Nandini Das – författare

'A perspective-altering take on a world we usually think of in far more domestic terms. A ground-breaking masterwork' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE'Triumphant . . . Cinematic . . . No one who reads this book will ever see Tudor and Stuart history in the same light again' JOHN GUY, LITERARY REVIEW'Many books claim to be a new way of looking at history, but this book truly is' FINANCIAL TIMESThe prize-winning author uncovers the revelatory global story of Tudor and Stuart England - told through the merchants, migrants, sailors, travellers and spies who helped forge a nation.The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries forged a powerful image of England – Shakespeare’s ‘scepter’d isle’, proud and apart, defined by royal spectacle and myth. But beneath this familiar narrative of ruffs and gowns, kings and queens, lies a more complex and connected reality.England at this time was far from insular. Travelling in and out of the country were Venetian glassmakers with English wives, African innkeepers and Native American envoys. There were people like the Flemish artist Levina Teerlinc, probably the only painter to be employed by four English monarchs. There was William Adams, a Kentish navigator who became Japan's first English samurai. And there was Elizabeth Key, daughter of an enslaved mother in the colony in Virginia, who battled in the courts for herself and her son.Drawing on extensive archival research, attentive to the textures of daily life, yet alive to the sweep of history, This Little World offers a startlingly new, globally resonant vision of England’s past and what it meant to be English. It is a story of a nation in the making – on the cusp of empire – told through the traces of those often written out of it. In reframing England’s story within a wider world, it challenges us to rethink some of our most fundamental ideas: about nationhood, about identity, and above all, about belonging.

This volume addresses dealings with the wondrous, magical, holy, sacred, sainted, numinous, uncanny, auratic, and sacral in the plays of Shakespeare and contemporaries, produced in an era often associated with the irresistible rise of a thinned-out secular rationalism. By starting from the literary text and looking outwards to social, cultural, and historical aspects, it comes to grips with the instabilities of ‘enchanted’ and ‘disenchanted’ practices of thinking and knowledge-making in the early modern period. If what marvelously stands apart from conceptions of the world’s ordinary functioning might be said to be ‘enchanted’, is the enchantedness weakened, empowered, or modally altered by its translation to theatre? We have a received historical narrative of disenchantment as a large-scale early modern cultural process, inexorable in character, consisting of the substitution of a rationally understood and controllable world for one containing substantial areas of mystery. Early modern cultural change, however, involves transpositions, recreations, or fresh inventions of the enchanted, and not only its replacement in diminished or denatured form. This collection is centrally concerned with what happens in theatre, as a medium which can give power to experiences of wonder as well as circumscribe and curtail them, addressing plays written for the popular stage that contribute to and reflect significant contemporary reorientations of vision, awareness, and cognitive practice. The volume uses the idea of dis-enchantment/re-enchantment as a central hub to bring multiple perspectives to bear on early modern conceptualizations and theatricalizations of wonder, the sacred, and the supernatural from different vantage points, marking a significant contribution to studies of magic, witchcraft, enchantment, and natural philosophy in Shakespeare and early modern drama.

When Planetomachia was published in 1585, Greene himself-always the best advertiser of his own books-promised his readers a perfectly balanced diet of edification and entertainment. He described his newest offering as an astronomical discourse on the nature and influence of the planets interlaced with 'pleasant and tragical histories,' which one could ostensibly use as a manual to identify various planetary influences on 'natural constitution.' In this first complete critical edition, Nandini Das presents Planetomachia as a complex hybrid which is eminently a product of its times, exploring how the two very different intellectual and cultural spheres of Humanist scholarship and Renaissance popular print engage in an intriguing, albeit uneasy, dialogue to produce this unique work of prose fiction. The volume gives a clear sense, afforded by no other existing edition, of the intellectual climate which shaped this text. It offers substantial introductory material (on biographical, literary and scientific contexts) and extensive annotation identifying Greene's allusions and elucidating his vocabulary. It also includes translations and extracts from significant sources, along with a bibliography of relevant primary texts and critical work on Greene generally and on Planetomachia in particular.

What did it mean to be a stranger in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England? How were other nations, cultures, and religions perceived? What happened when individuals moved between languages, countries, religions, and spaces? Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility analyses a selection of terms that were central to the conceptualisation of identity, race, migration, and transculturality in the early modern period. In many cases, the concepts and debates that they embody – or sometimes subsume – came to play crucial roles in the articulation of identity, rights, and power in subsequent periods. Together, the essays in this volume provide an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the development of these formative issues.

What did it mean to be a 'go-between' in the early modern world? How were such figures perceived in sixteenth and seventeenth century England? And what effect did their movement between languages, countries, religions and social spaces – whether enforced or voluntary – have on the ways in which people navigated questions of identity and belonging? Lives in Transit in Early Modern England is a work of interdisciplinary scholarship which examines how questions of mobility and transculturality were negotiated in practice in the early modern world. Edited by Nandini Das, the twenty-four essays by João Vicente Melo, Tom Roberts, Haig Smith, Emily Stevenson, and Lauren Working cover a wide range of figures from different walks of life and corners of the globe, ranging from ambassadors to Amazons, monarchs to missionaries, translators to theologians. Together, the essays in this volume provide an invaluable resource for readers interested in questions of race, belonging, and human identity.

Bringing together original contributions from scholars around the world, this volume traces the history of travel writing from antiquity to the Internet age. It examines travel texts of several national or linguistic traditions, introducing readers to the global contexts of the genre. From wilderness to the urban, from Nigeria to the polar regions, from mountains to rivers and the desert, this book explores some of the key places and physical features represented in travel writing. Chapters also consider the employment in travel writing of the diary, the letter, visual images, maps and poetry, as well as the relationship of travel writing to fiction, science, translation and tourism. Gender-based and ecocritical approaches are among those surveyed. Together, the thirty-seven chapters here underline the richness and complexity of this genre.

