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1. General

(a) New editions and editorial issues

Susan M. Felch has done a fine job in presenting a scholarly yet accessible edition of The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock (c. 1534-after 1590). As Felch notes, Lock "assumed many roles throughout her eventful life: religious exile, poet, translator, correspondent, and political advocate" (p. xv) and this edition of all her published work contains a detailed biography as well as a thorough introduction to her work. It also contains an up-to-date selected bibliography and toward the back can be found thorough textual and explanatory notes. A very useful appendage is the index of biblical texts stating where each text is referred to or alluded to in her writing (a reference which is repeated in footnoting throughout the edition so the reader can be confident of having located the correct reference or allusion). A new edition of Sir Thomas More's Utopia, edited by David Sacks is part of The Bedford Series in History and Culture whose aim is "that readers can study the past as historians do" (p. vii) and indeed Sacks's analysis of More's text is thoroughly historical in approach. The lengthy and informative introduction is divided into three sections: 'Texts', 'Contexts' and 'Developments' and further divided into 'Literary Conventions', 'Philosophical Convictions', 'Personal Involvements', 'Historical Circumstances', and 'Transition', 'Translation' respectively. The first section, 'Texts', considers More's Utopia in relation to the literary and philosophical writings which influenced him; 'Contexts' is concerned with the socio-economic, political and legal frameworks within which More wrote, and 'Developments' considers the political significance of Ralph Robynson's English translation of More's Latin text. In addition to his inspired introduction Sacks provides in appendices 'Ralph Robynsons's Dedicatory Letter to William Cecil', a 'selected' yet thorough bibliography, and a detailed index.

A Brefe Dialoge bitwene a Christen Father and his Stobborne Sonne: The First Protestant Catachism published in English is an English translation of a text originally published in Latin in 1527. This new critical and scholarly edition (ed. Douglas H Parker and Bruce Krajewski) brings a previously inaccessible text to the attention of the modern reader. The text is important because it is the first Protestant catechism published in English, the first effort at outlining reformed doctrine in English, the first literary evidence of a shift in emphasis from Wittenberg to Zurich, and an early example of a printed work by an English Protestant--the previous two being works by Tyndale. The editors' introduction provides detailed contextual commentary on both text and author and editorial principles are clearly outlined. The text itself is supported by copious notes which help with difficulties surrounding vocabulary and syntax and provide a theological context by citing contemporary Reformation tracts and glossing all biblical references throughout. The Latin text translated by Roye is provided as an appendice as is a collation of the previous (and inferior) transcription of Roye's translation by Adolf Wolf and the original Latin text.

Thomas Phaer's The Boke of Chyldren first published in 1544 is the first book on pediatrics written in English for an English readership. That the book was reprinted several times during the last half of the sixteenth century indicates its popularity. This new edition by Rick Bowers is a major step-up from previous editions: one edited by Neale and Wallis and published in 1955 merely reproduced the 1553 imprint, unaware of the existence of the first edition and ignoring all other editions. Similarly a text published in 1976 is merely a reprint with no introduction or textual commentary. This new, annotated, and "lightly modernized" edition is based on the only extant copy of the first edition. This scholarly edition is prefaced by a critical introduction which provides a detailed biography of Phaer as well as an account of medical history. Phaer's text itself is fascinating; with conditions such as "the crampe or spasmus" and "diseases in the eares" described and remedies advised using authorities and personal observation. Bowers also provides a glossary of authors cited by Phaer as well as a very useful glossary of medicinal herbs and plants.

Editorial issues were explored in three critical articles. Thomas Freeman in "Texts, lies and microfilm: Reading and misreading Foxe's Book of Martyrs" (SCJ 30.23-46) claims that the four Victorian editions of Foxe's Acts and Monuments are very misleading about the text as it was printed and revised by Foxe in his lifetime, and that scholars have seriously misunderstood and misrepresented him because of this. Chris Ivic in "Incorporating Ireland: Cultural conflict in Holinshed's Irish chronicles" (JMEMS 29.iii.473-498) notes that Hooker's 1587 edition of the Irish section of Holinshed's Chronicles was considerably more militantly colonialist than the 1577 edition containing Irish material by Stanyhurst, as suited the changed situation in Ireland. In "Benefiting from the book: The Oxford edition of Samuel Daniel" (YES 29. 69-87) John Pitcher advertises the importance of his forthcoming edition of this neglected Elizabethan poet which will be a four-volume original spelling critical edition in the Oxford English Texts (OET) series from OUP.

(b) Prose

Commentary fell into four groups this year, on humanism and Thomas More, religious writing, travel writing, and women. Renaissance Transformations of Late Medieval Thought by Charles Trinkaus is a philosophicallly dense collection of articles. Particularly new is the emphasis on Renaissance and humanist thought as anti-scholastic and its entrance into the realm of natural philsophy. Trinkaus contends that the modern scholastic division into a Via antiqua and a Via moderna is not new but occurred among Renaissance thinkers and he asserts that Renaissance thought should be considered via its relationship with Medieval thought in terms of contestation over key intellectual, moral, and theological issues, its original contribution to these ideas, and its role in restoring the importance of ancient traditions. Augustinianism displaces Aristotelianism in the political arena as well as in the areas of religion and moral philsophy. Whilst the previous generation of Renaissance scholars emphasised the civic and political aspects of Renaissance thought with a focus upon the figures of Leonardo Bruni and Niccolo Machiavelli and around the Aristotelian and Ciceronian traditions from which they were thought to have descended this study shifts emphasis from Aristotle to Augustine, and to Quintilian, Plato and Plotinus. The focus is particularly on Italian humanists and their philosophical contribution to the Renaissance (chapter seven is written in Italian) with essays devoted to the ideas of Coluccio Salutati, Lorenzo Valla, Marsilio Ficino, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Trinkaus argues that fundamental transformations in thinking emerged from them and that natural philosophy, metaphysics, ontology and language theory become just as significant as the previously privledged ethics and political thought. In "Who's That in the Mirror? Thomas More's Utopia and the Problematic of the New World" from Opening the Borders: Inclusivity in Early Modern Studies, Essays in Honor of James V. Mirollo (ed. Peter C. Herman) Herman is concerned with the intersection of the Old World and the New in the cross-over between early modern discourse and Post-colonial criticism and argues that More's Utopia represents perhaps the first example of post-colonial analysis in which More implicity criticises European colonial ventures. In "Margaret Roper, the Humanist Political Project, and the Problem of Agency", from the same collection of essays, Mary Ellen Lamb challenges assumptions that Thomas More's promotion of the education of his daughter Margaret sprung from a feminist agenda. Lamb argues that Margaret was part of a humanist project to promote her "as a celebrity best able to advance the humanist learned woman as a object of desire" (p. 89).

