Iter Press: Books

In 1649, a seamstress named Elizabeth Poole appeared at the Whitehall debates in London to prophesy before Parliament’s army shortly after it had defeated the crown in the English civil wars. Invited to help deliberate the fate of Charles I, Poole advised the army to spare the king’s life but to put him on trial for tyranny and to enter into a new compact with the people.

Isabella Whitney published two poetic miscellanies of secular poems: The Copy of a Letter (1567) and A Sweet Nosegay (1573), each of which includes her own work and a total of six poems by five different male authors across both publications. The present edition of her writings prints modernized texts of the complete miscellanies and also six poems attributed to Whitney by largely twentieth-century critics.

Margaret More Roper (1505–1544) was, at the age of nineteen, the first early modern woman writer in Tudor England and the first nonroyal woman to have a book printed in the English language. This Other Voice edition recognizes her, the eldest daughter and confidante of Sir Thomas More, as a notable historical figure in her own right and as one of the most learned women of her time.

The Sprites of Kernosy Castle exemplifies the novel of leisure, a type of fiction that became popular in the late seventeenth century, reflecting both increased interest in the private lives of the aristocracy and a pre-Enlightenment questioning of political and religious orthodoxies. Murat combines humor, social satire, and a proto-feminist outlook in a well-constructed plot where the supernatural is debunked.

This edition presents poetry by William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke, a pivotal figure in the literary and political cultures of Stuart England, who wrote poetry primarily for social occasions: a debate with a friend, seductions or apologies to beloveds, and support for a deceased political ally. A hefty apparatus explores the networks in which the poems circulated, the interpretive contexts suggested in miscellanies, and alternative readings revealed through scribal variants.

Pompeo Colonna’s In Defense of Women (1529/1530), presented in this volume in its Latin edition and English translation, is one of several important defenses of women composed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by male advocates of women’s moral and intellectual worth. Known as a cardinal and a warrior but also as an active participant in sixteenth-century Italian literary circles, the author addresses the work to his cousin Vittoria >Colonna, the most renowned Italian woman poet of the era, who, he writes, had urged him to undertake it.

The essays in this volume focus on teaching at the intersection of early modern literature, book history, and digital media. Contributors from a range of fields — history, literature, general education — showcase how digital scholarship, whether in the classroom or through pedagogical collaboration, can support social knowledge construction and critical thinking. Essays reflect on building projects for and with learners; evaluating the many purposes of digital remediation; and engaging students in public-facing scholarship. This volume provides a snapshot of current thinking on digital pedagogy in early modern studies and offers a series of models that may be adapted, personalized and repurposed by future teachers.

Subject/Object and Beyond: Women in Early Modern France brings together seventeen essays by established and emerging scholars to honour the exceptionally rich contributions and career of Colette H. Winn. The essays explore multiple perspectives on early modern women, including their writings, translations, reception, and contributions to literature, music, politics, religion, and science.

The present volume is the first printed edition of Polwhele’s first play, The Faithful Virgins, until now extant only in an unsigned manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. A tragicomedy apparently performed in London by the Duke’s Company ca. 1669–1671,The Faithful Virgins is altogether different in tone from Polwhele’s later prose comedy, The Frolicks; or, The Lawyer Cheated (1671), first printed by Cornell University Press in 1977.

Lady Mary Carey examined her life and expressed her views in a handwritten manuscript created for self-reflection and restricted audiences of family and friends, rather than for print publication. Her poetry and prose, composed and revised between 1650 and 1658, were important enough to her inner circle that her autograph manuscript was copied in a fair hand in 1681.

The Letters of the commedia dell’arte diva Isabella Andreini (1562–1604) is a collection of epistles in fictional, anonymous, male and female voices, a “hermaphroditic” alternation of gender hitherto exceptional in letter writing. In her Letters Andreini reinvents the humanistic epistolary genre into a distinctive fusion of literary and dramatic performance.

Camilla Battista da Varano (1458–1524) was a Franciscan nun and the author of profound spiritual writings in both prose and verse. Raised in the princely household of Camerino in north-central Italy, she put her thorough humanist education to use explaining her own spiritual experience and delivering advice to others.

Marguerite Buffet’s fascinating text allows today’s readers to experience the vibrant and provocative salon culture of seventeenth-century France by bringing to life its sounds, conversations, and participants. Lynn Meskill’s elegant and faithful translation conveys the voices of Buffet’s female contemporaries as they shape French language and engage fully in early modern culture wars.

The treatise on the art of childbirth by Marie Baudoin (1625–1700), head midwife and governor of the Hôtel-Dieu, Clermont-Ferrand, sent to her powerful Parisian patron, Dr. Vallant, illuminates the knowledge-making practices of a provincial midwife. The story of how her voice came to be expressed, recorded, and archived begs the question: was she exceptional because she was herself extraordinary, or because her voice has reached us through Vallant’s careful archival thinking and practices?

Winner, Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender's 2023 Edition Award (Scholarly Edition category - Josephine Roberts Award)

The seven pamphlets in this edition focus on Mary Carleton’s bigamy trial, a trial in which the accused eloquently defends herself and is ultimately acquitted. Written in the early years of the English Restoration, they demonstrate that narratives presenting what “she said” and what ”he said” can reveal, forcefully and painfully, how truth can be fragmented in the different arenas of law, love, and politics.

This first print edition of two extant manuscripts by Dorothy Calthorpe (1648–1693) introduces a new seventeenth-century woman writer to the growing canon of early modern female authors. The edition provides transcriptions of the manuscripts and Calthorpe’s will, as well as a hefty apparatus that features a comprehensive introduction to Calthorpe, her family, and her work; a Glossary of Persons who figured in her writing and her life; and two genealogical charts.

Winner of the 2022 Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender's Award for a Scholarly Edition in Translation

Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index Translation of the Month, December 2022

Saint Colette of Corbie was a great French reformer of the Franciscan Order and the founder of seventeen convents. Though of humble origin, she attracted the support of pow-erful patrons and important Church officials. 

Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, baronne d’Aulnoy (1652–1705) was the first Frenchwoman to write, publicize, and publish, in 1691, the account of her travels into Spain as an independent woman. Considered the authority on things Spanish for nearly two centuries, until positivist historiographers labelled it fake, her Travels can now be appreciated for her ironic female gaze on realities concealed from male travelers and her unabashedly female and often playful voice.

Showcased here are three French women who ventured far from home at a time when such traveling was rare. The writings these women left of their journeys abroad represent significant contributions to early modern travel literature and to life writing.

The actress and author Isabella Andreini won international renown playing the bold, versatile, and intellectual innamorata of the commedia dell’arte. After her death, her husband Francesco Andreini continued publishing her works, among them the thirty-one amorosi contrasti, or debates, presented in this volume, which enable readers to envision the commedia dell’arte through the words of its most revered diva.

Maria Salviati de’ Medici (1499–1543) was a Medici daughter, wife, and mother of a Medici duke. Her surviving correspondence documents a life spent close to the centers of Medici power in Florence and in Rome that witnessed its failures, resurrection, and eventual triumph.

Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index Translation of the Month, July 2023

Around 1460, Michele Savonarola produced the extraordinary Mother’s Manual for the Women of Ferrara. This gynecological, obstetrical, and pediatric treatise is the first of its kind written in a European vernacular, so that it could be potentially read not only by the learned, who communicated in Latin, but also by pregnant and nursing mothers and the midwives and wet nurses who presided over childbirth.

Vittoria Colonna was the most celebrated woman writer of the Italian Renaissance. The selection of Colonna’s letters presented here for the first time in a translated edition, written to and from writers, artists, popes, cardinals, employees, and family members, place Colonna at the center of intersecting epistolary networks as a political actor, a theological thinker, a literary practitioner, and a caring friend.

Born in the early 1620s to parents of Scottish descent who were servants in Charles I’s household, Anne, Lady Halkett (née Murray), grew up on fringes of the English court during a period of increasing political tension. From 1644 to 1699, Halkett recorded her personal and political experiences in both England and Scotland in a series of manuscript meditations and an autobiographical narrative (A True Account of My Life).

Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index Translation of the Month, October 2022

Christine de Pizan’s Body Politic (1406–1407) is the first political treatise to have been written by a woman. It still resounds today, urging the need for probity in public life and the importance of responsibilities as well as rights.

Following on from The Aesop Episode, this episode sees the poetess Anna Stanisławska (1651–1701) recounting what was a hoped-for felicitous future. However, this is an age of tears and personal calamities; and war, broken faith, and Stanisławska’s resolve to maintain agency over her life will ultimately lead to marital conflict.

Composed of texts by Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701), primarily from Clélie (1654–1660), this volume focuses on the story of Lucretia, the Roman matron whose rape and suicide caused the downfall of the Roman monarchy.

Valeria Miani’s Amorous Hope (1604) is a play of remarkable richness, subtlety, and verve.

Vittoria Colonna’s 1538 Rime, was the first of many editions of her poetry published during her lifetime. This volume presents the first complete English translation.

Winner of the 2021 Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender's Award for a Scholarly Edition in Translation

Anna Maria van Schurman was widely regarded as the most erudite woman in seventeenth-century Europe. This volume presents in translation a remarkable collection of her letters and poems—many of which were previously unpublished—that span almost four decades of her life, from 1631 to 1669.

Marie Gigault de Bellefonds, Marquise de Villars was a well-regarded figure in Parisian salons and esteemed by King Louis XIV. This volume includes her surviving letters from Madrid to her friend Madame de Coulanges and an appendix of her letters sent from Paris and Turin.

Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index Translation of the Month, February 2022

The God of Love’s Letter (1399), Christine de Pizan’s first defense of women, is arguably her most succinct statement about gender. The Tale of the Rose (1402) responds to the growth in chivalric orders for the defense of women by arguing that women, not men, should choose members of the “Order of the Rose.”

My Life’s Travels and Adventures—part memoir, part autobiography, and part travelogue—provides a view into eighteenth-century social, professional, and gender interactions.

Honorable Mention, 2021 Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender's Award for a Scholarly Edition in Translation

In her Letters on Natural Philosophy, published originally in Krakow in 1584, Camilla Erculiani proposed her new theory of the natural causes of the universal flood in the biblical book of Genesis.

Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender's 2022 Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition

This volume provides a collection of Anne Vaughan Lock’s works presented in modern spelling, and it includes additional contemporary materials that place her voice in the larger context of the Tudor period, offering insight into the intertwined complexities of political, social, and religious life in sixteenth-century England.

Flaminio Scala’s The Fake Husband offers readers and performers an accessible English script which captures the comic brilliance of the commedia dell’arte.

Winner of the 2020 Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender's Award for a Scholarly Edition in Translation

Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, the little-known author of Beauty and the Beast, was a successful novelist and fairytale writer in mid eighteenth-century France.

Convent Paradise (1643), Arcangela Tarabotti’s first published work, invites the reader into the cloister to experience not only the trials of enclosure, but also its spiritual joys.

With Love Enamored and Driven Mad, Lucrezia Marinella puts her mark on classical mythology and literary antecedents. She demonstrates her deep knowledge of classical and vernacular authors, from Ovid to Apuleius and Prudentius, and from Dante to Tasso, with numerous forays into Petrarchan poetics.

Collected for the first time, this volume of the Franklin Family Papers offers rare insight into the personal lives of three generations of dissenting women.

Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–1652), Venetian nun and polemicist, responded to Francesco Buoninsegni’s Against the Vanities of Women (1638) with the Antisatire (1644), a defense of women’s fashions and a denunciation of men.

This volume presents all the surviving writings of the poet Anne Bradstreet (ca. 1612–1672.)

This volume provides an English translation of firsthand testimonies by three early modern French women. It illustrates the Huguenot experience of persecution and exile during the bloodiest times in the history of Protestantism.

Winner of the 2020 Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender's Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition

Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel was a poet, a political writer, a journalist, and a politician. She was the editor, and virtually the only writer of the Monitore Napoletano (Neapolitan Monitor), the journal in which she recorded the events and debates that took place in the short-lived Neapolitan Jacobin Republic of 1799.

Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender's Prize for Best Teaching Edition of a Work on Women and Gender Published in 2018

This volume presents three plays by women that were written in specific household contexts and survive in distinctive handwritten copies dating from their authors’ lifetimes.

Margaret Fell (1614–1702), one of the co-founders of the Society of Friends and a religious activist, was a prolific writer and distributor of Quaker pamphlets. This volume offers eight texts that span her writing career and represent her range of writing.

Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender's Josephine Roberts Award for the Best Scholarly Edition on Women and Gender in 2018

Margaret Cavendish offers views on physics, chemistry, algebraic geometry, medicine, political philosophy, ethics, psychology, and animal intelligence, as she develops her own theory of vital matter within the scope of nature’s ordering principles.

Honorable Mention - Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender's Prize for Best Translated Edition of a Work on Women and Gender Published in 2018

This translation makes The Buffoons, the first female-authored comedy printed in Italy, available to Anglophone readers for the first time. Published in 1641, this burlesque play depicts the mismatched sexual desires of a prince and princess.

Isabella Andreini was the most famous actress of the Italian Renaissance. She was also a playwright; in fact, the first woman to publish a pastoral. This modern edition and translation subtly captures the novelty, as well as the imaginative pyrotechnics, of a brilliant, self-made virtuosa of the stage.

Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index Translation of the Month, December 2017

First published in 1503 in Lyons, Symphorien Champier’s The Ship of Virtuous Ladies helped launch the French Renaissance version of the querelle des femmes, the debate over the nature and status of women.

The forty texts collected in this volume offer a small but representative sample of Quaker women’s tremendous literary output between 1655 and 1700. They include examples of key Quaker literary genres—proclamations, directives, warnings, sufferings, testimonies, polemic, pleas for toleration—and showcase a range of literary styles and voices.

Mary Wroth’s private manuscript, printed here for the first time, shows her to be a greater poet — a more psychologically insightful, verbally sophisticated, and boldly original poet than scholars realized, while her carefully curated, re-conceptualized printed collection shows her to be a remarkably self-reflexive and critically astute writer.

Marie-Geneviève-Charlotte Thiroux d’Arconville combined fierce intellectual ambition with the proper demeanor of the wife of a leading magistrate. Always publishing anonymously, her works included moralist philosophy, scientific and literary translations, original scientific research, fiction, and history.

Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index Translation of the Month, September 2017

Othea’s Letter to Hector, one of Christine de Pizan’s most popular works, is at the same time one of her most complex creations. Combining a somewhat Sibylline verse text based on a mythological figure with extensive citation of pagan sapiential authorities, the Bible, and the Church Fathers, it showcases Christine’s extraordinary learning and her innovative approach to didacticism.

Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women's 2018 Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition published in 2017

Diverse Observations is a groundbreaking book available for the first time in English. Written by a midwife committed to improving the care of women and newborns, it records the evolution of Bourgeois’s practice and beliefs, comments on changing attitudes related to reproductive health, and critiques the gendered elitism of the early modern medical hierarchy.

Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index Translation of the Month, November 2016

This volume presents in translation 100 previously unknown letters of Ippolita Maria Sforza (1445–1488), daughter of the Duke of Milan, who was sent at age twenty to marry the son of the infamously brutal King Ferrante of Naples. Sforza’s letters display the adroit diplomacy she used to strengthen the alliance between Milan and Naples, then the two most powerful states in Italy.

Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women's 2018 Scholarly Edition in Translation Award for a work published in 2017

Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), daughter of the Este dukes of Ferrara and wife of Marchese Francesco II Gonzaga of Mantua, co-regent of the Gonzaga state, art collector, musician, diplomat, dynastic mother, traveler, reader, gardener, fashion innovator, and consummate politician, was also, as this volume attests, a prolific letter writer with a highly developed epistolary network.

The texts available here in English for the first time open a window into the lives of three early modern Frenchwomen as they explore the common themes of family, memory, sin, and salvation: the Regrets of Marguerite d’Auge (1600), the Memoirs of Renée Burlamacchi (1623), and the Genealogy of Jeanne du Laurens (1631), are taken from different genres of historical writings.

Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index Translation of the Month, May 2016

Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364–ca. 1431) has long been recognized as France’s first professional woman of letters, and interest in her voluminous and wide-ranging corpus has been steadily rising for decades. In The Mutability of Fortune, Christine fuses world history with autobiography to demonstrate mankind’s subjugation to the ceaselessly changing, and often cruel, whims of Fortune.

In her autobiography and personal letters, María Vela y Cueto (1561–1617) speaks candidly of the obstacles, perils, and rewards of re-negotiating piety in a convent where devotion to God was no longer expressed through rigorous asceticism.

In 1654, Anna Trapnel — a Baptist, Fifth Monarchist, millenarian, and visionary from London — fell into a trance during which she prophesied passionately and at length against Oliver Cromwell and his government. Her Report and Plea offers fascinating insight into the life and times of an early modern woman claiming her place at the center of the tumultuous political events of mid-seventeenth-century England.

Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women's 2017 Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition published in 2016

This volume presents ten plays by three leading women playwrights of Spain’s Golden Age. Included are four bawdy and outrageous comic interludes; a full-length comedy involving sorcery, chivalry, and dramatic stage effects; and five short religious plays satirizing daily life in the convent.

These translations from the French bring two of Claudine-Alexandrine de Tencin’s novels back to life: The Memoirs of the Count of Comminge (1735), and The Misfortunes of Love (1747). Like the work of Abbé Prévost and Pierre de Marivaux, they were important contributions to the early sentimental novel.  They also anticipated the gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe which appeared later in the century.

Honorable Mention, Society for the Study of Early Modern Women's 2017 Scholarly Edition in Translation Award for a work published in 2016

Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534) is a unique figure in the history of the Catholic Church, thanks to her public visionary experiences. Juana’s so called “sermons” form a fascinating window into Castilian religiosity in the early sixteenth century.

Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women's 2017 Teaching Edition Award for a work published in 2016 

Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index Translation of the Month, October 2015

The seventy-three surviving letters written by Florentine widow, Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi (c.1406–1471), to her distant sons are here translated into English in their entirety for the first time, and constitute a most precious testimony regarding both private and public life in the mid-fifteenth century.

Anna Stanislawska (1651-1701) meticulously reconstructed in an epic poem the episode of her forced marriage to the deviant son of the Castellan of Kraków. Barry Keane's idiomatic and inventive verse translation brings to life this poetic account of a remarkable tale of triumph in the face of overwhelming oppression.

Bathsua Makin describes the appropriate education for London merchants’ daughters, arguing that girls should be educated and should aspire to follow learned women in history, and that educated women improve their families and themselves. Mary More argues that women have the right to an education, and that such an education shows that the inequality of married women under English law is a man-made institution.

This edition presents in English, for the first time, Jeanne d’Albret’s Letters, together with her Ample Declaration (1568) defending her decampment to the Protestant stronghold of La Rochelle. A historical-biographical introduction situates these writings in the larger context of Reformation politics and examines in detail the specific literary characteristics of her memoir.

Honorable Mention, Society for the Study of Early Modern Women's 2016 Scholarly Edition in Translation Award for a work published in 2015

Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index Translation of the Month, March 2015

In 1415, Francesco Barbaro produced a marriage manual intended at once for his friend, a scion of the Florentine Medici family, and for the young nobility of Venice. The Wealth of Wives circulated in more than 100 manuscript versions, five Latin editions, and translations into German, Italian, French, and English.

In her autobiographical Report on Captivity, Angélique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d’Andilly (1624–1684), abbess of Port-Royal, recounts her personal methods of spiritual resistance as she and her fellow nuns underwent waves of persecution resulting in exile, house arrest, interdict, and excommunication. Her voluminous theological writings present the theoretical basis for this resistance.

Winner, University of Colorado Boulder 2017 Biennial Eugene M. Kayden Translation Award

A sixteenth-century bestseller, The Pleasant Nights is today a fundamental text for European folk and fairy tale studies, for alongside triumphal and tragic love stories, comical tales of practical jokes, and accounts of witty retorts, Straparola (1480?–1557?) placed some of the first fairy tales printed in Europe. This book presents the first new and complete English translation of Straparola’s tales and riddles to be published since the nineteenth century.

In 1635, Margaret Van Noort, a lay sister of the royal convent of Discalced Carmelite nuns in Brussels, composed her spiritual autobiography. This text was followed by two diaries in 1636 and 1637. Now gathered in this volume, these works illustrate Margaret’s development from a troubled young lay sister into a woman of spiritual experience and authority.

The Bolognese nun Diodata Malvasia was presumed to have authored only one work, The Arrival and the Miraculous Workings of the Glorious Image of the Virgin (1617). In her recently discovered second chronicle, A Brief Discourse on What Occurred to the Most Reverend Sisters of the Joined Convents of San Mattia and San Luca (1575), her writing demonstrates active resistance to convent reform. Together, Malvasia’s works read as the bookends to a lifelong crusade on behalf of her convent.

Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women's 2016 Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition published in 2015

This edition presents, for the first time in English, a selection from the repertoire of the first Polish woman dramatist, Princess Franciszka Urszula Radziwillowa (1705–1753), with a historical-biographical Introduction incorporating interpretations of her works.

Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women's 2016 Award for a Teaching Edition published in 2015

The four works included here, translated into English for the first time, represent the diversity of genres cultivated by women playrights, while reflecting both the cultural milieu of the era and a concern for the status of women.

Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women's 2015 Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition published in 2014

This edition assembles a diverse array of scathing polemic and loft praise, diplomatic reports, and letters by Catherine de Médicis, which together show how one extraordinary woman’s rule intersected with early modern conceptions of gender, maternity, and power.

Veronica Gambara (1485 – 1550) was one of the most celebrated lyric poets of early sixteenth-century Italy. This book presents the first complete bilingual edition of Gambara’s verse. It sheds light on the unique interrelationship between Gambara’s cultural currency and her political power, as she drew on her literary talent to participate in the political arena to emerge as one of the first women poet-rulers of the Early Modern Italian tradition.

In Tales and Trials of Love, Jeanne Flore (whose identity remains a mystery) depicts an ideal notion of love as a mutually beneficial relationship upheld in a world governed by Venus and Cupid. These seven tales illustrate various obstacles to that ideal and the consequences of denouncing Cupid’s sovereignty.

Honorable Mention, Society for the Study of Early Modern Women's 2015 Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition published in 2014

Written during the 1640s, 50s, and 60s, Lady Hester Pulter’s Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda addresses some of the most pressing issues confronting early modern England, including the social status of women.

This edition offers a translation of two works by the seventeenth-century French Franciscan, Jacques Du Bosc: L’Honnête Femme (1632-36) in selected passages and the Nouveau recueil des lettres de dames de ce temps (1635) in its entirety.

In the wake of Peter the Great’s westernizing reforms, Russians raced to build the kind of modern literary culture that Europeans had achieved centuries earlier. Until recently, women’s contribution to this fascinating period of rapid assimilation and creation has been ignored. This volume challenges us to reimagine the early Russian literary canon, by considering a broad range of pioneering women poets who remain largely unknown, even in their homeland.

Rejecting marriage and the convent, the Spanish noblewoman, poet, and religious activist Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (Jaraicejo 1566–London 1614) led an uncommon life of adventure and spiritual devotion. This volume provides a scholarly introduction and translations of selections from her writings.

The figure of Tullia d’Aragona has long fascinated readers as the prototype of the “honest courtesan”, a woman who successfully exploited her physical and intellectual charms to win the adoration and respect of the Italian cultural elite. With Julia Hairston’s richly annotated edition of her collected verse, d’Aragona finally comes into focus also as poet.

This is the first modern edition of verse by Anne Killigrew, a poet and portrait painter born in 1660 at the very start of the Restoration, who grew up as part of the complicated political, religious, and artistic worlds of the Restoration courts of Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York.

