Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies,US – förlag

A scandal in its time and a revelation today, this fearless satire blends courtly decadence with political rebellion in an imagined world of unchecked power.A scandalous and subversive satire, Island of Hermaphrodites skewers the decadence and corruption of early seventeenth-century French society with razor-sharp wit. Published anonymously in 1605, this daring Menippean satire created an uproar for its irreverent portrayal of the French court, critique of absolute monarchy, and radical questioning of gender and power. A blend of political critique and biting humor, the novel follows an imagined land of aristocratic excess, where opulent feasts, elaborate fashion, and absurd rituals mask the deeper instability of a society built on privilege and deception.Republished throughout the eighteenth century and connected to the intellectual ferment leading up to the French Revolution, Island of Hermaphrodites remains a strikingly modern indictment of unchecked power and economic exploitation. In its first full English translation, Kathleen P. Long offers new audiences a satirical romp through a world of absurdist power—one that feels politically salient today.

Diverse Observations is a groundbreaking book available for the first time in English. Written by a midwife committed to improving the care of women and newborns, it records the evolution of Bourgeois’s practice and beliefs, comments on changing attitudes related to reproductive health, and critiques the gendered elitism of the early modern medical hierarchy

The third volume in the anthology, featuring a wide range of plays that reimagine Shakespeare works from Borderlands perspectives.For several decades, Chicanx and Indigenous theatermakers have been repurposing Shakespeare’s plays to reflect the histories and lived realities of the US–Mexico Borderlands and to create space to tell stories of and for La Frontera. Celebrating this rich tradition, The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera brings a wide range of Borderlands Shakespeare plays together for the first time in a multi-volume open-access scholarly edition. This anthology celebrates the dynamic, multilingual reworking of canon and place that defines Borderlands Shakespeare, and it situates these geographically and temporally diverse plays within the robust study of Shakespeare’s global afterlives.The plays featured in this volume diverge drastically from Shakespeare, bringing elements of Hamlet, Henry IV, Part 1, Macbeth, and The Tempest into a range of subcultures that challenge dominant structures of power. In so doing, they remix and revise intersecting histories and traditions to heal colonial wounds and to call forth new worlds for fronterizos.

Shakespeare’s most spirited play, adapted for new audiences by Jeffrey Whitty.Tony Award–winning and Oscar-nominated storyteller Jeffrey Whitty offers his adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, mindfully adapted into modern language. Matching the Bard line for line, rhyme for rhyme, Whitty illuminates Shakespeare’s meaning for modern audiences while maintaining the play’s storytelling architecture, emotional texture, and freewheeling humor. Designed to supplement, not supplant, the original, Whitty’s Midsummer cuts through the centuries to bring audiences a fresh, moment-by-moment take, designed to flow as effortlessly for modern audiences as Shakespeare’s beloved classic played to the Elizabethans.​This translation was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present the work of "The Bard" in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.

RETS Vol. 36. The Whole Book of Psalms, first published in a complete form in 1562, introduced congregational singing to England and contained the best known English verse in the early modern period. Often referred to by later critics as “Sternhold and Hopkins,” it was the dominant hymnal in England until the mid-eighteenth century and printed until 1861. This critical edition, the first to include both texts and tunes, is based on the 148 English impressions remaining from the reign of Elizabeth I along with their Marian predecessors. The appendices include miniature critical editions of the psalm paraphrases as published during Edward’s reign, additional texts included in some editions, later musical revisions, and the short tunes that began to replace the printed ones by the late sixteenth century.Although this is a scholarly edition with complete critical apparatus, it is also designed to make this crucial piece of early modern culture accessible to non-specialists. The texts are in modern spelling and the tunes in modern notation. The edition offers an extensive historical essay and notes on each text and tune, and is furnished with an audio supplement of representative musical settings.