William Rockett in "Words Written and Words Inspired: More and Sola Scriptura" (Moreana 36.cxxxvii.5-34) notes that in his Responsio ad Lutherum, as well as in other writings, Thomas More opposed Luther's doctrine of sola scriptura by arguing that adherence to scripture alone was damaging to the authority of the church and, moreover, that it ignored the spiritual law set forth in Jeremiah 31:33. In this theologically dense but fascinating essay Rockett considers a neglected aspect of More's argument against Luther and Tyndale in The Confutation of Tyndale's Answer where More asserts that the good christian should privledge the unwritten character of Christ's new covenant over and above the written character of the law and thus accuses Tyndale, in his privledging of sola scripture, of resisting the gospel. "Economy, ecology, and utopia in early colonial promotional literature" by Timothy Sweet (AL 71.iii.399-427) considers More's Utopia in the light of texts promoting colononization and is particulary concerned with the redefinition demanded by the New World environment of existing economic terms such as 'commodity', 'waste' (in the sense of both the potentional of unused lands and the potential of the indolent poor as labourers), and 'vent' (or market).

Staying with Thomas More but shifting to textual issues, Charles Clay Doyle in "Is it 'A Utopia' or 'An Utopia'? (Moreana 36.cxxxvii. 35-45) traces with painstaking attention to detail the process whereby the indefinite article an, rather than a, dominated before the word utopia and its derived forms in early texts. Doyle explains that when the word utopia first entered English language, its initial phoneme must have been a vowel as if spelled oo-topia. Today the initial phoneme is usually the consonant /y/, as if spelled you-topia. The very high occurence of the indefinite article an before utopia in writing and speech before the middle of the nineteenth century might be explained by the stigma attached to /yu-/ pronunciations which were considered vulgar. Words were often used with an awareness of their literary and Latin origin which encouraged more "correct" pronunciation. English orthography may also have influenced pronunication since an initial u looks like a vowel. Doyle provides a useful appendix which lists all instances prior to 1800 and some later ones.

In her scholarly monograph Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination, 1558-1660, Alison Shell considers the neglected topic of early modern Catholic literature and history. A simple error exists on page eighteen of the introduction to the book in Shell's assertion that her book consists of four chapters (it actually consists of six). The book is divided into two parts: part one 'Catholics and the Canon' has chapters dealing with anti-Catholic revenge tragedy and Catholic verse whilst part two 'Loyalism and Exclusion' consists of four chapters concentrating on the Catholic loyalism of Elizabethan and Stuart writers and the phenomenon of exile. Shell concentrates on imaginative writing (rather than, say, sermons) with a special emphasis on poetry, drama, allegory, emblem, and romance. Chapter one considers the anti-Catholic revenge tragedies of Webster and Middleton, the influence of anti-Catholic polemic upon their use of imagery, and their popularity in the nineteenth century. In chapter two Shell pays particular attention to Southwell and Crashaw and considers why Catholic religious poetry has been neglected. Shell is especially interested in marginal rather than canonical Catholic figures. Chapters three and four considers those writers who were loyal to both Catholicism and the crown, such as those writers who advanced Mary Stuart's claim to the throne and the masques of Henrietta Maria, wife to Charles I. Chapter five and six consider the theme of exile, both physical and spiritual exile, in a range of writings by Catholics and the benefits that exile could bring for those writing about the politically sensitive subjects of heresy and schism.

Two chapters from Catholicism and anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English texts (ed. Arthur F Marotti) were of particular interest. "Parasitic geographies: Manifesting Catholic identity in Early Modern England" by Julian Yates is a fascinating piece which outlines the ideological and physical landscape of Catholic recusancy in England in the sixteenth century. What irked officials, claims Yates, was not so much the existence of English Catholics as the hidden nature of their resistance. Recusants, like Edmund Campion, who invaded the homes of the queen's subjects in an effort to conceal themselves are referred to as parasites in contemporary propaganda-texts and as hiding-places became more complex the life of the Jesuit in England is compared to that of the fox by John Baxter in A Toile for Two-legged Foxes (1600). As well as Baxter's text Yates considers writings by Anthony Munday on Campion and contemporary documents which make for a detailed and absorbing study. Ronald Corthell's chapter "Robert Persons and the writer's mission" is concerned with the polemical writing of Robert Persons who was a member of the Jesuit mission to England and a prominent Catholic propagandist. Corthell considers Persons's writing in relation to "important arguments on questions of authority and obedience to both civil and ecclesiastical power" (p. 36) and enters into the debate surrounding the question of continuity and change in Catholic ideology during Elizabeth's reign. Particular attention is paid to Persons's Brief Discours which argues for toleration of Catholic recusancy. Catholic propaganda is also dealt with by Diane Watt in "A note on John Dering's tract De Duplice Spiritu" (N&Q 46.326-328) where she challenges Sharon L. Janse's assertion that a monk called John Dering was responsible for a book detailing the revelations of Elizabeth Barton, also known as the 'Holy Maid of Kent'. Watt claims that Dering's treatise did not deal with Barton's prophecies but, rather, celebrated Henry Gold who had been questioned by Cranmer during the investigation into Barton's activities. The purpose of this work of Catholic propaganda seems to have been to encourage Barton's supporters to defy persecution, which is ironic given the subsequent confession of treason by Barton and her denuciation by a fearful Gold.

Most of the essays in the collection The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature (ed. Piero Boitani) are concerned with texts written prior to the sixteenth century but Joerg O Fichte's chapter, "Foxe's Acts and monuments: The spirit's triumph over the flesh" (pp. 167-179) is of great interest to early modern scholars because it deals with a seminal text from the period. Fichte traces Foxe's adaptation of the traditional acta martyrum, which chronicled the trials of the early martyrs, to suit a new Protestant hagiography. The Catholic notion of body and soul is transformed by Foxe into flesh and spirit with an emphasis on the primacy of the spirit over the flesh, that is, the ability to suffer physical pain due to spiritual strength. The sanctified body of the Catholic martyr is replaced in the Protestant community by the textual body which is exempt from destruction although, as Fichte points out, women martyrs lacked the textual presence of their male counterparts. In "The 1545 Biblia of Robert Estienne" (N&Q 46.191-193) Kevin J. Gardner considers Estienne's second octavo edition of the bible which was condemned as heretical by the theology faculty at the Sorbonne. Gardner's examination of an important copy of this edition held at Tulane University in New Orleans shows how Estienne's arrangement of text, printing the Zurich translation alongside the more authoritative Vulgate, allowed the reader to choose their interpretation and defied Sorbonne orthodoxy. The faculty tried to censor Estienne's bible and in the copy examined by Gardner, deletions have been made by the early owner of the book, possibly a contemporary of Estienne, which may indicate what were considered heretical passages. Gardner also calls to attention discrepancies in the cataloging of the second octavo edition of the Biblia which reveal that the edition exists in multiple impressions.

