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Sir Richard Morison (c.1513-1556) is best known as Henry VIII's most prolific propagandist. Yet he was also an accomplished scholar, politician, theologian and diplomat who was linked to the leading political and religious figures of his day. Despite his prominence, Morison has never received a full historical treatment. Based on extensive archival research, Renaissance and Reform in Tudor England provides a well-rounded picture of Morison that contributes significantly to the broader questions of intellectual, cultural, religious, and political history. Tracey Sowerby contextualizes Morison within each of his careers: he is considered as a propagandist, politician, reformer, diplomat and Marian exile. Morison emerges as a more influential and original figure than previously thought.

This volume offers a description of early modern habits of writing and reading, of publication and stage performance, and of political and religious writing. An introduction to early modern English literature for students and general readers. Considers the ways in which early modern writers construct the past, recover and adapt classical genres, write about people and places, and tackle religious and secular controversies. Illustrated with a profusion of excerpts from early modern texts. Writers represented include More, Erasmus, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton, as well as less well known authors.

This examination of the fate of lost ideas after the Protestant reformation explores what might be called the pathology of the Renaissance.The first part of the book treats Spenser's Faerie Queene and Milton's Paradise Lost, concentrating on vacant cultural spaces and abandoned icons to trace the gap between sacred and secular life, between poetry and belief. The second part focuses on Shakespeare's Hamlet and Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam to investigate the eschatological implications of this gap, the ways that history is disentangled from memory and nostalgia severed from experience.The book challenges readings of Renaissance culture as an increasingly secular one, proposing that sacred symbols and practices still powerfully organized the English moral imagination, oriented behaviors and arranged perceptions, and specified the limits of the known world.

English royal funeral ceremony from Mary, Queen of Scots to James I gives fascinating insight into the relationship between power and ritual at the renaissance court.This book represents the first detailed study into English royal funeral ceremonies of the period, building on earlier scholarship dealing with the French royal funeral and with the social history of death and burial in early modern England. Funeral rituals are approached as performances, and placed in their political, religious and broader cultural contexts, showing them to be a microcosm of cultural change. The impact of the Reformation, with its strongiconophobic strain, on a ritual process which was centred on the display of a life-sized image of the dead monarch, is explored. Later, the counter influence of the Arminianism and Continental art is considered in relation to theapotheosis of the theatre of death under the early Stuarts, with particular reference to the funeral of James I. Earlier individual funeral occasions are also addressed, with varied focus. The author shows how the obsequiesof Elizabeth I were used to help establish the new Stuart dynasty; the sudden death of the young Henry Stuart, heir to the throne, led to a funeral quite different in atmosphere and political purpose. The death rituals of Mary, Queen of Scots (both the ceremonies staged in the wake of her execution, and the monuments and funeral performances created years later by her son, James) are analysed in depth: the emergent picture of the deliberate manipulation of the Scottish Queen's posthumous image provides a fascinating insight into the relationship between power and ritual at the renaissance court. Dr JENNIFER WOODWARD gained her Ph.D. from the University of Warwick.__________________