Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies – serie

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.

Studies in John Gower is a translation of Maria Wickert’s Studien zu John Gower, the book that began the modern study of the Vox Clamantis. It is a monograph in six chapters, the first five on various aspects of the Vox — textual development, the vision of the Peasants’ Revolt, influence of the medieval sermon, the open letter to Richard II, world view — and the sixth a penetrating study of Gower’s narrative technique in the Confessio Amantis.

Drawing upon literary, historical, and visual evidence, this collection of interdisciplinary essays examines how the Mediterranean shaped practices of gender in the premodern era. This volume bridges the gap between gender studies and Mediterranean studies, which have a natural fit with each other in their interest on defining identity carefully through connectivity and attentiveness to cultural hegemonies. The essays in this volume build off of this double approach to offer a unique contribution to the field, and use gender to understand the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean to understand premodern gender.Whereas other volumes have examined gender in the premodern period or premodern Mediterranean Studies, to date no other volume has sought to explore the intersection of the two.  The interdisciplinary nature of the essays will make them useful to both scholars and teachers, for they will combine theory and practice in a length that makes them easily accessible to advanced students as well as specialized researchers. The first chapter provides a critical overview of the scholarship on Mediterranean studies as a field of area studies as well as an overview of gender studies in the medieval period. As such, the volume will be useful for students, teachers, and researchers, and its interdisciplinary nature reflects the diaspora of the Mediterranean itself.

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.

As the patron of travelers, Saint Christopher inspired one of the most popular cults in the medieval era, which spread across Europe and especially the Iberian Peninsula. Artistic renderings of the saint were found near the doors of most Spanish Gothic churches, and paratheatrical representations of Saint Christopher were also commonplace in religious processions. His conversion and martyrdom were often staged between the fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the theater, Juan de Benavides’s Vida y muerte de San Cristóbal is one of two known comedias dealing with the saint, but it was heavily censored after its premiere. The immense popularity of St. Christopher and other primitive saints first drew the attention of the Council of Trent in the mid-1500s, when the Catholic Church attempted to suppress the influence of the earlier saints due to their fantastical nature. The stories of these saints were censored, rewritten or even omitted in the post-Tridentine martyrologies. This publication is the first critical edition of the only extant copy of Benavides’s playscript. The circumstances surrounding Benavides’s play continue a dialogue about such important topics as censorship and the influence of the church over artistic production.

The Greek philosopher George of Trebizond started the Plato-Aristotle Controversy of the Renaissance with two works published in Rome in the late 1450s. The first was his Protectio Aristotelis Problematum (The Protection of Aristotle’s Problemata), which was as much a treatise on translation as it was a polemic in defense of Aristotle. The second was his Comparatio Philosophorum Platonis et Aristotelis (A Comparison of the Philosophers Plato and Aristotle). This publication is the critical edition. It analyze the background, themes, and arguments of the works, as well as offering the texts themselves in new English translations.

The manuscript for Rivall Friendship was first acquired by the Newberry Library in 1937. At the time of the acquisition, the author of this seventeenth-century romance was anonymous. Scholar Jean R. Brink now suggests, based on dating of the manuscript and her analysis of its feminist themes, that the author was a woman. Specifically, Brink attributes the text to Bridget Manningham, who was the older sister of Thomas Manningham, a Jacobean and Caroline bishop, and the granddaughter of John Manningham, a diarist who recorded performances of Shakespeare’s plays. Rivall Friendship is a post–English Civil War romance that examines proto-feminist issues, such as patriarchal dominance in the family and marriage. Manningham is scrupulous about maintaining verisimilitude, and unlike more fantastical romances of the period that feature monsters, giants, and magic, this text aspires to a level of probability in its historical and geographical details. The text of Rivall Friendship is accessible to most modern readers, particularly to students and scholars accustomed to working with seventeenth-century texts.

This book gathers cutting-edge articles by prominent scholars reflecting on Petrarch’s poetry and his long legacy, from the Renaissance to the present day. The scholars engaged in this volume read Petrarch in the context of his own world and with a variety of theoretical and critical approaches, never overlooking the opportunity for an interdisciplinary reading that combines poetry and visual arts. The volume includes scholars from the United States and Europe (Italy, in particular), thus offering the opportunity to compare different theoretical approaches.  The articles in the second half of the volume celebrate Petrarch’s legacies beyond the historically fundamental Renaissance Petrarchism, while exploring the presence of Petrarch’s poetry in several cultural realities. The scholars also read Petrarch with necessary attention to new disciplines such as digital humanities. The richness of the volume lies in these innovative perusals of Petrarch’s works not only through the critical lens of dedicated scholars, but also through their readings of artists who throughout the centuries appreciated and revived Petrarch’s poetry in their own literary endeavors.

