This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post‐canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and providing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the field.

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Catherine Bates is Research Professor at the University of Warwick. She has published five monographs on Renaissance poetry and poetics, including Masculinity, Gender and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric (2007), Masculinity and the Hunt: Wyatt to Spenser (2013)—winner of the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, 2015—and On Not Defending Poetry: Defence and Indefensibility in Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (2017). She is editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Epic (2010).

Kenneth Borris is Professor of English at McGill University, and serves on the Editorial Board of Spenser Studies. A former Canada Research Fellow and winner of the MacCaffrey Award, he has authored Visionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism (2017), Allegory and Epic (2000), and Spenser’s Poetics of Prophecy (1990). His four edited and co‐edited books include The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe (2007) and Same‐Sex Desire in the English Renaissance (2004).

Gordon Braden is Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Virginia. He is author of Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradtion (1985), The Idea of the Renaissance (1989; with William Kerrigan), and Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (1999), and co‐editor (with Robert Cummings and Stuart Gillespie) of the Renaissance volume of The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English (2010).

Andrea Brady is Professor of Poetry at Queen Mary University of London, where she runs the Centre for Poetry and the Archive of the Now (www.archiveofthenow.org). She is currently writing a book on poetry and constraint across several historical periods. Scholarly works include English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century (2006). Her books of poetry are Dompteuse (2014), Cut from the Rushes (2013), Mutability (2012), and Wildfire (2010).

Joseph Campana is a poet, arts critic, and scholar of Renaissance literature and author of The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (2012), The Book of Faces (2005), Natural Selections (2012), and co‐editor of Renaissance Posthumanism (2016). He received the Isabel MacCaffrey Essay Prize, the MLA’s Crompton‐Noll Award for LGB studies, and grants from the NEA and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He teaches at Rice University, where he is editor of Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900.

Patrick Cheney is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Penn State. With Catherine Bates, he is co‐editor of Sixteenth‐Century British Poetry, volume 4 in The Oxford History of Poetry in English, for which he serves as General Editor.

A. E. B. Coldiron, the Berry Chair in English Literature at the University of St Andrews, is author of Printers Without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance (2015) and other books and essays on late‐medieval and Renaissance literature, translation, poetics, and print culture. In 2014–15 she directed the Folger Institute’s Year‐Long Colloquium on Translation. She guest‐edited The Translator’s Voice, a special double issue of Philological Quarterly (2016), a collection of Colloquium participants’ research.

Barbara Correll teaches English Renaissance literature and culture at Cornell University. She is the author of The End of Conduct: Grobianus and the Renaissance Text of the Subject (1996) and co‐editor of Disgust in English Renaissance Literature (2016). She has published essays on Shakespeare, Donne, Marlowe, Spenser, Webster, Erasmus, and cinema.

Jonathan Crewe is the Leon Black Professor Emeritus of Shakespearean Studies at Dartmouth College. He has edited five Shakespeare plays and the narrative poems for the New Pelican Shakespeare. His extensive publications include three books and numerous articles on English Renaissance poetry and prose; he has also published on cultural memory, and on writing in South Africa.

Stephen B. Dobranski is Distinguished University Professor of English at Georgia State University. His publications include Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade (1999), Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (2005), A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton: “Samson Agonistes” (2009), and The Cambridge Introduction to Milton (2012). His most recent book is Milton’s Visual Imagination: Imagery in “Paradise Lost” (2015).

Jim Ellis, Professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary, is the author of Sexuality and Citizenship: Metamorphosis in Elizabethan Erotic Verse (2003) and Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations (2009). His more recent work concerns poetry and performativity in the early modern period, particularly in relation to the Renaissance pleasure garden and progress entertainments.

Lynn Enterline is Nancy Perot Mulford Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Her publications investigate the overlapping histories of rhetoric, affect, gender, and sexuality from the classical to the early modern periods. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (2012), The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (2000), and The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (1995).

