A Catalogue Of The Harleian Collection Of Manuscripts Purchased By Authority Of Parliament For The Use Of The Publick And Preserved In The British Museum Published By Order Of The Trustees

Thomas North’s 1555 Travel Journal: From Italy to Shakespeare makes available a little known early modern journal kept by a member of Queen Mary’s delegation to Rome, its purpose to win papal approval of England’s return to Roman Catholicism. The book provides details of the six-month journey, a discussion of the manuscript, and an identification of the twenty-year-old Thomas North as its author. It also points to numerous connections between the journal and the plays of Shakespeare, extending the playwright’s debt beyond North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives and revealing how the journal served as a template for The Winter’s Tale and Henry VIII. Both, the authors argue, were written by North during the Marian years (1554-58) and later adapted by Shakespeare. Like the authors’ 2018 “A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels” by George North,this book presents original work using digital research tools, including massive databases and plagiarism software. The earlier book garnered worldwide attention, with a front-page story in The New York Times.

Nation-Space in Enlightenment Britain: An Archaeology of Empire is a provocative intervention that extends considerably the parameters of on-going dialogues about British identity during the Enlightenment. Thoughtfully interdisciplinary and with an allegiance to the culture which literary production engenders, this book describes how British identity emerges not despite of but due to its fluid, volatile, and subversive impulses and expressions. The imperial establishment—codified in the logics of the corporation, the academy, the cathedral, the theater, as well the private parlor or garden—derives its power and sustainability from scripting and then championing a solid resistance to precisely those subversive elements which threaten or undermine the foundations of order and liberalism in civil society. Choudhury argues that imperial Britain can best be understood in terms of this culture’s investment in spatial alignments which celebrated a radial interface with remote points of commercial interest. The volume contends Daniel Defoe, Arthur Onslow, David Garrick, Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander, Hans Sloane, Francis Barber, Samuel Johnson, Charles Burney, George Frideric Handel were not merely part of a dazzling line-up of the architects of empire. In retrospect, their contributions and various engagements reflect remarkably modern patterns of the corporatization of culture and this culture’s dependence on, and thus its collusion with, commerce.