Dante’s Volume from Alpha to Omega brings together essays written by internationally recognized scholars to explore the poet’s encyclopedic impulse in light of our own frenzied information age. This comprehensive collection of essays, coedited by Carol Chiodo and Christiana Purdy Moudarres, examines how Dante’s spiritual quest is powered by an encyclopedic one, which has for more than seven centuries drawn a readership as diverse as the knowledge his work contains. The essays investigate both the intellectual and spiritual pleasures that Dante’s Commedia affords, underscoring how, through the sheer breadth of its knowledge, the poem demands collective and collaborative inquiry. Rather than isolating the poetic or theological strands of the Commedia, the book acts as a bridge across disciplines, braiding together the well-worn strands of poetry and theology with those of philosophy, the sciences, and the arts. The wide range of entries within Dante’s poetic summa yield multiple opportunities to reflect on their points of intersection, and the urgency of the convergence of the poem’s aesthetic, intellectual, and affective aims.

As both layman and Franciscan friar, the Catalan writer known as Francesc Moner (ca 1463–1495) is one of the leading exponents of the bilingual (Catalan-Castilian) culture that flourished in Barcelona in the late 1400s. In his approach to Sepultura d’amor (Burial of Love), Moner’s longest poem, Peter Cocozzella focuses on the author’s ingenious version of a kind of parody that desacralizes but does not desecrate the celebration of the funeral Mass. Cocozzella discovers the aspects of Moner’s unconventional idea of a theater based on the dramatics of the monologue and on the transformation of the divine ritual into a human analogue of transubstantiation. This allegorical pattern validates the profile of the masterpiece in question as one of the earliest manifestations of the auto sacramental, the distinctive theatrical genre scripted in the language of Castile. The book includes the text of Sepultura and its translation.

A new addition to an ongoing project to publish the early-modern Exchequer manuscript law reports.This edition of Exchequer cases from 1685 to 1714 includes all of the Exchequer reports, both in print and in manuscript, known to date from this period. These consolidated reports are presented chronologically according to the modern method of presenting cases.

The first English translation of Olga A. Smirnitskaya’s influential 1994 Russian work on Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse studies.In 1994, Moscow State University professor Olga A. Smirnitskaya published a significant work in the field of Old Germanic Philology entitled The Verse and Language of Old Germanic Poetry (Стих и язык древнегерманской поэзии). The book was lauded as one of the most important contributions from the Russian school of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse studies to the worldwide scholarship in that field. It covers the emergence and evolution of Old Germanic verse forms from the earliest runic inscriptions to the pinnacles achieved in Old English Beowulf and Old Norse skaldic poetry. This translation is a fundamental piece of scholarship that will be in great demand by non-Russian-speaking scholars working in the fields of Old English and Old Norse language and literature all over the world, as well as by wider scholarly audiences involved in any aspect of studies of Old Germanic languages and literature, especially poetry and meters.

Early law reports from the English Court of Chancery.This edition of Chancery cases from 1625 to 1660 includes all Chancery reports, both in print and manuscript, known to date from this period. These consolidated reports are presented chronologically according to the modern case presentation method.

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.

Step into the Court of Chancery during the reign of James II with this essential compilation of legal cases that influenced Anglo-American law.A boon for legal historians and scholars, Reports of Cases in the Court of Chancery from 1683 to 1688 brings together all known Chancery reports—both printed and manuscript—from this pivotal period in English legal history. Edited by W. Hamilton Bryson, this volume presents these cases in a modern chronological format, offering invaluable insight into the development of equity law in the late seventeenth century.These reports cover a range of legal disputes heard in the Court of Chancery and shed light on the evolving role of equity in addressing matters beyond the reach of common law. Ranging from property disputes to fiduciary obligations, the cases in this collection reflect the legal complexities of Restoration England, shaping doctrines still relevant today.Essential reading for legal history academics, practicing lawyers with an interest in historical precedent, and students of early modern English law, this work offers an authoritative and accessible reference to one of the most influential courts in the Anglo-American legal tradition.

In Migdalia Cruz’s Macbeth, the Witches run the world. The Macbeths live out a dark cautionary tale of love, greed, and power, falling from glory into calamity as the Witches spin their fate. Translating Shakespeare’s language for a modern audience, Nuyorican playwright Migdalia Cruz rewrites Macbeth with all the passion of the Bronx.  This translation of Macbeth was presented in 2018 as part of the Play On! Shakespeare project, an ambitious undertaking from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that commissioned new translations of 39 Shakespeare plays. These translations present the Bard’s work in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.

