Renaissance Society of America Meeting

Jodi Cranston

“This wide-ranging exploration of the green world, pastoral, or ‘second nature’ of Venice helps rethink the complex and intricate world of pastoral, its production, and its experience. From palace and villa gardens to paintings, eclogues and plays, and sculptural figures, Jodi Cranston sets out the fictional and the actual modes of pastoralism in the light of both contemporary writers and modern critics who have extended their versions of pastoral.”
—John Dixon Hunt, author of A World of Gardens

Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition

Edited by Cécile Fromont

“A compelling collection of essays that map out the transplantation of Kongo and Central African Christian traditions in the Americas by exploring the crucial role African Christian festivals played in the Americas. This is a timely multidisciplinary text that invites readers to explore representation and performance expressed in ideas, music, and art deployed by Africans to assert the will to thrive in the context of domination and to forge a vibrant Christian presence and practice.”
—Elias Bongmba, author of The Dialectics of Transformation in Africa

Self-Representation and the Bible in John Milton’s Writings

David V. Urban

In Milton and the Parables of Jesus, David V. Urban examines Milton’s self-referential use of figures from the New Testament parables in his works of poetry and prose.

Urban’s informative introduction explores the history of parable interpretation and the writings of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformed biblical commentators, including John Calvin, Matthew Poole, and John Trapp, whose approaches to. . . (more)

French Renaissance Writings on the Italian Voyage

Richard E. Keatley

“Textual Spaces is the product of patient, sound, and thorough scholarship that mobilizes a wealth of source material to paint a vivid picture of the careerism, culture, and curiosity of early modern French travelers to Italy. Keatley has made an original and important contribution to the field of Renaissance studies and to the subfield of travel studies.”
—Eric M. MacPhail, author of Dancing Around the Well: The Circulation of Commonplaces in Renaissance Humanism

Gail Orgelfinger

“Well researched and vibrantly composed, Gail Orgelfinger’s Joan of Arc in the English Imagination, 1429–1829 traces the translations over time of the French heroine into a figure reviled and then embraced across the Channel. Through careful attention to an impressive array of sources, Orgelfinger offers to medieval studies and medievalism alike a not-to-be-missed book about how gender, national rivalries, temporal distance, fantasy, and historical fact enmesh over the centuries to keep the past alive in surprising new forms.”
—Jeffrey J. Cohen, author of Medieval Identity Machines

Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Confesionario

David Thomas Orique, O.P.

This volume is the first complete English translation and annotated study of Bartolomé de Las Casas’s important and provocative 1552 treatise commonly known as the Confesionario or Avisos y reglas. A text that generated controversy, like Las Casas’s more famous Brevísima relación, the Confesionario outlined a strikingly novel and arguably harsh use of confession for those administering the sacrament to conquistadores, encomenderos, slaveholders, settlers, and others who had harmed the indigenous people, thus using magisterial authority and jurisdictional power to promote restitution.

Joshua Eckhardt

Forthcoming!
“A tour de force. Weaving together close reading, reception study, and book history, this volume sheds new light on Donne’s writing, its readers, and the complex landscape of early modern religious belief and practice. Expertly navigating archival sources, Eckhardt follows Donne’s works as they travel through a world of religious communion and division, generating and participating in conversations that are as compelling now as they were in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”
—David Colclough, author of John Donne's Professional Lives

Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain

Nicholas R. Jones

Forthcoming!
“A crucial intervention in discussions about Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Focusing specifically on early modern Spain, Jones offers insightful and nuanced readings of the ways in which (mostly) white, Spanish writers appropriated black speech in staged performances and poetry, arguing that such appropriations actually encode Black African agency. Importantly, he de-centers the author and asks readers to approach these literary forms from the margin to understand how forces beyond the author influence text formation. Jones's careful, against-the-grain readings open up to readers new archives (and re-present familiar ones from fresh, intriguing perspectives) for the study of black cultural experiences in the Renaissance era.”
—Cassander L. Smith, author of Black Africans in the British Imagination

Mariana of Austria and the Government of Spain

Silvia Z. Mitchell

Forthcoming!
“An imaginative and wholly original account of a ruler who is regarded as the personification of Spain’s seventeenth-century decline as an imperial power. Mitchell revises the traditional view of Mariana as the hapless pawn of her confessors and male courtiers and shows her to be a fiercely independent woman capable of decisive action in domestic and foreign affairs as well as a ruler who successfully managed to defend the interests and reputation of Spain’s Habsburg monarchy. This book is a valuable contribution to the growing body of literature on early modern queenship.”
—Richard L. Kagan, author of Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain

A Journal of Medieval Studies and Literary Criticism

Susanna Fein and David Raybin, Editors

Founded in 1966, The Chaucer Review publishes studies of language, sources, social and political contexts, aesthetics, and associated meanings of Chaucer’s poetry, as well as articles on medieval literature, philosophy, theology, and mythography relevant to study of the poet and his contemporaries, predecessors, and audiences. It acts as a forum for the presentation and discussion of research and concepts about Chaucer and the literature of the Middle Ages.

Christine F. Cooper-Rompato and Sherri Olson, Editors

The Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures has been in continuous publication for over forty years. The journal chiefly publishes peer-reviewed essays on mystical and devotional texts, especially but not exclusively of the Western Middle Ages. In its current form, the journal seeks to expand its areas of focus to include the relationship of medieval religious cultures outside Europe. The journal also publishes book reviews and disseminates information of interest to all those who by profession, vocation, or inclination are interested in mysticism and the Middle Ages.

Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry

Ignacio López Alemany, Editor

Newest Issue Forthcoming!
Calíope is a critical journal published by the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry and dedicated to the scholarly examination of the poetry of Spain and the Americas during the Renaissance, Baroque, and Colonial periods. Calíope is dedicated to promoting scholarship and scholarly exchange about the poetic production of the early modern Hispanic world—broadly speaking, Spain and the Spanish-speaking parts of colonial Latin America.