A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion

The storied achievements of the Renaissance were not simply the result of a cultural rediscovery of shared European classical traditions. A Companion to the Global Renaissance presents a more complex perspective that considers England′s commercial and cross–cultural interactions with the New and Old Worlds of the Americas, Africa, and the East, as well as with Northern Europe. By illustrating how English culture and literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were shaped by emerging long–distance mercantile, proto–colonial, and cultural economies of exchange, this innovative collection presents a new history of globalization. After introducing globalization′s theoretical underpinnings, twenty one newly–commissioned essays collectively illustrate how twentieth–century globalization was the result of a lengthy and complex historical process linked to the emergence of capitalism and colonialism. These wide–ranging chapters examine such topics as England′s trading companies and the flow of labor and capital; exploration and cartography; travel and empire; domestic consumerism, money, and material culture; East–West relations and Islam; visual representations and aesthetic theories of and by cultural ‘others’; gender and race struggles within the new economies and cultures; the global dimensions of Renaissance literature; and global drama on the cosmopolitan English stage. With academic rigor and critical authority, A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion challenges popular notions of Renaissance history and presents fascinating new insights into the roots of globalization.

List of Illustrations ix Notes on Contributors x Acknowledgments xvi Introduction: The Global Renaissance 1 Jyotsna G. Singh Part I: Mapping the Global 29 1 The New Globalism: Transcultural Commerce, Global Systems Theory, and Spenser’s Mammon 31 Daniel Vitkus 2 “Travailing” Theory: Global Flows of Labor and the Enclosure of the Subject 50 Crystal Bartolovich 3 Islam and Tamburlaine’s World–picture 67 John Michael Archer 4 Traveling Nowhere: Global Utopias in the Early Modern Period 82 Chloë Houston Part II: “Contact Zones” 99 5 The Benefi ts of a Warm Study: The Resistance to Travel before Empire 101 Andrew Hadfield 6 “Apes of Imitation”: Imitation and Identity in Sir Thomas Roe’s Embassy to India 114 Nandini Das 7 A Multinational Corporation: Foreign Labor in the London East India Company 129 Richmond Barbour 8 Where was Iceland in 1600? 149 Mary C. Fuller 9 East by North–east: The English among the Russians, 1553–1603 163 Gerald MacLean 10 The Politics of Identity: William Adams, John Saris, and the English East India Company’s Failure in Japan 178 Catherine Ryu 11 The Queer Moor: Bodies, Borders, and Barbary Inns 190 Ian Smith Part III: Networks of Exchange: Traveling Objects 205 12 Guns and Gawds: Elizabethan England’s Infi del Trade 207 Matthew Dimmock 13 Cassio, Cash, and the “Infidel 0”: Arithmetic, Double–entry Bookkeeping, and Othello’s Unfaithful Accounts 223 Patricia Parker 14 Seeds of Sacrifice: Amaranth, the Gardens of Tenochtitlan and Spenser’s Faerie Queene 242 Edward M. Test 15 “So Pale, So Lame, So Lean, So Ruinous”: The Circulation of Foreign Coins in Early Modern England 262 Stephen Deng 16 Canary, Bristoles, Londres, Ingleses: English Traders in the Canaries in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 279 Barbara Sebek 17 “The Whole Globe of the Earth”: Almanacs and Their Readers 294 Adam Smyth 18 Cesare Vecellio, Venetian Writer and Art–book Cosmopolitan 305 Ann Rosalind Jones Part IV: The Globe Staged 323 19 Bettrice’s Monkey: Staging Exotica in Early Modern London Comedy 325 Jean E. Howard 20 The Maltese Factor: The Poetics of Place in The Jew of Malta and The Knight of Malta 340 Virginia Mason Vaughan 21 Local/Global Pericles: International Storytelling, Domestic Social Relations, Capitalism 355 David Morrow Index 378

Jyotsna G. Singh  is a Professor at Michigan State University, where she teaches early modern literature and culture, post–colonial theory, translation studies, and gender and race studies. Her published works include  Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: ′Discovery′ of India in the Language of Colonialism  (1996);  The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics  (co–authored, with Dympna Callaghan and Lorraine Helms, 1994); and  Travel Knowledge: European ′Discoveries′ in the Early Modern Period  (co–edited with Ivo Kamps, 2001). She has received several research fellowships, including at the Folger Shakespeare Library,Queen Mary, University of London, and the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.  She has also been invited to direct two workshops on "Early Modern Anglo Muslim Encounters" at the Renaissance Center of the Newberry Library, in Chicago.  She is currently working on a monograph on early English Slave Trade.