In coincide with the Sixteenth Century Society’s annual conference, scheduled to take place in Toronto this October, we’ve curated a reading list featuring new and bestselling books that explore various topics in politics, culture, literature, and society in Early Modern Britain. The list also highlights titles from some of our most prestigious series, including The Revels Plays and Studies in Early Modern European History.
Although MUP won’t be attending the Sixteenth Century Society’s annual conference this year, delegates can still browse our early modern books here and purchase books with a special 30% conference discount, using code EVENT30 at checkout. Not attending either? You can still get 30% off titles too!
Sexual politics in revolutionary England
This book explores the sudden emergence of graphic sex-talk in English print culture during the events of the English Revolution (1640-60) and argues for the long-term significance of that development for the political culture of late Stuart England and beyond.
Reformed identity and conformity in England, 1559-1714
This volume is the first collection of essays to focus specifically on how Reformed theology and ecclesiology related to one of the most consequential issues between the Elizabethan Settlement (1559) and the Hanoverian Succession (1714), namely conformity to the Church of England.
This book offers a new study of Hobbes's reception among seventeenth- and eighteenth- century deists and freethinkers, showing how influential Hobbes was for anticlerical thinking through a close analysis of the works of a large number of writers, including Charles Blount, John Toland, Antony Collins, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Morgan, and many others.
London presbyterians and the British revolutions, 1638-64
London presbyterians and the British revolutions is a case study in the politics of metropolitan religion and presbyterianism in the middle decades of the seventeenth-century.
London's mobilisation proved crucial to parliament's success in the English Civil War. Through a rigorous investigation of archival and print sources, this book shows how and why the City aligned its interests with parliament and how, ultimately, this alignment led to the establishment of an army that would defeat the king of England.
This book examines John Donne's theory of royal absolutism within a tradition of conformist thought.It argues that Donne displaced the conventional opposition between Catholics and Protestants and instead divided English subjects into two political categories: those who obey the law and those who break it.
This book examines the preaching and printing of sermons by royalists during the English Revolution. It shows how and why preaching became an indispensable tool for those who sought to resist the seismic changes in Church and state that England experienced between 1640 and 1662.
Intelligence and espionage in the English Republic c. 1600-60
This book provides a rich survey of the early-modern 'secret state', intelligence gathering espionage, and the work of spies in the British late sixteenth to mid-seventeenth-centuries.
Ideas of poverty in the Age of Enlightenment
This collection of essays examines the ways in which poverty was conceptualised in the social, political, and religious discourses of eighteenth-century Europe and North America.
This book establishes the crucial significance of the politics of enmity and pacification in the early modern Kingdom of Naples.
This volume explores the ideas, institutions, and experiences that shaped Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anabaptist charity in early modern Europe.
This book presents a new interpretation of the co-monarchy of Mary I and Philip II. It reclaims Mary as a great Catholic queen and fleshes out Philip's contributions as king, exposing the sectarian historiography that has cast their reign in a negative light. An important corrective for the history of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain.
Duellists, drunks and remorseful murderers populate Trials of the self, which highlights the criminal court as a space for publicising and negotiating models of the self. Using criminal trial records, the book argues that inner depth became increasingly important around 1800, not only for elites, but also for common people.
A scholarly, modern-spelling critical edition of John Ford's 1633 play, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore.
This is the first fully annotated, single-volume critical edition of Fletcher, Massinger, and Field's Thierry and Theodoret, with an introduction that reassesses sources (including Shakespeare) and discusses the authorship and reception of this captivating play, pointing the way for future study, especially of a historical or gender-based nature.
The Family of Love is a rumbustious citizen comedy. Delivering farcical twists on familiar dramatic situations, it offers a glimpse of spiritual freedom in paraperopandemical times.
Love's Cure, or The Martial Maid
A fully annotated critical edition of John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's ground-breaking comedy Love's Cure, or The Martial Maid (1615), a fascinating exploration of the journey of two transgender characters in an adverse heteronormative society. This Revels Plays edition offers a modernised text and a full critical commentary.
Hyde Park is a striking Caroline example of London city comedy. This critical edition unpicks its valuable insights into the shifting nature of the genre and early modern conceptions of London and courtship.
The first single-text scholarly edition in English. An indispensable resource for scholars, students, and theatre practitioners. Edited by Ruth Lunney.
The first ever critical edition of Thomas Heywood's 1626 play, Dick of Devonshire, presented for the first time with an anthology of its source material.
Dr Faustus: The A- and B- texts (1604, 1616)
Dr. Faustus is one of the jewels of early modern English drama, and is still widely performed today. Interestingly, the play has come down to the contemporary audience in two distinct versions that...
Masques of difference' presents an annotated edition of four seventeenth-century entertainments written by Ben Jonson, which reflect the royal court's self-representation as moral and just, in contrast to stylised images of chaotically (and exotically) 'othered' groups: Africans, the Irish, witches, and the homoeroticised figure of the Gypsy.
Women Beware Women by Thomas Middleton
Women Beware Women is among the most powerful and adroitly-plotted of Jacobean tragedies. Written by Thomas Middleton, a later contemporary of Shakespeare, the play deals with topics of enduring fascination such as sexual and financial greed, the sexual exploitation of women by a manipulative older woman and murderous revenge.
Thomas Nashe and literary performance
Thomas Nashe is typically regarded as an urban author and a University wit, but his writings are inflected and shaped by regional travel, 'non-literary', non-elite works, and oral culture. The essays in this collection address Nashe's use of the past, his engagement with the Elizabethan present, and his textual legacy.
Blending theatre history and sensory studies this book recaptures the sound of early modern drama, acknowledging its intangibility while attempting to both describe those sounds heard on the stage and to try and identify those sound's effects on the playgoers.
Three sixteenth-century dietaries
Three sixteenth century dietaries makes a significant contribution to our understanding of early modern culture. It provides the first modern edition of three of the most important dietaries of the time - with the texts offering advice on the best ways to maintain well-being.
Examines Fletcher's Roman plays and identifies disorientation as the unifying principle of his portrayal of imperial Rome. The book sheds new light on his intellectual life by arguing that his dramatization of Rome exudes a sense of scepticism over the authority of Roman models resulting from his irreverent approach to the classics.
This edition for the first time makes available in print a semi-diplomatic edition of William Percy's The Aphrodysial, as preserved in Huntington Library MS HM4. The accompanying introduction provides an account of Percy and his manuscript, and discusses the layers of authorial revisions and extensive stage directions found in the play.
Collections XVIII brings together the earliest texts of the first and last pre-Civil War plays to deal with Boccaccio's tragic story of the lovers, Gismond and Guiscardo: the Hargrave MS of Inner Temple tragedy, Gismond of Salern (1568), and the first ever printed edition of the 1620s manuscript play, Glausamond and Fidelia.
A new scholarly edition of Marlowe's most famous play which provides a facsimile of the 1616 text from the only surviving copy, and an introductory discussion of authorship, staging revisions and publication. The printer is identified for the first time.
A new scholarly edition of Marlowe's most famous play which provides a facsimile of the 1604 text from the only surviving copy, and a substantial introductory survey of sources, theatrical provenance and staging, printing and publication.
The Twice Chang'd Friar is a manuscript comedy based on a tale from Boccaccio's Decameron. Thought to be written by amateur playwright John Newdigate III, the play tells the story of friar Albert and his seduction of a Venetian merchant's wife by posing as the God Cupid. When discovered, Albert seeks to escape disguised under a bear's skin.