Verse libel in Renaissance England and Scotland / Steven W. May and Alan Bryson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

May, Steven W., author.

Bryson, Alan, author.

Contributor:

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Verse satire, English--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

Verse satire, English.

English poetry--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

English poetry.

Libel and slander in literature.

Physical Description:

xii, 449 pages ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2016.

Summary:

In Renaissance England and Scotland, verse libel was no mere sub-division of verse satire but a fully-developed, widely-read poetic genre in its own right. This fact has been hidden from literary historians by the nature of the genre itself: defamation was rigorously prosecuted by state and local authorities throughout the period. Thus most (but not all) libeling, in verse or prose, was confined to manuscript circulation. This comprehensive survey of the genre identifies all sixteenth-century libel texts, printed and transcribed. It makes fifty-two of the least familiar of these poems accessible for further study by providing critical texts with glosses and explanatory notes. In reconstructing the contexts of these poems, we identify a number of the libellers, their targets, the circumstances of attack, and the workings of the scribal networks that disseminated many of them over wide areas, often for decades. The book's concentration on poems restricted to manuscript circulation throws substantial new light on the nature of Renaissance scribal culture. As poetic technicians, its practitioners were among the age's most experimental and creative. They produced some of the most popular, widely read works of their age and beyond, while their output established the foundation upon which the seventeenth-century tradition of verse libel developed organically.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 403-425) and indexes.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

ISBN:

9780198739210

0198739214

OCLC:

959947156