In any time or place literature is often influenced by concepts such as politics, society, philosophy, and in the true Puritan and Anglican fashion, spirituality and the Bible. It is this influence which Edward Dowden has cleverly critiqued. In his foreword, he writes, "Literature, however, and especially what is most valuable in the seventeenth-century cannot be studied without reference to the history of religion." Which is why, although the seventeenth-century...

This 1915 volume traces the evolution of literary English into "a highly developed and efficient means of expression" from the early fourteenth century and the time of Wiclif until the early seventeenth century and the time of Bacon.

"In this striking contribution to trans history, Colby Gordon shows that gender transition significantly predates its take-over by modern medical technology. In the English Renaissance, he argues, the conceptual vocabulary for imagining gender variance was not medicine but theology. In chapters on Shakespeare, Webster, Donne, and Milton, Gordon examines the religious tropes available to early modern subjects for imagining how gender could change....

"Examines the colonial histories of everyday foods like sugar, spices, and coffee, arguing that it is in the writing on food and eating that we see among the earliest configurations of racial difference"--

This illuminating account of ideas of world order prevalent in the Elizabethan Age and later is an indispensable companion for readers of the great writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists, Donne and Milton, among many others. The basic medieval idea of an ordered Chain of Being is studied by Tillyard in the process of its various transformations by the dynamic spirit of the Renaissance. Among

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