For more than two centuries the group of early modern English manuscripts presented in this volume sat mostly ignored on the shelves of the British Library, known only to the librarians who catalogued them. Six of them, for four different elaborate allegorical paintings, appear in the manuscript catalog of the Sloane Collection as “Instructions to painters.” A seventh, from the Harley collection in the same library, has more recently been added to the group. On art historical, iconographic, and historical grounds the manuscripts add significantly to our knowledge of Elizabethan visual allegory, and reveal a provocative new contribution to the evolution of English political thought. And the development across three of the programs of a warm personal relationship between the patron and the artist opens a unique window into early modern relationships of this kind. Unlike most other surviving artistic programs, this one reveals its author’s personality and interests in a rich and beguiling way, and although as a writer he is no Sidney or Nashe, the naïve yet widely informed enthusiasm with which he addresses his readers has considerable force and charm.

This interdisciplinary project offers a rereading of the 1590 Arcadia as an apocalyptic allegory, maintaining that Sidney’s revised work participates in contemporary debates on church reform and church history in previously unrecognized ways. The book views Sidney’s work in relationship to Protestant Revelation commentaries and apocalyptic church histories and treatises on church reform by Philippe Du Plessis Mornay, George Gifford, William Fulke, Heinrich Bullinger, John Foxe, John Bale, and others. The interpretation is supported by careful analysis of Sidney’s additions to and alterations of the original Arcadia, as well as of his allusions to and reworkings of prior epics.

An erudite abbess of Port-Royal, Angélique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d’Andilly (1624 – 1684) resisted the demands of church and state to condemn the Jansenist theological doctrines which the convent had long upheld. In her autobiographical Report on Captivity, Angélique de Saint-Jean recounts her personal methods of spiritual resistance as she and her fellow nuns underwent waves of persecution resulting in exile, house arrest, interdict, and excommunication. Her voluminous theological writings present the theoretical basis for this resistance, limiting the claims of political and ecclesiastical authorities over the conscience of the individual. In particular, she defends the right of women to refuse to surrender their convictions due to specious appeals to obedience and humility.

Beginning with Diodorus Siculus’s first-century BCE account and extending to early modern German Meisterlieder, this book explores the plethora of narratives about the ancient Babylonian queen Semiramis. The selected texts, most from continental Europe, cover a range of genres and languages. Organized thematically around issues of visual communication — acts of seeing and being seen — this study highlights the narrative fluidity in the matière de Sémiramide, ultimately revealing a figure of excess and surplus that defies classification and categorization. In its thematic focus, this study also draws on the competitive yet complementary relationship between the visual and the verbal.

This edition presents in English, for the first time, Jeanne d’Albret’s Letters to the king, his mother, his brother, her own brother-in-law, and the queen of England, together with her Ample Declaration (1568) defending her decampment to the Protestant stronghold of La Rochelle. A historical-biographical introduction situates these writings in the larger context of Reformation politics and examines in detail the specific literary characteristics of her memoir. In her works, Jeanne d’Albret asserts her own position as legal sovereign of Béarn and Navarre and situates herself at the nexus of overlapping political, religious, and familial tensions.

This edition offers texts from Bathsua Makin and Mary More, and Robert Whitehall’s response to More’s argument. Makin describes the appropriate education for London merchants’ daughters, arguing that girls should be educated and should aspire to follow learned women in history, and that educated women improve their families and themselves. More argues that women have the right to an education, and that such an education shows that the inequality of married women under English law is a man-made institution. More’s argument drew objections from her Oxford reader, Robert Whitehall, who preserved her manuscript with his own. Makin and More enjoyed a measure of public recognition and esteem, yet after their deaths, they and their texts were largely ignored until the late twentieth century.

The Poetry of Burchiello: Deep-fried Nouns, Hunchbacked Pumpkins, and Other Nonsense is the first complete English translation of the poetry of Domenico di Giovanni, nicknamed il Burchiello (ca. 1404–1449). A highly influential Florentine poet of the fifteenth century, and a barber by trade, Burchiello composed poetry that inspired numerous imitators and influenced writers for centuries afterwards. Ironically, however, he specialized in a nonsensical style that destabilized semantic meaning and that continues to baffle readers. In this bilingual edition of Burchiello’s poetry, Fabian Alfie and Aileen A. Feng attempt to render Burchiello’s non-sensical poetry into readable English while maintaining the experimental spirit of the original.

