With a panoramic sweep across continents and topics, Early Modern Improvisations is an interdisciplinary collection that analyzes the relationship between early modern literature and history through lenses such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and politics.
The book engages readers interested in texts that range from Shakespeare and Tudor queens to Anglican missionary work in North America; from contemporary feminist television series to Ancient Greek linguistic and philosophical concepts; from the delicate dance of diplomatic exchange to the instabilities of illness, food insecurity, and piracy. Its range of contributions encourages readers to discover their own intersections across literary and historical texts, a sense of discovery that this collection’s contributors learned from its dedicatee, John Watkins, a major literary and cultural historian whose work moves effortlessly across geographical, temporal, and political borders. His work and his personality embody the spirit of creative improvisation that brings new ideas together, allowing texts and figures of history to haunt later eras and encourage new questions.
This volume is aimed at scholars and students alike who wish to explore early modern culture and its reverberations in ways that engage with a world outside the grand narratives and centralized institutions of power, a world that is more provisional, less scripted, and more improvisational.
"Introduction 1. “Sad Stories of the Death of Queens”: Elizabethan Beginnings and Endings 2. Queen Elizabeth’s Seneca 3. “Not By Blood”: Queenship in All Is True (Henry VIII) 4. Dangerous Wombs: Pregnant Bodies in Early Modern Drama and History 5. Mothers and Forced Marriages in the Later Middle Ages 6. Cultural Production, Familiarity, Race, and the 1682 Embassies from Morocco and Banten to England 7. “The Excellent Civil Policy of the Jesuits…Deserves our Imitation”: Anglican Missionaries, Native Americans, and the Jesuit Utopia of Paraguay 8. Between Diary, Comedy, and Diplomatic Report. Writing in the Midst of the Italian Wars: Francesco Vettori’s Viaggio in Alamagna, 1507–1515 9. Shakespeare’s Italian Loves: Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto in Much Ado About Nothing 10. The Arcadian History of Romeo and Juliet 11. Ghosting Shakespeare in Hulu’s Harlots 12. ""We Must be Gentle Now We are Gentlemen"": The Complex Concept of Kaloskagathos 13. Ruinations: Petrarch in Rome, Navagero in Granada 14. Life-Writing Dapifers: Early Modern Women as Textual Stewards 15. ""If You can Mock a Leek, You can Eat a Leek"": Cultural Resonances in Shakespearean Foodstuffs 16. “A Body Yet Distempered”: Being Sick at Home in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV 17. The Punishment of Pirates in the Medieval Mediterranean 18. The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming: Anglo-Russian Interplay in the English Renaissance Afterword: Early Modern Literary and Historical Improvisations: Towards a Generative Historicism"
Katherine Scheil, Professor of English, University of Minnesota, writes on Shakespeare and women, including Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway (2018) and She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America (2012). She is finishing a book on the history of women in Stratford-upon-Avon. Linda Shenk, Professor of English, Iowa State University, conducts transdisciplinary research on collaborative storytelling—from Elizabethan drama, diplomacy, and court culture to co-creating climate resilience among researchers and communities. She has published in ELR, WIREs Climate Change, Environmental Humanities, and Explorations in Renaissance Culture.
