The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature

This is the first major collection of essays to look at the literature of the entire Tudor period, from the reign of Henry VII to death of Elizabeth I. It pays particularly attention to the years before 1580. Those decades saw, amongst other things, the establishment of print culture and growth of a reading public; the various phases of the English Reformation and process of political centralization that enabled and accompanied them; the increasing emulation of Continental and classical literatures under the influence of humanism; the self-conscious emergence of English as a literary language and determined creation of a native literary canon; the beginnings of English empire and the consolidation of a sense of nationhood. However, study of Tudor literature prior to 1580 is not only of worth as a context, or foundation, for an Elizabethan 'golden age'. As this much-needed volume will show, it is also of artistic, intellectual, and cultural merit in its own right. Written by experts from Europe, North America, and the United Kingdom, the forty-five chapters in The Oxford Handbook to Tudor Literature recover some of the distinctive voices of sixteenth-century writing, its energy, variety, and inventiveness. As well as essays on well-known writers, such as Philip Sidney or Thomas Wyatt, the volume contains the first extensive treatment in print of some of the Tudor era's most original voices.

Readership: Students and scholars of Tudor Literature

Edited by Mike Pincombe, Professor of Tudor and Elizabethan Literature, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and Cathy Shrank, Reader in Tudor Literature, University of Sheffield

"All of the essays are informed by clear and careful close readings which exemplify and support the arguments presented. They do this in such a way as to make the arguments not only compelling, but also accessible to the reader for whom the texts discussed are unfamiliar. This book is thus in the very best sense a handbook - it will offer inspiring and useful support to the reader of the primary texts of Tudor literature. It will be useful to student and lecturer alike in providing introductory material to new texts, up-to-date summaries of extant scholarship, and full bibliography." - Elisabeth Dutton, English

"The first major collection to survey literature from Henry VII to Elizabeth I, this book offers a wealth of information... All the essays are of exceptionally high caliber" - A. Castaldo, Choice

Acknowledgements
Conventions and list of abbreviations
List of illustrations
Notes on contributors
Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank: Prologue: The travails of Tudor Literature
Section I: 1485-1529
1: Alexandra Gillespie: Caxton and the invention of printing
2: Kent Cartwright: Dramatic theory and Lucres' 'discretion': the plays of Henry Medwall
3: Daniel Wakelin: Stephen Hawes and courtly education
4: Jane Griffiths: Having the last word: manuscript, print, and the envoy in the poetry of John Skelton
5: Joyce Boro: All for love: Lord Berners and the enduring, evolving romance
Section II: 1530-1559
6: John N. King: Thomas More, William Tyndale, and the printing of religious propaganda
7: James Simpson: Rhetoric, conscience and the playful positions of Sir Thomas More
8: Peter Happé: John Bale and controversy: readers and audiences
9: Cathy Shrank: Sir Thomas Elyot and the bonds of community
10: Thomas Betteridge: John Heywood and court drama
11: Jason Powell: Thomas Wyatt and Francis Bryan: plainness and dissimulation
12: Hannibal Hamlin: Piety and poetry: English psalms from Miles Coverdale to Mary Sidney
13: Janel Mueller: Katherine Parr and her circle
14: Philip Schwyzer: John Leland and his heirs: the topography of England
15: Mark Rankin: Biblical allusion and argument in Luke Shepherd's verse satires
16: Christopher Warley: Reforming the reformers: Robert Crowley and Nicholas Udall
17: R. W. Maslen: William Baldwin and the Tudor imagination
18: Wolfgang G. Müller: Directions for English: Thomas Wilson's Art of Rhetoric, George Puttenham's Art of English Poesy, and the Search for Vernacular Eloquence
19: Alan Bryson: Order and Disorder: John Proctor's History of Wyatt's Rebellion (1554)
20: Alice Hunt: Marian political allegory: John Heywood's The Spider and the Fly
21: Scott Lucas: Hall's chronicle and A Mirror for Magistrates: history and the tragic pattern
22: Mike Pincombe: A place in the shade: George Cavendish and de casibus tragedy
23: Margaret Tudeau-Clayton: What is my nation?: language, verse and politics in Tudor translations of Virgil's Aeneid
24: Jonathan Woolfson: Thomas Hoby, William Thomas and mid-Tudor travel to Italy
25: Steven W. May: Popularizing courtly poetry: Tottel's 'Miscellany' and its progeny
Section III: 1560-1579
26: Laurie Shannon: Minerva's men: horizontal nationhood and the literary production of Googe, Turberville, and Gascoigne
27: Phil Withington: 'For This is True or Els I do Lye': Thomas Smith, William Bullein and Mid-Tudor Dialogue
28: Jessica Winston: English Seneca: Heywood to Hamlet
29: Dermot Cavanagh: Political tragedy in the 1560s: Cambises and Gorboduc
30: Andrew Escobedo: John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, 1563-1583: antiquity and the affect of history
31: Jonathan Gibson: Tragical histories, tragical tales
32: Andrew Hadfield: Foresters, ploughmen and shepherds: versions of Tudor pastoral
33: Paul Whitfield White: Interludes, economics and the Elizabethan stage
34: Syrithe Pugh: Ovidian reflections in Gascoigne's Steel Glass
35: D. J. B. Trim: The art of war: martial poetics from Henry Howard to Philip Sidney
36: Elizabeth Heale: Thomas Whythorne and first-person life-writing in the sixteenth century
37: Janette Dillon: Pageants and Propaganda: Robert Langham's Letter and George Gascoigne's Princely Pleasures at Kenilworth
38: Helen Moore: Sir Philip Sidney and the Arcadias
Section IV: 1580-1603
39: Jennifer Richards: Gabriel Harvey's choleric writing
40: Fred Schurink: The intimacy of manuscript and the pleasure of print: literary culture from The Schoolmaster to Euphues
41: Katharine Wilson: Robert Greene's Pandosto and George Pettie's Palace of Pleasure
42: David Bevington: Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Nathaniel Woodes's The Conflict of Conscience
43: Lorna Hutson: Fictive Acts: Thomas Nashe and the mid-Tudor legacy
44: Andrew Hiscock: 'Hear my tale or kiss my tail!': The Old Wife's Tale, Gammer Gurton's Needle and the popular cultures of Tudor comedy
Helen Cooper: Epilogue: Edmund Spenser and the passing of Tudor literature
Bibliography
Index