The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500-1640

The Oxford Handbook of English Prose1500-1640 is the only current overview of early modern English prose writing. The aim of the volume is to make prose more visible as a subject and as a mode of writing. It covers a vast range of material vital for the understanding of the period: from jestbooks, newsbooks, and popular romance to the translation of the classics and the pioneering collections of scientific writing and travel writing; from diaries, tracts on witchcraft, and domestic conduct books to rhetorical treatises designed for a courtly audience; from little known works such as William Baldwin's Beware the Cat, probably the first novel in English, to The Bible, The Book of Common Prayer and Richard Hooker's eloquent statement of Anglican belief, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. The work not only deals with the range and variety of the substance and types of English prose, but also analyses the forms and styles of writing adopted in the early modern period, ranging from the Euphuistic nature of prose fiction inaugurated by John Lyly's mannered novel, to the aggressive polemic of the Marprelate controversy; from the scatological humour of comic writing to the careful modulations of the most significant sermons of the age; and from the pithy and concise English essays of Francis Bacon to the ornate and meandering style of John Florio's translation of Montaigne's famous collection. Each essay provides an overview as well as comment on key passages, and a select guide to further reading.Introduction ; PART 1: TRANSLATION, EDUCATION, AND LITERARY CRITICISM ; 1. Englishing Eloquence: Sixteenth-Century Arts of Rhetoric and Poetics ; 2. All talk and no action? Early modern political dialogue ; 3. Commonplacing and Prose Writing: William Baldwin and Robert Burton ; 4. Romance: Amadis de Gaul and William Barclay's Argenis ; 5. Montaigne and Florio ; 6. Italianate Tales: William Painter and George Peele ; 7. Classical translation ; 8. Lazarillo de Tormes and the Picaresque in Early Modern England ; PART 2: PROSE FICTION ; 9. William Baldwin's Beware the Cat and Other Foolish Writing ; 10. The Adventures Passed by Master George Gascoigne: Experiments in Prose ; 11. 'Turne Your Library to a Wardrobe': John Lyly and Euphuism ; 12. Robert Greene ; 13. Thomas Nashe ; 14. Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia ; 15. Topicality in Mary Wroth's Countess of Montgomery's Urania: Prose, Romance, Masque, and Lyric ; PART 3: VARIETIES OF EARLY MODERN PROSE 1: PUBLIC PROSE ; 16. Utopia and Utopianism ; 17. English Scientific Prose: Bacon, Browne, Boyle ; 18. Richard Hakluyt and travel writing ; 19. Raphael Holinshed and historical Writing ; 20. Astrology, magic, and witchcraft ; 21. Jest books ; 22. Political Prose ; 23. Polemic/Satire ; 24. News Writing ; PART 4: VARIETIES OF EARLY MODERN PROSE 2: PRIVATE PROSE ; 25. Letters ; 26. Diaries ; 27. Life writing ; 28. Essays ; 29. Domestic conduct books ; SECTION 5: RELIGIOUS PROSE ; 30. Immethodical, Incoherent, Unadorned: Style and The Early Modern Bible ; 31. The Style of Authorship in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments ; 32. The Marpelate Controversy ; 33. Sermons ; 34. The Book of Common Prayer ; PART 6: MAJOR PROSE WRITERS ; 35. Gabriel Harvey ; 36. Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity ; 37. John Knox, George Buchanan, and Scots Prose ; 38. Robert Burton and The Anatomy of Melancholy ; 39. 'When all things shall confesse their ashes': Science and Soul in Thomas Browne