Program

Research Programs: Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions

Period of Performance

3/1/2006 - 6/30/2011

Funding Totals

$535,200.00 (approved)
$535,200.00 (awarded)


Long-term Residential Fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library

FAIN: RA-50043-06

Folger Shakespeare Library admin by Trustees of Amherst College (Washington, DC 20003-1004)
Gail Kern Paster (Project Director: September 2005 to March 2012)

Funding details:
Original grant (2006) $378,000.00
Supplement (2008) $157,200.00

Three fellowships per year for three years.

The Fellowship Program at the Folger Shakespeare Library is an essential component of the Library's mission to render its collections accessible to scholars for advanced research. The program encourages ongoing cross-disciplinary dialogue among scholars who use the collection. The Folger requests funding for 3 long-term fellows per academic year for residencies in 2007-08, 2008-09, and 2009-2010, and requests funds to promote the program and to select the fellows. The long-term fellows form the core of a much larger international program of intellectual exchange about the early modern period.





Associated Products

Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England (Book)
Title: Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England
Author: Wolfram Schmidgen
Abstract: Exquisite Mixture examines the writing of Robert Boyle, John Locke, Daniel Defoe, and others in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain who advocated mixture as a critical element of this belief in English superiority: mixture could produce superior languages, new species, flawless ideas, and resilient civil societies. The author traces the emergence of the valuation of mixture to the political and scientific revolutions of the seventeenth century, and invites the reader to rethink the stories we tell about the development of modern society.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/exquisite-mixture-the-virtues-of-impurity-in-early-modern-england/oclc/785870949&referer=brief_results
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780812244427

Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama (Book)
Title: Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama
Author: Jeremy Lopez
Abstract: For 100 years, the drama of Shakespeare's contemporaries has been consistently represented in anthologies, edited texts, and the critical traditon by a familiar group of about two dozen plays running from Kyd's "Spanish Tragedy" to Ford's "'Tis Pity She's a Whore" by way of Dekker, Jonson, Middleton, and Webster. How was this canon created, and what ideological and institutional functions does it serve? What preceded it, and is it possible for it to become something else? Lopez takes up these questions by tracing a history of anthologies of "non-Shakespearean" drama from Robert Dodsley's "Select Collection of Old Plays" (1744) through those recently published by Blackwell, Norton, and Routledge. Containing dozens of short, provocative readings of unfamiliar plays, this book will benefit those who seek a broader sense of the period's dazzling array of forms. (Book Jacket)
Year: 2014
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/constructing-the-canon-of-early-modern-drama/oclc/852399958&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat Entry
Secondary URL: http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/renaissance-and-early-modern-literature/constructing-canon-early-modern-drama
Secondary URL Description: Publisher's website
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781107030572
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Visibility Now: Historicizing Foreign Presences in Translation (Article)
Title: Visibility Now: Historicizing Foreign Presences in Translation
Author: Coldiron, Anne E.B.
Abstract: do not have
Year: 2012
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Translation Studies

La Femme Replique: English Paratexts, Genre Cues, and Versification (Book Section)
Title: La Femme Replique: English Paratexts, Genre Cues, and Versification
Author: Coldiron, Anne E.B.
Editor: Catherine Gimelli Martin and Hassan Melehy
Abstract: do not have
Year: 2013
Publisher: Ashgate
Book Title: French Connections in the English Renaissance

Shakespeare and the Law: A conversation among Disciplines and Professions (Book)
Title: Shakespeare and the Law: A conversation among Disciplines and Professions
Editor: Cormack, Bradin, with Richard Strier and Martha Nussbaum
Abstract: do not have
Year: 2013
Publisher: Chicago University Press
Type: Edited Volume
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Decision, Possession: The Time of Law in 'The Winter's Tale' and the Sonnets (Book Section)
Title: Decision, Possession: The Time of Law in 'The Winter's Tale' and the Sonnets
Author: Cormack, Bradin
Editor: Cormack, Bradin, with Richard Strier and Martha Nussbaum
Abstract: do not have
Year: 2013
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Book Title: Shakespeare and the Law: A Conversation among Disciplines and Professions

Decision, Possession: The Time of Law in 'The Winter's Tale' and the Sonnets (Book Section)
Title: Decision, Possession: The Time of Law in 'The Winter's Tale' and the Sonnets
Author: Cormack, Bradin
Editor: Cormack, Bradin, with Richard Strier and Martha Nussbaum
Abstract: do not have
Year: 2013
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Book Title: Shakespeare and the Law: A Conversation among Disciplines and Professions

Shakespeare and Literary Theory (Book)
Title: Shakespeare and Literary Theory
Author: Harris, Jonathan Gil
Abstract: do not have
Year: 2010
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Mechanical Turks, Mammet Tricks, Messianic Time (Article)
Title: Mechanical Turks, Mammet Tricks, Messianic Time
Author: Harris, Jonathan Gil
Abstract: do not have
Year: 2010
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Postmedieval

The Anne Finch digital Archive (Web Resource)
Title: The Anne Finch digital Archive
Author: Keith, Jennifer and Claudia Kairoff
Abstract: do not have
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://library.uncg.edu/dp/annefinch

The Worst Book in the World: a brief study of the 'Liber de tribus impostoribus' (Book Section)
Title: The Worst Book in the World: a brief study of the 'Liber de tribus impostoribus'
Author: Midelfort, H.C. Erik
Abstract: do not have
Year: 2013
Publisher: Ashgate Variorum
Book Title: Witchcraft, Madness, Society and Religion

