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  3. Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture

The past twenty years have seen a broad and vital reinterpretation of the nature of literary texts, a move away from formalism to a sense of literature as an aspect of social, economic, political, and cultural history. Recent writing on the nature of representation, the historical construction of gender and of the concept of identity itself, has opened new avenues. This series is designed to offer historically oriented studies of Renaissance literature and theater from recent theoretical perspectives. The view of history envisioned is above all a view of our own history, a reading of the Renaissance for and from our own time.

  • General Editors: Stephen Orgel, Stanford University, California
  • Editorial Boards: Anne Barton, University of Cambridge, Jonathan Dollimore, University of York, Marjorie Garber, Harvard University, Massachusetts , Jonathan Goldberg, The Johns Hopkins University , Nancy Vickers, Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania , Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Kate McLuskie, University of Southampton

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27 results in Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture

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Knowledge, Discovery and Imagination in Early Modern Europe
  • The Rise of Aesthetic Rationalism
  • Timothy J. Reiss
  • Published online:
    01 February 2010
    Print publication:
    13 March 1997
  • Recent explanations of changes in early modern European thought speak much of a move from orality and emphasis on language to print culture and a 'spatial' way of thinking. Timothy J. Reiss offers a more complex explanation for the massive changes that occurred. He describes how by the late fifteenth century the language arts of the trivium had come to seem useful only for communication, teaching and public debate, and how humanists turned to the mathematical arts of the quadrivium - including music - to enable new means and methods of discovery. Reiss goes on to argue that the new 'mathematical' ideal formed the basis of wide sociocultural renewal; he analyses Northern vernacular grammars, examines the work of French and Italian mathematicians, musicians and philosophers including Descartes, and censures such modern commonplaces as the supposed impact of print and 'spatial' thinking. He ends by exploring the broad impact of this 'mathematisation' of the Western imagination.

Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England
  • Mark Breitenberg
  • Published online:
    19 November 2009
    Print publication:
    14 March 1996
  • To recent studies of Renaissance subjectivity, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England contributes the argument that masculinity is unavoidably anxious and volatile in cultures that distribute power and authority according to patriarchal prerogatives. Drawing from current arguments in feminism, cultural studies, historicism, psychoanalysis and gay studies, Mark Breitenberg explores the dialectic of desire and anxiety in masculine subjectivity in the work of a wide range of writers, including Shakespeare, Bacon, Burton and the women writers of the 'querelles des femmes' debate, especially Jane Anger. Breitenberg discusses jealousy and cuckoldry anxiety, hetero and homoerotic desire, humoural psychology, anatomical difference, cross-dressing and the idea of honour and reputation. He traces masculine anxiety both as a sign of ideological contradiction and, paradoxically, as a productive force in the perpetuation of western patriarchal systems.

Seizures of the Will in Early Modern English Drama
  • Frank Whigham
  • Published online:
    17 August 2009
    Print publication:
    26 January 1996
  • In Seizures of the Will in Early Modern English Drama Frank Whigham combines an analysis of English Renaissance plays with an enriched sense of their social surroundings. He traces the violent gestures of social self-construction that animate many such plays, and the ways in which drama interacts with the conflict-ridden discourses of social, rank, gender, kinship, and service relationships. In Whigham's view, The Spanish Tragedy initiates the 'matter of court,' a complex and marauding discourse of gender warfare and master-servant manipulations; Arden of Faversham explores linked redefinitions of land, service, and marriage in county culture; The Miseries of Enforced Marriage and A Yorkshire Tragedy present a powerful critique of the traditional imperialism of kinship in northern England; and The Duchess of Malfi explores metaphors of erotic transgression.

Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder
  • T. G. Bishop
  • Published online:
    07 December 2009
    Print publication:
    18 January 1996
  • Playwrights throughout history have used the emotion of wonder to explore the relation between feeling and knowing in the theatre. In Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder, T. G. Bishop argues that wonder provides a turbulent space, rich at once in emotion and self-consciousness, where the nature and value of knowing is brought into question. Bishop compares the treatment of wonder in classical philosophy and drama, and goes on to examine English cycle-plays, charting wonder's ambivalent relation to dogma and sacrament in the medieval religious theatre. Through extended readings of three of Shakespeare's plays - The Comedy of Errors, Pericles and The Winter's Tale - Bishop argues that Shakespeare uses wonder as a key component of his dialectic between affirmation and critique. Wonder is shown as vital to the characteristic self-consciousness of Shakespeare's plays as acts of narrative enquiry and renovation.

The Reformation of the Subject
  • Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic
  • Linda Gregerson
  • Published online:
    08 October 2009
    Print publication:
    26 May 1995
  • The Reformation of the Subject is a study of the cultural contradictions that gave birth to the English Protestant epic. In lucid and theoretically sophisticated language, Linda Gregerson examines the fraught ideological, political and gender conflicts that are woven into the texture of The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost. She reminds us that Reformation iconoclasts viewed verbal images with the same aversion as visual images, because they too were capable of waylaying the human imagination. Through a series of detailed readings, Gregerson examines the different strategies adopted by Spenser and Milton as they sought to distinguish their poems from idols yet preserve the shaping power that iconoclasts have long attributed to icons. Tracing the transformation of the epic poem into an instrument for the reformation of the political subject, Gregerson thus provides an illuminating contribution to our understanding of the ways in which subjectivities are historically produced.

The Renaissance Dialogue
  • Literary Dialogue in its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo
  • Virginia Cox
  • Published online:
    05 December 2011
    Print publication:
    03 December 1992
  • This is a full-length study of the use of the dialogue form in Italy from the early sixteenth century until Galileo. Drawing on a wide range of sources, it examines the characteristics which determined the genre's unrivalled popularity in the period as a vehicle for polemic, debate, technical exposition and comic drama. More than simply an account of the development of an individual literary genre, however, the book is a contribution to the broader social and cultural history of the period. As representations of conversation, miniature dramas of persuasion, the dialogues of the Italian Renaissance constitute an extraordinarily rich - and largely untapped - source of information about the ideals and practice of communication in the early modern age.

Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare
  • Douglas Bruster
  • Published online:
    11 September 2009
    Print publication:
    27 November 1992
  • Douglas Bruster's provocative study of English Renaissance drama explores its links with Elizabethan and Jacobean economy and society, looking at the status of playwrights such as Shakespeare and the establishment of commercial theatres. He identifies in the drama a materialist vision which has its origins in the climate of uncertainty engendered by the rapidly expanding economy of London. His examples range from the economic importance of cuckoldry to the role of stage props as commodities, and the commercial significance of the Troy story in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, and he offers new ways of reading English Renaissance drama, by returning the theatre and the plays performed there, to its basis in the material world.

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