Download or read book Sir Stephen Powle of Court and Country written by Virginia F. Stern and published by Susquehanna University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This reconstruction of Sir Stephen Powle's life (1553?-1630) is based on some nine hundred letters, diaries, and legal documents that he recorded, and it concludes with a summary of his extensive manuscripts. Making this previously unexplored primary source material lucidly and chronologically available within a narrative of Powle's life should prove of unique importance to scholars and yet of interest to the general reader as well, for Powle has given color and illuminating detail to an eventful era. Being more introspective than most of his contemporaries, he enables a modern reader to understand some of the motivating feelings of the period. Powle tells us first of his education at Oxford and at the Middle Temple of his struggles to achieve independence from an autocratic and parsimonious father, and of a young man's subsequent three years of travel on the Continent and in Scotland. After this, he became a government agent: first for Lord Treasurer Burghley in Heidelberg at the court of Duke John Casimir and later under the aegis of Sir Francis Walsingham in Venice and northern Italy during the eighteen months preceding the Spanish Armada's "Enterprise of England." During this period Powle sent back biweekly newsletters of considerable political and historical interest, which proved of value to Burghley and Walsingham in London. Upon Powle's return to London in 1588 he was knighted, and he made use of his legal education by serving as Clerk of the Crown in Chancery during the last eventful years of Elizabeth's reign and as one of the Six Clerks of Chancery during the early Jacobean period. His marginal comments on some of the important documents (which it was his function to record) provide new sidelights on the government's handling of the Essex Rebellion. Powle's adored first wife died in childbirth in 1590, but after a period of mourning from which he gradually recovered he married the heiress Margaret Turner Smith in 1593 and retired to their country estate in Essex, where he became a conscientious and hardworking Justice of the Peace. In 1608 he was elected to the Council of the Virginia Company of London, which gave paternal protection to the new young American settlements, and Powle served faithfully until the company's demise in the mid 1620s. He died in 1630 at the age of about seventy-seven, leaving for future generations the important legacy of his papers. Among these are lively, hitherto unprinted letters to and from his friend John Chamberlain and many exchanges of memoranda and comments with Sir Walter Raleigh, Powle's roommate at the Middle Temple and his firm friend thereafter. There are also letters of medical advice from his physician and literary crony Thomas Lodge, as well as unprinted brief verses by the poet Nicholas Breton, who so aptly dedicated his 1618 dialogue, The Court and Country, to Sir Stephen Powle.

Download or read book John Nichols s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth Volume II written by John Nichols and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 857 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second volume in this annotated collection of texts relating to the 'progresses' of Queen Elizabeth I around England includes accounts of dramatic performances, orations, and poems, and a wealth of supplementary material dating from 1572 to 1578.

Download or read book Hamlet s Moment written by András Kiséry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-28 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hamlet's Moment identifies a turning point in the history of English drama and early modern political culture: the moment when the business of politics became a matter of dramatic representation. Drama turned from open, military conflict to diplomacy and court policy, from the public contestation of power to the technologies of government. Tragedies of state turned into tragedies of state servants, inviting the public to consider politics as a profession-to imagine what it meant to have a political career. By staging intelligence derived from diplomatic sources, and by inflecting the action and discourse of their plays with a Machiavellian style of political analysis, playwrights such as Shakespeare, Jonson, Chapman, and Marston transformed political knowledge into a more broadly useful type of cultural capital, something even people without political agency could deploy in conversation and use in claiming social distinction. In Hamlet's moment, the public stage created the political competence that enabled the rise of the modern public sphere.

Download or read book The Arch Conjuror of England written by Glyn Parry and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Outlandish alchemist and magician, political intelligencer, apocalyptic prophet, and converser with angels, John Dee (1527–1609) was one of the most colorful and controversial figures of the Tudor world. In this fascinating book—the first full-length biography of Dee based on primary historical sources—Glyn Parry explores Dee's vast array of political, magical, and scientific writings and finds that they cast significant new light on policy struggles in the Elizabethan court, conservative attacks on magic, and Europe's religious wars. John Dee was more than just a fringe magus, Parry shows: he was a major figure of the Reformation and Renaissance.

Download or read book The Gentry in England and Wales 1500 1700 written by Felicity Heal and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 1994-10-10 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is the first full analysis of the gentry in the early modern period since G.E.Mingay The Gentry: the Rise and Fall of a Ruling Class (1976). It offers a synthesis of the recent specialist work on this key social and political group, but will also provide a distinctive approach to its subjects through the use of the texts and artefacts by which the gentry sought to fashion themselves.

Download or read book Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 1558 1640 written by H. R. Woudhuysen and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1996-05-23 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first modern study of the production and circulation of manuscripts during the English Renaissance. H.R. Woudhuysen examines the relationship between manuscript and print, looks at people who lived by their pens, and surveys authorial and scribal manuscripts, paying particular attention to the copying of verse, plays, and scholarly works by hand. It investigates the professional production of manuscripts for sale by scribes such as Ralph Crane and Richard Robinson. The second part of the book examines Sir Philip Sydney's works in the context of Woudhuysen's research, discussing all Sidney's important manuscripts, and seeking to assess his part in the circulation of his works and his role in the promotion of a scribal culture. A detailed examination of the manuscripts and early prints of his poems, his Arcadias, and of Astrophil and Stella shed new light on their composition, evolution, and dissemination, as well as on Sidney's friends and admirers.