Patricia Fumerton is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Director of UCSB’s online English Broadside Ballad Archive, and author of Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (2006) and Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (1991). She has just completed a book on moving media and tactical publics in English broadside ballads, 1500–1800.

Jonathan Gibson is Senior Lecturer in English at The Open University (UK). Earlier in his career he worked as a researcher on the Perdita Project on early modern women’s manuscript writings. His publications span many topics, including Ralegh, Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, translation, early modern letter‐writing, italic script, codicology, and Elizabethan fiction. His most recent book is Elizabeth I’s Foreign Correspondence (2014), co‐edited with Carlo M. Bajetta and Guillaume Coatalen.

Stephen Guy‐Bray is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He specializes in Renaissance poetry and queer theory. Forthcoming are essays on love and war in Renaissance sonnets, on Venus and Adonis, and on women and textual production. He is currently working on Renaissance inactivity.

Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He is the author of a number of studies of early modern literature, culture, and history, including Edmund Spenser: A Life (2012) and Shakespeare and Republicanism (2005). He is currently working on a study of lying in early modern culture and is general editor, with Joe Black, Jennifer Richards, and Cathy Shrank, of the Complete Works of Thomas Nashe, both forthcoming. He is chair of the Society for Renaissance Studies, a regular reviewer for the Irish Times and a visiting professor at the University of Granada.

Hannibal Hamlin is Professor of English at The Ohio State University, author of Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (2004) and The Bible in Shakespeare (2013), and co‐editor of The Sidney Psalter: The Psalms of Philip and Mary Sidney (2009) and The King James Bible after Four Hundred Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences (2010). He is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion as well as an anthology of Psalms for the MHRA Tudor & Stuart Translations.

Danijela Kambaskovic‐Schwartz is Research Associate, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion 1100–1800, formerly Assistant Professor, Shakespeare and Renaissance Studies, University of Western Australia. She was born in the former Yugoslavia, migrated to Australia in 1999, and writes in Serbian and English. She has published widely on Shakespeare, history of genres, social and religious history, history of love and courtship, early modern mental health, and religious doctrine and the history of the senses; she is an award‐winning poet.

William J. Kennedy is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities in the department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His publications include three books on European Renaissance poetry: Authorizing Petrarch (1994), The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France, and England (2003), and Petrarchism at Work: Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare (2016).

Gary Kuchar is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria. He is the author of Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England (2005), The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England (2008), and George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word: Poetry and Scripture in Seventeenth‐Century England (2017), and co‐editor of The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, Volume II (2015).

Seth Lerer is Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California at San Diego, where he served as Dean of Arts and Humanities from 2009 to 2014. He has published widely on medieval and early modern literature, children’s literature, the history of the English language, and the institutions of scholarship and criticism. His most recent book is Tradition: A Feeling for the Literary Past (2016).

David Loewenstein is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and the Humanities at Penn State‐University Park. He has published widely on Milton and on politics and religion in early modern English literature. His book Treacherous Faith: The Specter of Heresy in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (2013) examines the construction of heresy and heretics from More to Milton. With Thomas Corns, he is editing Paradise Lost for the Oxford University Press edition of The Complete Works of John Milton.

Joseph Loewenstein is the author of two books on Jonson and another on the history of intellectual property and the rise of “possessive authorship.” He has edited The Staple of News for the Cambridge Ben Jonson (2012) and is one of the editors of the Oxford Collected Works of Edmund Spenser. He currently directs the Humanities Digital Workshop and the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis.

Willy Maley is Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of A Spenser Chronology (1994), Salvaging Spenser (1997), and Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (2003). Edited collections include Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660 (1993), British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (2002), Shakespeare and Scotland (2004), Shakespeare and Wales (2010), This England, That Shakespeare (2010), and Celtic Shakespeare (2013).

Arthur F. Marotti is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Wayne State University and Director of its Emeritus Academy. He is the author of John Donne, Coterie Poet (1986), Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (1995), Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti‐Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (2005), and (with Steven W. May) Ink, Stink Bait, Revenge, and Queen Elizabeth: A Yorkshire Yeoman’s Household Book (2014).