Common Law and Enlightenment in England, 1689-1750 (Book)
Title: Common Law and Enlightenment in England, 1689-1750
Author: Rudolph, Julia
Abstract: do not have
Year: 2013
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Printers without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance (Book)
Title: Printers without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance
Author: Anne Coldiron
Abstract: This study shows how printing and translation transformed English literary culture in the Renaissance. Focusing on the century after Caxton brought the press to England in 1476, Coldiron illustrates the foundational place of foreign, especially French language, materials. The book reveals unexpected foreign connections between works as different as Caxton's first printed translations, several editions of Book of the Courtier, sixteenth-century multilingual poetry, and a royal Armada broadside. Demonstrating a new way of writing literary history beyond source-influence models, the author treats the patterns and processes of translation and printing.
Year: 2015
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781107073173
Copy sent to NEH?: No
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Women in Early Print Culture (Book Section)
Title: Women in Early Print Culture
Author: Anne E. B. Coldiron
Editor: Jennifer Summit
Editor: Caroline Bicks
Abstract: Rethinking the history of women's writing and literary history itself, this new volume examines the diversity of early women's writing (from verse and songs to household records and recipes), offering a new paradigm for understanding women's shaping roles in the literary, religious, and political movements of the sixteenth century.
Year: 2013
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Book Title: The History of British Women's Writing, 1500-1610 Volume Two

The Mediated ‘Medieval’ and Shakespeare (Book Section)
Title: The Mediated ‘Medieval’ and Shakespeare
Author: Anne E. B. Coldiron
Editor: Ruth Morse
Editor: Helen Cooper
Editor: Peter Holland
Abstract: For many, Shakespeare represents the advent of modernity. It is easy to forget that he was in fact a writer deeply embedded in the Middle Ages, who inherited many of his shaping ideas and assumptions from the medieval past. This collection brings together essays by internationally renowned scholars of medieval and early modern literature, the history of the book and theatre history to present new perspectives on Shakespeare and his medieval heritage. Separated into four parts, the collection explores Shakespeare and his work in the context of the Middle Ages, medieval books and language, the British past, and medieval conceptions of drama and theatricality, together showing Shakespeare's work as rooted in late medieval history and culture. Insisting upon Shakespeare's complexity and medieval multiplicity, Medieval Shakespeare gives readers the opportunity to appreciate both Shakespeare and his period within the traditions that fostered and surrounded him.
Year: 2015
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Book Title: Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents

Spenser and Du Bellay (Book Section)
Title: Spenser and Du Bellay
Author: Anne E. B. Coldiron
Author: Edmund Spenser
Editor: Anne Lake Prescott
Editor: Andrew Hadfield
Abstract: This revised and enlarged Fourth Edition expands and improves on the strengths of the previous three editions. All selections are based on early and established texts, fully glossed, and carefully annotated. An Editor's Note follows each section. This new edition addresses the shifts in scholarly and critical interests in Spenser studies since 1993 as well as access provided by new technology. Notes reflect the information that Spenser’s best readers would have at their fingertips without spoiling the pleasure of reading Spenser for the first time. Mother Hubberds Tale from the 1591 Complaints is newly included. The Ruines of Rome, Spenser’s translation of Joachim Du Bellay’s Antiquitez, is also added to give readers the chance to see Spenser at work as a translator and to give the English perspective on Rome. Sixteen critical essays have been added to supplement fourteen earlier commentaries. Among the perspectives new to the Fourth Edition are those of C. S Lewis, Martha Craig, Gordon Teskey, Jeff Dolven, David Wilson-Okamura, and Jennifer Summit. In keeping with the last edition, critical pieces on the House of Busyrane, Spenser's pastoral, Muiopotmos, and Amoretti are grouped together to facilitate classroom discussion. New selections from Jane Grogan, Andrew D. Hadfield, Colin Burrow, Lynn Staley, Lauren Silberman, and A. E. B. Coldiron join the readings on House of Busyrane, and “Amoretti” grows with selections by A. Leigh DeNeef and Helena Mennie Shire. A Chronology of Spenser's life and an extensive Bibliography are also included.
Year: 2013
Publisher: Norton
Book Title: The Norton Edmund Spenser’s Poetry

Macaronic Verse, Plurilingual Printing, and the Uses of Translation (Book Section)
Title: Macaronic Verse, Plurilingual Printing, and the Uses of Translation
Author: Anne E. B. Coldiron
Editor: K. Newman
Editor: J. Tylus
Abstract: "Would there have been a Renaissance without translation?" Karen Newman and Jane Tylus ask in their Introduction to this wide-ranging group of essays on the uses of translation in an era formative for the modern age. The early modern period saw cross-cultural translation on a massive scale. Humanists negotiated status by means of their literary skills as translators of culturally prestigious Greek and Latin texts, as teachers of those same languages, and as purveyors of the new technologies for the dissemination of writing. Indeed, with the emergence of new vernaculars and new literatures came a sense of the necessary interactions of languages in a moment that can truly be defined as "after Babel." As they take their starting point from a wide range of primary sources—the poems of Louise Labé, the first Catalan dictionary, early printed versions of the Ptolemy world map, the King James Bible, and Roger Williams's Key to the Language of America—the contributors to this volume provide a sense of the political, religious, and cultural stakes for translators, their patrons, and their readers. They also vividly show how the very instabilities engendered by unprecedented linguistic and technological change resulted in a far more capacious understanding of translation than what we have today. A genuinely interdisciplinary volume, Early Modern Cultures of Translation looks both east and west while at the same time telling a story that continues to the present about the slow, uncertain rise of English as a major European and, eventually, world language.
Year: 2015
Publisher: University Of Pennsylvania Press
Book Title: Early Modern Cultures of Translation

