Exploring the imaginative habits of thought of early modern thinkers—including Shakespeare, Milton, Sidney, Bacon, Spenser, and Cavendish—Possible Knowledge enacts a history of ideas that centers literary studies and suggests that what we term a history of science might ultimately be a history of the imagination.
The Kinetic Text revisits the eccentric literary landscape that emerged in England in the roughly two hundred years after the rise of print in order to introduce a new theory of early modern poetics centered on the expressive potential of the material text.
Critical History and the Interpretation of Early Modern Texts
Andrew Mattison
Price: $65.00
ISBN: 9781512829860
Pub Date: October 2026
Format: Hardcover
240 Pages
Rethinking the relationship of current literary criticism to the discipline’s past, Reading the Literary Past presents an interpretive approach to literary criticism grounded in critical histories rather than methods, attentive to the idiosyncrasy of reading and the contingencies influencing it.
In Ancien Régime France, the discourse of society was usually referred to as bruit, or noise. Public Acoustics explores how writers manipulated this acoustic metaphor to theorize the political and social force of common talk, offering an alternative history of the public sphere that resonates with the noisy digital media environments of today.
Paper Intimacies in the Early Modern Lyric explores how everyday Renaissance practices of folding, sending, archiving, and arranging manuscript poetry informed how their authors, including John Donne and William Shakespeare, imagined possibilities for nearness and desire.
Carceral Institutions and Humanist Culture in Early Modern England
Matthew Ritger
Price: $65.00
ISBN: 9781512828993
Pub Date: April 2026
Format: Hardcover
288 Pages
Examining how the work of writers including More, Shakespeare, and Milton dealt with humanism’s entanglements with these new prisons, Houses of Correction constructs the first book-length literary history of some of early modern Europe’s most influential carceral institutions.
Women's Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare
Holly A. Crocker
Price: $34.95
ISBN: 9781512829679
Pub Date: February 2026
Format: Paperback
360 Pages
In The Matter of Virtue, Holly A. Crocker explores what happened to virtue when late medieval and early modern English poets thought about the material body not as a tool of an empowered male agent but rather, and as women more frequently experienced it, as something fragile and open, subject but also connected to others.
Sexuality, Humanism, and Ephemeral Performances in Fifteenth-Century Italy
Ralph J. Hexter
Price: $75.00
ISBN: 9781512828542
Pub Date: December 2025
Format: Hardcover
320 Pages
Through his excavation of two fifteenth-century Latin comedies about the entrapment of a priest who is eager for sexual activity with men—Janus the Priest and The False Hypocrite—Ralph Hexter shows how characters deployed coded language to navigate same-sex relationships. Includes the first published English translations of both plays.
