This chapter comprises an introduction to Gertrude More (1606-33), a Catholic nun who spent most of her life in exile in Cambrai at Our Lady of Comfort convent protected by Henrietta Maria, and her two posthumously published works: The Holy Practises of a Devine Lover or the Sainctly Ideots Devotions (1657) and The Spiritual Exercises of the Most Vertuous and Religious D. Gertrude More (1658). More was the great-great-granddaughter of Sir Thomas More. More's works, which are mostly prose but include several poems, demonstrate her piety and instruct all believers to engage in regular spiritual practices. They also include allusions to the Song of Songs, where More figures Christ as her divine lover, and these are explored in vivid, corporeal images.

This chapter considers diction in poetry from several points of view, beginning with a consideration of overall effects, rather than localised instances or phrases, using notions like 'pace', 'mood' and 'cohesion'. It looks at how grammatical and syntactical means can be used to slow the reader's arrival at a culminating phrase by re-ordering the way the words would probably occur in ordinary speech. The chapter illustrates poets' frequent preference for the apparently incongruous lexical item. It also looks at two examples of 'counter-intuitive' diction in poetry. The first example shows a poet's instinct for verbal counter-intuition at the start of Michael Donaghy's poem 'Liverpool'. The second example of counter-intuitive diction is from Ciaran Carson, whose 1989 book Belfast Confetti gives a series of disturbingly intimate insights into life in Belfast at the height of the 'Troubles' during the 1970s.

This chapter comprises an introduction to the anonymously authored deathbed testimony titled Conversion Exemplified (1663), followed by selected reading, and several edited extracts from the work itself (including an extract from the address to the reader written by the author's husband). The anonymous gentlewoman's testimony was evidently posthumously published in order to vindicate her religious beliefs believed scandalous by her relatives who were more given to episcopacy. Recorded visits by Puritan ministers Joseph Caryl and John Rowe help to establish her piety. She expresses concern for how she would appear after death (both physically and spiritually), a concern that was quite typical of the period, when a dying person could be judged on how they behaved in their last moments.

Some 20th and 21st century literary critics treat allegoresis as a project fraught with psychological and philosophical complexity and The Faerie Queene as deliberately obscure or ironic. Most early marginal comments demonstrate that Spenser’s first readers found the poem’s allegorical message accessible and mainstream. Sermons, aspiring like Spenser (in this work) to orthodoxy, are similarly didactic. When a preacher addressed a public audience, biblical types of Elizabeth like Moses, David, and Hezekiah, appeared without reference to unedifying details. The implication for The Faerie Queene (though not for all of Spenser’s work): ostensible praise and blame may be taken at face value.

Occasional liturgies are scripts for religious services which respond to specific occasions: emergencies like plague (in 1563), Muslim invasions in Europe (in 1565 and 1566), bad weather (in 1571), the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the London earthquake of 1580, the Spanish invasion (expected from 1586 through 1588), or plots against the queen like Dr. Parry’s in 1585 and Babington’s in 1586. Two occasional liturgies from 1576 and 1585 offer readings and prayers for November 17, signalling that, like Pentecost and Christmas, Accession Day was part of the church year. Identifying England with Israel, liturgists treated Elizabethan current events and public figures as interchangeable with events and characters described in the Bible. Elizabethan churchgoers thus had abundant training in decoding allegorical narratives—a facility they could bring to a reading of The Faerie Queene.

The 1570 "Homelie against Disobedience" and court sermons responding to the Northern Rebellion and the threat posed by Mary Stuart employ biblical figures to develop a spiritual interpretation of current events. Public sermons in 1587, the year of Mary Stuart’s execution, and in 1589 likewise use biblical typology which shades into nationalism. Recent critics see the Mercilla episode, in its idealization of Elizabeth’s attitude and inaccurate presentation of Mary Stuart’s trial, as evidence of Spenser’s bad faith or a sophisticated critique of power. Rather, his allegory recalls preachers’ use of typology to spiritualize recent events and present them as reflecting well upon Elizabeth and God’s care of England.

Gives a biography, the first to appear in print, of the manuscripts compiler, who was born in 1581, and had an early association with the Earl of Essex, probably accompanying him on the ill-fated Irish expedition of 1599. From this period until 1619, when he was knighted, he was in the service of the Crown, much of the time in association with Sir Henry Wotton, ambassador for many years to Venice, and also to the court of Savoy. During all that service, he was also a secret agent, intercepting correspondence and carrying out other duties. Several home appointments followed, including that of joint Warden of the Mint, which he held until the onset of the Civil War. He took the King’s side, and transferred to the Oxford Mint, but when the war was lost suffered years of relative hardship. He was reinstated at the Restoration, and died in 1667.

Elizabethans thought genealogy offered a key to character, as shown by their analyses of the discrepancies between the lists of Christ’s forebears in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Since spiritual kinship was a criterion for inclu¬sion in such a list, preachers like Richard Curteys and Edwin Sandys demonstrate that Elizabeth’s family tree properly included biblical ancestors. In the chronicle history cantos, Spenser, with a similar concern to capture Elizabeth’s essential nature, provided the queen with spiritually significant ancestors from pre-history and from invention. Awareness of the cultural resources Spenser used in creating (and his first readers used in making sense of) these lists of ancestors relieves us of the burden of distilling a consistent moral and political message from Briton moniments and Antiquitie of Faerie lond.

After an introduction discussing Renaissance letter-writing and the Burley letters in particular, letters are taken in groups of similar kind, such as Donne’s correspondence with Wotton, Goodere and others, his love letters to Anne More, the Symmachus translations, and so on. Extensive commentary and notes are provided for each group and, in the case of the translations, notes of deviations from Symmachus’s original. The concluding section discusses Renaissance letter-writing in general, citing the writers John Hoskyns and the slightly later James Howell, and showing how the letters recorded in Burley display the qualities they commended.

The coda of this study summarizes findings about the literary orphan figure in contemporary American novels. Through brief analyses of Tim Gautreaux’s The Missing (2009), Chang-Rae Lee’s The Surrendered (2010), Sapphire’s The Kid (2011), Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child (2012), and Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son (2012), it demonstrates the continued relevance of this figure for literary imaginings of home.