Medieval and Renaissance Literature
The Medieval and Renaissance period stretches across a thousand years from the fifth century right through to the late fifteenth century. The literature of this period reflects a diverse range of cultural, religious, and aesthetic attitudes and practices. The Renaissance period is characterised by the development of humanist philosophies and recoveries of classical scientific and artistic works. Our authors cover a diverse range of subjects including mysticism, famine in India, cultures of lordship, hermits, and early modern philosophy.
This range of topics reflects not just the English and Creative Writing department’s strengths in Medieval and Renaissance studies, but Exeter’s status as an important centre during this period, with Exeter Cathedral containing one of the largest medieval spaces in Europe.
Works on Medieval and Renaissance literature by our departmental staff
Francis Lodwick: On Language, Theology, and Utopia
Francis Lodwick FRS (1619-94) was a prosperous merchant, bibliophile, writer, thinker, and member of the Royal Society. He wrote extensively on language, religion, and experimental philosophy, most of it too controversial to be safely published during his lifetime. This edition includes the first publication of his unorthodox religious works alongside groundbreaking writings on language.
Hermits and anchorites in England, 1200-1550
This source book offers a comprehensive treatment of solitary religious lives in England in the late Middle Ages. It covers both enclosed recluses (anchorites) and free-wandering hermits, and explores the relationship between them. Although there has been a recent surge of interest in the solitary vocations, especially anchorites, this has focused almost exclusively on a small number of examples.
The field is in need of reinvigoration, and this book provides it. Featuring translated extracts from a wide range of Latin, Middle English and Old French sources, as well as a scholarly introduction and commentary from one of the foremost experts in the field, Hermits and anchorites in England is an invaluable resource for students and lecturers alike.
Lordship and Literature
A ground-breaking approach to the politics of late medieval texts, Lordship and Literature investigates the importance of the great household to late fourteenth-century English culture and society. A sustained new reading of John Gower's major English poem, Confessio Amantis, shows how deeply the great household informed the way Gower and his contemporaries imagined their world.
Exploring royal government and gentry ambitions, this thoroughly interdisciplinary book views the period's politics and literature in terms of a household-based economy of power.
The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England
Mystical writing flourished between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries across Europe and in England, and had a wide influence on religion and spirituality. This volume examines a range of topics within the field. The five "Middle English Mystics" (Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe) receive renewed attention, with significant new insights generated by fresh theoretical approaches.
In addition, there are studies of the relationships between continental and English mystical authors, introductions to some less well-known writers in the tradition (such as the Monk of Farne), and explorations around the fringes of the mystical canon, including Middle English translations of Boethius, Lollard spirituality, and the Syon brother Richard Whytford's writings for a sixteenth-century "mixed life" audience.
Poly-Olbion: New Perspectives
Poly-Olbion (1612-1622), the collaborative work of the poet Michael Drayton, the legal scholar John Selden, and the engraver William Hole, ranks among the most remarkable literary productions of early modern England, and arguably among the most important.
An ambitious and idiosyncratic survey of the history, topography, and ecology of England and Wales - ranging in its preoccupations from the supernatural conception of Merlin to the curious habits of beavers, and from celebrations of martial glory to laments over the diminishment of woodlands - the book seems determined to pack all of national and natural history between its covers.
Famine Tales: A Graphic Anthology
Famine Tales: A Graphic Anthology brings to light a selection of stories of famine from both India and Britain, presented through the work of two teams of artists. It offers two versions of each famine tale – one retold by patachitrakars from the Naya village, and another by modern comic artists. The NaNaya artists from Midnapore, West Bengal, tell the tales in their traditional style of scroll painting, their scrolls based on original narrative poems composed by the legendary patachitrakar, the late Dukhushyam Chitrakar. A second team of artists adapted and illustrated the same historical narratives of famine in the form of comics.
Aerial Environments on the Early Modern Stage
During the early days of the professional English theatre, dramatists including Dekker, Greene, Heywood, Jonson, Marlowe, Middleton, and Shakespeare wrote for playhouses that, though enclosed by surrounding walls, remained open to the ambient air and the sky above. The drama written for performance at these open-air venues drew attention to and reflected on its own relationship to the space of the air.
At a time when theories of the imagination emphasized dramatic performance’s reliance upon and implication in the air from and through which its staged fictions were presented and received, plays written for performance at open-air venues frequently draw attention to the nature and significance of that elemental relationship. This book considers the various ways in which the air is brought into presence within early modern drama, analysing around a hundred works that were performed at the London open-air playhouses between 1576 and 1609 with reference to their attention to theatrical atmospheres and aerial encounters.
I explore how the various theatrical effects and staging strategies used by these authors and those presenting their plays could additionally or alternatively foregrounded early modern drama’s relationship to and impact on the actual playhouse air. In considering open-air drama’s pervasive and ongoing attention to aerial imagery, actions, and representational strategies, I suggest that these playwrights and the companies they wrote for developed a dramaturgical awareness that extended from the earth to encompass and make explicit the space of air.
Inventor of Britain: The Work and Legacies of Humphrey Llwyd
The work of the map-maker and historian Humphrey Llwyd (1527–68) were a crucial contribution to a new vision of Britain in the early modern period. It lies close to the roots of the emerging ideology of British Empire, and Llwyd’s influence is to be found in the works of major English poets such as Edmund Spenser and Michael Drayton. His history of medieval Wales, Cronica Walliae, shaped Welsh historical traditions for centuries to come.
Llwyd is also the earliest extant source for the legend of Prince Madoc, whose twelfth-century voyage to America shaped British fantasies of the New World from the reign of Elizabeth to the nineteenth century. This is the first book-length study of Llwyd’s works, influence and intellectual milieu, and contributions from scholars in the fields of history, geography and literary studies cover the range of Llwyd’s achievement as a cartographer, historian and chorographer of Wales and Britain.
Elizabethan Diplomacy and Epistolary Culture
A new account of Elizabethan diplomacy with an original archival foundation, this book examines the world of letters underlying diplomacy and political administration by exploring a material text never before studied in its own right: the diplomatic letter-book.
Author Elizabeth R. Williamson argues that a new focus on the central activity of information gathering allows us to situate diplomacy in its natural context as one of several intertwined areas of crown service, and as one of the several sites of production of political information under Elizabeth I.
Extending this discussion to our own conditions of access, a new parallel is drawn across two ages of information obsession as Williamson argues that the digital has a natural place in this textual history that we can no longer ignore.