These translations from the French bring two of Claudine-Alexandrine de Tencin’s novels back to life: The Memoirs of the Count of Comminge (1735), presented as a much-needed new translation, and The Misfortunes of Love (1747), appearing here for the first time in English. Published more than half a century after Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves, they belonged less to Tencin’s time than to the tradition of the “feminine historical novel” inspired by Lafayette. Beautifully written in the spare but powerful prose characteristic of French classicism and widely read both in Tencin’s lifetime and beyond, the novels were forgotten in the mid-nineteenth century. Like the work of Abbé Prévost and Pierre de Marivaux, they were important contributions to the early sentimental novel. They also anticipated, surprisingly, the gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe which appeared later in the century.

Sir Paul Rycaut (1629–1700) was a diplomat, poet, translator and administrator. His Present State of the Ottoman Empire was the most important and influential work on its topic produced by an Englishman in the seventeenth century, and it served as a reference point for others writing on the same subject for nearly two hundred years. Rycaut’s book was considered the most informative and accurate text on its subject, and was widely-read in Europe as well as in England. It contains extensive discussions of Ottoman government, religion, and military matters, and may also be read as a subtext suggesting a middle road between absolutism and constitutional monarchy.This critical edition of Rycaut’s important work includes a full introduction, which discusses at length the historical background to the text, its reception at the time in which it was written and a discussion of its influence, as well as an extensive bibliography. This is the first modern edition of the work, and should be useful for general scholars of the period, specialists, and students alike.

In 1654, Anna Trapnel — a Baptist, Fifth Monarchist, millenarian, and visionary from London — fell into a trance during which she prophesied passionately and at length against Oliver Cromwell and his government. The prophecies attracted widespread public attention, and resulted in an invitation to travel to Cornwall. Her Report and Plea, republished here for the first time, is a lively and engaging firsthand account of the visit, which concluded in her arrest, a court hearing, and imprisonment. Part memoir, part travelogue, and part impassioned defense of her beliefs and actions, the Report and Plea offers vivid and fascinating insight into the life and times of an early modern woman claiming her place at the center of the tumultuous political events of mid-seventeenth-century England.

When María Vela y Cueto (1561–1617) declared that God had personally ordered her to take only the Eucharist as food and to restore primitive dress and public penance in her aristocratic convent, the entire religious community, according to her confessor, “rose up in wrath.” Yet, when Vela died, her peers joined with the populace to declare her a saint. In her autobiography and personal letters, Vela speaks candidly of the obstacles, perils, and rewards of re-negotiating piety in a convent where devotion to God was no longer expressed through rigorous asceticism. Vela’s experience, told in her own words, reveals her shrewd understanding of the persuasive power of a woman’s body.

This volume is a reference work, organized chronologically in its sections, with a separate entry for each translator’s work. The sections are defined by the type of translations they comprise. The plan of the book is encyclopedic in nature: some biographical material is provided for each translator; the translations are described briefly, as are their linguistic peculiarities, their implied audiences, their links with other translations, and their general reception. Sample passages from the translations are provided, and where possible these samples are taken from two of the most well-known moments in the Consolatio: the appearance of Lady Philosophy, narrated by the Prisoner, and the cosmological hymn to the Deus of the work, sung by Lady Philosophy.Where possible, an attempt also has been made to keep the general appearance of the original printed pages. Orthographic peculiarities (in spelling, capitalization, indentation, etc.) except for the elongated “s” have been maintained. Notes inserted by the translators or editors upon the passages transcribed in this volume are maintained as footnotes. These notes are included because they reveal much about the scholarship that the translators bring to their work of translating. The notes signal the translators’ familiarity with commentaries and earlier Consolatio translations, and they help to identify the types of audiences targeted by the translators (whether general or scholarly). The notes indicate points in the text (either grammatical or cultural) that translators or editors deemed needful of clarification for their readers, but the notes often also represent actual borrowings of notes, sometimes verbatim, from earlier translations. Such “borrowed notes” help to establish or verify lines of affiliation between the translations.

