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.
Lodovico Antonio Muratori: An Intellectual in the Republic of Letters
1st Edition
Edited
By Matteo Al Kalak, Marco Capriotti, Gianvittorio Signorotto
October 16, 2025
Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672-1750) was one of the most prominent intellectuals of eighteenth-century Europe. His scholarship spanned from aesthetics to literature, from philosophy to jurisprudence, from history to epigraphy, from theology to medicine, and his political and social vision was ...
Neighbourly Relationships in Early Modern Drama: Staged Communities
1st Edition
By Iman Sheeha
September 30, 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 ...
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 ...
Human Insufficiency: Natural Slavery and the Racialization of Vulnerability in Early Modern England
1st Edition
By Jeffrey B. Griswold
January 30, 2025
Human Insufficiency argues that early modern writers depict the human political subject as physically vulnerable in order to naturalize slavery. Representations of Man as a weak creature—“poor” and “bare” in King Lear’s words—strategically portrayed English bodies as needing care from people who ...
Printed Drama and Political Instability in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Britain: The Literary Politics of Resistance and Distraction in Plays and Entertainments, 1649–1658
1st Edition
By Christopher Orchard
November 28, 2024
Printed Drama and Political Instability in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Britain: The Literary Politics of Resistance and Distraction in Plays and Entertainments, 1649–1658 describes the function of printed drama in 1650s Britain. After the regicide of 1649, printed plays could be interpreted by royalist...
Remembering, Replaying, and Rereading Henry VIII: The Courtier’s Henry
1st Edition
By Igor Djordjevic
November 21, 2024
This book begins by asking about the memorial issues involved in the replaying of an old history play, Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII, at the Globe on 29 July 1628, but it is not primarily concerned with the memory of a single individual, George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham who paid for ...
Milton's Loves: From Amity to Caritas in the Paradise Epics
1st Edition
By Rosamund Paice
October 08, 2024
This book is about the multiple loves of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained: sanctioned loves and outlawed loves, sincere loves and false loves, Christian loves, classical loves, humanist loves, and love as emotion. In showing how these loves motivate the most significant actions of the Paradise ...
New Essays on History and Form in Early Modern English Literature
1st Edition
Edited
By Nick Moschovakis, Gail Kern Paster
August 19, 2024
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
June 07, 2024
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 ...
Dante Alive: Essays on a Cultural Icon
1st Edition
Edited
By Francesco Ciabattoni, Simone Marchesi
May 27, 2024
The essays collected here join in, and contribute to, the current reflection on Dante’s vitality today in a critical, multidisciplinary vein. Their intervention comes at a particularly sensitive juncture in the history of Dante’s global reception and cultural reuse. Dante today is as alive as ever....