Examining dozens of plays depicting common tropes of pagan ritual—magical conjurations, oracular prophecies, barbaric triumphal parades, and group suicides—Making Pagans shows how early modern theatrical practice helped construct the category of “pagan” as a tool of European self-definition and colonial ambition.

Four years before the publication of the First Folio, a group of London printers and booksellers attempted to produce a "collected works" of William Shakespeare as a series of quarto pamphlets. Zachary Lesser examines more than three hundred surviving copies of these "Pavier Quartos," revealing they are far more mysterious than we thought.

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.

Katherine Eggert explores the crumbling state of humanistic learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the benefits of relying on alchemy despite its recognized flaws.

In The Book of Books, Thomas Fulton charts the process of recovery, interpretation, and reuse of scripture in early modern English literary culture, exploring the uses of the Bible as a combination of text and paratext that revolved around sites of social controversy and was continually transformed for political purposes.

In Making the Miscellany Megan Heffernan charts the development of printed poetry in early modern England, showing how material practices of organization were dynamic responses to poetic form and content. Her book argues for a literary history that is sensitive to the conditions of making and using early printed books.

Early Modern Histories of Time examines how chronological modes intrinsic to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shaped the thought-worlds of those living during this time and the ways in which these temporally indigenous models can productively influence our own working concepts of historical period.

In Subjects of Advice, Ivan Lupić considers a variety of Renaissance dramatic texts, from the canonical plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare to the anonymous moral interludes and learned humanist drama, in an effort to uncover and define the formative dialogue between dramatic art and the culture of counsel in the early modern period.

Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling explores the mutually generative relationship between post-Reformation religious life and London's commercial theaters. By engaging with dramatic texts and performance practices, Musa Gurnis demonstrates how early modern theater drew mixed-faith playgoers into new relations with a complex religious culture.

In The Poet and the Antiquaries, Megan L. Cook explores how early modern historians, lexicographers, religious polemicists, and other readers with extra-literary interests in the English past made Chaucer a figure of lasting cultural significance.