Literary Studies / Renaissance Literature

This book examines imagery of the eponymous character from La Celestina from the early sixteenth century until today.

This important new edition reintroduces Joseph Tusiani's classic translation of Michelangelo's poetry.

Taking cues from the energy of the stage, this book harnesses lessons from some of Shakespeare’s most popular plays to help cultivate critical hope and empathy.

Heroic Awe studies the impact of the philosophy of the sublime on the genre of Renaissance epic poetry.

In Speaking Spirits, Sherry Roush presents the first systematic study of early modern Italian eidolopoeia.

A Sudden Frenzy explores the intellectual and cultural history of improvisation and oral poetry in Renaissance Italy.

Veronica Franco in Dialogue reconsiders the literary and cultural significance of a well-known sixteenth-century Venetian courtesan and writer.

A Poetry of Things considers how cultural objects were used by poets in the years around 1600 – a time of social and economic crisis, but also of remarkable artistic and literary production.

In Forms of Modernity, Rachel Schmidt examines how seminal theorists and philosophers have wrestled with the status of Cervantes' Don Quixote is as an 'exemplary novel', in turn contributing to the emergence of key concepts within genre theory.

Alone Together reinterprets the explosion of sentimental poetry and prose in fifteenth-century Iberia.

Written more than half a century before Sir Philip Sidney’s well-known Apology for Poetry, Erasmus’ Ratio or ‘System’ is an almost lost masterpiece of Renaissance literary theory and interpretive practice, now available for the first time in English in a convenient student edition.

A surfeit of tropes about love exhausted Spanish literature in the age of Cervantes. This book provides a pioneering look at the rich array of ways in which Spanish Golden Age authors responded by crafting a new literary aesthetic.

Cervantes’ Persiles and the Travails of Romance explores the lure of the Aethiopika while also seeking to articulate the reasons for Cervantes’ enthusiasm for his own text.

This is the first book to provide a full treatment of Shakespeare’s literary and theatrical engagement with the Italian novella and female agency.

Contesting theories of print as a monologic, uniform, and unifying form, Reading by Design investigates 16th and 17th century print as a uniquely multi-sensory and interactive medium.

A glimpse into both the celebration of and opposition to social irreverence in the early modern period, Flaunting is a fascinating historical account of drama, fashion, and rebellion with surprisingly close parallels to the contemporary world.