"Writing up the log: The legacy of Hakluyt" by T. J. Cribb from Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit (ed. Steve Clark) considers Richard Hakluyt's Navigations which set a pattern for proceeding travel writers who, like Hakluyt focussed on the practical application of the documents they had gathered. Cribb directly relates this pattern to the rise of what he calls "the imperialising power of the narrative episteme of the traditional novel". The Guyyana Quartet by Wilson Harris challenges the pattern set by Hakluyt and followed by writers of adventure and discovery novels by opening up "a sense of plenitude rarely found in narrative since the cosmographies Hakluyt's new method displaced" (p. 112). In his meticulously researched article "'These are not the thinges men live by now a days": Sir John Harington's Visit to the O'Neill, 1599" (Cahiers E 55.1-15) David Gardiner writes that Sir John Harington, godson to Queen Elizabeth, travelled with Sir William Warren to Ulster to meet with Hugh O'Neill and follow up the terms of peace previously negotitated by Essex. Harington's written account of his meeting with O'Neill serves as an explanation to Elizabeth of his role in Essex's activities in Ireland but also serves to underline the English humanist belief in the political importance of poetry in its ability to civilize and control. Harington's meeting with O'Neill centres on O'Neill's pleasure at hearing him read from his translation of Orlando Furioso but, ironically, Harington does not consider the potential for Gaelic appropriation of English literature, just as Harington had appropriated the Italian and, unlike other Renaissance poets, he does not acknowledge the strength of the bardic tradition in Ireland. Harington believed his reading played a part in O'Neill's signing of a peace treaty when previously he has only given his oath to Essex. The defeat of the Irish military is thus presented by Harington as a literary exercise and thus underlines the role of the literary in the establishment of empire.

In "Through the Cultural Chunnel: The (Robert)Greeneing of Louise Labé" from Opening the Borders: Inclusivity in Early Modern Studies, Essays in Honor of James V. Mirollo (ed. Peter C. Herman) Anne Lake Prescott considers Robert's Greene's translation of Louise Labe's Debat de Folie et d'Amour (1555) in 1584. The effect of the shift from French to English and the modifications made by its translator encourages the view that the author is male. Prescott explores how this results in a shift in emphasis which highlights assumptions about gender and effects our interpretation of the text itself. Renaissance Fantasies: The Gendering of Aesthetics in Early Modern Fiction by Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast considers the role of fantasy and femininity, or effeminacy, in a range of seminal Renaissance texts from both England and the continent. Chapter one considers three treatises of the 1580s and 1590s: Philip Sidney's A Defence of Poetry, Thomas Nashe's The Anatomie of Absurditie, and Jane Anger's Jane Anger, Her Protection for Women, all texts which attack fantasy and femininity, or effeminacy, but themselves betray a tendency toward these states. Etienne Pasquier's Monophile (1555) is the focus in chapter two, a work which responded to Castiglione's Book of the Courtier (1518) by challenging his depcition of men as active and women as passive via his articulate amazon Charilée. Chapter three considers Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and the way in which Sidney questions the dominant male voice by allowing Stella to be the voice of Petrarchan authority and chapter four looks at the influence of Boccaccio's the Decameron on Sidney's Arcadia, particularly the way in which both works are framed by a flirtatious female audience. Finally, chapter five is a study of Shakespeare's challenge of Sidney's condemnation of drama in A Defence of Poetry by celebrating unruly femininity in As You Like It. The study provides an original and important contribution to the status of the gendered voice in early modern writing by considering male writers who choose to write from a feminine perspective and celebrate the marginal.

Three worthy chapters from one book, Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women's Alliances in Early Modern England (ed. Susan Frye and Karen Robertson), deserve attention. In "Sewing connections: Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth Talbot, and seventeenth-century anonymous needleworkers" Susan Frye considers the way in which women used needlework as a means of subverting received notions of womanhood, with samples produced by women challenging "the passivity, privacy, and silence that needlework was supposed to enforce" (p.165). Part one considers efforts by the young Elizabeth I to influence her father and her stepmother, Katherine Parr, by presenting them with needlework-covered calligraphic manuscripts, gifts intended to demonstrate her intellectual skills and win approval. In part two the relationship between Mary Queen of Scots and her jailer, Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury is explored with both women collaborating on needlework which expressed their ambitions. Queen Mary's needlework defiantly asserts her identity as former queen of France, present queen of Scotland, and heir to the English throne whilst her companion asserted her connections to family, present and future, but also imagined associations with famous mythic female figures. Parts three and four consider known and annonymous women needleworkers and the political motives traceable in their creations. In "Maidservants of London: Sisterhoods of Kinship and Labor" Ann Rosalind Jones considers two recently found pamphlets from late sixteenth-century London written by maidservants: Isabella Whitney's "A Modest meane for Maids" (1573) and the anonymous "A Letter sent by the Maydens of London" (1567) both of which share "a spirit of group solidarity that considerably enlarges our sense of women's alliances in early modern England" (p. 22). Whitney emphasizes the economic instablity of her profession and criticizes employers under the guise of a homily advising women servants of their duties. "A Letter sent by the Maydens of London" (1567) is a response to the misogynist opinions of Edward Hake who in 1567 published an attack on lazy and dishonest London maidservants in "The Mery Meeting of Maydens in London", a now lost pamphlet . The text is written in the voices of six women who expose Hake's hatred of women in general, thus undermining his ability to judge the maidservants in particular. Jones considers that, despite a claim to the contrary, the pamphlet could well have been written by a woman and she explores the language used in its counter-arguments. In the first half of the sixteenth century women were encouraged to participate in the literary and intellectual life of the Reformation but once the new religion had become established women tended to be marginalised. "Tracing women's connections from a letter by Elizabeth Ralegh" by Karen Robertson considers a list of women's names which appears on the back of a letter written by Elizabeth Ralegh (or Elizabeth Throckmorton) shortly after her husband's imprisonment for treason. The letter, written to Robert Cecil in an effort to protect the seizure of property by the Lord Admiral, is endorsed by the names of women who were kin to Elizabeth and is a good example of the kind of female support structure that existed in struggles over property.