Teaching the Tudor Christine (Book Section)
Title: Teaching the Tudor Christine
Author: Anne E. B. Coldiron
Editor: A. Tarnowski
Abstract: Forthcoming.
Year: 2017
Book Title: Approaches to Teaching the Works of Christine de Pizan

Form[e]s of Transnationhood: John Wolfe’s Trilingual Courtier (Article)
Title: Form[e]s of Transnationhood: John Wolfe’s Trilingual Courtier
Author: Anne E. B. Coldiron
Abstract: This article treats the importance of printing and translation, and of printing as a kind of translation, in John Wolfe's 1588 trilingual edition of the Courtier. At a signal moment in England's international relations, this book brings not a new word to English readers: the included Hoby, Chappuys, and Castiglione versions were widely available in England (previous editions in English and Latin, and the bilingual French editions on which Wolfe probably based the concept of this work, are noted here). But Wolfe's mise-en-page establishes and encourages a newly internationalized English courtiership, and his choices of previous paratexts are also strategic and significant in the new moment. The edition does much more than multiply by three Hoby's appropriative impulses. Wolfe's page strategies, together with his selected paratexts, inculcate an engagement with alterity that offers a new answer to England's old predicament of wanting – and not wanting – what the continent had to offer.
Year: 2015
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Renaissance Studies

Response to Karin Littau, ‘Translation and the materialities of communication’ (Article)
Title: Response to Karin Littau, ‘Translation and the materialities of communication’
Author: Anne E. B. Coldiron
Abstract: The question with which Yeats closed his meditation on matter, form and transformation, “Among School Children”, has become a cliché, but it is apposite to Littau's sections on immateriality, mediality and technicity. The old division that Littau discusses between the supposedly immaterial work and the supposedly incidental material text that conveys it has, I hope, been thoroughly collapsed among book historians following D. F. McKenzie (1999 McKenzie, D. F. 1999. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [CrossRef], [Google Scholar] ), in addition to McLuhan, Mumford, Innis and others whom Littau engages. Matter does matter, and media are not mere tools: on this we agree. Scholars in both fields, TS and MS, understand that physical forms (including digital forms) not only make possible the uptake of meaning, but also shape and construct that meaning, and mean in themselves. I would add that any serious attention to aesthetics confirms the meaning inhering in media: such meaning derives from the affordances of human-created material forms, the features of which are not haphazard or incidental but rather are conceived, planned, executed and signifying inside cultural matrices.
Year: 2015
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Translation Studies

Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century (Book)
Title: Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century
Author: Claudia Kairoff
Abstract: Anna Seward and her career defy easy placement into the traditional periods of British literature. Raised to emulate the great poets John Milton and Alexander Pope, maturing in the Age of Sensibility, and publishing during the early Romantic era, Seward exemplifies the eighteenth-century transition from classical to Romantic. Claudia Thomas Kairoff’s excellent critical study offers fresh readings of Anna Seward’s most important writings and firmly establishes the poet as a pivotal figure among late-century British writers. Reading Seward’s writing alongside recent scholarship on gendered conceptions of the poetic career, patriotism, provincial culture, sensibility, and the sonnet revival, Kairoff carefully reconsiders Seward’s poetry and critical prose. Written as it was in the last decades of the eighteenth century, Seward’s work does not comfortably fit into the dominant models of Enlightenment-era verse or the tropes that characterize Romantic poetry. Rather than seeing this as an obstacle for understanding Seward’s writing within a particular literary style, Kairoff argues that this allows readers to see in Seward’s works the eighteenth-century roots of Romantic-era poetry. Arguably the most prominent woman poet of her lifetime, Seward’s writings disappeared from popular and scholarly view shortly after her death. After nearly two hundred years of critical neglect, Seward is attracting renewed attention, and with this book Kairoff makes a strong and convincing case for including Anna Seward's remarkable literary achievements among the most important of the late eighteenth century.
Year: 2011
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781421403281

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (Book)
Title: The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea
Author: Anne Finch
Editor: Jennifer Keith
Editor: Claudia Kairoff
Abstract: This is the first ever complete critical edition of the writings of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661–1720), including work printed in her lifetime and material left in manuscript form at her death. Textual analysis, based on print and manuscript copies in repositories across the United Kingdom and United States, reveals her revision processes and uses of manuscript and print. Extensive commentary clarifies her techniques, sources, contexts, and diction. A detailed essay traces the history of her works' reception and transmission. The result is a complete view of her achievements that will promote more accurate assessments of her contributions to literary and cultural shifts, including perspectives on literary value, women's equality, religion, and affairs of state. This second volume provides established texts of Finch's later collections in print and manuscript form, Miscellany Poems, on Several Occasions (1713) and The Wellesley Manuscript, as well as uncollected poems and letters.
Year: 2017
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 9781107068650

