The Forms of Renaissance Thought New Essays in Literature and Culture

The boundaries separating Literary Studies from other kinds of humanistic inquiry are more permeable now than at any moment since the Enlightenment, when disciplinary categories began to acquire their modern definition. The Forms of Renaissance Thought celebrates scholarship at a number of these frontiers. The contributors address works of the European Renaissance as they relate both to the textured world of their origins and to a modern scholarly culture that turns to the early moderns for methodological provocation and renewal. In this way, the volume charts the most important developments in the field since the turn towards cultural and ideological features of the Renaissance imagination.

LEONARD BARKAN teaches in the Comparative Literature Department at Princeton University. His most recent books are Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture and Satyr Square: A Year, a Life in Rome. BRADIN CORMACK teaches in the English Department at the University of Chicago. In addition to essays on drama and poetry, he is author of A Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509-1625 and co-author of Book Use, Book Theory: 1500-1700. SEAN KEILEN, a fellow of the National Humanities Center, USA, is the author of Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature and essays about antiquarianism, mythography, and the classical tradition. He is also co-editor of Shakespeare: The Critical Complex.