In "Four prayer books addressed to women during the reign of Elizabeth I" (HLQ 60.407-423) Colin B. Atkinson and Jo B. Atkinson consider devotional books as "rich sources for the study of attitudes to women in general, and to their spiritual life in particular, in the late sixteenth century" (p.407-408). A Tablet for Gentlewomen published in 1574 by William Seres was a small book intended to be worn as an ornament by women. The collection contains thirty-one prayers but only four directlly address women's concerns. In two prayers concerned with childbirth the focus is on sinfulness and the sorrows and dangers of childbirth whilst another another dictates that the ideal unmarried woman is silent and chaste. In contrast The Monument of Matrones, dedicated to Elizabeth and printed by Thomas Bentley, adopts a postive attitude to childbirth and the collection contains a range of voices, male and female, and from various classes and contexts, including queens, ordinary people and biblical figures. Although the book celebrates female power and holiness in the figure of Elizabeth, Bentely makes sure to qualify this celebration by implying that women should be subservient to men. Anne Wheathill's A Handfull of Holesome (though Homelie) Hearbs was published in 1584, two years after The Monument. It is the first book of devotion written by a gentlewoman (though not the first written by a woman) and the first addressed to other women. Wheathill is apologetic for being a woman who presumes to write but she defends her decision by emphasising her zeal and her desire to avoid sloth. Unlike most prayer books from the period her prayers are not arranged by occasions, such as childbirth, but are rather organised by a system of numerical patterns and symbolism. The fourth book considered is Auspicante Jehova. Maries exercis, a volume by Nicholas Breton printed by Thomas East in 1597 and, as the authors of this essay admit, the least interesting of all the prayer books considered here. It is dedicated to Breton's patron the countess of Pembroke and most of the prayers focus on a passage in the New Testament associated with women. Atkinson and Atkinson claim that by and large Breton's text "is more hack work that an carefully crafted devotional exercise" (p. 423).

Elizabeth I herself is considered in "Idols of the queen: Policy, gendering, and the picturing of Elizabeth 1" (Rep 68.108-161) where Louis Montrose traces the ideological signifcance of pictorial representations of the queen. Overseas, images of Elizabeth were used to degrade the Elizabethan regime with the cult of Elizabeth as a virgin being criticized (by Puritans and Catholics) as idolatrous. Ralegh claimed responsibility for spreading the veneration of Elizabeth's image in the New World. The Rainbow portrait used images of orifices to suggest her eroticization of power which overcame the problem that she was a female ruler. (Curiously, Montrose uses a colon between sentences). In "The Ide and Olive episode in Lord Berner's Huon of Burdeux" from Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance (ed. Rosalind Field) Elizabeth Archibald considers the way in which the traditional story of a daughter fleeing an incestuous father is subverted in Berner's translation of a French story by its unique slant on the phenomenon of female cross-dressing. The notion of divinely-ordained gender hierarchies are effectively challenged when God himself intervenes in order to reinforce the heroine's chosen identity, making her a man in reality not simply outward appearance. This essay should prove particularly interesting in relation to Shakespeare's cross-dressing heroines. In "The Seymour sisters: Elegizing female attachment" (SCJ 30.343-65) Patricia Demers claims that the Seymour sisters (daughters of Protestant politician Edward Seymoure, brother to Jane) are unjustly forgotten and their Latin elegy to Margueritte de Navarre (the Protestant-sympathizing French queen) is translated into English here for the first time.

In Jonathan Gibson's "French and Italian Sources for Ralegh's 'Farewell False Love'" (RES 50.155-165) two analogues for Ralegh's poem 'Farewell False Love" are considered for the first time. The French analogue comes from a poem, "Contr' amour", contained in one of the most influential poetry books of the period, Desportes's Premières oeuvres, first printed in 1573. The rejection of love as cruel by the narrator and parallels in the use of images and phraseology can be found in Ralegh's poem, although Ralegh does alter the order in which the images occur. Desportes is indebted to an Itailan poem of uncertain authorship, "Là've l'aurora", first published in 1553 but Ralegh appears to be entirely endebted to Desportes and this proves that Ralegh's poem was composed before "Most welcome love" by Thomas Henage, a companion poem to "Farewell false love". Confirming Ralegh's indebtedness to Desportes does not help us establish why Ralegh's poem appears in three versions but the poem can be read as a response to Castiglione's depiction of Pietro Bembo's Neopatonic view of love as evident in The Book of the Courtier. "Petrarchan poetics" by William J. Kennedy from volume three of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism on the Renaissance (ed. Glyn P. Norton) comes under the main heading 'Poetics' and the sub-heading 'The rediscovery and transmission of materials'. Although Pietro Bembo's Prose della volgar lingua (1525) is usually considered to be responsible for establishing Petrarch's Rime Sparse as canonical Kennedy draws attention to the annotated editions available across Europe in the fifteenth- and sixteenth centuries which established a huge audience for Petrarch at the same time as they proposed that Petrarch spoke for a particular ideological position, some claiming him as a conservative, others as a radical. The study of French and Italian sources for Elizabethan manuscript and miscellany poetry has hitherto been neglected by critics with previous work in this area tending to concentrate on printed sonnet sequences and bibliographical issues. In "Is That a Man in Her Dress?" from Opening the Borders: Inclusivity in Early Modern Studies, Essays in Honor of James V. Mirollo (ed. Peter C. Herman) William J. Kennedy considers Renaissance and contemporary commentaries on Petrarch's Sonnet 182 which have ignored the poem's suggestions of transvestism. Kennedy traces the motif of transvestism in classical texts and the ideological impact of the phenomenon in terms of class and gender.

Steven May claims that the purpose of his monograph The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and their Contexts is "to identify the queen's courtier poets and then to collect, edit, and assess their work within the context of the court which produced it" (p. 3) and in this he does not disappoint. This ambitious and elegant study is divided into two parts with the first part focussing on the critical history of courtier verse and the second on the biographies and texts relating to the poets considered in part one. Chapter one considers the definition 'courtier poet' and the poet's relationship to the court. Also considered are the 'out-of-court poet', such as Edmund Spenser, and the so-called 'court poet' who was connected to the royal household but considered subordinate to the elite courtier circle. Chapters two to seven provide a largely chronological account of courtier verse starting with verse before Sidney and incorporating such well-known figures such as Sidney himself, Essex, Ralegh, John Harrington, and lesser-known courtier poets such as Arthur Gorges. These chapters are broadly chronological but are also organised along genre lines so, for example, chapter five focusses on Harrington but via 'Satire and NarrativeVerse'. Chapter six moves on to 'The Sidney Legacy' while chapter seven deals with 'Devotional Verse' allowing for the welcome inclusion of Mary Herbert, countess of Pembroke. Part two provides concise but informative biographies of the thirty-two poets considered 'courtier poets' and reproduces selected poems, some of which are not readily available, what May rightly calls "a representative anthology of Elizabethan courtier verse" (p. 5).