Anne Finch as Playwright: The Purposes of Manuscript and Print in Her Pro-Stuart Plays (Article)
Title: Anne Finch as Playwright: The Purposes of Manuscript and Print in Her Pro-Stuart Plays
Author: Claudia Kairoff
Abstract: When Heneage Finch transcribed his wife’s selected writings into a folio manuscript after James II’s death in September 1701, he preserved two plays essential for understanding both Anne Finch’s artistic development and her method of political intervention.1 The Triumphs of Love and Innocence (c. 1688-1690) and Aristomenes (c. 1690) participated in a mode, like songs and occasional verse, favored by writers in Finch’s courtly milieu. The plays reflect her experimentation with various genres, as she composed first a tragicomedy in which the evil are banished and the good rewarded, and next, a tragedy about a charismatic but flawed ruler and his conflicted children. Both plays reveal Finch as an avid student of favorite dramatists, such as Shakespeare and Otway. The plays also show that like her peers at James II’s court, Finch intended her plays to comment on contemporary political events through well-established literary devices and subtle allusions. For various reasons, Finch’s plays have not been sufficiently examined, especially in their political dimensions. But attention to the political implications of Finch’s plays, both in manuscript and print, support arguments that Finch intended her writings to encourage positive reaction to James’s policies while he was king, and afterward, support for his restoration. In this essay, I argue the importance of Finch’s manuscripts to informed consideration of her writings, and particularly that study of Finch’s plays in their manuscript and, in one case, printed version supports interpretations of Finch’s works as politically dynamic. Indeed, Finch’s purposeful revisions of Aristomenes for print demonstrate her support for the Stuart cause during the critical year preceding Anne’s death. I conclude that a standard critical edition of Finch’s writings, providing access to Finch’s revisions throughout her canon, is urgently needed to advance scholarship on her work, in its political and all other dimensions.
Year: 2014
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Restoration

The Anne Finch Digital Archives (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: The Anne Finch Digital Archives
Author: Jennifer Keith
Author: Claudia Kairoff
Abstract: The multimedia elements of this site reflect the range of ways that Finch’s work engaged her contemporary readers and listeners, who knew her work in manuscript, print, or performance, or in all of these forms. Annotations to the featured poems provide analysis and contexts that expose Finch’s engagement with her cultural, political and social contexts. Writing in an era known for the overtly public and political poetry of Dryden, Swift, and Pope, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720), articulated a different literary and political authority. From her position as a female aristocrat, once at the center of the court and then for many years a political internal exile, Finch explored the individual’s spiritual condition as inextricable from social and political phenomena.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://library.uncg.edu/dp/annefinch/

The Arden Introduction to Reading Shakespeare: Close Reading and Analysis (Book)
Title: The Arden Introduction to Reading Shakespeare: Close Reading and Analysis
Author: Jeremy Lopez
Abstract: How can we define the complexity of Shakespeare's language? Where do literary critics begin when developing their interpretations out of Shakespeare's language? This handbook on close reading provides some practical answers to these questions. It offers a systematic survey of how Shakespeare's language works, and an introduction to the critical methods of linguistic interpretation that have been used since the eighteenth century. The book comprises seven chapters, each on a single unit of dramatic composition-Word, Line, Image, Passage, Play, Text, Performance. The examples in these chapters provide students of Shakespeare with a practical means of understanding, and expressing in their own interpretations, three fundamental assumptions about the language of his plays: (1) that poetic structures are both intertwined with and independent of the plays' content; (2) that the plays' language often expresses multiple, contradictory meanings simultaneously; and (3) that the things any given passage says are often surprisingly different from what that passage seems to mean. This is an ideal teaching text for introductory courses on Shakespeare, offering a welcome return to close textual analysis and showing students how to read and analyse the plays in close detail to build sustained critical readings of their own.
Year: 2018
Publisher: Arden
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1472581044

Shakespeare and the Law: A Conversation among Disciplines and Professions (Book)
Title: Shakespeare and the Law: A Conversation among Disciplines and Professions
Editor: Bradin Cormack
Editor: Martha C Nussbaum
Editor: Richard Strier
Abstract: William Shakespeare is inextricably linked with the law. Legal documents make up most of the records we have of his life, and trials, lawsuits, and legal terms permeate his plays. Gathering an extraordinary team of literary and legal scholars, philosophers, and even sitting judges, Shakespeare and the Law demonstrates that Shakespeare’s thinking about legal concepts and legal practice points to a deep and sometimes vexed engagement with the law’s technical workings, its underlying premises, and its social effects. The book’s opening essays offer perspectives on law and literature that emphasize both the continuities and contrasts between the two fields. The second section considers Shakespeare’s awareness of common law thinking and common law practice, while the third inquires into Shakespeare’s general attitudes toward legal systems. The fourth part of the book looks at how law enters into conversation with issues of politics and community, whether in the plays, in Shakespeare’s world, or in our own world. Finally, a colloquy among Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Judge Richard Posner, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Richard Strier covers everything from the ghost in Hamlet to the nature of judicial discretion.
Year: 2013
Publisher: UCP
Type: Edited Volume

The Publication Date for Marlowe's Massacre at Paris (Article)
Title: The Publication Date for Marlowe's Massacre at Paris
Author: R. Carter Hailey
Abstract: No abstract.
Year: 2011
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Marlowe Studies

