Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture
About the Book Series
From Shakespeare to Jonson, Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture looks at both the literature and culture of the early modern period. This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Considering literature alongside theatre, popular culture, race, gender, ecology, space, and other subjects, titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics.
Image, Word, and Catholicism in Ben Jonson’s Works: Curating Pictures
1st Edition
By Steven Hrdlicka
May 29, 2026
The first monograph to address Ben Jonson’s thought on the visual arts, Image, Word, and Catholicism in Ben Jonson’s Works: Curating Pictures shows how Jonson placed a high value on the visual arts and the extent to which he designed his poetics around visual frames. Up until this point, ...
Mockery and Typology in Milton’s Poetry: Laughing with God
1st Edition
By Zeyi Zhang
May 21, 2026
This book examines the typological significance of Milton’s use of mockery in his major poetic works. In Milton’s poetry, mockery has a constructive purpose that transcends the primarily destructive and condemnatory function of comic ridicule. Engaging human affections, mockery plays a mediating ...
Strategies of Failure in the Early Modern Sonnet: Petrarch, Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Wroth
1st Edition
By D. K. Smith
March 12, 2026
This book offers an ambitious reassessment of the post- Petrarchan tradition. Elegantly and lucidly written, it examines the uses of failure as a poetic strategy in the Petrarchan sonnet sequence— a strategy that originated with Petrarch and was then imitated and developed in the English ...
New Essays on History and Form in Early Modern English Literature
1st Edition
Edited
By Nick Moschovakis, Gail Kern Paster
December 25, 2025
This volume convenes eight noted scholars with varied positions at the interface of formal and historical literary criticism. The editors’ introduction—a far-reaching account of how both methods have intersected in studies of early modern English texts since the 1990s—is the first such survey in ...
Time and Causality in Early Modern Drama: Plotting Revenge
1st Edition
By Linc Kesler
November 27, 2025
The opening of the first commercial theatre in London in 1579 initiated a pattern of development that radically reshaped representation. The competition among theatres required the constant production of new works, creating an interplay between the innovations of producers and the rapidly changing ...
Lodovico Antonio Muratori: An Intellectual in the Republic of Letters
1st Edition
Edited
By Matteo Al Kalak, Marco Capriotti, Gianvittorio Signorotto
October 28, 2025
Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750) was one of the most prominent intellectuals of eighteenth-century Europe. His scholarship spanned from philosophy to jurisprudence, from history to epigraphy, from theology to medicine, and his political and social vision was regarded as the manifesto of the ...
Neighbourly Relationships in Early Modern Drama: Staged Communities
1st Edition
By Iman Sheeha
September 29, 2025
The book offers the first sustained examination of neighbourly relationships in early modern English drama, situating the close analyses of the selected plays within contemporary prescriptive literature (such as sermons and conduct books), letters, diaries, pamphlets, ballads, wills, proverbs, as ...
The Theatrical Legacy of Thomas Middleton, 1624–2024
1st Edition
Edited
By William David Green, Anna L. Hegland, Sam Jermy
September 28, 2025
This volume celebrates Thomas Middleton’s legacy as a dramatist, marking the 400th anniversary of Middleton’s final and most contentious work for the public theatres, A Game at Chess (1624). The collection is divided into three sections: ‘Critical and Textual Reception’, ‘Afterlives and Legacies’, ...
Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution: Forms of Proof
1st Edition
By Michael Slater
September 28, 2025
Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution: Forms of Proof argues that the rise of mechanical science in the seventeenth century had a profound impact on both language and literature. To the extent that new ideas about things were accompanied by new attitudes toward words, what we commonly ...
Women Writing Race in the Seventeenth-Century English Atlantic: Civil Agents
1st Edition
By Kristina Lucenko
May 20, 2025
Women Writing Race in the Seventeenth-Century English Atlantic: Civil Agents highlights early modern women writers’ invocations of civility to reach for the privileges of whiteness. The women studied in this book were writing in various textual modes and span boundaries of ideology, class, religion...
Paradise Lost and the Making of English Literary Criticism
1st Edition
By David A. Harper
May 05, 2025
Paradise Lost and the Making of English Literary Criticism identifies the early reception of Paradise Lost as a site of contest over the place of literature in political and religious controversy. Milton’s earliest readers and critics (Dryden, Addison, Dennis, Hume, and Bentley) confronted a poem ...
Early Modern Women Writers of Venice: Looking for Happiness
1st Edition
By Kathleen French
April 22, 2025
Early Modern Women Writers of Venice: Looking for Happiness explores the ways in which five women used their writing to challenge misogynistic views about female inferiority, develop a sense of agency, and form meaningful interpersonal relationships that would enable them to find happiness. They ...