This excellent piece of work brings a new and fascinating seventeenth-century voice to twenty-first-century readers interested in women’s studies, literature, and history. Book M by the London widow Katherine Austen lends itself well to modernization, and it will be a great contextual reading for courses on British Restoration culture and literature.

Granddaughter of James I of England, Sophia (1630–1714) began life a penniless princess in exile. She ended it as electress dowager of Hanover, an emerging European power. The memoirs, which recount the first fifty years of Sophia’s life, appear here in English for the first time in their entirety. Their publication in this series is particularly timely, as it coincides with the three hundredth anniversary of the Hanoverian succession (2014).

The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705) is the most mature and comprehensive statement of Mary Astell's religious and philosophical views. It also represents the culmination of Astell's feminist project to teach her fellow women how to lead useful lives of virtue and wisdom. This volume offers the first complete modern version of the 1717 second edition.

Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women's 2014 Award for a Teaching Edition published in 2013

Why did pregnancy and birth attract so much attention in early modern France? This edition translates and discusses works by four key physicians and one surgeon, revealing how these practitioners are distinguished by their particularly caring attitudes.

Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women's 2014 Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition published in 2013

The Other Voice's edition of Barbara Torelli's pastoral drama Partenia (c. 1586) is a groundbreaking contribution to the study of early modern Italian literature and women's writing. This is the first ever print edition of the earliest secular play by an Italian woman, acclaimed at the time of its composition.

Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women's 2014 Scholarly Edition in Translation Award for a work published in 2013

Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index Translation of the Month, April 2013

This volume brings together the two most influential voices in the Spanish querelle des femmes, Pere Torrellas (ca. 1420 - ca. 1492) and Juan de Flores (d. ca. 1503). Torrellas' Slander against Women (ca. 1445) and Flores' Grisel and Mirabella (ca. 1475) circulated widely among Spanish readers throughout the sixteenth century.

Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women's 2013 Scholarly Edition in Translation Award for a work published in 2012

Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-1652) was compelled to become a nun against her will. Tarabotti used her 1650 Letters—here published in translation for the first time—to defend and build her literary reputation while she also documented rough-and-tumble literary society in early modern Venice and material existence in an early modern convent.

Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women's 2013 Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition published in 2012

This is the first printed edition of a manuscript collection of verse important for an understanding of the culture of Henry VIII's court and women's central role in the exchange and enjoyment of poetry.

This edition, which offers a bilingual selection of poetry and selected prose translated into English by the nun-author Cecilia del Nacimiento (1570–1646), increases contemporary scholars' access to, and therefore understanding of, the Spanish early modern religious and intellectual milieu.

Delarivier Manley and Mary Pix were among the groundbreaking "female wits," who debuted their original plays for the public stage in 1695–96. Two of these plays contain explicitly Islamicate themes. The plays have been modernized and annotated in this edition, most for the first time.

Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index Translation of the Month, February 2012

The letters of Margherita Datini to her husband, Francesco di Marco Datini (the subject of Iris Origo's popular biography, The Merchant of Prato), are here translated into English for the first time as a complete collection. They provide a fascinating portrait of urban life in late-medieval Tuscany and give us entrée to the couple's loving but volatile relationship.

For her last published volume, Lucrezia Marinella (1571?-1653) summons all her erudition and persuasive skill for a discussion of issues ranging from women's behavior to childrearing to the virtues necessary for orderly civic life. The author's bleak portrayal of an educated woman's life, together with her praise of traditional female virtues, is emblematic of the negative attitudes towards women's creativity and learning that had become prominent in seventeenth-century Italian culture.

This edition of the writings of Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell (1540-1609) unites in one volume the varied corpus of a prolific early modern woman writer, including her unpublished correspondence, manuscript poems, monumental inscriptions and elegies, courtroom appearances, and ceremonial performances, as well as her printed translation, A Way of Reconciliation of a Good and Learned Man. In these formidable writings, women's erudition is defended as an inalienable birthright and a defining feature of femininity.

This volume presents in English the selected works of Liubov Krichevskaya (1800–1841?), arguably the first professional woman of letters in Ukraine. At times hopeful, at other times despairing, her literary works, written in Russian, explore the theme of woman's agency in contemporary society and include dramas, novellas, lyric poetry and an epistolary novel.

The Chronicle of Le Murate, completed by Sister Giustina Niccolini in 1598, is one of a small number of surviving documents that presents a nun's own interpretation and synthesis of historical events. It recounts the roughly two hundred–year history of Florence's largest convent, which attracted boarders, nuns and patrons from Italy's elite families. The manuscript provides a rare view of life behind the enclosure walls and of nuns' interaction with the world outside.

This excellent collection of essays and texts surveys the culture and intellectual context of early modern Italy in order to render more intelligible the writing of Italian women.

A critical edition of the philosophical correspondence between the seventeenth–century philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and his two royal patronesses, Electress Sophie of Hanover and her daughter, Queen Sophie Charlotte of Prussia. This is the first English translation of all the philosophically important material from the two correspondences.

In late seventeenth-century France, the conte de feés, or fairy tale, became a fashionable new genre. It was sophisticated and ironic women who not only inaugurated the vogue but also produced sixty–eight of the one hundred twelve tales published 1690–1709. This collection presents eight fairy tales (most never before translated into English) by the most prominent women authors.

Valeria Miani's Celinda (1611), the only female–authored secular tragedy of early modern Italy, is here made available for the first time in a modern edition. Miani's tale of the doomed love of the Lydian princess Celinda for the cross–dressed Persian prince Autilio/Lucinia offers a striking example of the explorative attitude to gender identity that is such a marked characteristic of Italian drama in this period.

Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index Translation of the Month, December 2011

This fresh translation of five plays securely authored by Antonia Pulci—one of the first published women writers in Renaissance Florence—reveals this gifted dramatist at her finest.

This new bilingual edition of Du Guillet's poems includes a richly detailed and up-to-date introduction and a translation that follows the original rhymes—a daunting undertaking performed with accuracy, humor and verve.

One of the most acclaimed French poets from the turn of the eighteenth century and one of the rare women of the time to achieve recognition at court, Louise-Geneviève Gillot de Sainctonge was France's first female librettist. This volume provides the most in-depth biography of her ever published, but also the first appearance of any of her work in English.