Robert Matz is Professor of English and Senior Associate Dean in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at George Mason University. He is the author of Defending Literature in Early Modern England: Renaissance Literary Theory in Social Context (2000) and The World of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: An Introduction (2008), which was designated a Choice 2008 Outstanding Academic Title. His most recent book is an edition of two early modern marriage sermons.

Steven W. May is adjunct Professor of English at Emory University, Atlanta. His books include The Elizabethan Courtier Poets (1991), an edition of Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works (2004), Elizabethan Poetry: A Bibliography and First‐Line Index of English Verse, 1559–1603 (2004), and most recently (with Alan Bryson), Verse Libel in Renaissance England and Scotland (2016). His research interests center on English Renaissance manuscript culture, the Tudor court, and editing early modern documents.

Shannon Miller is a Professor in and Chair of the English and Comparative Literature Department at San José State University. She is the author of Engendering the Fall: John Milton and Seventeenth‐Century Women Writers (2008) and Invested with Meaning: The Raleigh Circle in the New World (1998), as well as numerous articles on women writers in the Renaissance and Restoration including Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Sidney, Mary Wroth, and Aphra Behn.

Femke Molekamp has held Leverhulme and AHRC early career fellowships at the University of Warwick, and more recently a Global Research Fellowship at Warwick’s Institute of Advanced Study. Her work explores the history of reading, women’s writing, and engagements with religion and emotion in early modern literature. She is the author of Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing (2013).

Susannah Brietz Monta is Glynn Family Honors Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Her books include Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (2009), Teaching Early Modern English Prose (2010, ed. with Margaret W. Ferguson), and A Fig for Fortune by Anthony Copley: A Catholic response to The Faerie Queene (2016). She edited Religion and Literature from 2008 to 2015 and is a co‐editor of Spenser Studies.

Catherine Nicholson is Associate Professor of English at Yale University. In addition to articles and essays on Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, and the early modern art of rhetoric, she is the author of Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance (2014). She is at work on a book about reading, reception history, and The Faerie Queene.

Michelle O’Callaghan is Professor of Early Modern Literature in the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading. She is the author of The ‘shepheards nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture, 1612–1625 (2000), The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (2007), and Thomas Middleton, Renaissance Dramatist (2009), and co‐editor of Verse Miscellanies Online, a digital edition of Elizabethan poetry anthologies.

Syrithe Pugh is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Aberdeen and works mainly on classical reception in sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century English poetry. Among her publications are various articles on Jonson, Herrick, and Fanshawe, and a monograph on the politics and allusive practices of the latter pair. She has also published extensively on Spenser: her latest monograph is Spenser and Virgil: The Pastoral Poems (2016).

Sarah C. E. Ross teaches English at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She is the author of Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth‐Century Britain (2015), Katherine Austen’s ‘Book M’: British Library, Additional Manuscript 4454 (2011), and numerous articles on early modern women, religious writing, and manuscript culture. She is the co‐editor, with Paul Salzman, of a volume of essays titled Editing Early Modern Women (2016).

Michael Schoenfeldt is the John Knott Professor of English at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (1991), Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (1999), and The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poetry (2010), and editor of the Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2006). He is currently editing John Donne in Context for Cambridge University Press, writing on a book entitled Reading Seventeenth‐Century Poetry for Blackwell, and researching pain and pleasure in early modern England.

Cathy Shrank is Professor of Tudor and Renaissance Literature at the University of Sheffield. She is author of Writing the Nation in Reformation England (2004) and co‐editor of the Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature (2009). She is co‐editor of Shakespeare’s Poems (Annotated English Poets, forthcoming) and general editor of the AHRC‐funded Collected Works of Thomas Nashe, in preparation for Oxford University Press. With a Major Leverhulme Research Fellowship, she is writing a monograph on dialogue.