This volume addresses dealings with the wondrous, magical, holy, sacred, sainted, numinous, uncanny, auratic, and sacral in the plays of Shakespeare and contemporaries, produced in an era often associated with the irresistible rise of a thinned-out secular rationalism. By starting from the literary text and looking outwards to social, cultural, and historical aspects, it comes to grips with the instabilities of ‘enchanted’ and ‘disenchanted’ practices of thinking and knowledge-making in the early modern period. If what marvelously stands apart from conceptions of the world’s ordinary functioning might be said to be ‘enchanted’, is the enchantedness weakened, empowered, or modally altered by its translation to theatre? We have a received historical narrative of disenchantment as a large-scale early modern cultural process, inexorable in character, consisting of the substitution of a rationally understood and controllable world for one containing substantial areas of mystery. Early modern cultural change, however, involves transpositions, recreations, or fresh inventions of the enchanted, and not only its replacement in diminished or denatured form. This collection is centrally concerned with what happens in theatre, as a medium which can give power to experiences of wonder as well as circumscribe and curtail them, addressing plays written for the popular stage that contribute to and reflect significant contemporary reorientations of vision, awareness, and cognitive practice. The volume uses the idea of dis-enchantment/re-enchantment as a central hub to bring multiple perspectives to bear on early modern conceptualizations and theatricalizations of wonder, the sacred, and the supernatural from different vantage points, marking a significant contribution to studies of magic, witchcraft, enchantment, and natural philosophy in Shakespeare and early modern drama.

Romance was criticized for its perceived immorality throughout the Renaissance, and even enthusiasts were often forced to acknowledge the shortcomings of its dated narrative conventions. Yet despite that general condemnation, the striking growth in English fiction in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is marked by writers who persisted in using this much-maligned narrative form. In Renaissance Romance, Nandini Das examines why the fears and expectations surrounding the old genre of romance resonated with successive new generations at this particular historical juncture. Across a range of texts in which romance was adopted by the court, by popular print and by women, Das shows how the process of realignment and transformation through which the new prose fiction took shape was driven by a generational consciousness that was always inherent in romance. In the fiction produced by writers such as Sir Philip Sidney, Robert Greene and Lady Mary Wroth, the transformative interaction of romance with other emergent forms, from the court masque to cartography, was determined by specific configurations of social groups, drawn along the lines of generational difference. What emerged as a result of that interaction radically changed the possibilities of fiction in the period.

Romance was criticized for its perceived immorality throughout the Renaissance, and even enthusiasts were often forced to acknowledge the shortcomings of its dated narrative conventions. Yet despite that general condemnation, the striking growth in English fiction in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is marked by writers who persisted in using this much-maligned narrative form. In Renaissance Romance, Nandini Das examines why the fears and expectations surrounding the old genre of romance resonated with successive new generations at this particular historical juncture. Across a range of texts in which romance was adopted by the court, by popular print and by women, Das shows how the process of realignment and transformation through which the new prose fiction took shape was driven by a generational consciousness that was always inherent in romance. In the fiction produced by writers such as Sir Philip Sidney, Robert Greene and Lady Mary Wroth, the transformative interaction of romance with other emergent forms, from the court masque to cartography, was determined by specific configurations of social groups, drawn along the lines of generational difference. What emerged as a result of that interaction radically changed the possibilities of fiction in the period.

WINNER OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY BOOK PRIZEA profound and ground-breaking new history of one of the most important encounters in the history of colonialism: the British arrival in India in the early seventeenth century.‘A triumph of writing and scholarship. It is hard to imagine anyone ever bettering Das's account of this part of the story’ - William Dalrymple, Financial Times ‘A fascinating glimpse of the origins of the British Empire . . . drawn in dazzling technicolour’ - Spectator‘Beautifully written and masterfully researched, this has the makings of a classic’ - Peter FrankopanSHORTLISTED FOR THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE POL ROGER DUFF COOPER PRIZELONGLISTED FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE HWA CROWN AWARDSA SPECTATOR, WATERSTONES, BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE, PROSPECT AND HISTORY TODAY BOOK OF THE YEARWhen Thomas Roe arrived in India in 1616 as James I’s first ambassador to the Mughal Empire, the English barely had a toehold in the subcontinent. Their understanding of South Asian trade and India was sketchy at best, and, to the Mughals, they were minor players on a very large stage. Roe was representing a kingdom that was beset by financial woes and deeply conflicted about its identity as a unified ‘Great Britain’ under the Stuart monarchy. Meanwhile, the court he entered in India was wealthy and cultured, its dominion widely considered to be one of the greatest and richest empires of the world.In Nandini Das's fascinating history of Roe's four years in India, she offers an insider's view of a Britain in the making, a country whose imperial seeds were just being sown. It is a story of palace intrigue and scandal, lotteries and wagers that unfolds as global trade begins to stretch from Russia to Virginia, from West Africa to the Spice Islands of Indonesia.A major debut that explores the art, literature, sights and sounds of Jacobean London and Imperial India, Courting India reveals Thomas Roe's time in the Mughal Empire to be a turning point in history – and offers a rich and radical challenge to our understanding of Britain and its early empire.

What did it mean to be a stranger in 16th and 17th century England? This text analyses a selection of terms that were central to the conceptualisation of identity, race, migration, and transculturality in the early modern period.