One of the first printed medical texts to be attributed to a female author, The True Medicine (1587) is radically innovative in its rejection of contemporary medical theory for a more pro-feminist physiology and cosmology.

Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index Translation of the Month, January 2011

The Great Schism (1378–1417) divided Western Christendom into two groups: those who recognized a pope in Rome and those who recognized one in Avignon. This volume brings to life the extraordinary spiritual and political engagement of two late medieval women who refused to be passive bystanders as rival papal factions tore Christendom apart.

Love in the Mirror tells the unforgettable and path–breaking story of a passionate love affair between two women in early modern Florence.

Winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women's 2010 Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition published in 2009 

Five nuns set out in the early 1700s from their cloistered convent in Madrid, Spain, to travel halfway around the world to Lima, Peru. The journey lasted three years -- an odyssey not all of them would complete.

These essays explore problems with digital approaches to analog objects and offer digital methods to study networks of production, dissemination, and collection.

In the humanities, the field of “social knowledge creation” has helped define how social media platforms and other collaborative spaces have shaped humanistic critique in the twenty-first century.

The ubiquity of social media has transformed the scope and scale of scholarly communication in the arts and humanities. The consequences of this new participatory and collaborative environment for humanities research has allowed for fresh approaches to communicating research. Social Knowledge Creation takes up the norms and customs of online life to reorient, redistribute, and oftentimes flatten traditional academic hierarchies. This book discusses the implications of how humanists communicate with the world and looks to how social media shapes research methods.

The essays collected in this volume address the digital humanities’ core tensions: fast and slow; surficial and nuanced; quantitative and qualitative. Every essay in this book is concerned with the human-machine dynamic, as it bears on early modern research objects and methods.

This volume of the New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies series is the Devonshire Manuscript (BL MS Add. 17492), a verse miscellany belonging to the 1530s and early 1540s. This edition publishes the contents of the manuscript in their entirety, documenting well the manuscript's place as the earliest sustained example in English of men and women writing together in a community.

This volume brings together some of the best work from the New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies panels at the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) annual meetings for the years 2004–2010.

The aim of this book is to encapsulate the potential that digital technologies pose for Medieval Material Culture, providing examples of leading projects worldwide which are enabling new forms of research in this area. The text aims to provide a broad overview of the tools now used by historians, including text encoding, digitization, and visualization, and juxtaposing this with core concerns from historians investigating particular research questions.

This book explores the practical aspects of electronic publication and reflect on the politics of the knowledge landscape that is emerging. Their accounts of such practical matters as Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and coding standards form part of a larger consideration of the new knowledge economy and how the humanities disciplines will fare in a world that increasingly trusts its cultural heritage to magnetism and laser optics rather than inks and paper.

The first volume of the series, New Technologies and Renaissance Studies, presents a collection of contributions from the the annual "conference within a conference" of the same name which takes place during the Renaissance Sociey of America (RSA) gathering, dedicated specifically to the intersection of computational methods and Renaissance Studies. Papers in this volume are from their inception at the 2001 meeting in Chicago to the 2005 meeting in Cambridge.

This volume presents the first printed edition of a late sixteenth-century poetic miscellany and provides invaluable insight into understanding the literature of the period.

This volume comprises more than three hundred letters written by Elizabeth Butler, first Duchess of Ormonde, revealing her importance within the Ormonde-Butler family and in the social, cultural, and political life of seventeenth-century Ireland.

A vibrant literary and musical reflection of the early Tudor court, the Henry VIII Manuscript (British Library Additional Manuscript 31,922) contributes to our critical understanding of court milieu and the connections between poetry and power in early Renaissance society in England.

New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, now in its sixth volume, preserves and disseminates papers sponsored by the Society at such conferences as MLA, RSA, Kalamazoo, and Sixteenth-Century Studies.

This edition makes available for the first time a recently discovered and provocative work by the English historian Edmund Bolton.

The Whole Book of Psalms, first published in a complete form in 1562, introduced congregational singing to England and contained the best known English verse in the early modern period.

The Whole Book of Psalms, first published in a complete form in 1562, introduced congregational singing to England and contained the best known English verse in the early modern period.

Masculinities are at once heterogeneous and multivalent, manifested according to cultural milieu and social status. In the premodern world, hegemonic masculinity served to reinforce patriarchal social structure and men’s domination of women and subordinate men.

Crossing premodern Europe, the essays in this volume examine how masculinity was constructed by external presentation, such as hair, musculature, sexual prowess, clothing, and honourable behaviour, or deconstructed through bodily defects such a virginity, impotence, castration, non-normative sexuality, or shameful behaviour. Together, they reveal the fluctuations that men experienced and explore how social and embodied masculinity intersected and could reconstruct or redefine masculinity as social and cultural values modified.

Between the fifteenth and seventeenth century, Italy was home to an animated debate on the role of women in society, history, and religion. Despite this open and fruitful dialogue, women were still idealized according to a strict model of female virtue based on a culture of honour and chastity that was reflected in the arts as well as in law and daily life. The volume analyses this process of idealization, the rhetorical, philosophical, or historical tools used, and how this vision differed from theory and practice.

Service permeated premodern Europe and was a key concept for defining relationships. This volume explores simultaneously the medieval and early modern periods, and considers service and servants through multiple discourses and in a wide variety of contexts. The volume brings together an interdisciplinary and international team of scholars who study a highly diverse group of servants: male and female, young and old, lay and religious, of both high and low status, with few or great expectations for their future.

The essays in this volume, written over the span of five decades, are in most cases an exploration of the often unrecognized or poorly understood relationships among four reformers who were advocates of governmental responsibility for religious reform: Erasmus of Rotterdam, Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, and Johannes Brenz.

Confraternity studies has been one of the most innovative and active fields of scholarly inquiry in the last several decades, yet few scholars have ventured beyond the traditional focus on northern Italian communities. This ambitious volume addresses the historical and historiographical origins of these scholarly biases, introduces the vibrant yet understudied world of southern Italian confraternities, and provides many suggestions for areas of future research and comparative analysis.