Download or read book English Renaissance Manuscript Culture written by Steven W. May and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-14 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: English Renaissance Manuscript Culture: The Paper Revolution traces the development of a new type of scribal culture in England that emerged early in the fourteenth century. The main medieval writing surfaces of parchment and wax tablets were augmented by a writing medium that was both lasting and cheap enough to be expendable. Writing was transformed from a near monopoly of professional scribes employed by the upper class to a practice ordinary citizens could afford. Personal correspondence, business records, notebooks on all sorts of subjects, creative writing, and much more flourished at social levels where they had previously been excluded by the high cost of parchment. Steven W. May places literary manuscripts and in particular poetic anthologies in this larger scribal context, showing how its innovative features affected both authorship and readership. As this amateur scribal culture developed, the medieval professional culture expanded as well. Classes of documents formerly restricted to parchment often shifted over to paper, while entirely new classes of documents were added to the records of church and state as these institutions took advantage of relatively inexpensive paper. Paper stimulated original composition by making it possible to draft, revise, and rewrite works in this new, affordable medium. Amateur scribes were soon producing an enormous volume of manuscript works of all kinds--works they could afford to circulate in multiple copies. England's ever-increasing literate population developed an informal network that transmitted all kinds of texts from single sheets to book-length documents efficiently throughout the kingdom. The operation of restrictive coteries had little if any role in the mass circulation of manuscripts through this network. However, paper was cheap enough that manuscripts could also be readily disposed of (unlike expensive parchment). More than 90% of the output from this scribal tradition has been lost, a fact that tends to distort our understanding and interpretation of what has survived. May illustrates these conclusions with close analysis of representative manuscripts.

Download or read book Communities in Early Modern England written by Alexandra Shepard and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How were cultural, political, and social identities formed in the early modern period? How were they maintained? What happened when they were contested? What meanings did “community” have? This path-breaking book looks at how individuals were bound into communities by religious, professional, and social networks; the importance of place--ranging from the Parish to communities of crime; and the value of rhetoric in generating community--from the King’s English to the use of “public” as a rhetorical community. The essays offer an original, comparative, and thematic approach to the many ways in which people utilized communication, space, and symbols to constitute communities in early modern England.

Download or read book Sir Walter Raleigh written by Mark Nicholls and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-03-31 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: >

Download or read book Amazons Savages and Machiavels written by Matthew Dimmock and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-02 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A broad-based and accessible anthology of travel and colonial writing in the English Renaissance, selected to represent the world-picture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers in England. It includes not just the narratives of discovery of the New World but also accounts of cultures already well known through trade links, such as Turkey and the Moluccan islands, and of places that featured just as significantly in the early modern English imagination: from Ireland to Russia and the Far East, from Calais to India and Africa, from France and Italy to the West Indies. The writings reveal painstaking attempts to understand the 'other' as well as ignorance and prejudice, surprising connections alongside phobic reactions to difference, the desire to co-operate alongside the desire to extinguish and exploit. The second edition of Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels is significantly revised and expanded, twenty years after the first edition helped to establish the field of travel and colonial writing in English. The anthology includes substantial new chapters of extracts on 'The North', detailing the important Arctic voyages and search for the elusive North-West Passage; 'Islamic West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean', includes new material on Persia, Russia, and Jerusalem; 'England from Elsewhere' includes observations of England and the English from European travellers; and the epilogue on women travellers, explores the importance in particular of Lady Catherine Whetenhall's journey to Italy, recorded after her early death. The chapter on Africa includes new material on the Congo, Gambia, and Sierra Leone, and the chapter on East Asia and the South Seas contains new material on China and Japan. There are new images of West African figures and Sir Anthony and Lady Shirley in Persian courtly attire. The introduction has been carefully revised to take into account the wealth of scholarship on English perceptions of Asia and the Mediterranean, and the analysis of race and racial identity has been expanded in line with contemporary concerns. Headnotes and notes have been revised and expanded throughout the text. The anthology is the most comprehensive single-volume available in English, and, with its newly modernized text and reader-friendly apparatus, is designed to appeal to the general as well as the specialist reader. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of travel, colonial writing, and racial politics at the time of the first British Empire.

Download or read book Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth Century English Manuscripts written by Laura Estill and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-01-21 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the seventeenth century, early modern play readers and playgoers copied dramatic extracts into their commonplace books, verse miscellanies, diaries, and songbooks. This is the first book to examine these often overlooked texts, which reveal what early modern audiences and readers took, literally and figuratively, from plays.