In "Polyglottia and the vindication of English poetry: Abraham Fraunce's Arcadian rhetoric" (Neophil 83.317-329) Petrina Allesandra claims that Fraunce's Arcadian Rhetorike attempted to teach Ramist rhetoric using examples from all poetic languages, including English. The point being to demonstrate that English (especially in the hands of Sidney, and using his unpublished Arcadia) is as good as the classical and foreign languages. In "Greville's poetic revisted" (Neophil 83.145-167) Maria R. Philmus notes that most people follow Bullough's edition of Greville's work in thinking that stanzas 107-111 of Humane Learning are where Greville gives his views on poetry. These are, claims Philmus, about rhetoric not poetry. Greville's views on poetry follow immediately after and are a limited Calvinist approval (well short of the contemporary claim that the arts can do moral good) and a concern to provide practical help with the problems his readers have in their lives. James Simpson in "Breaking the vacuum: Ricardian and Henrician Ovidianism" (JMEMS 29.ii.325-355) claims that what we think of as characteristics of Renaissance poetry (especially the divided self and historical isolation) can be found in medieval poetry of the 1380s (for example in Gower's Confessio Amantis) as well as in writing of the 1530s (for example by Surrey and Wyatt) although the latter is more politically constrained. That the Arte of English Poesie, commonly thought to have been written by George Puttenham, was published anonymously is ironic given its advice that gentlemen writers ought not to remain anonymous in order to retain the respect of the court. As Marcy L North points out in "Anonymity's revelations in The arte of English poesie" (SEL 39.1-18) astute readers would recognise that Puttenham's examples of those who have eschewed anonymity, classical and royal, were well-established and powerful men, thus showing that "all names are not equal" (p.5). In this well-argued piece North considers what J. W. Saunders called "the stigma of print" (p.6) in the early modern period in order to contextualise the stigma attached to publication and self-promotion.

In "'Respect': Verses attributed to Henry VIII in a prayer book owned by Katherine Parr" (N&Q 46.186-189) R. G. Siemens follows up a note by E. Charlton relating to a book of prayers owned by Katherine Parr. Hand-written verses that appear in the book have been attributed to Henry VIII by Charlton and Mary Trefusis. Although Siemens lists a number of contextual factors that may underwrite this attribution he notes the hand-writing does not resemble extant examples of Henry's writing and calls for further evidence before attribution may be unquestioned. In "New evidence on Wyatt's 'A Robyn' in British library additional MS 31, 922" (N&Q 46.189-191) Siemens revaluates evidence from the Henry VIII Manuscript in the British Library in order to demonstrate that the manuscript can be dated c. 1522 rather than c.1515. This makes it conceivable that Wyatt wrote 'A Robyn', set by William Cornish and contained in the manuscript, which previous critics thought unlikely because Wyatt would only have been fifteen or sixteen years old in 1515.

(d) Emblem Studies

Renaissance semiotics is a neglected subject, as acknowledged by John Manning in his introduction to Aspects of Renaissance and Baroque Symbol Theory 1500-1700 (ed. John Manning and Peter Daly). This neglect may owe something to the inter-disciplinary nature of the topic which straddles, yet refused to be defined by, the disciplines of art and literature and which draws upon politics, religion and philosophy. Manning emphasises the inter-disciplinary nature of emblem studies where the movement is between the visual and the verbal and, within the verbal, between neo-Latin and European languages and the essays contained in this book consider the form as it evolved in England and on the continent. The book is divided into three sections the first of which considers the complexities surrounding terminology, for example how the imprecise term 'symbol' was inadequate to describe some of the newly invented symbolic forms such as the Italian impresa. The second part of book is perhaps of most interest, addressing ways of seeing in relation to the emblem whereby the viewer is confronted with a unique and strange visual culture which involves what Manning calls "a sense of violent visual dislocation" (p. xv). However the verbal is central to the effectiveness of the emblem form and the text, which may only be implied, will translate the visual and convey its message to the viewer. Manning denies that the emblem is tautological--rather the image calls for interpretation and provides reinforcement for the familiar verbal text which should be considered anew. The third topic considered is the authority of signs. J.D. Loach in "The Influence of the Counter-Reformation Defence of Images on the Contemporary Concept of the Emblem" considers images in relation to post-Reformation politics and explores the religious significance of symbolic images in an age of Christian contention. A key philosophical issue raised in relation to authority is that surrounding the power of the sign and where that power comes from. Is authority conferred by the author, by the form itself and its tradition, or by the way in which the work is presented to the public? Also under consideration in relation to the question of authority is the significance of sources and translations. In "Thomas Blount's the Art of Making Devises and the Translation of Authority" Alan R. Young points out that in some cases priority indicated authority and he traces the bogus and nationalistic claims to authenticity made by Henri Estienne's in the light of Blount's English translation of his L'art de faire les devises. In "Perceiving, Seeing and Meaning: Emblems and Some Approaches to Reading Early Modern Culture" Daniel S. Russell theorises ways of seeing the emblem, and draws parallels between its sense of fracture and dislocation and the visual disjunction provoked in the French tradition of the blason anatomique with it focus on body parts rather than the naturalistic whole. Michael Bath in "'Emblem' as Rhetorical Figure: John Hoskins and Thomas Blount" considers an important manuscript treatise on English rhetoric by John Hoskins which dates from around 1599. Directions for Speech and Style, is a rare example of a contemporary theoretical document which defines the relationship between the emblem and other rhetorical figures. The work includes passages from Sidney's Arcadia as illustration of what consitutes an emblem and how it differs from other rhetorical figures. Although not published under Hoskins's name until the 1930s the work was plagarised by Thomas Blount in 1654. Intended for manuscript circulation only, it proved to be an influencial text as evidenced by Jonson referring to Hoskins as his literary "father". In "Ornament of the civill Life: The Device in Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie" Mary Silcox asserts that Puttenham's analysis of the device is of interest to the reader not because it concentrates on definitions or because it is especially detailed but rather because of its early date, the context of Puttenham's comments and the assumptions they reveal. Puttenham's discussion of the device, which he considered the representative emblematic form, comes amidst a treatise on English poetry. For Puttenham the device is an ideal genre for the courtly poet because of it subtlety, that is, its ability to deceive the reader, and its wit. However, claims Puttenham, dissembling wit is not sufficent to ensure a good device for there must also be decorum. He insist that there must be a relationship between the circumstances of the individual and his or her device and he cautions against inappropriate devices, supplying various examples to illustrate his point. The collection provides illustrations which pertain to particular essays and a useful annotated bibliography of primary sources compiled by Manning.

(e) Drama before 1550

Peter Happé's article "Dramatic images of kingship in Heywood and Bale" (SEL 39.239-253) presents a convincing argument for what he claims are dramatic representations of King Henry VIII in two Tudor plays: John Heywood's The Play of the Wether, possibly written shortly before 1533, and John Bale's King Johan, in existence by around 1536 but parts of which can be dated 1538 and 1560. Happé claims that in Heywood's play the king can be identified in the comic figure of Jupiter and that by comparing Henry to this notoriously sexually prolific God, Heywood thus ridicules Henry. Bale's depiction of Henry is not satiric but rather his character 'Imperial majesty' allows Bale to praise Henry's encouragement of Protestantism and attacks on Catholic vice. Also on the subject of Henry, "'It lak'th but life': Redford's wit and science, Anne of Cleves, and the politics of interpretation" (CompD 33.ii.270-291) by Hillary Nunn looks at John Redford's neglected play Wit and Science. This is a thinly disguised telling of the story of Henry VIII's rejection of Anne of of Cleves and Nunn notes that it metadramatically forces the courtly audience (who read and misreported Anne's appearance and portrait) to confront their interpretative acts.

In Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century Kent Cartwright challenges the critical orthodoxy that Tudor drama is best explained via the tradition of morality drama and provides an analysis of the earlier drama's engagement with feelings and sensibilites, a phenomenon usually associated with plays of the 1590s. Cartwright encourages readers to reconsider the radical, playful elements of humanist academic drama and reconsider our tendency to draw a sharp divide between the popular and the learned, something that sixteenth-century audiences may not have done. By emphasising the influence of the morality tradition on later drama, critics have dismissed the influence of humanist theatre and other types of drama, such as folk drama. Cartwright insists that he does not want to privledge the humanist tradition at the expense of the morality tradition but he does want to "redress the devaluing of humanist dramaturgy, a side-effect of the morality thesis perhaps not fully intended" (p.7). Chapter one considers the role of enigmatic acting in John Heywood's The Foure PP (c. 1520s) whereby the dramatist presents a surprisingly open meaning, an effect which is normally associated with later drama. Chapter two is concerned with the humanist education ideals evident in John Redford's school play, Wit and Science (c. 1530-47) which draws upon the traditions of the moralities, romance, and prodigal-son plays in order to emphaise how emotionally exciting academic study could be. Chapter five explores the complex depiction of women in humanist drama and provides a detailed examination of a range of texts. Other chapters consider Elizabethan plays: Gammer Gurton's Needle, John Lyly's Gallathea, Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Part I , and Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. One small criticism of this thorough and engaging study is Cartwright's promise of a study of the University wits in chapters seven, eight, and nine (p. 21) but no chapter nine appears, unless the reader is being directed to the rather short 'After word' on page 247.

(f) Collections of essays

Quite a few collections of essays each dealing with various literary genres appeared. Other Voices, Other Views: Expanding the Canon in English Renaissance Studies (ed. Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox, and Graham Roebuck) considers hitherto neglected early modern writers. The range of texts considered is broad and and the theoretical bias diverse although readings are historically specific and all are from the point of view of marginalized sources. The chapters in the book are divided into three sections. Part I: Multivocal/Multifocal: Readerly Direction considers the influence that texts have upon their readers. In the first essay "Reading the Metacanonical Texts" David Linton sets forth his theory of the metacanon in an effort to understand the process by which early modern texts were produced and consumed and how this relates to the modern reader. Judith Deitch in "'Dialoguewise': Discovering Alterity in Elizabethan Dialogues" claims that the formation of the canon has led to the early modern dialogue being neglected by modern readers. Her essay deals with a range of examples of the genre in order to demonstrate that it provides the reader with conflicting voices which highlight the diversity of early modern culture. In "The Ages of Man and the Lord Mayor's Show" John H. Astington focuses on civic pageantry and considers the visual and verbal signs evident in books published to commemorate Tudor and Stuart Lord Mayor shows which allow us to trace the status of those involved. In Part II: Countering Received History the focus is on historiographical texts written between the 1580s and the 1620s and essays centre on frictions between different classes and religious groups, the private and the public, men and women, monarch and subjects. The last of these binaries is dealt with by Sandra Bell in "Writing the Monarch: King James VI and Lepanto" which considers James's attempts at self-aggrandizement via a poem about the Catholic victory over the Turks in 1571 at the battle of Lepanto. Written at a time when Catholics were an increasing threat in England and Scotland as well as abroad, James's choice of a Catholic sucess for the subject of his poem implied Catholic sympathies which did not please his Protestant subjects. Other essays in this section are not within the remit of this review. Part III: Articulating Female Voices considers women's voices in texts featuring women and in texts by women. The former is represented in an essay by Stanley Mc Kenzie on Drayton's representation of Mistress Shore in Drayton's England's Heroicall Epistles where Shore resists Edward IV's attempts at sexual objectification in order to construct her own identity. Two essays consider the writings of Anne Lock: Kel Morin-Parsons in "'Thus crave I mercy': The Preface of Anne Locke and John Ottenhoff in "Mediating Anne Locke's Meditation Sonnets".

Contextualizing the Renaissance: Returns to history. Selected proceedings from the 28th annual CEMERS conference (ed. Albert H. Tricomi) stems from the twenty-eighth annual conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies. The collection is divided into three distinct sections: part one 'Literature and History as Critical Practices'; part two 'Rehistoricizing Through the Visual Arts'; and part three 'New Historicism and Representation'. As Tricomi puts it in his introduction the "governing theme" of the volume is "modes of historicization" (p.1). The two essays that fall within the remit of this review are included in part one, those by David Quint and Margaret Mikesell. In "Dueling and Civility in Sixteenth-Century Italy" Quint considers duelling in literary texts, particularly the Orlando Furioso, in order to demonstrate how imaginative depictions of the phenomenon interlink with the real-life practice, seen via contemporary treatises on the subject. Unfortunately Tricomi's claim, in his introduction to the collection, that Quint will consider The Faerie Queen in his essay (p.7) proves erroneous. Margaret Mikesell's concise essay "The Place of Vive's Instruction of a Christen Woman in Early Modern English Domestic Book Literature", like Quint's, considers a contemporary treatise. Mikesell focuses on the influence of the Instruction upon subsequent domestic treatises with particular attention given to the fact that, though Catholic, the Instruction was modified by later writers in order to conform to Protestant thought, particularly on chastity and obedience.

The 'borders' in the title of the anthology Opening the Borders: Inclusivity in Early Modern Studies are disiplinary, theoretical, generational, and national and its editor celebrates its eclecticism and diversity. Extending the ideological significance of the collection's title, each essay takes the notion of borders as its theme and "demonstrates what happens when both authors and their critics refuse to respect the lines separating putatively discrete areas, be they chronological, geographical, theoretical, sexual, or textual" (p. 16). Essays from this collection appear in categorised reviews above. Others includes Wayne A. Rebhorn's "Machiavelli's Vita di Castruccio Castracani": Charismatic Spectacles and the Irony of History" which is informed by Hew Historicism and close reading. Rebhorn is interested in Machiavelli's own version of history which in the Vita presents Castruccio, a version of his ideal prince, as an essentially inferior character to the real ruler of history, Lady Fortuna. The Vita shows Castruccio to be her victim despite his attempts to govern her. Ian Frederick Moulton in 'Bawdy Politic: Renaissance Republicanism and the Discourse of Pricks' draws our attention to a little-known text, Antonio Vignali's La Cazzaria ("The Book of the Prick"), a dialogue written in Siena in the 1520s in order to consider the interaction between the erotic and the political. In "What History Really Teaches: Historical Pyrrhonism in William Baldwin's A Mirror for Magistrates" Sherri Geller claims that critical bias toward and editorial alterations in A Mirror for Magistrates has led to its nonfictional frame story being treated as a separate entity rather than an integral part of the text. Critics tend to search for 'facts' within the frame but Geller argues that this approach has encouraged its marginality. The frame story interacts with the complaints made by the ghost in the Mirror and raises issues to do with fact and fiction and the nature of truth in historical narratives. Other essays that are of interest to the early modernist include David Scott Kastan's essay "Shakespeare After Theory" and Pamela Joseph Benson's essay on Amelia Lanyer and patronage.