Using the North African diplomat Hasan al –Wazzan, known in Europe as Leo Africanus (c. 1488-after 1532), as its guide, this book offers a comparative journey through the worlds of Italian and Islamic theatre in the late medieval and early modern period.

The thirteen essays in this collection offer case studies that examine the philosophies and dynamics of hospitality in early modern Italy, England, Central Europe, and the Ottoman Empire.

Bathhouses and Riverbanks carries out, for the first time in English, a thorough examination of the criminal records dealing with sodomy in the Republic of Lucca from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century.

Playful pleasure or devout piety? Why did Florentines invest so much effort in the performance of sacre rappresentazioni, their dramatizations of the life of Christ and the saints? This study explores their motives, and the financing, staging, and reception of their plays.

Playful pleasure or devout piety? Why did Florentines invest so much effort in the performance of sacre rappresentazioni, their dramatizations of the life of Christ and the saints? This study explores their motives, and the financing, staging, and reception of their plays.

Under the aegis of discerning patrons such as Francis I, Henri II, and Catherine de’ Medici, France developed a rich artistic vocabulary dominated by elongated figures, inventive decorative motifs, and intriguing subject matter. The volume’s contributors explore different aspects of the extant material record and how it was shaped.

This is a book about Isabella d’Este (1474–1539) and the roles that letter writing played in her public and private life.

Eternal Ephemera is the first book dedicated to the visual culture and history of the possesso. In this collection, six essays symbiotically expose the long-lasting ramifications of possessi in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Rome.

This collection offers a sustained, comparative, and interdisciplinary exploration of religious transformations in the early modern world.

This collection offers a set of new readings on the history, meanings, and cultural innovations of the grotesque as defined by various current critical theories and practices.

This volume celebrates the scholarship of Alison Brown, emeritus professor in the department of history at Royal Holloway, University of London.

The information explosion of the last two decades has triggered an interest in the historical precursors of such a phenomenon.

Heresy is a fluid concept, not easy to define or pinpoint, and certainly one that defies religious and political boundaries. The articles in this volume examine the varieties of perceptions and representations of heresy in early modern France.

This volume celebrates the considerable contributions of Edward Muir to the history of Renaissance Italy and early modern Europe.

This book carefully dissects and contextualizes a vast seventeenth-century panorama of Constantinople that is not only an exceptional representation of the city, but also an elaborate piece of anti-Ottoman propaganda.

The twelve essays in this volume identify mutually interactive developments in media and saints’ cults at a time and in a place when both underwent profound change. Focusing on the Italian peninsula between 1400 and 1600, authors analyze specific sites of intense cultural production and innovation.

The Medici grand ducal family and the court it created in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have long fascinated historians and the general public.  It is only in the last decade or so that scholars have begun to reassess their roles and achievements. The aim of this book is to advance that reassessment.

The thirteen essays in this volume demonstrate the multiplicity of connections between learning and politics in Renaissance Italy.

For several decades James M. Estes has been pointing to the complexity of the problems facing sixteenth-century reformers and the practical solutions they were able to reach. The career of Johannes Brenz, the careful analytical thinking of Philip Melanchthon, and the incessant correspondence of Desiderius Erasmus, all serve as guideposts for Estes’ career as a scholar, but also for this collection of articles in his honour.

Friendship and Sociability in Premodern Europe explores ideas and instances of friendship in premodern Europe through a series of investigations into amity in discrete social and cultural contexts related to some of the most salient moments and expressions of European history and civilization.

In their range and breadth, the essays in this collection illustrate the cultural force of Neo-Latin in Early Modern Europe.

This interdisciplinary and diverse collection of articles stems from a conference that centred on the idea of creating women. The verbal adjective in the title was meant to signal a dual meaning: women create and women are created by others.

This volume brings together new scholarship in Italian art and culture from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries first presented during April and May 2007 at two conferences celebrating Charles Dempsey on his retirement from teaching at The Johns Hopkins University.

Peter Howard carefully reconstructs the concept of magnificence by tracing its development through Archbishop Antoninus's texts and his mendicant career in 1420s Florence.

Treating the devil not as a reified theological entity but as a dynamic concept that was made and remade over the centuries according to cultural priorities and the exigencies of circumstance, the articles in this collection probe how the devil and demonism operated as explanatory categories that helped create and rationalise experience, thereby shaping the way people lived their lives and understood their place and role in premodern Europe.

The articles in this volume provide an overview of the issues and complexities that informed marriage in the premodern West. They provide a series of interdisciplinary and multicultural analyses of an institution that was fundamental across societies and cultures, but manifested in diverse practices and beliefs.

The twenty essays in this collection examine critical issues in Renaissance art. Written by students of Colin Eisler, professor at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University for fifty years, and dedicated to him, they serve as a tribute to this exceptional scholar.

This collection of essays shows the remarkable strides the study of gender has made in the decades since Barbara Todd helped reshape the field through her publications and teaching. In Worth and Repute: Valuing Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, gender conventions are examined in regard to men as well as women.

Savonarola and Savonarolism retraces the history of the reformer's controversial Florentine period and examines his political, religious, and cultural legacy throughout the sixteenth century in Florence and beyond.

Through a close reading of rarely studied materials, Sergius Kodera examines the contested position of the body in Renaissance philosophy, showing how abstract metaphysical ideas evolved in tandem with the creation of new metaphors that shaped the understanding of early modern political, cultural, and scientific practices.

The idea that masculinity has a history is fairly recent. This collection opens new paths in literary and theatre studies by addressing not only how literary texts represented masculinity but how different representational strategies in such texts produce masculinity.

A fundamental aspect of culture in all ages, religion was a particularly crucial issue in the Renaissance. Religion and imagination, or “faith and fantasy”, represent the theme of this volume. These essays explore the intersection between religion and the creative forces of the individuals who wrote about sacred matters, practised their religion, or fashioned religious themes in their artwork.

This volume deals with a wide range of sports from the thirteenth through to the seventeenth century, placing them within a variety of larger contexts.

