Each volume in the Critical Theory Handbooks series features a collection of newly‐commissioned essays exploring the use of contemporary critical theory in the study of a given period, and the ways in which the period serves as a site for interrogating and reframing the practices of modern scholars and theorists. The volumes are organized around a set of key terms that demonstrate the engagement by literary scholars with current critical trends, and aim to increase the visibility of theoretically‐oriented and ‐informed work in literary studies, both within the discipline and to students and scholars in other areas.

Published:

A Handbook of Romanticism Studies
Edited by Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wright

A Handbook of Anglo‐Saxon Studies
Edited by Jacqueline Stodnick and Renée R. Trilling

A Handbook of Middle English Studies
Edited by Marion Turner

A Handbook of Modernism Studies
Edited by Jean‐Michel Rabaté

A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies
Edited by John Lee

Many people have helped in the production of this book. Thanks go first to the contributors for their chapters: the editing of the Handbook was, among other things, an illuminating pleasure. Thanks go next to my and the contributors’ students – this is a book that has been shaped by our interactions with them. Thanks are also owed to colleagues, especially George Donaldson and Tim Kendall, and to the several teams at Wiley‐Blackwell who oversaw the project: in editing Emma Bennett, who got things going, and then Deirdre Ilkson, Rebecca Harkin, and Ben Thatcher; in production Luthra Manish and Carol Thomas; and in marketing Emily Corkhill. Final thanks are due to the University of Bristol.

Judith H. Anderson is Chancellor’s Professor of English Emeritus at Indiana University. She has published five books, most recently Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor‐Stuart England (2005) and Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton (2008), which received the MacCaffrey Award of the International Spenser Society. She has also co‐edited five books. Her forthcoming book project is titled Issues of Analogy, Light, and Death: Spenser, Kepler, Donne, and Milton.

David J. Baker is Peter G. Phialas Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of On Demand: Writing for the Market in Early Modern England (2010) and Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell and the Question of Britain (1997). With Willy Maley, he is the co‐editor or British Identity and English Renaissance Literature (2002).

Catherine Bates is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her books include The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (1992), Play in a Godless World: The Theory and Practice of Play in Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Freud (1999), Masculinity, Gender and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric (2007), and Masculinity and the Hunt: Wyatt to Spenser (2013). She is currently writing a book on Sidney’s Defence of Poesy.

Bruce Boehrer is Bertram H. Davis Professor of English at Florida State University. His most recent book, Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama, was published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press.

James M. Bromley is an associate professor of English at Miami University. He is the author of Intimacy and Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2012) and the co‐editor of Sex before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England (Minnesota, 2013).

Joshua Eckhardt is an associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University; the author of Manuscript Verse Collectors and the Politics of Anti‐Courtly Love Poetry (2009); a co‐editor, with Daniel Starza Smith, of Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England (2014); and a founding editor of British Virginia, digital publisher of colonial documents.

Jean E. Feerick teaches in the Department of English at John Carroll University. She is the author of Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance (2010) and co‐editor, with Vin Nardizzi, of The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (2012). Her essays have appeared in Shakespeare Studies, Early Modern Literary Studies, English Literary Renaissance, Renaissance Drama, and South Central Review. She is currently at work investigating the elemental underpinnings of early modern identity.

Jane Griffiths is a Fellow and Tutor in English at Wadham College, and an associate professor of English at the University of Oxford. She has published widely on the poetry and drama of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; her two monographs, John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak (2006) and Diverting Authorities: Experimental Glossing Practices in Manuscript and Print (2014) are both published by Oxford University Press.

John Lee is a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol. His publications in the Renaissance and Early‐Modern area include Edmund Spenser: Shorter Poems (1998), Shakespeare's "Hamlet" and the Controversies of Self (2000), and a history of Hamlet criticism in Hamlet: A Critical Reader (2016).

Mary Ann Lund is Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at the School of English, University of Leicester. She is the author of Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ (2010) and is editor of Vol. 12 of The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne. She has written articles on Robert Burton, Thomas Browne, John Donne, sermons, and Richard III.

Julia Reinhard Lupton is Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, where she has taught since 1989. She is the author or co‐author of four books on Shakespeare, including Citizen‐Saints (2005), Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (2011) and Political Theology (2014). She is a Guggenheim Fellow (2013) and a Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America (2013–2016).