Actor and director David Ivers presents As You Like It, as you’d like to hear it today. Presenting a new translation of Shakespeare into contemporary English, Ivers reimagines Shakespeare’s comedy from an actor’s point of view. Analyzing the play line by line to uncover the meaning of every joke, pun, and witty aside, Ivers repurposes Shakespeare’s language while maintaining an homage to the original rhythm, cadence, and structure. An accomplished actor and director, and a lifelong lover of the Bard, Ivers is the perfect writer to bring As You Like It into the present moment. This translation of As You Like It was written as part of the Play On! Shakespeare project, an ambitious undertaking from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that commissioned new translations of 39 Shakespeare plays. These translations present the Bard’s work in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.

Considered by most scholars to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote, The Tempest is a stormy tale of betrayal and forgiveness. After being banished by his brother Antonio, Prospero harnesses the magic of an otherworldly island full of monsters and spirits to seek revenge. In reworking this play for a twenty-first-century audience, Kenneth Cavander focuses on the humor and the magic in the tale, much of which has largely escaped modern audiences in recent years. Cavander’s translation of The Tempest, which premiered at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 2017, was written as part of the Play On! Shakespeare project, an ambitious undertaking from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that commissioned new translations of 39 Shakespeare plays. These translations present the Bard’s work in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.

This is the 2016 paperback printing of the 2008 edition of the popular text, translation, and commentary by S. A. Farmer. (The 2008 edition was a revised edition of the 1998 original publication).Published by ACMRS (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies) in Tempe, Arizona as part of the MRTS (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies) Series, this book -- previously available only in hardcover and otherwise out-of-print since 2014 -- is now available in its entirety in paperback format.

This expansive volume examines the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and other formations of identity in early modern representations of queens.Race/Queer/Queens is a new intervention into the well-established field of queenship and royalty studies. Queens/(queans) are at once the epitome of royal power and the exemplum of gendered disenfranchisement. The essays in this volume address the interlocking methodologies of premodern critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, and queer and trans theory to shed light on how gendered negotiations of power, reproductive politics, and embodied performance are determined by and inscribed within a hierarchy of gender, race, class, religion, nationhood, and sexuality. Ranging across early modern drama, poetry, and prose by the likes of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Lucy Hutchinson, and Hester Pulter, the essays in Race/Queer/Queens offer new intersectional approaches to studies of early modern history, genealogy, embodiment, and the nation, including model methodologies and directions for future scholarship.

Blends material, performance, and gender studies to highlight Indigenous women's vital contributions to ritual movement and dance.This book examines the cultural history of materials (feather, turtle shell, metal, and seashell) used to add sound to dancing in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Americas as a way of rediscovering the foundational nature of Indigenous women’s cultural, spiritual, and political actions and their links to cultural revitalization today. Objects created by Indigenous women throughout the Americas added aural and visual spectacle to ritual movement and dance, activities that carried spiritual, political, martial, and diplomatic significance. Women’s skilled labor was thus essential to reproducing culture and tending spiritual connections with other-than-human beings, even when women were not the main dancers, musicians, or singers. This book joins conversations about hemispheric connections across historiographical boundaries of “Latin American” and “early American” scholarship and offers an interdisciplinary focus on women, gender, material culture, and performance. It shows readers how stories about the past, covering a fuller range of human experience, come from so much more than alphabetic written documents and are about so much more than European invasion and colonization. Meant to broaden students’ ideas about what counts as history, this book also offers vivid details to capture the attention of more general readers.

Blends material, performance, and gender studies to highlight Indigenous women's vital contributions to ritual movement and dance.This book examines the cultural history of materials (feather, turtle shell, metal, and seashell) used to add sound to dancing in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Americas as a way of rediscovering the foundational nature of Indigenous women’s cultural, spiritual, and political actions and their links to cultural revitalization today. Objects created by Indigenous women throughout the Americas added aural and visual spectacle to ritual movement and dance, activities that carried spiritual, political, martial, and diplomatic significance. Women’s skilled labor was thus essential to reproducing culture and tending spiritual connections with other-than-human beings, even when women were not the main dancers, musicians, or singers. This book joins conversations about hemispheric connections across historiographical boundaries of “Latin American” and “early American” scholarship and offers an interdisciplinary focus on women, gender, material culture, and performance. It shows readers how stories about the past, covering a fuller range of human experience, come from so much more than alphabetic written documents and are about so much more than European invasion and colonization. Meant to broaden students’ ideas about what counts as history, this book also offers vivid details to capture the attention of more general readers.

