Thomas Churchyard

Thomas Churchyard

Author: Matthew Woodcock

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-11-24

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0191081922

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Soldier, courtier, author, entertainer, and amateur spy, Thomas Churchyard (c.1529-1604) saw action in most of the principal Tudor theatres of war, was a servant to five monarchs, and had a literary career spanning over half a century during which time he produced over fifty different works in a variety of forms and genres. Churchyard's struggles to subsist as an author and soldier provides an unrivalled opportunity to examine the self-promotional strategies employed by an individual who attempts to make a living from both writing and fighting, and who experiments throughout his life with ways in which the arts of the pen and sword may be reconciled and aligned. Drawing on extensive archival and literary sources, Matthew Woodcock reconstructs the extraordinary life of a figure well-known yet long neglected in early modern literary studies. In the first ever book-length biography of Churchyard, Woodcock reveals the author to be a resourceful and innovative writer whose long literary career plays an important part in the history of professional authorship in sixteenth-century England. This book also situates Churchyard alongside contemporary soldier-authors such as Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, George Gascoigne, and Sir Philip Sidney, and it makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the relationship between literature and the military in the early modern period. Churchyard's writings drew heavily upon his own experiences at court and in the wars and the author never tired of drawing attention to the struggles he endured throughout his life. Consequently, this study addresses the wider methodological question of how we should construct the biography of an individual who was consistently preoccupied with telling his own story.


International Exchange in the Early Modern Book World

International Exchange in the Early Modern Book World

Author: Matthew McLean

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2016-07-11

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 9004316639

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International Exchange in the Early Modern Book World presents new research on several aspects of the movement and exchange of books between countries, languages and confessions. It considers elements of the international book trade, the circulation and collection of texts, the practice of translation and the diffusion and exchange of technical and cultural knowledge. Commercial and logistical aspects of the early modern book trade are considered, as are the relationships between local markets and the internationally-minded firms which sought to meet their expectations. The barriers to the movement of books across borders – political, linguistic, confessional, cultural – are explored, as are the means by which these barriers were surmounted.


Henry VIII and Francis I

Henry VIII and Francis I

Author: David Potter

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011-05-10

Total Pages: 593

ISBN-13: 9004204318

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This book, based on a wide variety of contemporary sources, re-examines the little-studied late war between Henry VIII and Francis I in order to assess its impact on both countries and its influence on strategies and tactics for waging war and making peace in the 1540s.


Bosworth 1485

Bosworth 1485

Author: Glenn Foard

Publisher: Oxbow Books

Published: 2013-08-22

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1782971807

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Bosworth stands alongside Naseby and Hastings as one of the three most iconic battles ever fought on English soil. The action on 22 August 1485 brought to an end the dynastic struggle known as the Wars of the Roses and heralded the dawn of the Tudor dynasty. However, Bosworth was also the most famous lost battlefield in England. Between 2005 and 2010, the techniques of battlefield archaeology were used in a major research programme to locate the site. Bosworth 1485: a battlefield rediscovered is the result. Using data from historical documents, landscape archaeology, metal detecting survey, ballistics and scientific analysis, the volume explores each aspect of the investigation – from the size of the armies, their weaponry, and the battlefield terrain to exciting new evidence of the early use of artillery – in order to identify where and how the fighting took place. Bosworth 1485 provides a fascinating and intricately researched new perspective on the event which, perhaps more than any other, marked the transition between medieval and early modern England.


Henry VIII and Francis I

Henry VIII and Francis I

Author: David Linley Potter

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011-05-10

Total Pages: 592

ISBN-13: 9004204326

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The aim of this book is to explore the neglected subject of the final war between France and England at the end of Henry VIII’s and Francis I’s reigns. The relationship between these two monarchs has long fascinated historians and serious work has been done in the last generation, especially on the earlier period. Rather less has been done on the end of their reigns. The perspective is a dual one, from both that of England and France, with equal weight given to the reasons for conflict and the effects of war on both (on land and sea, in France and Scotland). For England, the military effort of the period proved to be extremely damaging and long-lasting, while France found itself at war on two fronts for the first time since the early 1520s. The book therefore asks why Henry VIII opted for the imperial alliance in 1542, thus committing himself to war in the long term, and why Francis I and his advisers did not do more to win over the English alliance. The Anglo-French war needs to be placed firmly in the context of the great Habsburg-Valois dual. The Anglo-French wars of this period have not received any serious modern analysis and the study of diplomacy in the period needs to be updated. Maps and plans are included and some illustrations.