Rosalind Smith is an Associate Professor in English at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She is the author of Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621: The Politics of Absence (2005), as well as articles and chapters on gender, genre, politics, and history in early modern women’s poetry. She is the lead researcher on a large, multi‐institutional project funded by the Australian Research Council on the production, transmission, and circulation of early modern women’s writing, and from that project has edited both the collection Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing (2014) as well as a digital archive of early modern women’s writing: http://hri.newcastle.edu.au/emwrn/da/index.php?content=digitalarchive.

Adam Smyth is Professor of English Literature and the History of the Book at Balliol College, Oxford University. His publications include Autobiography in Early Modern England (2010) and Material Texts in Early Modern England (2017). He writes regularly for the London Review of Books.

Chris Stamatakis, Lecturer in Renaissance Literature in the Department of English at University College London, is author of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting (2012) and articles on Gabriel Harvey, early Tudor literary criticism, and sixteenth‐century poetics. Works in progress include a monograph on the influence of Italian literature on sixteenth‐century English poetry; essays on the transmission of Petrarch in England; and an edition of Thomas Nashe’s Christs Teares ouer Ierusalem.

M. L. Stapleton is Chapman Distinguished Professor of English at Indiana University‐Purdue University, Fort Wayne. He is editor of Marlowe Studies: An Annual and The New Variorum Shakespeare Julius Caesar. His most recent book is Marlowe’s Ovid: the “Elegies” in the Marlowe Canon (2014).

Richard Strier, Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in English at the University of Chicago, is the author of Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry (1983), Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (1996), and The Unrepentant Renaissance from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (2011), which won the Warren‐Brooks Prize for Literary Criticism. He is co‐editor of Shakespeare and the Law, The Theatrical City, The Historical Renaissance, and other interdisciplinary collections.

Gordon Teskey, professor of English at Harvard University, is author of Allegory and Violence (1996), Delirious Milton (2006), The Poetry of John Milton (2015), and numerous essays on Spenser, including the major entry “Allegory” in The Spenser Encyclopedia. He is editor of the Norton Edition of Paradise Lost (2005; 2nd ed. forthcoming). His next book, Spenserian Moments, is in progress.

Douglas Trevor is Professor of English and Director of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (2004), the short story collection The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space (2005), and the novel Girls I Know (2013). He is currently completing a study of radical interpretations of charity in late medieval and early modern Europe.

Wendy Wall, Avalon Professor for the Humanities at Northwestern University, is author of The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (1993), Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (2002), and Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen (2015). Professor Wall has published articles on topics such as editorial theory, gender, early modern poetry, national identity, authorship, food studies, domesticity, theater, women’s writing, and Jell‐O.

Christopher Warley is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Reading Class through Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton (2014) and Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (2005). His current project is “Auerbach’s Renaissance: Literature, History, Criticism.”

Helen Wilcox is Professor of English at Bangor University. Her research interests lie in early modern devotional poetry, Shakespearian tragicomedy, early women’s writing, and the relationship between literature and music. Recent publications include The English Poems of George Herbert (2007), 1611: Authority, Gender and the Word in Early Modern England (2014), and (with Andrew Hiscock) The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion (2017).

Jessica Wolfe is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and director of UNC’s program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She is the author of Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (2004) and Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes (2015), and is currently editing Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica​ for the forthcoming Complete Works of Thomas Browne (Oxford).

This book aims to do two things. The first is to situate its readers from the outset amid current debates that are shaping the discipline and to position them at the forefront of new directions in which contemporary work on Renaissance poetry is taking forward our understanding of the early modern period and of poetics more generally. Major developments in the last 20 years or so have opened up whole new areas of study (great projects of archival recovery, for example, which have restored the centrality of manuscript culture to the period) and introduced fresh topics of inquiry, many of which—concerning technology or the environment, for example—show the issues of today to have been just as live in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Areas formerly neglected are being brought into the light (the current project to archive the “street” poetry of ballads and broadsides is one example). Positions formerly established are being tested and reinvigorated (the identity of a distinctly “Protestant” poetics, for example, or the supposed antipathy between historicist and formalist approaches to poetry). Theoretical approaches long familiar are being self‐critiqued and stretched (as feminism and queer studies provide an impetus to renewed investigations into early modern masculinity, or psychoanalysis to questions of performance and embodiment, or Marxism to the so‐called economic criticism). And new—often interdisciplinary—areas of collective interest and excitement have emerged (such as the history of the emotions, chorography and the poetics of place, “archipelagic” as opposed to national identities, materiality and the world of objects). The aim of this book is to capture this energy and to provide readers with a snapshot of the field in its early twenty‐first century articulation.

