Images of Matter: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance

In these proceedings from the conference of February 2002, contributors start from the comment from Bacon that "words are but the images of matter." The 12 papers in this collection address such topics as choreography and cartography, interpretive agency in Withers's A Collection of Emblems, Ovid and the question of politics in early modern England, the kinship of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Fletcher, a reading of Raimondi by Aretino, George Herbert and the sacrament of Holy Communion, Thomas Wentworth (the first Earl of Stafford), domestic politics in The Tragedy of Mariam, gender and the market in Henry VI, Part 1, kinship and succession in Beowulf, Shylock as Shakespeare's bad Jew, and the effects of the failure of the English Reformation. Distributed by Associated University Presses Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR