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The prevalent worldview of early modern England, clearly shaped by Protestantism, dismissed magical belief as an ideological delusion inherent in Catholicism. That same Protestantism encouraged a strong sense of individualism, with its emphasis on self-transformation, through which a new masculinity found expression. Why, then, did magical self-empowerment retain such a hold on the artistic and cultural imagination of early modern English society? Ian McAdam's innovative study suggests that the answer to this question may lie partly in an increasingly ironic presentation of magic. While the magical beliefs of the period asserted, on the one hand, individual empowerment through a quasi-religious self-justification and a presumed mastery of the objective world, those beliefs also gave rise to various anxieties concerning power and control--anxieties that created difficulty with conceptions of masculine and feminine gender roles as well as cultural attitudes toward Nature and the natural. Thus, McAdam contends, the increased interest in magic was connected to a crisis in masculine identity, which was exacerbated by the Protestant Reformation and its concern with individual empowerment as well as class, sexual, and religious identifications. Moreover, as artistic presentations--especially in the theater--were concerned with magic as a form of psychological, ideological, and cultural control, the study finds the psychoanalytic concept of narcissism useful in explaining the notion of selfhood as it developed in early modern England. In chapters that explore various literary texts, McAdam considers depictions of magic by tracing a chronological path that follows a dialectical struggle involving a precarious attempt to balance supra-rational and sub-rational impulses. Beginning with Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, which depicts some ambivalent attitudes toward magical self-empowerment and the cultural concern of a feminine sexual threat to masculine (magical) control, the book moves to the Calvinist constructions of manhood in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and eventually to considerations of male self-definition and its reliance on women, class considerations in more oblique magical contexts, and surrender to magical (and ideological) powers in the works of Shakespeare, Marston, Middleton, Chapman, and Jonson. In addition to appealing to those who study early modern Literary Studies and drama, this book will interest scholars of gender and those concerned with the theological basis of human subjectivity in the Renaissance.

Forgiving the Gift challenges the tendency to reflexively understand gifts as exchanges, negotiations, and circulations. Lawrence reads plays by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare as informed by an early modern belief in the possibility and even necessity of radical generosity, of gifts that break the cycle of economy and self-interest.The prologue reads Marlowe's Dr. Faustus to show how the play aligns gift and grace, depicting Faustus's famous bond as the instrument simultaneously of reciprocal exchange and of damnation. In the introduction, the author frames his argument theoretically by placing Marcel Mauss's classic essay, ?The Gift,? into dialogue with Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Paul Ricoeur to sketch two very different understandings of gift-giving. In the first, described by Mauss, the gift becomes a covert form of exchange. Though Mauss contrasts the gift economy with the market economy, his description of the gift economy nevertheless undermines his own project of discovering in it a basis for social solidarity. In the second understanding of gift exchange, derived from the philosophy of Levinas, the gift expresses the radical asymmetry of ethical concern.Literature and philosophy scholars alike will benefit from the original readings of The Merchant of Venice, Edward II, King Lear, Titus Andronicus, and The Tempest, which constitute the body of the text. These readings find in the plays a generosity that exceeds the social practice of gift-giving, because extraordinarily generous acts of friendship or filial affection survive the collapse of social norms. Antonio in Merchant and the title character in Edward II practice a friendship whose extravagance marks its excess. Lear, on the other hand, brings about his tragedy by attempting to reduce filial love to debt. Titus also discovers a love excessive to social convention when rape and mutilation annihilate his daughter's cultural value. Finally, Prospero in The Tempest sacrifices power and even his own life for the love of his daughter, giving a gift rendered asymmetrical by both its excess and its secrecy.While proposing new readings of works of Renaissance drama, Forgiving the Gift also questions the model of human life from which many contemporary readings, especially those characterized as new historicist or cultural materialist, grow. In so doing, it addresses questions of how we are to understand literary texts?and how we are to live with others in the world.

"During the Reformation, as Christian scholars demonstrated more interest in Hebrew language and the Jewish roots of European civilization, John Donne's prose works highlight this intellectual trend as Donne draws on specific exegetical, lexical, rhetorical, and thematic strategies tied to Hebrew traditions. Goodblatt also includes reproductions of the Hebrew Rabbinic and Geneva Bibles for reference"--Provided by publisher.

"Scholars discuss Milton's focus on prophecy and violence and how these themes--which function as a context in Milton's life and as a mode for an extended analysis of Restoration politics in Milton's poetry--add to an understanding of Milton as a visionary, extending the literary discussion of Milton's work into a larger geopolitical area"--Provided by publisher.

In The Plague in Print, Rebecca Totaro takes the reader into the world of plague-riddled Elizabethan England, documenting the development of distinct subgenres related to the plague and providing unprecedented access to important original sources of early modern plague writing. Totaro elucidates the interdisciplinary nature of plague writing, which raises religious, medical, civic, social, and individual concerns in early modern England. Each of the primary texts in the collection offers a glimpse into a particular subgenre of plague writing, beginning with Thomas Moulton's plague remedy and prayers published by the Church of England and devoted to the issue of the plague. William Bullein's A Dialogue, both pleasant and pietyful, a work that both addresses concerns related to the plague and offers humorous literary entertainment, exemplifies the multilayered nature of plague literature. The plague orders of Queen Elizabeth I highlight the community-wide attempts to combat the plague and deal with its manifold dilemmas. And after a plague bill from the Corporation of London, the collection ends with Thomas Dekker's The Wonderful Year, which illustrates plague literature as it was fully formed, combining attitudes toward the plague from both the Elizabethan and Stuart periods.These writings offer a vivid picture of important themes particular to plague literature in England, providing valuable insight into the beliefs and fears of those who suffered through bubonic plague while illuminating the cultural significance of references to the plague in the more familiar early modern literature by Spenser, Donne, Milton, Shakespeare, and others. As a result, The Plague in Print will be of interest to students and scholars in a number of fields, including sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, cultural studies, medical humanities, and the history of medicine.

Tropes provide access into habits of thought and worldviews-they express a climate of opinion and a hermeneutical context. Focusing on the textual activity of major cultural tropes, this study demonstrates the ways in which they enunciate and transform the cultural imagination on matters of love and power in the world, the body politic, and the rising sphere of personal life in early modern England. In twelve essays, prominent Renaissance scholars extend the theoretical analysis and application of the four tropes identified by Gale Carrithers and James Hardy: theatre, moment, journey, and ambassadorship. Renaissance tropologies and habits of thought are here demonstrated through exegesis of the works of Shakespeare, Vaughan, and especially John Donne, whose writings, because they explore the most provocative issues of his day, are a lens through which one can understand the surrounding culture. The text itself is organised around the four tropes, and their cross-disciplinary approach to cultural phenomenon is part of the move toward a more fully historicised rhetorical analysis of texts.

Theresa M. DiPasquale's study of John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton demonstrates how each of these seventeenth century English poets revised, reformed, and renewed the Judeo-Christian tradition of the sacred feminine. The central figures of this tradition--divine Wisdom, created Wisdom, the Bride, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Ecclesia--are essential to the works of Donne, Lanyer, and Milton. All three poets are deeply invested in the ancient, scripturally authorized belief that the relationship between God and humankind is gendered: God is father, bridegroom, king; the human soul and the church as corporate entity are daughter, bride, and consort.This important text not only casts new light on these poets and on the history of Christian doctrine and belief, but also makes enormous contributions to our understanding of the feminine more broadly. It will be of interest to scholars who study the Literary Studies, religion, and culture of early modern England, to feminist theologians, and to any reader grappling seriously with gender issues in Christian theology and spirituality.

In lively, forceful, and at times witty language, Michael Lieb has written an illuminating study of the figure of God as a literary character in the writings of John Milton. Milton's God has always been a provocative and controversial figure, and Lieb offers a fresh way to look at the relationship between the language of theology and the language of poetry in Milton's works. He draws into the discussion previous authors on the subject Patrides, Hunter, Kelley, Empson, Danielson, Rumrich, and others resulting in a dynamic debate about Milton's multifarious God. By stressing God's multivalent qualities, Theological Milton offers an innovative perspective on the darker side of the divinity. Lieb allows us to see a Miltonic God of hate as well as a God of love, a God who is a creator as well as a destroyer. Lieb directly confronts the more troubling faces of God in a manner richly informed by Milton's own theology. Against the theoretical framework for the idea of addressing God as a distinctly literary figure, Lieb presents Milton in the historical milieu prior to and contemporaneous with his works. More cogently than others, Lieb clarifies Milton's theology of the godhead and the various heresies, such as Socinianism and Arianism, that informed the religious controversies of the seventeenth century. He does so in a manner that exemplifies how literary studies and theology are inextricably intertwined.

The completed texts of two of the greatest epic poems in English literature are combined in one volume where each provides a profound exploration of the moral problems of God's justice. Each work demonstrates Milton's genius for classicism, innovation, narrative and drama. Includes a new introduction and extensive footnotes.

This book takes a fresh look at John Milton's major poems Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and Paradise Regained and a few of the minor ones in light of a new analysis of Milton's famous tracts on divorce. Luxon contends that Milton's work is best understood as part of a major cultural project in which Milton assumed a leading role the redefinition of Protestant marriage as a heteroerotic version of classical friendship, originally a homoerotic cultural practice. Schooled in the humanist notion that man was created as a godlike being, Milton also believed that what marked man as different from God is loneliness. Milton's reading of Genesis it is not good for man to be alone prescribes a wife as the remedy for this single imperfection, but Milton thought marriage had fallen to such a degraded state that it required a reformation. As a humanist, Milton looked to classical culture, especially to Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, for a more dignified model of human relations friendship. Milton reimagined marriage as a classical friendship, without explicitly conceptualizing the issues of gender construction. Nor did he allow the chief tenet of classical friendship, equality, to claim a place in reformed marriage. Single Imperfection traces the path of friendship theory through Milton's epistolary friendship with Charles Diodati, his elegies, divorce pamphlets, and major poems. The book will prompt even more reinterpretations of Milton's poetry in an age that is anxiously redefining marriage once again.

In Suffering in Paradise, Rebecca Totaro provides a unique and timely discussion of the bubonic plague as it shaped Literary Studies in England from 1500 through the first half of the eighteenth century. Within the experience and accounts of bubonic plague, men and women found their own understanding of the body, of the human relationship with nature, and of the degree to which they had faith in their nation and their God. An early modern writer''s reading of the plague shows us in detail what he or she believes to be the parameters within which life is lived. Focusing on the broadest of these parameters, Totaro examines hope and despair as displayed within a range of imaginary realms designed to include and control the bubonic plague. Each of the works in this study-Thomas More''s Utopia, William Shakespeare''s Timon of Athens, Ben Jonson''s The Alchemist, Francis Bacon''s The New Atlantis, Margaret Cavendish''s The Blazing World, and John Milton''s Paradise Lost-provides literary and English answers that cohere in stunning form and resonate today.

In this provocative study, Kristin A. Pruitt offers a close reading of pivotal passages and critical concerns in Paradise Lost and examines Milton's presentation of Adam and Eve's relationship through the intersections of theology and gender in the poem. By delving into several seventeenth century commentaries on Genesis, Pruitt examines the various depictions of Eve and presents Milton's Eve and her relationship with Adam. In recent years, scholars have addressed the disparate, often contradictory positions on gender and hierarchy in Paradise Lost. However, Pruitt adds to the discussion another layer: that the dialectic in the poem the parallels and reversals in structure, imagery, action, and characterization offer a reading from multiple perspectives and means of understanding one of the poem's principal messages, which is the dual emphases on individuality versus selfhood and relationship versus union as they illuminate the ideal of unity in diversity.