The second aim of the book is to present a picture of Renaissance poetry and poetics that remains attuned to the period’s own literary categories and structures of thought and that, even allowing for the changes of half a millennium or more, a reader of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries would not find wholly alien or strange. Many of the terms with which we identify the most basic poetic genres or types—words such as ballad, elegy, epic, epigram, georgic, lyric, ode, pastoral, satire, or sonnet—entered the language for the first time in the sixteenth century (or for the first time in a distinctly literary sense). This was the period in which the idea of English poetry as an intellectual category—with its own linguistic, formal, and generic boundaries—began to emerge in its own right, the history, traditions, and possibilities of which came to be shaped and scoped by a host of figures (Gascoigne, Lodge, Sidney, Spenser, Harvey, Puttenham, Webbe, Carew, Campion, Daniel, Drayton, Chapman, Jonson), most of them poets themselves. It was their theories and practice that forged and mapped a poetic domain that—however open to subsequent adaptation, extension, revision, and subversion—we have largely inherited today. Much of the impetus for their projects came from the new: the impact of humanist scholarship, the unprecedented availability of new or previously unknown texts, and their rapid absorption into the language and culture by means of translation and imitation. But continuities with the past were no less important. Other familiar literary terms (epistle or complaint, for example) derived from Chaucer, a figure whom—as they “walk so stumblingly after him” (Sidney) and “follow here the footing of thy feete” (Spenser)—the poets of this period had no doubt was the great progenitor of English poetry. In capturing that period’s unique spirit of inquiry and definition, its synthesis of past and present in making sense of a new and emerging field, this book aims to offer an Art of English Poesy for our own times.

The volume thus seeks to combine a deep respect for and sensitivity toward the ways in which poets of the period understood and fashioned a distinctively English poetry with an engagement with some of the debates and departures that are currently animating the discipline. The last of the book’s three sections consists of a series of discrete essays that focus on some of these key debates, but the questions driving them are not, as a result, cordoned off as if in a designated area.

Part I provides a contextual framework designed to explain the many and complex factors that made possible the formation of an “English poesie” in the period. The emphasis throughout this section is on breaking down such hegemonic entities as the “Renaissance” or “Reformation” in order to recover as nearly as possible the mixture and mess of actual lived experience, with all its compromises, contingencies, and irrationalities. As with the volume as a whole, this section aligns itself with those revisionist approaches that seek to set the sudden breaks, traumas, and decisive turns that history undeniably delivers alongside the persistence of deep and pervasive continuities, however contradictory and illogical the results. A number of subsections organize these essays around a series of key headings that aim to negotiate such scenes of complexity. “Transitions and Translations,” for example, sets the unmistakable innovations of the “new learning” against the pervasive influence of Chaucer, considers ways in which translation “naturalized” (or otherwise) classical and continental models, and gauges the effects of a humanist pedagogy that, as Lynn Enterline has recently argued, included its recipients’ taste for reproducing Ovidian elegy, epyllion, or female complaint—rather than more culturally approved forms such as epic—among its unintended consequences. “Religions and Reformations” fields the sheer welter of competing doctrines that are now accepted as forming the experience of the English Reformation. What used to be branded as a “Protestant” poetics is increasingly being differentiated into inflections of a Lutheran or Calvinist cast, or modified by the ongoing sacramental or visionary poetics of what one critic has recently termed the “Catholic Imaginary.” As Donne suggested, “To adore, or scorn an image, or protest” presented alternatives that contemporaries might accept, reject, or hold in ingenious or uneasy combination. Essays under the next heading, “Authorships and Authorities,” consider the impact that the thoroughly mixed picture of manuscript and print transmission had on the contemporary evaluation of poetry in the period. They ask what kinds of poetic “status” these different forms of material record were taken to signify, whether the differences between them were exaggerated or downplayed (as in printed miscellanies, for example), for what reasons, and with what success. Questions of self‐presentation—the stigmas or otherwise of being a “poet in print”—mutate naturally into questions of authorship and the authority, if any, that could be assumed by or accorded to the writer of poetry, be it as originator or translator or both (compositions by female hands posing a distinctive set of variations on this theme). The last subsection, “Defenses and Definitions,” assesses the period’s own answers to some of these questions in its many justifications and apologia (not all of them self‐consistent) and, by looking in particular at its preoccupation with matters of definition and form—what could be said to constitute English verse, rhyme, and given forms and genres (inherited or hybrid)—it sets the scene for Part II.

