Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture

This collection of original essays brings together some of the most prominent figures in new historicist and cultural materialist approaches to the early modern period, and offers a new focus on the literature and culture of the Renaissance. Traditionally, Renaissance studies have concentrated on the human subject. The essays collected here bring objects - purses, clothes, tapestries, houses, maps, feathers, communion wafers, tools, pages, skulls - back into view. As a result, the much-vaunted early modern subject ceases to look autonomous and sovereign, but is instead caught up in a vast and uneven world of objects which he and she makes, owns, values, imagines, and represents. This book puts things back into relation with people; in the process, it elicits new critical readings, and new cultural configurations.

• Collection of original essays by leading scholars in the field • Revisionary view of Renaissance literature and culture through concentration on object rather than subject - no competing book with the same focus • Wide appeal across areas of humanities and social sciences

Introduction Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass; Part I. Priority of Objects: 1. The ideology of superfluous things: King Lear as period piece Margreta de Grazia; 2. Rude mechanicals Patricia Parker; 3. Spenser’s domestic domain: poetry property and the Early Modern subject Louis A. Montrose; Part II. Materialisations: 4. Gendering the Crown Stephen Orgel; 5. The unauthored 1539 volume in which is printed the Hecatomphile, The Flowers of French Poetry and Other Soothing Things Nancy J. Vickers; 6. Dematerialisations: textile and textual properties in Ovid, Sandys, and Spenser Ann Rosalind Jones; Part III. Appropriations: 7. Freedom service and the trade in slaves: the problem of labour in Paradise Lost Maureen Quilligan; 8. Feathers and flies: Aphra Behn and the seventeenth-century trade in exotica Margaret W. Ferguson; 9. Unlearning the Aztec Cantares (Preliminaries to a postcolonial history) Gary Tomlinson; Part IV. Fetishisms: 10. Worn worlds: clothes and identity on the Renaissance stage Peter Stallybrass; 11. The Countess of Pembroke’s literal translation Jonathan Goldberg; 12. Remnants of the sacred in early modern England Stephen Greenblatt; Part V. Objections: 13. The insincerity of women Marjorie Garber; 14. Desire is death Jonathan Dollimore; Index.