The AIDS memoir has become one of the most common genres of gay men’s writing. American autobiographical accounts of AIDS can be found across a wide range of genres, including fictionalized versions in novels and poetry. There is considerable variety in these texts’ representations of the disease, yet, for all their variety, most AIDS autobiographies have in common the paradoxical fact that they are usually about another with AIDS rather than the writer’s own experience of AIDS. This is the case even when the writer is himself infected. The emphasis on care connects to the importance of community in both the gay male experience of AIDS and of literature.

Dante traces the question of happiness to our nature, knowledge of which is available.His decision to persist in rational inquiry is not arbitrary as rests on such knowledge. At the heart of Paradiso Dante speaks with his ancestor Cacciaguida about Florentine politics and nobility because the needed self-knowledge is gained through reflection on political life. From the contemplative unity characteristic of the previous Heaven to the political conflict in Mars is an ascent.

The key discussion concerns how candidly Dante’s poem should express the truth. The literary question points to the political problem of posed by the enduring tensions among human goods, and these tensions disclose the conflicts inherent in an embodied mind. Among beings that desire and reason, that are “mortal” and aware of their mortality, there is decisive inequality, inequality regarding the willingness and ability to discern truth.The scope of this difference defies the possibility that good can be understood by deduction from a principle or law, making it a matter for inquiry. The life devoted to this inquiry, as indicated in these central Cantos, is available here and now and grounds every genuinely common good. Dante calls his epic of self-reflection a “comedy.”

Standish O’Grady’s treatment of Cuchulainn was central to Patrick Pearse’s vision of sacrifice. O’Grady depicts Cuchulainn’s martyrdom as Christ-like, but does so in light of contemporaneous anthropological writings on blood sacrifice and the deities of vegetative regeneration. For blood to seep into the land and revive Ireland was a compelling image to Pearse, dauntless as he imagined that Robert Emmet smiled in anticipation of death. Accordingly, Pearse urged students at St Enda’s and St Ita’s to adopt Emmet and Anne Devlin as presiding figures although – contrary to Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’ – in the act of sacrifice one should not aspire to individual fame. Influenced by Pearse, the Irish landscape thirsts for blood in Dorothy Macardle’s short fiction.

The June eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender is famous for its homage to Chaucer, marking Spenser’s thinking about his project of making poetry in relation to an English literary past. This chapter explores the insights ‘June’ offers into the role Chaucer played in Spenser’s poetic ambitions by examining the spatialised poetics of ‘June’ alongside Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale. Both poems stipulate a similar setting for the main character’s predicament: a locus amoenus described in terms of Paradise. In each case a despairing emotional state prevents the character from experiencing the joys of the paradisal space; each poem links this situation to a spatialised account of poetic making that locates literary failure, inspiration and achievement within its imagined geography. The chapter investigates resonances between the two poems (and A Theatre for Worldlings) and their implications for Spenser’s Chaucerian poetics. Staging a character’s isolation from the ultimately pleasant place serves to highlight problems associated with poetic inheritance and ambition and to frame the solutions both poems contemplate – including access to the Muses’ Parnassus and the fountain of Helicon. For Spenser, importing classical and Christian images of paradise into the landscape of English poetry seems to require a series of moves amounting to colonisation.

Spenser’s choice of Chaucer as his master was a matter less of anxiety of influence than of deliberate and self-promoting emulation. Both his debts and his creative encounters are apparent especially in his responses to Chaucer’s exploration of different kinds of love and sexuality, from the cosmic to the lustful, signalled most evidently in Britomart’s quotation from the Franklin’s Tale. Spenser further extends such an exploration to the allegorical relationships between his figures for virtue and vice.

Thomas Speght was the first Chaucer editor to present readers with a ‘medieval’ Chaucer firmly situated in the past. By providing a substantial apparatus of supplementary materials aiming to facilitate access to Chaucer’s works, Speght was implicitly highlighting Chaucer’s datedness. At the same time, Speght also used his ‘additions’ to present Chaucer as a true English classic and national poet still worthy of being read, and to insist that Chaucer’s works continued to be relevant to his sixteenth-century readers. This chapter traces the evolution of the front and back matter of Speght’s editions (of 1598 and 1602) and analyses how they serve Speght’s double agenda to present Chaucer as a poet both ancient and ‘modern’. In particular, it examines how Speght pursued his double strategy by stressing links between Chaucer and Edmund Spenser and by fashioning a ‘friendship’ between the two major English poets of the past and present.

This chapter uses literary and visual material, from the medieval period to the twenty-first century, to explore how technology has shaped the theory and practice of reading. Particular emphasis is placed on the relationship between public and private forms of reading, including debates about silent reading, and the role of reading in the Abrahamic religions.

Using current debates about fake news and post-truth politics as a frame, this chapter examines how queer theory complicates received academic approaches to reading. The chapter is centred on a discussion of Eve Sedgwick’s work on Jane Austen, which it uses as a paradigm of how academic close reading has been challenged by the mode of reading that I call ‘loose reading’.

The Countess of Bedford as Queen Elizabeth's personal representative attended, as did the Earl of Shrewsbury, who came to honour this woman whom he had guarded and protected and whose company he enjoyed. Queen Mary's approval of the 'Babington Plot', a plan by insistent Catholics to assassinate Elizabeth and free Mary, determined her final destiny. Three things will bring about Mary's 'translation': the actual movement of the body, the velvet pall, and the monument. The translation of Mary also underscored a translation of King James, a kind of expiation of whatever lingering guilt he felt about his mother. The 1618 edition of John Stow's Survey of London, prepared by Anthony Munday, includes the lengthy Latin inscription, written by the Earl of Northampton, on Mary Stuart's tomb in the Abbey.

Publication of plays and theatre performances in 1613 underscore the growing cultural power of London's theatrical landscape, from which William Shakespeare was beginning to exit, but leaving behind an exceptionally rich heritage. London's industrious printers produced an avalanche of books in 1613, containing a stunning range of materials, from sermons to books on husbandry, music, poetry, and drama. These books link the public and private spheres of England's culture, as they bridge the distance between Whitehall and the City of London. Courtier and worker could jostle side by side at London's book stalls whose wares complement and sometimes complete the cultural process. The cultural excitement of a royal wedding and an aristocratic one, the cultural investment in a royal funeral, the resonance and solace of unparalleled drama performances and publication, the unstinting productivity of writers and printers all combined to make 1613 an exceptionally important year.