, of print and publishing history, of history of the book, and of early modern cultural, political, and religious history.

This Handbook offers a comprehensive introduction and thirty-seven new essays by an international team of literary critics and historians on the writings generated by the tumultuous events of mid-seventeenth-century England. Unprecedented events-civil war, regicide, the abolition of monarchy, proscription of episcopacy, constitutional experiment, and finally the return of monarchy-led to an unprecedented outpouring of texts, including new and transformed literary genres and techniques. The Handbook provides up-to-date scholarship on current issues as well as historical information, textual analysis, and bibliographical tools to help readers understand and appreciate the bold and indeed revolutionary character of writing in mid-seventeenth-century England. The volume is innovative in its attention to the literary and aesthetic aspects of a wide range of political and religious writing, as well as in its demonstration of how literary texts register the political pressures of their time. Opening with essential contextual chapters on religion, politics, society, and culture, the largely chronological subsequent chapters analyse particular voices, texts, and genres as they respond to revolutionary events. Attention is given to aesthetic qualities, as well as to bold political and religious ideas, in such writers as James Harrington, Marchamont Nedham, Thomas Hobbes, Gerrard Winstanley, John Lilburne, and Abiezer Coppe. At the same time, the revolutionary political context sheds new light on such well-known literary writers as John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Robert Herrick, Henry Vaughan, William Davenant, John Dryden, Lucy Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish, and John Bunyan. Overall, the volume provides an indispensable guide to the innovative and exciting texts of the English Revolution and reevaluates its long-term cultural impact.

Constructing Cromwell traces the complex and shifting popular images of Oliver Cromwell from his first appearance as a public figure in the mid-1640s through the period of his power to his death and eventual disinterment after the restoration of the monarchy. The meaning and impact of this enigmatic figure has long been debated in the context of mid seventeenth-century crisis but contemporary representations of Cromwell have largely been neglected. Cromwellian print, Laura Knoppers argues, transformed the courtly forms of Caroline ceremony, portraiture and panegyric and in turn complicated and altered the cultural forms available to Charles II. The book draws on extensive archival research, including manuscript sources, startling print ephemera, and visual artefacts. Placing canonical authors such as Milton, Marvell, Waller and Dryden alongside such neglected writers as George Wither and Payne Fisher, Knoppers demonstrates how literary texts both respond and contribute to political and cultural change.

Constructing Cromwell traces the complex and shifting popular images of Oliver Cromwell from his first appearance as a public figure in the mid-1640s through the period of his power to his death and eventual disinterment after the restoration of the monarchy. The meaning and impact of this enigmatic figure has long been debated in the context of mid seventeenth-century crisis but contemporary representations of Cromwell have largely been neglected. Cromwellian print, Laura Knoppers argues, transformed the courtly forms of Caroline ceremony, portraiture and panegyric and in turn complicated and altered the cultural forms available to Charles II. The book draws on extensive archival research, including manuscript sources, startling print ephemera, and visual artefacts. Placing canonical authors such as Milton, Marvell, Waller and Dryden alongside such neglected writers as George Wither and Payne Fisher, Knoppers demonstrates how literary texts both respond and contribute to political and cultural change.

Featuring the most frequently taught female writers and texts of the early modern period, this Companion introduces the reader to the range, complexity, historical importance, and aesthetic merit of women's writing in Britain from 1500-1700. Presenting key textual, historical, and methodological information, the volume exemplifies new and diverse approaches to the study of women's writing. The book is clearly divided into three sections, covering: how women learnt to write and how their work was circulated or published; how and what women wrote in the places and spaces in which they lived, worked, and worshipped; and the different kinds of writing women produced, from poetry and fiction to letters, diaries, and political prose. This structure makes the volume readily adaptable to course usage. The Companion is enhanced by an introduction that lays out crucial framework and critical issues, and by chronologies that situate women's writings alongside political and cultural events.

Featuring the most frequently taught female writers and texts of the early modern period, this Companion introduces the reader to the range, complexity, historical importance, and aesthetic merit of women's writing in Britain from 1500-1700. Presenting key textual, historical, and methodological information, the volume exemplifies new and diverse approaches to the study of women's writing. The book is clearly divided into three sections, covering: how women learnt to write and how their work was circulated or published; how and what women wrote in the places and spaces in which they lived, worked, and worshipped; and the different kinds of writing women produced, from poetry and fiction to letters, diaries, and political prose. This structure makes the volume readily adaptable to course usage. The Companion is enhanced by an introduction that lays out crucial framework and critical issues, and by chronologies that situate women's writings alongside political and cultural events.

Multi-disciplinary in approach and cross-European in scope, this richly illustrated book features new links between the political and the monstrous in the early modern period. Emphasizing the importance of the visual in the culture of the monstrous, the book presents a range of striking engravings, woodcuts, broadsides, and anatomical works. Some of the most respected scholars of early modern Europe explore monstrous bodies in descriptions of aberrant births and grotesque anatomies, appropriations of classical or biblical beasts and harlots, satire, myth, and science fiction.Canonical writings on monstrosity by Aristotle, Ambroise Paré, Rabelais, Montaigne, and Mary Shelley are juxtaposed to less familiar treatments by Calvin, Luther, and Andrew Marvell, among others. This volume challenges established narratives in which modern science and medicine, sustained by enlightened reason and secularization, progressively contain and even "normalize" all monsters. Instead, these essays stress the continual reinvention and polemical applications of the monstrous in the early modern period. Monsters emerge as a rich subject for not only the history of science, but also political and religious history, literary studies, visual studies, and the history of popular culture.

Multi-disciplinary in approach and cross-European in scope, this richly illustrated book features new links between the political and the monstrous in the early modern period. Emphasizing the importance of the visual in the culture of the monstrous, the book presents a range of striking engravings, woodcuts, broadsides, and anatomical works. Some of the most respected scholars of early modern Europe explore monstrous bodies in descriptions of aberrant births and grotesque anatomies, appropriations of classical or biblical beasts and harlots, satire, myth, and science fiction.Canonical writings on monstrosity by Aristotle, Ambroise Paré, Rabelais, Montaigne, and Mary Shelley are juxtaposed to less familiar treatments by Calvin, Luther, and Andrew Marvell, among others. This volume challenges established narratives in which modern science and medicine, sustained by enlightened reason and secularization, progressively contain and even "normalize" all monsters. Instead, these essays stress the continual reinvention and polemical applications of the monstrous in the early modern period. Monsters emerge as a rich subject for not only the history of science, but also political and religious history, literary studies, visual studies, and the history of popular culture.

Bringing together literary texts, political and household writings, and visual images, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton's Eve traces how the language of the domestic became a powerful and contested tool of political propaganda in representations of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, Oliver and Elizabeth Cromwell, and Milton's Adam and Eve. The book reconstitutes a lively seventeenth-century discourse that ranges from van Dyck portraiture to political texts such as Eikon Basilike and Kings Cabinet Opened, to cookery books attributed to Henrietta Maria and Elizabeth Cromwell, to Milton's Paradise Lost. Extensive archival materials are drawn upon, including holograph letters, legal documents, little-known portraits and early readers' marginalia. Challenging previous binaries of public and private, political and domestic, Knoppers demonstrates that the domestication of the royal family image is an important and largely unrecognized legacy of the English Revolution. The study will appeal to scholars of political and cultural history, literature, book history and women's studies.