Volume 9 continues to expand the range of early modern book owners represented in PLRE. The libraries in this volume were collected by statesmen, diplomats, government officials, and estate landowners; by merchants and tradesmen (a cooper, an apothecary, a clothier, a merchant adventurer); by a poet and pamphleteer, a churchwarden, and a lawyer. PLRE has also continued to seek out evidence of book ownership by early modern women, offering here book-lists associated with six aristocratic and upper gentry women, including the well-known diarists Elizabeth Isham and Lady Anne Clifford. The book-lists in this volume furthermore represent a range of locations within England, with records of libraries situated in Westmorland, Lancashire, Warwickshire, Yorkshire, Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cornwall, and the Isle of Wight in addition to London.With this volume, nearly three hundred and forty personal libraries representing approximately 17,000 books itemized in personal catalogues, wills, and probate inventories between 1507 and 1653 have been transcribed, identified, and annotated, with each collection provided with an introductory essay.

Edward Poeton’s The Winnowing of White Witchcraft was written in the 1630s and has never been printed. Poeton, a physician, was one of few non-clergymen to write about magic during the early modern period, and the treatise offers new insights into the problem of popular errors concerning the nature of witchcraft. As well as advancing a number of standard and not-so-standard arguments for the sinfulness of white witches, the treatise offers fascinating insight into Poeton’s practice as a physician and his own youthful dalliance with magic. It is thus a significant new source in the history of early modern medicine and witchcraft belief. This edition includes an introduction and explanatory notes.Edited with an introduction and notes by Simon F. Davies

Incorporating advances in historical linguistics but aimed at teachers and students of poetry, Chaucer’s Verse Art in its European Context argues that between 1378 and 1400 Geoffrey Chaucer used his knowledge of how poets versified in other languages to devise a meter that would be a perfect fit for the newly respectable English. While Chaucer and Gower are largely responsible for the last stage of this evolution in Middle English and Anglo-Norman, Chaucer’s risk in composing in English paid off and iambic pentameter and tetrameter endured to become the staples of English verse, while Gower’s French stress-syllabic meters died with the Anglo-Norman dialect.

Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), daughter of the Este dukes of Ferrara and wife of Marchese Francesco II Gonzaga of Mantua, co-regent of the Gonzaga state, art collector, musician, diplomat, dynastic mother, traveler, reader, gardener, fashion innovator, and consummate politician, was also, as this volume attests, a prolific letter writer with a highly developed epistolary network. Presented here for the first time in any language is a representative selection from over 16,000 letters sent by Isabella to addressees across a wide social spectrum. Together, they paint a nuanced and colorful portrait of a brilliant and influential female protagonist of early modern European society.

The 15 original essays in this volume represent only a few of the paths that Glyn Burgess’s research career has taken: lays, by Marie de France and unknown authors; manuscript collections of lays and fabliaux; episodic narratives, from ancestral/​outlaw romance and Norman vernacular historiography; transformations of the Brendan legend; and authorial voice in religious texts, including Wace’s. The diversity of content and approaches has created a volume which will serve both as a fitting tribute to Burgess’s continuing influence and expertise, as well as a contribution to the growing theoretical and applied work in the area of the short narrative, which the authors extend to a very broad range of works, from fabliau to hagiography, from history to myth. This breadth of interest, within a close and analytical focus on short narrative, make this an important, indeed unique, collection.

This volume presents in translation 100 previously unknown letters of Ippolita Maria Sforza (1445–1488), daughter of the Duke of Milan, who was sent at age twenty to marry the son of the infamously brutal King Ferrante of Naples. Sforza’s letters display the adroit diplomacy she used to strengthen the alliance between Milan and Naples, then the two most powerful states in Italy, amid such grave crises as her brother’s assassination in Milan and the Turkish invasion of Otranto. Still, Ippolita lived as a hostage at the Neapolitan court, subject not only to the threat of foreign invasion but also to her husband’s well-known sexual adventures and her father-in-law’s ruthlessness. Soon after Ippolita’s mysterious death in 1488, the fraught Naples-Milan alliance collapsed.