Cultural Creativity in the Early English Renaissance Popular Culture in Town and Country

This book is about the ways that ordinary people in town and country creatively define themselves, their families and their social networks. It explores, for the period c. 1450-1560, inheritance strategies, personal possessions and their meanings, attitudes to commemoration after death, the daily fashioning of identity and the interactions between imagination and daily life. The book is also about how the surviving textual evidence may be used to reconstruct these perceptions and experiences and the implications of such reconstruction for cultural history in the current crises of interpretation. Above all, this book emphasizes the cultural significance of the creative imagination.

ELISABETH SALTER is Lecturer in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at the University of Aberystwyth.

Preface * Acknowledgements * List of Abbreviations * Reconstructing Perception and Experience I: Evidence * Reconstructing Perception and Experience II: Vocabularies * Inheritance and Property * Possessions * Life Fashioning * Death Fashioning * The Creativity of Reading * Conclusions * Notes * Bibliography * Index Preface * Acknowledgements * List of Abbreviations * Reconstructing Perception and Experience I: Evidence * Reconstructing Perception and Experience II: Vocabularies * Inheritance and Property * Possessions * Life Fashioning * Death Fashioning * The Creativity of Reading * Conclusions * Notes * Bibliography * Index