Marissa Nicosia – författare

This volume consists of fourteen original essays that showcase the latest thinking about John Milton's emergence as a popular and canonical author. Contributors consider how Milton positioned himself in relation to the book trade, contemporaneous thinkers, and intellectual movements, as well as how his works have been positioned since their first publication. The individual chapters assess Milton's reception by exploring how his authorial persona was shaped by the modes of writing in which he chose to express himself, the material forms in which his works circulated, and the ways in which his texts were re-appropriated by later writers. The Milton that emerges is one who actively fashioned his reputation by carefully selecting his modes of writing, his language of composition, and the stationers with whom he collaborated. Throughout the volume, contributors also demonstrate the profound impact Milton and his works have had on the careers of a variety of agents, from publishers, booksellers, and fellow writers to colonizers in Mexico and South America.

Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660 argues that dramatic narratives about monarchy and succession codified speculative futures in the early modern English cultural imaginary. This book considers chronicle plays--plays written for the public stage and play pamphlets composed when the playhouses were closed during the civil wars--in order to examine the formal and material ways that playwrights imagined futures in dramatic works that were purportedly about the past. Through close readings of William Shakespeare's 1&2 Henry IV, Richard III, Shakespeare's and John Fletcher's All is True, Samuel Rowley's When You See Me, You Know Me, John Ford's Perkin Warbeck, and the anonymous play pamphlets The Leveller's Levelled, 1 & 2 Craftie Cromwell, Charles I, and Cromwell's Conspiracy, the volume shows that imaginative treatments of history in plays that are usually associated with the past also had purchase on the future. While plays about the nation's past retell history, these plays are not restricted by their subject matter to merely document what happened: Playwrights projected possible futures in their accounts of verifiable historical events.

Audiences and scholars alike have long remarked that Shakespeare’s poems and plays record the pleasures and perils of the table. Shakespeare in the Kitchen asks what Shakespeare’s works can tell us about Renaissance culinary recipes, and what these recipes can tell us about Shakespeare’s works.Marissa Nicosia explores how Shakespeare’s works reveal tensions not only within early modern food culture about who should eat, what to eat or serve guests, and when to preserve foods, but also how to undertake the embodied processes of cooking, baking, and serving. The chapters include both analysis of plays and poems, as well as updated historical recipes ready for cooking. Nicosia prepares the recipes that permeate the canon—from Falstaff’s beloved capons to the cakes that invite festivity in Twelfth Night—demonstrating how the physical act of cooking can transform our understanding of once familiar texts, and asking what we can learn about food history by recreating historical recipes with twenty-first-century ingredients and tools.Shakespeare in the Kitchen is an original and fascinating read for anyone interested in Shakespeare, Renaissance England, Early Modern literature, history, food studies, and the history of food.