Henrietta Maria's Inventory at Colombes: Courtly Magnificence and Hidden Politics (Article)
Title: Henrietta Maria's Inventory at Colombes: Courtly Magnificence and Hidden Politics
Author: Erin Griffey
Author: Caroline Hubbard
Abstract: The story of Henrietta Maria's death, and the inventory that documents her possessions, offers new insight into the constant and indeed connected flow of political missions, confessional loyalty, finances and artworks during the middle decades of the seventeenth century. The making of the inventory was more than a routine bureaucratic procedure; it provides a valuable entrée into high political intrigue, as those who were drawing up the inventory were also engaged in secret negotiations for the Treaty of Dover (1670). The assessment of the inventory itself, particularly the Queen's art collection, reveals a refined taste for old and ‘moderne’ masters, as well as a sense of her purpose as the handmaiden of the Catholic faith for a Protestant country. The inventory's significance to the history of collecting and display goes well beyond her space at Colombes, shedding new light on her rooms at the post-Restoration Somerset House, treasures she maintained from the 1630s, and possible acquisitions of the 1640s and 1650s. An online appendix is provided of paintings in Henrietta Maria's inventory at Colombes.
Year: 2012
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of the History of Collections

The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic and Cultural Influences (Book)
Title: The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic and Cultural Influences
Editor: Hannibal Hamlin
Editor: Norman W. Jones
Abstract: 2011 marks the 400th anniversary of the King James version of the Bible. No other book has been as vital to the development of English writing or indeed to the English language itself. This major collection of essays is the most complete one-volume exploration of the King James Bible and its influence to date. The chapters are written by leading scholars from a range of disciplines, who examine the creation of the King James Bible as a work of translation and as a linguistic and literary accomplishment. They consider how it differed from the Bible versions which preceded it, and assess its broad cultural impact and precise literary influence over the centuries of writing which followed, in English and American literature, until today. The story will fascinate readers who approach the King James Bible from the perspectives of literary, linguistic, religious or cultural history.
Year: 2010
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Edited Volume

The Sidney Psalter: Psalms of Philip and Mary Sidney (Book)
Title: The Sidney Psalter: Psalms of Philip and Mary Sidney
Author: Philip Sidney
Author: Mary Sidney
Editor: Hannibal Hamlin
Abstract: Among the most accomplished lyrics of the English Renaissance, The Sidney Psalter influenced poets from Donne and Herbert to Milton and beyond. It turned the well-known biblical psalms into sophisticated verse, selecting or inventing a different stanza form for each one. This variety of forms matches the appeal of their content--making them suitable for every occasion, for public worship and private devotion--and their lyrical virtuosity appeals to any poetry lover. The first complete edition of the Sidney Psalter for over forty years, this new volume makes these beautiful poems available in an authoritative modernized text drawn from the definitive Oxford editions of the two poets. Hannibal Hamlin's excellent Introduction considers the poems' astonishing mastery of verse forms and describes the literary and social contexts from which they came. On-page glosses explain unfamiliar words or usages, and fuller explanatory notes summarize each psalm and provide further background information. The book also includes an up-to-date bibliography and chronology.
Year: 2009
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Edited Volume

The Bible and Shakespeare (Book)
Title: The Bible and Shakespeare
Author: Hannibal Hamlin
Abstract: The Bible in Shakespeare is the first full-length critical study of biblical allusion in Shakespeare’s plays. There is no book Shakespeare alludes to more often, more significantly, and in every play he wrote, than the Bible. Shakespeare was a serious, if sometimes skeptical, Bible reader, but he knew too that he could count on his audience recognizing and understanding biblical allusions, since Elizabethan and Jacobean culture was pervasively biblical. The book describes this biblical culture, and offers fresh and sometimes surprising interpretations of many of Shakespeare’s plays by reading his biblical allusions in the context of interpretations of Scripture available to him and his audience. Allusions to the Bible sometimes connect to the religious concerns of early modern England, but, in an age when the sacred and secular were inextricably intertwined, biblical characters, stories, and ideas were understood to connect to most areas of human life: love, sex, and marriage, history and politics, law and finance, jealousy, betrayal, murder, suffering, and sacrifice, gardening, medicine, and science. Shakespeare’s allusions to the Bible do not imply any particular religiosity on his part, nor are they evidence for his personal beliefs. Allusion was one of Shakespeare’s most essential literary devices, and allusions to the Bible are one his best methods of engaging his audience and enhancing the meaning of his plays.
Year: 2013
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph

Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Book)
Title: Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare
Author: Jonathan Gil Harris
Abstract: The New Historicism of the 1980s and early 1990s was preoccupied with the fashioning of early modern subjects. But, Jonathan Gil Harris notes, the pronounced tendency now is to engage with objects. From textiles to stage beards to furniture, objects are read by literary critics as closely as literature used to be. For a growing number of Renaissance and Shakespeare scholars, the play is no longer the thing: the thing is the thing. Curiously, the current wave of "thing studies" has largely avoided posing questions of time. How do we understand time through a thing? What is the time of a thing? In Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, Harris challenges the ways we conventionally understand physical objects and their relation to history. Turning to Renaissance theories of matter, Harris considers the profound untimeliness of things, focusing particularly on Shakespeare's stage materials. He reveals that many "Renaissance" objects were actually survivals from an older time—the medieval monastic properties that, post-Reformation, were recycled as stage props in the public playhouses, or the old Roman walls of London, still visible in Shakespeare's time. Then, as now, old objects were inherited, recycled, repurposed; they were polytemporal or palimpsested. By treating matter as dynamic and temporally hybrid, Harris addresses objects in their futurity, not just in their encapsulation of the past. Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare is a bold study that puts the matériel—the explosive, world-changing potential—back into a "material culture" that has been too often understood as inert stuff.
Year: 2011
Publisher: University Of Pennsylvania Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780812221466