Reading the Renaissance is a timely and compelling answer to a decades-long attack on literature by various schools of critical theory. A collection of new and provocative essays by prominent scholars, it speaks eloquently to the enduring value of Renaissance literature and literary study.Reading Renaissance literature requires what Edward W. Tayler calls "literary tact," the willingness to allow poets their own ideas. A reader might best come to understand Renaissance writers by attending, again and again, to their ideas, idioms, and intentions. "Reading," writes Marc Berley, "is a dangerous act, for how we confront another's genius reveals much about ourselves."The contributors here--Frank Kermode, Marc Berley, Michael Mack, Louis L. Martz, Albert C. Labriola, Anne Lake Prescott, Stanley Stewart, Ernest B. Gilman, Martin Elsky, Anthony Low, Edward W. Tayler--hold that the author, not the critic, is supreme, that the aim of a reader should be, as Ben Jonson urged, to "understand." These scholars focus on the various Renaissance authors they consider, not contemporary theories or schools that might seem to offer totalizing safety. They are committed to the thrill of reading the Renaissance--not the power of rewriting it. This commitment, not coincidentally, leads them to authoritative new readings of major texts. Reading the Renaissance makes a powerful corrective statement about the direction in which Renaissance literary studies should go in the wake of critical theory. Unabashed in detailing wrong turns made by critical theory in recent years, this book will doubtless make waves. But it will be most appreciated for its own considerable accomplishments. The essays here are exemplary--signs of how rich, joyous, and indeed critical, engagement with the Renaissance can be in the twenty-first century.

Ken Simpson's study, focusing on John Milton's Paradise Regained, examines the literary ecclesiology of this most subtle and elusive of Milton's works. While far less critical attention has been given to Paradise Regained over the years as compared to Paradise Lost and others of Milton's canon, it might be argued that Paradise Regained may be read as a full and culminating expression of Milton's views on the doctrine of the church, the nature of the Word, prophecy and vocation, and apocalypticism. As Simpson asserts, in Paradise Regained Milton not only continues his critique of the English Reformation by confronting the failures of the Restoration settlement, but he also continues to develop the consistent theology of the church that preoccupied him in his prose during the civil war and Interregnum. Theology, polemics, and poetry were not backgrounds of one another in Milton's work, nor was theology a set of abstract propositions to which all discourses referred; rather, these were overlapping fields of discourse that offered different opportunities to fulfill the religious imperative to build the church. Simpson examines Milton's view of the church as a textual community--a group of participants in the church who are each guided by the Holy Spirit in their reading of the Word. The interplay of silence and the Word, then, in Paradise Regained demonstrates that interpretive authority must always defer to the Spirit rather than tradition. This approach also shapes Milton's construction of ministry, liturgy, and church militancy in the poem. Simpson's provocative and unique examination of Milton and Paradise Regained will become an indispensable study, offering new views of this somewhat neglected poem.

With the publication of Thomas More's Utopia in 1516, it may have seemed as if England had found the place whereby its most optimistic of futures could be imagined. But the truth is that there was already a serious contender for that role: Eden. To a modern reader this may seem counterintuitive. After all, isn't Edenic literature in some sense just the opposite of the utopian genre in that the concern is not with an imagined future but rather with a lost past? While it is certainly true that Eden was imagined as a paradise lost at the dawn of human history, this topos was also seen as a place that might be regained. What made Eden of particular interest to early modern England was that, as a pristine garden, it captured the imagination of a country in the midst of an environmental crisis of unprecedented proportions.The essays in Renaissance Ecology consider how writers and artists such as John Milton imagined, by way of Eden, a future where human beings would live in greater peace with the natural world. This impressive collection, which includes contributions by such eminent scholars as Barbara Lewalski and Diane McColley, takes an exciting, new, "green" approach to representations of Eden, while also considering the role of gender, politics, and poetics, discussing relevant issues of both literature and culture.