The uniting theme of the collection of essays The Author as Character: Representing Historical Writers in Western Literature, as its title indicates, is that of the genre of author as character in fiction. For the Renaissance scholar two chapters, both of which focus on classical authors as characters, are of particular interest. In "A Voice Restored: Louise Labé's Impersonation of Sappho" Phyllis R. Brown explores how Labe's name and poetic voice has been closely linked with the ancient Greek female poet Sappho. In her writing, Labe created herself as Sappho--an identity derived from what she knew of the woman and her poetry and from the stories written about her by classical writers such as Ovid. In "Plato as Protagonist in Sir Thomas Elyot's Of the Knowledge which Maketh a Wise Man"Robert Haynes explores Elyot's use of classical characters to distance himself from the politically sensitive views put forward in his writing. In the titular dialogue he uses Plato (one of his favourite authors who himself practised this distancing technique) in order to comment on contemporary Tudor politics. Elyot can thus safely opinionate on the dangerous subject of Henrician reform. The book's editors, Paul Franssen and Ton Hoenselaars, present "a representative selection of literature in terms of historical period, geography, and gender." (p.20) and althought the collection is undoubtedly inclusive in some ways that is its downfall since the vast range of periods included may serve to limit its appeal.

(g) Miscellaneous:

Writing and Society: Literacy, print and politics in Britain 1590-1660 by Nigel Wheale is a lively study of the increase in literacy during the early modern period. Of particular interest are chapters two, and three which consider contemporary descriptions of early modern social hierarchy in which status was directly linked with literacy, and the impact of social position and gender upon access to education in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries repectively. Also of interest is chapter four where Wheale provides a fascinating history of the Stationers' Company, paying particular attention to the relationship between author, printer, and audience. Other chapters consider drama after 1550 (including Shakespeare) and seventeeth-century texts, all of which are outside the remit of this review. Chapter nine is particularly valuable since here is provided, for the first time in a single-volume work, a detailed chronological outline of the main political and constitutional developments from 1589 through to 1662. The chapter also lists significant publications and performances for each year. One criticism is that the book tends to sub-divide too often which can be distracting and tends to result in a rather 'bitty' presentation.

In "The Future of Early Modern studies" from Proceedings of the seventh Northern Plains conference on early British literature (ed. Jay Ruud) SusanneWoods draws parallels between the renaissance period and our own, particularly the "emphasis on textual scholarship, distrust of traditional boundaries, and an information revolution emerging from new technology" (p. 2). She considers the focus on multiple interpretations of text, multiple meanings of language, and attention to unmarked categories, for example the teaching of heterosexual studies on the model of gay studies, looking at pressures on heterosexuality in largely homosocial early modern europe. Particular focus is placed on the increasing significance of electronic texts and internet resources especially the Brown Women Writers Project which grew up as a reaction to what Woods and colleagues considered to be the inadequate Norton Anthology of Literature by Women edited by Gilbert and Gubar. Neglected texts written by women are available electronically with a focus on full texts rather than extracts typical of anthologies. Woods shows how textual markup using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) tagging system for Standardized General Markup Language produces a resource which can be searched in sophisticated ways unattainable in the print medium.

Considering Gabriel Harvey's ambivalent attitude toward Method and Ramism through the 1580s and 1590s, Kendrick W. Prewitt's essay "Gabriel Harvey and the practice of method" (SEL 39.19-39) builds upon previous studies by Lisa Jardine, amongst others, in order to provide an insight into Harvey--the man and his writings--and to show that Harvey's ideas about Method were intimately connected to his personal and professional efforts to succeed. Prewitt pays particular attention to Harvey's Ciceronianus, the "Earthquake Letter" (published as part of Three proper and wittie, familiar Letters) and Foure Letters and Certeine Sonnets, Especially Touching Robert Greene in order to explore Harvey's qualified allegiance to method epitomized in the statement made in the Foure Letters: "I love Method: but honour Practice" (p. 36).

The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism is an ambitious and excellent series which provides a detailed account of the huge wealth of Western literary criticism from the classical period to the twentieth-century. The Renaissance is the focus of volume three (ed. Glyn P. Norton) and articles explore a range of important intellectual issues which informed Renaissance writers as well as the genres within which they wrote. The subject areas covered are divided into separate categories such as 'Poetics', 'Theories of Prose Fiction', and 'Voices of Dissent', with some categories being further sub-divided, for example the sub-division of 'Literary forms' within the 'Poetics' section. The focus goes beyond England to include the continent and this highlights one of the strengths of the volume: its inclusivity. Entries are concise but at the same time detailed and will undoubtedly prove to be an invaluable guide to scholars working within the period who wish to become more familiar with its intellectual developments. In "Renaissance Neoplatonism"Michael J. B. Allen traces the influence of Platonic dialogue in the development of Renaissance Neoplatonism by fifteenth-century Florentines Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The focus is on issues posed by Platonic dialogue and explored by the Renaissance Neoplatonists such as genre, inspiration, and interpretation. Selected Individual essays from the volume are reviewed in the relevant categories above.