The Shakespearean International Yearbook Vol. 11 (Book)
Title: The Shakespearean International Yearbook Vol. 11
Editor: Jonathan Gil Harris
Abstract: No abstract.
Year: 2011
Type: Edited Volume

Marvellous Repossessions: The Tempest, Globalization and the Walking Dream of Paradise (Book)
Title: Marvellous Repossessions: The Tempest, Globalization and the Walking Dream of Paradise
Author: Jonathan Gil Harris
Abstract: For many years now theater directors have argued about how to present Shakespeare's The Tempest. Originally, the play was seen as Prospero's use of magic to reclaim his European heritage against corrupt usurpers. More recently, the play has been produced as a protest against the ongoing colonialism in the new world. In his 2011 Garnett Sedgewick Lecture at the University of British Columbia, Professor Harris explores the play and its historical background to show how it is driven by a waking dream in which progress towards a glorious future shades into recovery of a lost past. Drawing on the logbook of Christopher Columbus in his voyage of discovery, Harris reminds us how Columbus believed that he was traveling to the East and that he had approached the original Garden of Eden. Moreover, the gold that was to be found in the supposed East would be used to create the prosperity of the West. In his examination of contemporary anti-colonialist productions of The Tempest, Harris shows how there remains a move backwards to an original paradise—in fact replicating the movement within The Tempest itself.
Year: 2012
Publisher: Ronsdale
Type: Single author monograph

Indography: Writing the "Indian" in Early Modern England (Book)
Title: Indography: Writing the "Indian" in Early Modern England
Abstract: In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans invented 'Indians' and populated the world with them. The global history of the term 'Indian' remains largely unwritten and this volume, taking its cue from Shakespeare, asks us to consider the proximities and distances between various early modern discourses of the Indian. Through new analysis of English travel writing, medical treatises, literature, and drama, contributors seek not just to recover unexpected counter-histories but to put pressure on the ways in which we understand race, foreign bodies, and identity in a globalizing age that has still not shed deeply ingrained imperialist habits of marking difference.
Year: 2012
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Type: Single author monograph

Witchcraft, Madness, Society, and Religion in Early Modern Germany: A Ship of Fools (Book)
Title: Witchcraft, Madness, Society, and Religion in Early Modern Germany: A Ship of Fools
Author: H.C. Erik Midelfort
Abstract: H.C. Erik Midelfort has carved out a reputation for innovative work on early modern German history, with a particular focus on the social history of ideas and religion. This collection pulls together some of his best work on the related subjects of witchcraft, the history of madness and psychology, demonology, exorcism, and the social history of religious change in early modern Europe. Several of the pieces reprinted here constitute reviews of recent scholarly literature on their topics, while others offer sharp departures from conventional wisdom. A critique of Michel Foucault’s view of the history of madness proved both stimulating but irritating to Foucault’s most faithful readers, so it is reprinted here along with a short retrospective comment by the author. Another focus of this collection is the social history of the Holy Roman Empire, where towns, peasants, and noble families developed different perceptions of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and of the options the religious revolutions of the sixteenth century offered. Finally, this collection also brings together articles which show how Freudian psychoanalysis and academic sociology have filtered and interpreted the history of early modern Germany.
Year: 2013
Publisher: Ashgate Variorum
Type: Single author monograph

Translation of Martin Mulsow, Enlightenment Underground: Radical Germany, 1680-1720 (Book)
Title: Translation of Martin Mulsow, Enlightenment Underground: Radical Germany, 1680-1720
Author: H.C. Erik Midelfort
Abstract: Martin Mulsow’s seismic reinterpretation of the origins of the Enlightenment in Germany won awards and renown in its original German edition, and now H. C. Erik Midelfort's translation makes this sensational book available to English-speaking readers. In Enlightenment Underground, Mulsow shows that even in the late seventeenth century some thinkers in Germany ventured to express extremely dangerous ideas, but did so as part of a secret underground. Scouring manuscript collections across northern Europe, Mulsow studied the writings of countless hitherto unknown radical jurists, theologians, historians, and dissident students who pushed for the secularization of legal, political, social, and religious knowledge. Often their works circulated in manuscript, anonymously, or as clandestinely published books. Working as a philosophical microhistorian, Mulsow has discovered the identities of several covert radicals and linked them to circles of young German scholars, many of whom were connected with the vibrant radical cultures of the Netherlands, England, and Denmark. The author reveals how radical ideas and contributions to intellectual doubt came from Socinians and Jews, church historians and biblical scholars, political theorists, and unemployed university students. He shows that misreadings of humorous or ironic works sometimes gave rise to unintended skeptical thoughts or corrosively political interpretations of Christianity. This landmark book overturns stereotypical views of the early Enlightenment in Germany as cautious, conservative, and moderate, and replaces them with a new portrait that reveals a movement far more radical, unintended, and puzzling than previously suspected.
Year: 2015
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780813938158

