Marco Armiero is Senior Researcher at the Italian National Research Council and Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technologies, Universitat Aut(noma de Barcelona. He has published extensively on-Italian environmental history and edited Views from the South: Environmental Stories from the Mediterranean World. --
Thomas Wyatt is the finest English poet between Chaucer and the Elizabethans. Many poems have been wrongly attributed to him, however, and the authenticity of different versions of his lyrics has been a matter of dispute. Richard Harrier makes a significant contribution both by establishing accurate texts and by determining the canon itself. The only solid foundation for the Wyatt canon is his personal copybook, the Egerton MS, here reproduced in a diplomatic text. The apparatus records all changes within the manuscript and all contemporary variants; explanatory notes are provided. This volume, which includes a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the sources, will stand as the ultimate authority for the text and canon of Wyatt's poems.
In early modern Britain, the primary medium of free comment was the clandestine satire, circulated either orally or in manuscript. Part of the national political culture from Jacobean times, satire reached its greatest influence following the Restoration of Charles II, when a new 'easy' style, combining courtly polish with demotic frankness and flagrant indecency, led to the composition of thousands of such poems. Most of the poets of the time, including such major talents as Marvell and Rochester, wrote in the genre, though nearly always anonymously. While its chief targets were political, much Restoration satire concerned itself with the emerging demography of 'Town' and its uncertain experimentation with new kinds of social freedom. Attacks on the sexual misbehaviour (real or imagined) of aristocratic women hover, equally uncertainly, between moral condemnation and ill-disguised envy, while also conferring an inverse celebrity status on their victims. In this paradoxical social world, not to be lampooned could mean that one was no longer a person of importance. In the first comprehensive survey of this vast field, Harold Love considers the relationship of the lampoon to gossip, how one might construct a poetics of the genre, and how clandestine satire reached and was received by its readers. Constructing three primary categories of 'court', 'Town' and 'state' lampooning, Love argues that far from being the product of isolated disaffection, most satire was the work of a circle of recognized poets, frequently operating in collaboration. An extensive first-line index to the principal manuscript sources for clandestine satire makes this book an open sesame to further exploration of its fascinating field.
This study reappraises Sir Thomas Wyatt (c.1504-1542) as a poetic innovator. It discusses Wyatt's reflections on the writing process, and his awareness of how words can be turned in new directions - that is, rewritten, amended, transformed, manipulated, even performed - over the course of a text's production, transmission, and reception.
The death of Edmund Campion in 1581 marked a disjunction between the world of printed untruth and private, handwritten, truth in Elizabethan England. Gerard Kilroy here uncovers a fascinating network of scribal communities where Campion manuscripts circulated among a group of families dominated by Sir John Harington and Sir Thomas Tresham. His work provides startling new views about Campion's literary, historical and cultural impact in early modern England. The book lays the foundations of the first full literary assessment of Campion the scholar, the impact he had on the literature of early modern England, and the long legacy in manuscript writing.