The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe

The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe

Author: Catherine Richardson

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-09-13

Total Pages: 506

ISBN-13: 1317042859

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The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe marks the arrival of early modern material culture studies as a vibrant, fully-established field of multi-disciplinary research. The volume provides a rounded, accessible collection of work on the nature and significance of materiality in early modern Europe – a term that embraces a vast range of objects as well as addressing a wide variety of human interactions with their physical environments. This stimulating view of materiality is distinctive in asking questions about the whole material world as a context for lived experience, and the book considers material interactions at all social levels. There are 27 chapters by leading experts as well as 13 feature object studies to highlight specific items that have survived from this period (defined broadly as c.1500–c.1800). These contributions explore the things people acquired, owned, treasured, displayed and discarded, the spaces in which people used and thought about things, the social relationships which cluster around goods – between producers, vendors and consumers of various kinds – and the way knowledge travels around those circuits of connection. The content also engages with wider issues such as the relationship between public and private life, the changing connections between the sacred and the profane, or the effects of gender and social status upon lived experience. Constructed as an accessible, wide-ranging guide to research practice, the book describes and represents the methods which have been developed within various disciplines for analysing pre-modern material culture. It comprises four sections which open up the approaches of various disciplines to non-specialists: ‘Definitions, disciplines, new directions’, ‘Contexts and categories’, ‘Object studies’ and ‘Material culture in action’. This volume addresses the need for sustained, coherent comment on the state, breadth and potential of this lively new field, including the work of historians, art historians, museum curators, archaeologists, social scientists and literary scholars. It consolidates and communicates recent developments and considers how we might take forward a multi-disciplinary research agenda for the study of material culture in periods before the mass production of goods.


Sir Henry Neville, Alias William Shakespeare

Sir Henry Neville, Alias William Shakespeare

Author: Mark Bradbeer

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2015-02-12

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 0786494816

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Shakspere's history plays are more than dramatized history lessons. They explore contemporary dangers inherent in royal succession at a time when Elizabeth I decreed that mere discussion of who would inherit the throne was treason. The plays were political and therefore dangerous. Yet William Shakspere from Stratford-upon-Avon was never arrested for his writing nor spent time in prison, unlike his fellow playwrights Marlowe, Kyd and Jonson. In 1601 Sir Henry Neville was imprisoned and "Shakespeare" stopped writing history plays. The identification of Neville as an authorship candidate, put forward by James and Rubinstein (2005), urges reinterpretation of the plays. Neville enjoyed privileged access to the Holinshed Chronicles (1587), a primary source for the plays. He was ambassador to France and spoke French (see Henry V), knew the descendants of Jack Cade (Henry VI Part 2), was familiar with Crosby Place (Richard III) and lived in Blackfriars (Henry VIII). This book reveals new evidence of Neville's authorship, with examples of annotation found in books from Neville's library suggesting they were source material for the plays. Numerous anomalies in the plays indicate Shakespeare's consistent bias in portraying the Nevilles in a positive light, revealing the hidden author's political viewpoint and true identity.


Gabriel Harvey and the History of Reading

Gabriel Harvey and the History of Reading

Author: Anthony Grafton

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2024-01-08

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 1800081685

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Few articles in the humanities have had the impact of Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton’s seminal ‘Studied for Action’ (1990), a study of the reading practices of Elizabethan polymath and prolific annotator Gabriel Harvey. Their excavation of the setting, methods and ambitions of Harvey’s encounters with his books ignited the History of Reading, an interdisciplinary field which quickly became one of the most exciting corners of the scholarly cosmos. A generation inspired by the model of Harvey fanned out across the world’s libraries and archives, seeking to reveal the many creative, unexpected and curious ways that individuals throughout history responded to texts, and how these interpretations in turn illuminate past worlds. Three decades on, Harvey’s example and Jardine’s work remain central to cutting-edge scholarship in the History of Reading. By uniting ‘Studied for Action’ with published and unpublished studies on Harvey by Jardine, Grafton and the scholars they have influenced, this collection provides a unique lens on the place of marginalia in textual, intellectual and cultural history. The chapters capture subsequent work on Harvey and map the fields opened by Jardine and Grafton’s original article, collectively offering a posthumous tribute to Lisa Jardine and an authoritative overview of the History of Reading.