Witch Craze? Beyond the Legends of Panic (Article)
Title: Witch Craze? Beyond the Legends of Panic
Author: H. C. Erik Midelfort
Abstract: Historians have long been interested in the "witch craze" or Hexenwahn of premodern Europe. Though the author himself has written of "panic" and "frenzy" in earlier studies, he argues here that these terms have led to a distorted perspective which encourages attention to episodes of large-scale panic and overemphasizes torture and the devil. The distortion can be corrected by looking at places that avoided massive outbursts (the Palatinate, Rothenburg o.d. Tauber, Württemberg) and noting that even when there were many executions, trials could occur within the framework of processus ordinarius (Mecklenburg). Overall, most witch trials were routine, focusing on ordinary maleficium,which was far more widespread than we thought a generation ago; England, with trials of individuals more than chain-reaction trials, and with little interest in diabolical witchcraft, is more typical than we thought.
Year: 2011
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft

The Gadarene Demoniac in the English Enlightenment (Book Section)
Title: The Gadarene Demoniac in the English Enlightenment
Author: H.C. Erik Midelfort
Editor: Emily Michelson
Editor: Scott K. Taylor
Editor: Mary Noll Venables
Abstract: The Reformation of the sixteenth century shattered the unity of medieval Christendom, and the resulting fissures spread to the corners of the earth. No scholar of the period has done more than Carlos M.N. Eire, however, to document how much these ruptures implicated otherworldly spheres as well. His deeply innovative publications helped shape new fields of study, intertwining social, intellectual, cultural, and religious history to reveal how, lived beliefs had real and profound implications for social and political life in early modern Europe. Reflecting these themes, the volume celebrates the intellectual legacy of Carlos Eire's scholarship, applying his distinctive combination of cultural and religious history to new areas and topics. In so doing it underlines the extent to which the relationship between the natural and the supernatural in the early modern world was dynamic, contentious, and always urgent. Organized around three sections - 'Connecting the Natural and the Supernatural', 'Bodies in Motion: Mind, Soul, and Death' and 'Living One's Faith' - the essays are bound together by the example of Eire's scholarship, ensuring a coherence of approach that makes the book crucial reading for scholars of the Reformation, Christianity and early modern cultural history.
Year: 2012
Publisher: Ashgate
Book Title: A Linking of Heaven and Earth: Studies in Religious and Cultural History in honor of Carlos M. N. Eire

Medicine, Theology, and the Problem of Germany's Pietist Ecstatics (Book Section)
Title: Medicine, Theology, and the Problem of Germany's Pietist Ecstatics
Author: H.C. Erik Midelfort
Editor: William J. Bulman
Editor: Robert G. Ingram
Abstract: We have long been taught that the Enlightenment was an attempt to free the world from the clutches of Christian civilization and make it safe for philosophy. The lesson has been well learned. In today's culture wars, both liberals and their conservative enemies, inside and outside the academy, rest their claims about the present on the notion that the Enlightenment was a secularist movement of philosophically driven emancipation. Historians have had doubts about the accuracy of this portrait for some time, but they have never managed to furnish a viable alternative to it-for themselves, for scholars interested in matters of church and state, or for the public at large. In this book, William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram bring together recent scholarship from distinguished experts in history, theology, and literature to make clear that God not only survived the Enlightenment but thrived within it as well. The Enlightenment was not a radical break from the past in which Europeans jettisoned their intellectual and institutional inheritance. It was, to be sure, a moment of great change, but one in which the characteristic convictions and traditions of the Renaissance and Reformation were perpetuated to the point of transformation, in the wake of the Wars of Religion and during the early phases of globalization. The Enlightenment's primary imperatives were not freedom and irreligion but peace and prosperity. As a result, Enlightenment could be Christian, communitarian, or authoritarian as easily as it could be atheistic, individualistic, or libertarian. Honing in on the intellectual crisis of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries while moving from Spinoza to Kant and from India to Peru, God in the Enlightenment takes a prism to the age of lights.
Year: 2016
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Book Title: God in the Enlightenment

The Shadow of the Canon (Article)
Title: The Shadow of the Canon
Author: Jeremy Lopez
Abstract: T HE ANTHOLOGY IS THE CANON ’ S SHADOW. I mean this in two ways. First, anthologies of “non-Shakespearean” early modern drama published in the last hundred years share a recognizable profile, an arc of evolutionary history from The Spanish Tragedy to Edward II to The Knight of the Burning Pestle to The Changeling to ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. This sharp outline is the shadow that runs before an authorial canon, the larger features of which are predictable (Lyly, Marlowe, Dekker, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Middleton, Massinger, Ford) but which also change slightly as it moves from one literarycritical era to the next (Greene and Peele sometimes replace or supplement Lyly, Chapman sometimes follows Jonson, Brome and Shirley sometimes follow Ford). Second, whatever their local differences, early modern drama anthologies are consistent not only in their exclusion of plays by Shakespeare, but also in their selection of plays that most closely resemble Shakespeare’s—that is, in their predilection for an essentially “Shakespearean” dramatic style, one that foregrounds poetic richness, individuated characters, and a high degree of structural unity. Thus, the early modern dramatic anthology is also the shadow of the Shakespeare canon, cast off behind (and following the contours of ) that canon as it is illuminated by the enduring lights of criticism, performance, pedagogy, and popular adulation.
Year: 2014
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Shakespeare Quarterly