Download or read book England and the Spanish Armada written by James McDermott and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Armada campaign pitted Europe's mightiest military power against Christendom's most powerful navy in a battle for different ideals of civilisation. Both protagonists expected the clash to be decisive; neither, as it soon became apparent, knew how to fight a battle whose scale and character were beyond the experience of anyone in the two fleets. What ensued was not the heroic encounter of legend, but an inconclusive affair, redeemed - for England - by atrocious weather and poor Spanish understanding of the coastlines of western Scotland and Ireland."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Manuscript Print and the English Renaissance Lyric written by Arthur F. Marotti and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last of the literary genres to be incorporated into print culture, verse in the English Renaissance not only was published in anthologies, pamphlets, and folio editions, it was also circulated in manuscript. In this ground-breaking historical and cultural study of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century lyric poetry, Marotti examines the interrelationship between the two systems of literary transmission and shows how in England manuscript and print publication together shaped the emerging institution of literature. Surveying a wide range of manuscript and print poetry of the period, Marotti outlines the different social and institutional contexts in which poems were collected and transmitted. He focuses on the two kinds of verse that were circulated more commonly in manuscript than in print—the obscene and the political—and he considers the contributions of scribes and compilers, particularly in composing "answer poetry" and other verse. Analyzing the process through which print gradually replaced manuscript as the standard medium for lyric verse, he identifies four crucial events in the history of publication in England: the appearances of Tottel's Miscellany ( (1557), Sir Philip Sidney's works in the 1590s, Ben Jonson's folio Workes (1616), and the posthumous editions of the poems of Donne and of Herbert (both 1633). Marotti also considers how certain material features of the book determined the reception of poetry, and he explores how poets attempted to establish their authority in print in relation to publishers, patrons, and readers.

Download or read book Thomas Churchyard written by Matthew Woodcock and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book-length biography of Tudor writer, soldier, and courtier Thomas Churchyard (c.1529-1604), a figure well-known yet long neglected in early modern studies, who lived, wrote, and fought under five different monarchs and enjoyed an unrivalled fifty-year literary career.

Download or read book The Favourite written by Mathew Lyons and published by Constable. This book was released on 2011-03-24 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Favourite, Mathew Lyons strips away the myth - and the self-mythologising - to find Sir Walter Ralegh in the one role in which his contemporaries knew him best: the courtier who could win the attention - and the heart - of Elizabeth I, while also being the 'most hated man in England'. Using first-hand accounts, Lyons uncovers the maze of ambition, desire and amorality in which Ralegh lived before he rose to fame - a brutal Elizabethan world riven with crime and corruption and riddled with traitors and spies.

Download or read book Localizing Christopher Marlowe written by Arata Ide and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2023-12-12 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study punctures the stereotyped portrayals of Marlowe, first created by his rival Robert Greene, and, yet, which still colour our view. In doing so, Ide reveals the social and cultural discourses out of which such myths emerged.We know next to nothing about the life of the playwright Christopher Marlowe (b.1564 - d. 1593). Few documents survive other than his birth record in the parish register, a handful of legal cases in court records, Privy Council mandates and reports to the Council, the coroner's examination of his death, and a few hearsay accounts of his atheism. With such a limited collection of biographical documents available, it is impossible to retrieve from history a complete sense of Marlowe. However, this does not mean that biography cannot play a significant role in Marlowe studies. By observing the details of the specific places and communities to which Marlowe belonged, this book highlights the collective experiences and concerns of the social groups and communities with which we know he was personally and financially involved. Specifically, Localizing Christopher Marlowe reveals the political and cultural dynamics in the community of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, into which Marlowe was deeply integrated and through which he became affiliated with the circle of Sir Francis Walsingham, mapping these influences in both his life and works.e was personally and financially involved. Specifically, Localizing Christopher Marlowe reveals the political and cultural dynamics in the community of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, into which Marlowe was deeply integrated and through which he became affiliated with the circle of Sir Francis Walsingham, mapping these influences in both his life and works.e was personally and financially involved. Specifically, Localizing Christopher Marlowe reveals the political and cultural dynamics in the community of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, into which Marlowe was deeply integrated and through which he became affiliated with the circle of Sir Francis Walsingham, mapping these influences in both his life and works.e was personally and financially involved. Specifically, Localizing Christopher Marlowe reveals the political and cultural dynamics in the community of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, into which Marlowe was deeply integrated and through which he became affiliated with the circle of Sir Francis Walsingham, mapping these influences in both his life and works.

Download or read book Monstrous Adversary written by Alan H. Nelson and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Elizabethan Court poet Edward de Vere has, since 1920, lived a notorious second, wholly illegitimate life as the putative author of the poems and plays of William Shakespeare. The work reconstructs Oxford’s life, assesses his poetic works, and demonstrates the absurdity of attributing Shakespeare’s works to him. The first documentary biography of Oxford in over seventy years, Monstrous Adversary seeks to measure the real Oxford against the myth. Impeccably researched and presenting many documents written by Oxford himself, Nelson’s book provides a unique insight into Elizabethan society and manners through the eyes of a man whose life was privately scandalous and richly documented.