Willy Maley is Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Glasgow. His recent work includes Shakespeare and Wales: From the Marches to the Assembly, co‐edited with Philip Schwyzer (2010), This England, That Shakespeare, co‐edited with Margaret Tudeau‐Clayton (2010), and Celtic Shakespeare: The Bard and the Borderers, co‐edited with Rory Loughnane (2013). In 2011 he co‐edited with Thomas Herron a special double issue of the Sidney Journal, Sir Henry Sidney in Ireland and Wales (29.1–2).

Howard Marchitello is Professor of English and Associate Dean for Research and the Graduate School at Rutgers University–Camden. He has co‐edited (with Evelyn Tribble) The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science, and is the General Editor of the Palgrave Literature and Science Handbooks series. He is author of the book The Machine in the Text: Science and Literature in the Age of Shakespeare & Galileo (2011).

Ian Munro is Associate Professor of Drama at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London: The City and Its Double (2005) and many articles on early modern theater.

Anne M. Myers is an associate professor of English at the University of Missouri, where she teaches courses in Shakespeare, Milton, and Renaissance drama and poetry. Her first book Literature and Architecture in Early Modern England was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2013.

Patricia Phillippy is Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University, London. She is the author of three monographs and numerous articles on English and Comparative literature and culture in the early modern period, particularly focused on gender and women’s writing. She has edited the writings of Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell (1540–1609) and is currently editing A History of Early Modern Women’s Writing for Cambridge University Press.

Joanna Picciotto is Associate Professor of English at University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (2010) and a number of essays on the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is currently working on a book about natural theology in the period.

Nicholas Popper is associate professor of history at the College of William and Mary. He is the author of Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (2012). He works on early modern intellectual history, history of science, political practice, and the history of the book. His current project examines how the proliferation of archives and manuscript collecting transformed politics and epistemology in early modern Britain.

Benedict S. Robinson is the author of Islam and Early Modern English Literature, as well as of essays that have appeared in English Literary History, Shakespeare Quarterly, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and elsewhere. He is currently completing a book‐manuscript tentatively titled Inventing Emotion in Shakespeare’s England.

Timothy Rosendale is an associate professor of English at Southern Methodist University, where he teaches and writes about early modern literature, history, and religion. He is the author of Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England (2007) and various articles, and is currently completing a book about theological problems of agency.

Simon Ryle teaches literature and film at the University of Split, Croatia. His monograph, Shakespeare, Cinema and Desire: Adaptation and Other Futures of Shakespeare’s Language was published in 2014 by Palgrave Macmillan.

David Schalkwyk is currently Academic Director of Global Shakespeare, a joint venture between Queen Mary and the University of Warwick. He was formerly Director of Research at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC and editor of the Shakespeare Quarterly. His books include Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (2002), Literature and the Touch of the Real (2004), Shakespeare, Love and Service (2008) and Hamlet’s Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare (2013).

Lauren Shohet is Luckow Family Professor of English at Villanova University (USA). She is the author of Reading Masques: The English Masque and Public Culture in the Seventeenth Century, and numerous articles on early‐modern poetry, drama, and adaptation.

William W.E. Slights, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan, is the author of Ben Jonson and the Art of Secrecy (1994), Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books (2001), and The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare (2008). He has taught Renaissance literature at New York University and the universities of Wisconsin‐Madison, Saskatchewan, and Warsaw. He lives in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Helen Smith is Director of the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies and Reader in Renaissance Literature at the University of York. She is author of Grossly Material Things: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (2012), and co‐editor of Renaissance Paratexts (2011), Conversions: Gender and Religious Change in Early Modern Europe (2015), and The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in England, c. 1530–1700 (2015).

Mary E. Trull is an associate professor of English at St. Olaf College. Her monograph, Performing Privacy and Gender in Early Modern Literature (2013), explores performative and gendered aspects of the early modern concept of privacy in drama, poetry, prose fiction, and household documents. She is currently developing a book manuscript exploring the impact of Lucretius and Epicurean physics on women writers of the seventeenth century, including Lucy Hutchinson, Aphra Behn, and Margaret Cavendish.

Angus Vine is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of Stirling. His research interests include antiquarianism, chorography, the works of Francis Bacon, manuscript culture and the history of the book. He is the author of In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England (2010), and is currently writing a book on notebooks and the organization of knowledge. He is also co‐editing Volume III of The Oxford Francis Bacon, and Volume IV of The Oxford Traherne.

Julian Yates teaches English and Material Culture studies at University of Delaware. He is the author of some 30 essays on Renaissance literature and culture as well as two books: Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (2003), finalist for the MLA Best First Book Prize; and What’s The Worst Thing You Can Do To Shakespeare? (2013), written with Richard Burt.