Introduction (Book Section)
Title: Introduction
Author: Jeremy Lopez
Author: William Shakespeare
Editor: Marvin Spevack
Abstract: Julius Caesar.
Year: 2017
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Book Title: New Cambridge Shakespeare: Julius Caesar

Dumbshow (Book Section)
Title: Dumbshow
Author: Jeremy Lopez
Editor: Henry Turner
Abstract: The original essays in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature mean to provoke rather than reassure, to challenge rather than codify. Instead of summarizing existing knowledge scholars working in the field aim at opening fresh discussion; instead of emphasizing settled consensus they direct their readers to areas of enlivened and unresolved debate. Following the models established by previous volumes in the series, Early Modern Theatricality launches a new generation of scholarship on early modern drama by focusing on the rich formal capacities of theatrical performance. The collection gathers some of the most innovative critics in the field to examine the techniques, objects, bodies, and conventions that characterized early modern theatricality, from the Tudor period to the Restoration. Taking their cues from a series of guiding keywords, the contributors identify the fundamental features of theatricality in the period, using them to launch conceptually adventurous arguments that provoke our rediscovery of early modern drama in all its complexity and inventiveness.
Year: 2013
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Book Title: 21st-Century Approaches to Early Modern Theatricality

From bad to verse: poetry and spectacle on the modern Shakespearean stage (Book Section)
Title: From bad to verse: poetry and spectacle on the modern Shakespearean stage
Author: Jeremy Lopez
Editor: Jonathan Post
Abstract: Is it possible to hear blank pentameter verse during a theatrical performance? Can an audience perceive the difference between verse and prose, or hear when the playwright alters the iambic rhythm? Is blank verse a constitutive element of the performance event, something whose handling by the actors should be used to measure a production’s success? Is the poetry the actors speak more important than the visual and narrative experience they work to create? This chapter examines some answers that have been provided to these questions by modern criticism and performance. Part 19.1 discusses scholarly conceptions of blank verse as an historical phenomenon. Part 19.2 discusses the place Shakespeare’s poetry has held in post-Renaissance engagements with Shakespeare’s plays in performance. Part 19.3 focuses onOthelloin order to draw some conclusions about the historical and ideological stakes of speaking, experiencing, and criticizing dramatic poetry in live performance.
Year: 2013
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Book Title: The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare's Poetry

Student Theatre and the Drama of Shakespeare’s Contemporaries (Book Section)
Title: Student Theatre and the Drama of Shakespeare’s Contemporaries
Author: Jeremy Lopez
Editor: Pascale Aebischer
Editor: Kathryn Prince
Abstract: While much attention has been devoted to performances of Shakespeare's plays today, little has been focused on modern productions of the plays of his contemporaries, such as Marlowe, Webster and Jonson. Performing Early Modern Drama Today offers an overview of early modern performance, featuring chapters by academics, teachers and practitioners, incorporating a variety of approaches. The book examines modern performances in both Britain and America and includes interviews with influential directors, close analysis of particular stage and screen adaptations and detailed appendices of professional and amateur productions. Chapters examine intellectual and practical opportunities to analyse what is at stake when the plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries are performed by ours. Whether experimenting with original performance practices or contemporary theatrical and cinematic ones, productions of early modern drama offer an inspiring, sometimes unusual, always interesting perspective on the plays they interpret for modern audiences.
Year: 2012
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Book Title: Performing Early Modern Drama Today

Fletcher’s Mad Lover and the Late Shakespeare (Book Section)
Title: Fletcher’s Mad Lover and the Late Shakespeare
Author: Jeremy Lopez
Editor: Russ McDonald
Editor: Travis D Williams
Editor: Nicholas D Nace
Abstract: This landmark collection of newly-commissioned essays by leading international scholars, offers expert close readings of Shakespeare and other early modern authors. The book is an intervention into current critical methodology as well as an invaluable tool for all students of the literature of the period, exemplifying the possibilities of close reading in the hands of a range of gifted practitioners. Chapters cover a range of key texts from Shakespeare and other major writers of the period such as Milton, Donne, Jonson and Sidney. This is a unique collection as no other book offers such a rich variety of self-contained, short-form close readings. As such it can be used in the undergraduate classroom as well as by scholars and post-graduates and will also appeal to literary readers with an enthusiasm for Shakespeare. Contributors include leading Shakespeareans Stanley Wells, Stanley Fish, Coppelia Kahn and Lukas Erne.
Year: 2012
Publisher: Arden
Book Title: Shakespeare Up Close

Re-viewing Ophelia (Book Section)
Title: Re-viewing Ophelia
Author: Jeremy Lopez
Editor: Deanne Williams
Editor: K. Peterson
Abstract: This collection of new essays is the first to explore the rich afterlife of one of Shakespeare's most recognizable characters. With contributions from an international group of established and emerging scholars, The Afterlife of Ophelia moves beyond the confines of existing scholarship and forges new lines of inquiry beyond Shakespeare studies.
Year: 2012
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Book Title: The Afterlife of Ophelia
ISBN: 978-0230116900

John Harrell (Book Section)
Title: John Harrell
Author: Jeremy Lopez
Editor: John Russell Brown
Abstract: The Routledge Companion to Actors’ Shakespeare is a window onto how today’s actors contribute to the continuing life and relevance of Shakespeare’s plays.
Year: 2012
Publisher: Routledge
Book Title: The Routledge Companion to Actors’ Shakespeare