Nicholas McDowell

Alan Stewart

Jennifer Richards

Rebecca Lemon

Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr.

Featuring entries composed by leading international scholars, The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature presents comprehensive coverage of all aspects of English literature produced from the early 16th to the mid 17th centuries. Comprises over 400 entries ranging from 1000 to 5000 words written by leading international scholars Arranged in A-Z format across three fully indexed and cross-referenced volumes Provides coverage of canonical authors and their works, as well as a variety of previously under-considered areas, including women writers, broadside ballads, commonplace books, and other popular literary forms Biographical material on authors is presented in the context of cutting-edge critical discussion of literary works. Represents the most comprehensive resource available for those working in English Renaissance literary studies Also available online as part of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature, providing 24/7 access and powerful searching, browsing and cross-referencing capabilities

The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature, 3 Volume Set

Under the Tudor monarchy, English law expanded to include the category of "treason by words." Rebecca Lemon investigates this remarkable phrase both as a legal charge and as a cultural event. English citizens, she shows, expressed competing notions of treason in opposition to the growing absolutism of the monarchy. Lemon explores the complex participation of texts by John Donne, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare in the legal and political controversies marking the Earl of Essex's 1601 rebellion and the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. Lemon suggests that the articulation of diverse ideas about treason within literary and polemical texts produced increasingly fractured conceptions of the crime of treason itself. Further, literary texts, in representing issues familiar from political polemic, helped to foster more free, less ideologically rigid, responses to the crisis of treason. As a result, such works of imagination bolstered an emerging discourse on subjects' rights. Treason by Words offers an original theory of the role of dissent and rebellion during a period of burgeoning sovereign power.

Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare's England

Treason by Words

Rebecca Lemon shows how sixteenth-century writers, such as Marlowe and Shakespeare, depict addiction in many forms, including to God, study, love, friendship, and drinking. Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England explores the fine line between devotion and pathology, revealing addiction's laudable as well as pejorative meanings.

Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England

Jonathan Roberts

Christopher Rowland

Emma Mason

This Companion explores the Bible's role and influence onindividual writers, whilst tracing the key developments of Biblicalthemes and literary theory through the ages. An ambitious overview of the Bible's impact on Englishliterature – as arguably the most powerful work of literaturein history – from the medieval period through to thetwentieth-century Includes introductory sections to each period giving backgroundinformation about the Bible as a source text in English literature,and placing writers in their historical context Draws on examples from medieval, early-modern,eighteenth-century and Romantic, Victorian, and Modernistliterature Includes many 'secular' or 'anti-clerical' writers alongsidetheir 'Christian' contemporaries, revealing how the Bible's textshifts and changes in the writing of each author who reads andstudies it

The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature

Lemon investigates the remarkable phrase, treason by words, both as a legal charge and as a cultural event under the Tudor monarchy.

Rebecca Lemon illuminates a previously-buried conception of addiction, as a form of devotion at once laudable, difficult, and extraordinary, that has been concealed by the persistent modern link of addiction to pathology. Surveying sixteenth-century invocations, she reveals how early moderns might consider themselves addicted to study, friendship, love, or God. However, she also uncovers their understanding of addiction as a form of compulsion that resonates with modern scientific definitions. Specifically, early modern medical tracts, legal rulings, and religious polemic stressed the dangers of addiction to alcohol in terms of disease, compulsion, and enslavement. Yet the relationship between these two understandings of addiction was not simply oppositional, for what unites these discourses is a shared emphasis on addiction as the overthrow of the will. Etymologically, "addiction" is a verbal contract or a pledge, and even as sixteenth-century audiences actively embraced addiction to God and love, writers warned against commitment to improper forms of addiction, and the term became increasingly associated with disease and tyranny. Examining canonical texts including Doctor Faustus, Twelfth Night, Henry IV, and Othello alongside theological, medical, imaginative, and legal writings, Lemon traces the variety of early modern addictive attachments. Although contemporary notions of addiction seem to bear little resemblance to its initial meanings, Lemon argues that the early modern period's understanding of addiction is relevant to our modern conceptions of, and debates about, the phenomenon.

Rebecca Lemon

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