The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature: 3 Volume Set

The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature presents sweeping coverage and in–depth critical analysis of myriad aspects of the English literary landscape from the early 16th to the mid 17th centuries. Featuring over 400 clear and accessible entries on a wide range of writers and literary forms, this comprehensive three–volume collection covers canonical authors and their works – from John Skelton to John Milton as well as a variety of previously under–considered areas, including women writers, writings in manuscript, ballads, cookbooks, and other popular literary forms. Entries are written by leading international scholars and biographical material on authors is presented in the context of cutting–edge critical discussion of literary works, with suggested readings for further study. With its unprecedented breadth of coverage, The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature is an indispensable resource for students and scholars alike.

Volume I

List of entries ix

Notes on contributors xv

Introduction xlv

Acknowledgements liii

English Renaissance Literature A–F 1

Volume II

List of entries ix

Notes on contributors xv

English Renaissance Literature G–O 375

Volume III

List of entries ix

Notes on contributors xv

English Renaissance Literature P–Z 757

Index 1089

Editors
Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. is Professor of English at Penn State University. He is the author of The drama of landscape: land, property, and social relations on the early modern stage (1998) and Memory and forgetting in English Renaissance drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster (2005).

Alan Stewart is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and International Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, University of London. He is the author of Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (1997), and Shakespeare′s Letters (2008), and editor of volume I of the Oxford Francis Bacon, Early writings, 1584–1596 (forthcoming).

Associate Editors
Rebecca Lemon is Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern California. She is author of Treason by words: literature, law, and rebellion in Shakespeare′s England (2006) and one of the editors for The Blackwell companion to literature and the Bible (2009).

Nicholas McDowell is Associate Professor of English at the University of Exeter. His publications include Poetry and allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the cause of wit (2008), and he is co–editor for The Oxford handbook of Milton (2009).

Jennifer Richards is head of the School of English Literature, Language, and Linguistics, and Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at Newcastle University. Her publications include Rhetoric (2007) in the New Critical Idiom series.

In this respect, the Encyclopedia brings together a very wide range of material that would otherwise not be so easily accessible. To some extent, it even redresses the canonical centrality of the well–known names by locating them very firmly within their own historical context and in relation to the literary culture of the time.   (Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 1 December 2012)

As such, it would be a strong contender for any academic library, of good use in a public library, and will work best when placed alongside the online Wiley–Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature, though this is not essential to get value from the set.   (Reference Reviews, 1 December 2012)

Summing Up: Recommended.  Lower–division undergraduates through graduate students.   ( Choice, 1 July 2012)