Early Modern Improvisations

Essays on History and Literature in Honor of John Watkins

Katherine Scheil, Linda Shenk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781032698281
• eBook ISBN: 9781040037416
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

With a panoramic sweep across continents and topics, Early Modern Improvisations is an interdisciplinary collection that analyzes the relationship between early modern literature and history through lenses such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and politics.

The book engages readers interested in texts that range from Shakespeare and Tudor queens to Anglican missionary work in North America; from contemporary feminist television series to Ancient Greek linguistic and philosophical concepts; from the delicate dance of diplomatic exchange to the instabilities of illness, food insecurity, and piracy. Its range of contributions encourages readers to discover their own intersections across literary and historical texts, a sense of discovery that this collection's contributors learned from its dedicatee, John Watkins, a major literary and cultural historian whose work moves effortlessly across geographical, temporal, and political borders. His work and his personality embody the spirit of creative improvisation that brings new ideas together, allowing texts and figures of history to haunt later eras and encourage new questions.

This volume is aimed at scholars and students alike who wish to explore early modern culture and its reverberations in ways that engage with a world outside the grand narratives and centralized institutions of power, a world that is more provisional, less scripted, and more improvisational.

Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial (CC-BY-NC)] 4.0 license.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Of Gentle Deeds and Generative Improvisations
• 1 “Sad Stories of the Death of Queens”: Elizabethan Beginnings and Endings
• 2 Queen Elizabeth’s Seneca
• 3 “Not By Blood”: Queenship in All Is True (Henry VIII)
• 4 Dangerous Wombs: Pregnant Bodies in Early Modern Drama and History
• 5 Mothers and Forced Marriages in the Later Middle Ages
• 6 Cultural Production, Familiarity, Race, and the 1682 Embassies from Morocco and Banten to England
• 7 “The Excellent Civil Policy of the Jesuits … Deserves our Imitation:”: Anglican Missionaries, Native Americans, and the Jesuit Utopia of Paraguay
• 8 Between Diary, Comedy, and Diplomatic Report. Writing in the Midst of the Italian Wars: Francesco Vettori’s Viaggio in Alamagna, 1507–1515
• 9 Shakespeare’s Italian Loves: Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto in Much Ado About Nothing
• 10 The Arcadian History of Romeo and Juliet
• 11 Ghosting Shakespeare in Hulu’s Harlots
• 12 “We Must be Gentle Now We are Gentlemen”: The Complex Concept of Kaloskagathos
• 13 Ruinations: Petrarch in Rome, Navagero in Granada
• 14 Life-Writing Dapifers: Early Modern Women as Textual Stewards
• 15 “If You can Mock a Leek, You can Eat a Leek”: Cultural Resonances in Shakespearean Foodstuffs
• 16 “A Body Yet Distempered”: Being Sick at Home in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV
• 17 The Punishment of Pirates in the Medieval Mediterranean
• 18 The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming: Anglo-Russian Interplay in the English Renaissance
• Afterword: Early Modern Literary and Historical Improvisations: Toward a Generative Historicism
• Index