The second and central section of the volume offers a comprehensive analysis of non‐dramatic poetry in English between Wyatt and Milton and is organized along the broadly generic lines with which the period classified its poetic productions. The first subsection therefore focuses on epic, considered the master of all poetic forms in the Renaissance on account of its literary credentials, inclusiveness, and ambition. Given the scope of the great literary epics of the English Renaissance, individual essays are devoted to specific texts, The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, of course, but also Lucy Hutchinson’s recently edited Order and Disorder. The last essay in this subsection looks at the mini‐epic or epyllion—the racy narrative poems of Lodge, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and so forth—which, in identifying with Ovid rather than Virgil, exemplify the complexity of period’s response to its classical inheritance: as receptive to contending, alternative, “counter” forms as to approved or official ones. The following subsection is devoted to lyric and, in much the same way, considers the “songs and sonnets” tradition of the period as existing from the very outset in self‐conscious relation with an inherited master discourse, in this case Petrarch’s. Recent descriptions of the lyric output of the period as, variously, “anti‐,” counter‐,” pseudo‐,” or “post‐” Petrarchan testify to this complex mesh of imitation and contention, proximity and divergence, although such self‐contradiction is as prevalent in the master discourse as in its counter forms and thus, arguably, endemic to lyric itself. An opening essay that sets this scene gives way to individual essays on specific authors ranging from Wyatt and Surrey through to the Cavalier poets of the 1630s and 1640s. Subsequent subsections go on to consider a whole range of literary genres and forms, including the complaint, various epistolary and dialogic forms, the funeral elegy, pastoral, verse satire, popular poetry, and religious poetry (including the tradition of female devotional poetry, and Psalm translations). With a view to combining coverage with depth, essays focus either on individual works or authors or on more largely defined categories as appropriate. Within each subsection, topics are arranged more or less chronologically, so that readers can trace the etiologies, developments, and deviations within a particular form in order to garner a deeper understanding of both individual works and the form as a whole. At the same time, they can learn about individual authors across a range of different essays—reading about Spenser under the categories of epic, lyric, and pastoral, for example—gaining, through a diversity of approaches, a richer understanding of the poetry in both its Renaissance and contemporary contexts.

Thanks must in the first instance go to the many contributors to this volume, without whose individual, joint, and collective efforts this project would never have come into being. I am grateful to all of them for their receptiveness to the idea of a rather extensive collection of essays devoted to English Renaissance poetry, and their willingness to participate in what has of necessity been a long process of commissioning, thinking, writing, gathering, and editing. The present volume is the result of work on many fronts. I would also like to thank a number of colleagues formerly of Wiley Blackwell, especially Emma Bennett for her initial approach as commissioning editor, and Deirdre Ilkson for maintaining support while Emma was away on maternity leave. Bridget Jennings was extraordinarily helpful at the contracting stage, and Ben Thatcher was equally efficient in dealing with permissions issues. More recently, it has also been a pleasure to work with Manish Luthra on the final stages of preparation.