Acknowledging new direction in scholarship, this volume seeks to trace the plurality and complexity of memory's cultural work throughout the English and Continental Renaissance.

The articles in this collection seek to contribute to the ongoing debate on the Renaissance and further our understanding of this brilliant period in European history and culture.

Richard C. Trexler (1932-2007) was one of our era’s most original historians. The seventeen articles in this collection are inspired by Trexler’s cholarly achievements and pay tribute to a scholar who never tired of pursuing new questions, overturning received assumptions, and sharing his enthusiasm for research with his colleagues and students.

This volume brings together essays on the intellectual, cultural and social history of the Italian Renaissance, areas of inquiry that Paul F. Grendler has done so much to develop through the decades.

This volume celebrates the many contributions of John M. Najemy to the study of Florentine and Italian Renaissance history.

This collection presents eight articles by one of the most influential scholars of Florentine culture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Michel Plaisance.

This collection of fifteen essays examines the literary influence of Ovid's Metamorphoses from the late Middle Ages to the seventeenth century.

Johannes Brenz affected church life and shaped the Reformation in German-speaking countries well into the 1560s.

The articles in this volume use a variety of disciplinary approaches to examine, each in its own way, the interpretation of texts and archival documents that record French ceremonial entries in the sixteenth century.

The collection includes interpretive essays, text editions of two of Wolfgang Capito’s works and documents of a lawsuit that affected his establishment in the city, as well as studies of the problems of producing modern editions of Capito himself and his contemporaries Erasmus, Bucer, Bullinger, and Beza.

The articles in this volume position Venice and her economy from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century in relation to the larger European and Mediterranean context.

In Florence, in the summer of 1501, a man named Antonio Rinaldeschi was arrested and hanged after throwing horse dung at an outdoor painting of the Virgin Mary. Sacrilege and Redemption in Renaissance Florence unveils a series of newly discovered sources concerning this striking episode.

The ten essays in this volume seek to gauge the impact of sexual disease on early modern society by exploring the rich variety of ways in which European culture reacted to the presence of a new deadly sexual infection.

This study examines the art patronage of the Sacchetti family in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Rome.

The fifteen essays in this volume offer compelling new treatments of these now-evaporated fantasies of Troy, which were central to the European social imaginary. The essays consider texts and performances of Troy across a wide generic range-from learned court poetry to burlesque, from treatises on linguistic history to public spectacles.

The papers in this volume highlight sites of social, political, and epistemological tension as Europe slowly moves from the medieval to the modern.

The essays in this collection study conflict and continuity across the spectrum of political, jurisdictional, and spiritual traditions from late medieval Umbria and Tuscany to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice, Rome, and Castile.

This collection brings together an international collection of sixteen authors who examine the many Renaissances conceived by European novelists and poets, artists and composers, architects and city planners, political theorists and politicians, businessmen and advertisers.

Few scholars have focused on post-pubescent youth in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The seventeen essays in this volume seek to redress this imbalance by offering a sampling of the research currently underway in this field and of the various questions and methodologies that could be useful in the study of teenagers in the 13th-17th centuries.

Heinrich Bebel (1472/73–1518), humanist poet and academic at the south-west German University of Tübingen, compiled his three books of facetiae (final authorized edition appearing in 1514). This first complete translation in English of Bebel’s many jokes and funny anecdotes will provide readers with a window into a Northern European culture of Renaissance laughter that is learned and yet celebrates the popular.

The chronicle of Bindino da Travale (1356–1418) gathers his extensive knowledge of fifteenth-century Italy and combines it with his self-reflective comments and vivid imagination to produce a highly idiosyncratic and lively account of his times.

Giovan Maria Cecchi (1518–87) was the most prolific and versatile dramatist in all of sixteenth-century Italy. The five plays in this collection are representative of the variety of religious theatre he composed for performance by youths in confraternities.

Sforza Pallavicino’s play Martyr Hermenegild (1644) is a masterpiece of seventeenth-century Jesuit hagiographical drama.

The two documents translated in this volume provide a detailed snapshot into the Ottoman Empire and its relations with Venice at a time of transition for both of these Mediterranean powers.

Johannes Brenz (1499-1570) was the most important champion of the Lutheran Reformation in Southern Germany. The documents in this volume provide an excellent basis for tracing the development, both theoretical and practical, of the Lutheran territorial church during the early Reformation.

By the beginning of the 1530s, the governments of many German territories that had abolished Catholicism and established the Reformation had begun to impose strict uniformity of doctrine and worship on their subjects. In some communities, individuals who felt threatened by the impending orthodoxy raised their voices in protest. The texts in this volume record one such protest and the responses that it evoked.

These three treatises (which are translated here for the first time into English) established the terms of reference for one of the most important debates of the Reformation.

Nicolas of Cusa (1401-1464) was a theologian, philosopher, Canon lawyer, and Church reformer. Cusanus dedicates his philosophical writings to the exploration of the limits of the mind in its pursuit of absolute truth.

Courtesy books have a special relationship to the age that produces them. By attempting to codify manners, styles, ideals and values of a society, they reveal the principles and presuppositions that shape and animate their world. Galateo does this brilliantly.

In these two little-known pamphlets, published here for the first time together, you will find rollicking storytelling: Kind Heart’s Dream brings to life the dog-eat-dog world of the London marketplace, while Piers Plainness recounts the trials of an apprentice who tries to survive corrupt masters during the fallout of a political coup.

This collection of Aesop’s fables signals an important moment in the history of the illustrated English book, making it a treat for readers with its nearly equal collaboration between poet and artist.

The Martin Marprelate Press: A Documentary History offers a freshly edited collection of twenty primary documents, mainly from manuscript archival sources, connected with the underground press that produced the Martin Marprelate tracts (1588–1589), the anti-episcopal satires that sparked the most famous pamphlet war of the English Renaissance.

James I's unique writings are more often known of than known and read. The True Law of Free Monarchies is a theoretical justification of the divine right of kings; Basilikon Doron (or the king's gift) is a pragmatic guide, a "how to" book, that combines James's personal experiences as king of Scotland, with his scholarly and literary notions of the ideal comportment of the monarch.