From reproductions of Dürer copperplates to twenty-first-century apparel, this exhibition explores the history of images printed on fabric. Printing images and texts on luxurious fabrics instead of paper once took portraits, devotional images, and other artworks to the next level, brokering powerful relationships and memorializing important events on resplendent broadsides and serviceable handkerchiefs alike. However, whether fancy or functional, these early imprints from Europe and the Americas and their modern-day equivalents remain understudied and unappreciated for their artistry and deep connections to global economies. Premodern Printing on Fabric, held at the Newberry Library in 2026, is the first exhibition to tell the story of these exceedingly rare objects, highlighting new research that bridges the gap between art and book history, textiles, and printmaking.This exhibition catalog delves into fabric printings from the medieval to the modern. Examples range from seventeenth-century marriage poems and portraits on silk and devotional printings on linen reproducing cult objects to the nostalgically reprinted Albrecht Dürer copperplates and George Washington-themed handkerchiefs. A flurry of proto-computerized Jacquard-loom activity during nineteenth-century world's fairs offered woven silk memorabilia in collectible sizes, while simultaneously recreating high-end medieval manuscripts. Many unable to afford printed silks could then incorporate swatches into family quilts long before the popularity of graphic t-shirts.

From reproductions of Dürer copperplates to twenty-first-century apparel, this exhibition explores the history of images printed on fabric. Printing images and texts on luxurious fabrics instead of paper once took portraits, devotional images, and other artworks to the next level, brokering powerful relationships and memorializing important events on resplendent broadsides and serviceable handkerchiefs alike. However, whether fancy or functional, these early imprints from Europe and the Americas and their modern-day equivalents remain understudied and unappreciated for their artistry and deep connections to global economies. Premodern Printing on Fabric, held at the Newberry Library in 2026, is the first exhibition to tell the story of these exceedingly rare objects, highlighting new research that bridges the gap between art and book history, textiles, and printmaking.This exhibition catalog delves into fabric printings from the medieval to the modern. Examples range from seventeenth-century marriage poems and portraits on silk and devotional printings on linen reproducing cult objects to the nostalgically reprinted Albrecht Dürer copperplates and George Washington-themed handkerchiefs. A flurry of proto-computerized Jacquard-loom activity during nineteenth-century world's fairs offered woven silk memorabilia in collectible sizes, while simultaneously recreating high-end medieval manuscripts. Many unable to afford printed silks could then incorporate swatches into family quilts long before the popularity of graphic t-shirts.

An updated edition of the works of an important poet whose career spanned the Wars of the Roses. Peter Idley’s poetry provides a unique window into the dynamics of art, civil society, religion, gender, and politics during a tumultuous and transitional period in English history. Based on newly discovered manuscripts and updated scholarship, this edition provides over 1700 lines of previously unedited English poetry; the text of Idley’s extensive Latin citations; and newly identified sources for Idley’s work. This edition also provides an updated critical apparatus for scholarly reference. Idley’s work survives in ten manuscripts, all of them highly variable, which give direct testimony to the diversity of his popularity. He worked and wrote in the environs of the powerful Duchess of Suffolk, granddaughter of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, and his poetry circulated in the female religious community at Syon Abbey; magnate collections in the north and in Ireland; merchant households; and later Tudor and seventeenth-century literary collections. Peter Idley: Instructions to His Son provides new access to this valuable and understudied resource for understanding the culture of late medieval England as it moved into the early modern era.

An updated edition of the works of an important poet whose career spanned the Wars of the Roses. Peter Idley’s poetry provides a unique window into the dynamics of art, civil society, religion, gender, and politics during a tumultuous and transitional period in English history. Based on newly discovered manuscripts and updated scholarship, this edition provides over 1700 lines of previously unedited English poetry; the text of Idley’s extensive Latin citations; and newly identified sources for Idley’s work. This edition also provides an updated critical apparatus for scholarly reference. Idley’s work survives in ten manuscripts, all of them highly variable, which give direct testimony to the diversity of his popularity. He worked and wrote in the environs of the powerful Duchess of Suffolk, granddaughter of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, and his poetry circulated in the female religious community at Syon Abbey; magnate collections in the north and in Ireland; merchant households; and later Tudor and seventeenth-century literary collections. Peter Idley: Instructions to His Son provides new access to this valuable and understudied resource for understanding the culture of late medieval England as it moved into the early modern era.

Recovers a previously hidden theater and performance history of Black women engaging with Shakespeare as actors, playwrights, costume designers, and directors.This catalog documents and expands on the Folger Shakespeare Library’s 2026 exhibition To Hear Her Speak: Black Women and Shakespeare, curated by Dr. Patricia Akhimie, the Director of the Folger Institute and an internationally recognized scholar in the field of premodern critical race studies. To Hear Her Speak explores the presence of Black women in the early modern world, the histories of Black women in Shakespearean performance both on and off stage, and how Black women as writers, thinkers, and artists have utilized Shakespeare's language, forms, stories, and characters for their own purposes and to diverse ends. Akhimie shares how these women, their histories, and their cultures are represented (and misrepresented) through the eyes of early modern European artists and writers, and allows readers to listen for and learn from the voices of Black women in a wide variety of forms of expression.