Notes and Queries for 1998 was not included in the previous review and there were several pieces worth mentioning. Firstly in the category of religion, Janice Devereux in "The Identity of the Curate's Friend in Luke Shepherd's Doctour Doubble Ale" ((N&Q 45.295-296) notes that the drunken cleric 'Syr Harry' who appears in Luke Shepherd's anti-Catholic satiric poem has been identified by Susan Brigden as Henry (Harry) George, the conservative curate of the London parish church of St Sepulchre. In Doctour Doubble Ale, the curate refers to a "speciall frynde" who Devereux idenitfies as the notoriously strict Catholic and tavern-owner John Twyford who George undoubtedly knew. Coverdale's 1535 translation of the bible is quoted frequently in the OED whilst William Tyndale's 1530 Pentateuch is neglected. In "Hidden Tyndale in OED's First Instances from Miles Coverdale's 1535 Bible" (N&Q 45.289-293) James Andrew Clark asserts that many of the words attributed to Coverdale in the OED are taken from Tyndale's Pentateuch.Using query language from the CD-ROM version of the OED, Clark has produced an alphabetical list of sample entries that should be ascribed to Tyndale. In an important piece, "Mother Arnold: A Lost witchcraft Pamplet Rediscovered" (N&Q 45.296-300), Marion Gibson claims that a document contained in William Barley's A World of Wonders. A Masse of Murthers. A Covie of Cosonages (1595) is a version of a witchcraft pamplet thought lost since 1574 which outlines the offences, interrogation, and trial of an alleged witch, Mother Arnold. Gibson considers references to the Arnold case in other pamplets from the period and in legal records in order to clarify Arnold's biography and get closer to the original 1574 account. Two notes came under the category of poetry: in "Dating Sir Thomas Wyatt's 'Iopas's song'" (N&Q 45.294-295) A. J. Turner asserts that David Scott's proposed date for the poem of late 1539 is incorrect. The unfinished poem has an astronomical theme and Scott claimed that it was written to celebrate the construction of an astronomical clock now in Hampton Court but originally set up in St James's palace in 1539 and coinciding with a celebration for Anne of Cleves. Its unfinished state, claimed Scott, could be explained by Wyatt's visit as ambassador to the Emperor Charles V. Turner accepts that the poem may be associated with the clock but balks at the notion that the clock was set up anywhere other than Hampton Court. Furthermore, there is no evidence of any ceremonies given in Anne's honour at either St James's or Hampton Court. Since the clock is dated 1540 Wyatt would have begun his poem after the clock was in place and this date also explains why the poem was never finished since Wyatt died that same year. In "Donne's debt to Petrarch in his sonnet 17" (N&Q 45.34) Jonquil Bevan points out that line four of Donne's poem is a direct translation of line thirteen of Petrarch's Sonnet 75 in Rime in Morte di Laura. Bevan asserts that this should make us reconsider the tired claim that Donne's poetry reacts against the Petrarchanism of the Elizabethans.Whether Long Meg of Westminster--the heroine of several literary works in the Renaissance period--really existed has been the subject of much debate. In the fascinating "Long Meg of Westminster: A mystery solved" (N&Q 45.302-304) Bernard Capp reveals that she was a real person, one Margaret Barnes who "ran a popular victualling house and sought to conceal its character as a bawdy house" (p. 304). Evidence from the Bridewell Hospital court books shows that Barnes had appeared before the Bridewell Governors voluntarily in an apparently fruitless effort to clear her name.

I was unable to see copies of the following: Theo Stemmler's essay "A portrait of the artist as a young man: Henry VIII's early songs in Intercultural Encounters--Studies in English literatures. Essays presented to Rudiger Ahrens on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday (ed. Heinz Antor and Kevin L Cope). I was also unable to see copies of the following articles: "Sexuality, corruption, and the body politic: The paradoxical tribute of The Misfortune's of Arthur to Elizabeth 1" (Arth 9.iii.68-80); and Ian Romauld Lakowski "From history of myth: The misogyny of Richard III in More's history and Shakespeare's play" (QWERTY 9.15-19)

List of Books reviewed

Bowers, Rick, ed. Thomas Phaer and The Boke of Chyldren (1544). Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. pp. x + 100. £19 ($22). ISBN 0 8669 8243 4.

Cartwright, Kent. Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge University Press. pp. x + 321. £44.94 ($64.95). ISBN 0 5216 4075 x.

Clark, Steve. ed. Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit. Zed. pp. 224. £45 ($65). ISBN 1 8564 9627 9.

Daly, Peter M., and John Manning, eds. Aspects of Renaissance and Baroque Symbol Theory. AMS. pp. xxii + 283. £65.95 ($78). ISBN 0 4046 3714 0.

Field, Rosalind, ed. Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance. Brewer. pp. xv + 172. £40 ($75). ISBN 0 8599 1553 0.

Franssen, Paul and Ton Hoenselaars, eds. The Author as Character: Representing Historical Writers in Western Literature. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. pp. 313. £37.50 ($46.50). ISBN 0 8386 3786 8.

Frye, Susan, and Karen Robertson, eds. Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women's Alliances in Early Modern England. Oxford University Press. pp. 304. pb £15.99 ($19.95). ISBN 0 1951 1735 2.

Herman, Peter C., ed. Opening the Borders: Inclusivity in Early Modern Studies. Essays in Honor of James V. Mirollo. University of Delaware Press. pp. 355. $42 ($52.50). ISBN 0 8741 3675 x.

Lock, Anne Vaughan. The Collected Works. ed. Susan M. Felch. Medieval and Renaissance Texts. 185. Arizona State University. pp. xc + 273. £24 ($28). ISBN 0 8669 8227 2.

Marotti, Arthur F., ed. Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts. Macmillan. pp. xviii + 266. £38.06 ($55). ISBN 0 3337 3218 9.

May, Steven W. The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and Their Contexts. Pegasus. pp. 407. £37.95 ($24.95). ISBN 0 8262 0749 9.

Norton, Glyn P., ed. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. 3: The Renaissance. Cambridge University Press. pp. xxiii + 758. £75 ($130). ISBN 0 5213 0008 8.

Ostovich, Helen, Mary V. Silcox and Graham Roebuck, eds. Other Voices, Other Views: Expanding the Canon in English Renaissance Studies. University of Delaware Press. pp. 324. £37 ($47.50). ISBN 0 8741 3680 6.

Parker, Douglas H., and Bruce Krajewski, eds. A Brefe Dialoge Bitwene a Christen Father and His Stobborne Sonne: The First Protestant Catachism Published in English. University of Toronto Press. pp. 305. £40 ($60). ISBN 0 8020 4389 5.

Prendergast, Maria Teresa Micaela. Renaissance Fantasies: The Gendering of Aesthetics in Early Modern Fiction. Kent State University Press. pp. x + 214. £32.95 ($39). ISBN 0 8733 8644 2.

Ruud, Jay, ed. Proceedings of the Seventh Northern Plains Conference on Early British Literature. Northern State University Press. pp. iv + 369. $15. ISBN 1 8831 2014 4.

Sacks, David Harris, ed. Utopia. Bedford / St Martin's Press. pp. 208. pb £7.99 ($12.75). ISBN 0 3121 0145 7.

Shell, Alison. Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination, 1558-1660. Cambridge University Press. pp. xi + 309. £42.50 ($64.95). ISBN 0 5215 8090 0.

Trinklaus, Charles. Renaissance Transformations of Late Medieval Thought. Ashgate. pp. x + 369. £59.50 ($111.95). ISBN 0 8607 8811 3.

Wheale, Nigel. Writing and Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain, 1590-1660. Routledge. pp. 208. £55 ($90). ISBN 0 4150 8497 0.