Astraea Yates

This is Volume V of selected works of Frances A. Yates. Astraea looks at the Imperial theme in the sixteenth century and includes Charles V and the idea of Empire to the Tudor Imperial Reform and the French Monarchy.

This gracefully written and well thought-out study deals with a neglected collection of poems by Spenser, which was issued in 1591 at the height of his career. While there has been a good deal written in recent years on two of the poems in the collection, "Mother Hubberd’s Tale" and "Muiopotmos", Brown innovatively addresses the collection in its entirety. He urges us to see it as a planned whole with a consistent design on the reader: he fully acknowledges, and even brings out further, the heterogeneity of the collection, but he examines it nevertheless as a sustained reflection on the nature of poetry and the auspices for writing in a modern world, distancing itself from the traditions of the immediate past. The strength of this work lies both in the originality of its project and in the precision and enterprise of the close reading that informs its argument. Interest in the concern of Spenser’s poetry with the nature of poetry is in the current critical mainstream, but here the attentiveness is both unusually focused and unusually sustained. Brown garners more than would be expected from the translations in the Complaints, while at the same time including striking and individual chapters on the better known "Mother Hubberd’s Tale" and "Muiopotmos"; he advances understanding of these extremely subtle texts and fully justifies his wider approach to the collection as a whole. Arguing that Spenser’s relationship to literary tradition is more complex than is often thought, Brown suggests that Spenser was a self-conscious innovator whose gradual move away from traditional poetics is exhibited by the different texts in the Complaints. He further suggests that the Complaints are a "poetics in practice", which progress from traditional ideas of poetry to a new poetry that emerges through Spenser’s transformation of traditional complaint.

This is the first full-length biography of British historian Frances Yates, author of such acclaimed works as Giordano Bruno and The Hermetic Tradition and The Art of Memory, one of the most influential non-fiction books of the twentieth century. Jones’s book explores Yates’ remarkable life and career and her interest in the mysterious figure of Giordano Bruno and the influence of the Hermetic tradition on the culture of the Renaissance. Her revolutionary way of viewing history, literature, art, and the theater as integral parts of the cultural picture of the time period did much to shape modern interdisciplinary approaches to history and literary criticism. Jones focuses not only on the particulars of Yates’ life, but also sheds light on the tradition of female historians of her time and their contributions to Renaissance scholarship. In addition to her insightful commentary on Yates’ academic work, Jones quotes from Frances’ diaries and the writings of those who were close to her, to shed light on Yates’ private life. This biography is significant for those with an interest in literary criticism, women’s history, scientific history, or the intellectual atmosphere of post-war Britain, as well as those interested in the Hermetic tradition.

From a Bancroft Prize-winning historian, a biography of the famed poet, courtier, and colonizer, showing how he laid the foundations of the English Empire Sir Walter Ralegh was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth. She showered him with estates and political appointments. He envisioned her becoming empress of a universal empire. She gave him the opportunity to lead the way. In Walter Ralegh, Alan Gallay shows that, while Ralegh may be best known for founding the failed Roanoke colony, his historical importance vastly exceeds that enterprise. Inspired by the mystical religious philosophy of hermeticism, Ralegh led English attempts to colonize in North America, South America, and Ireland. He believed that the answer to English fears of national decline resided overseas -- and that colonialism could be achieved without conquest. Gallay reveals how Ralegh launched the English Empire and an era of colonization that shaped Western history for centuries after his death.

John Manning's The Emblem charts the rise and evolution of the emblem from its earliest manifestations to its emergence as a genre in its own right in the sixteenth century, and through its various reinventions to the present day.

Elizabeth I of England, as a female monarch who did not heed counsel, particularly in the events surrounding the marriage proposal from the much younger Roman Catholic Duke of Alençon and Anjou (c 1579–1586), aroused anxiety and frustration in her Protestant male courtiers. Two of these, Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, expressed their dissatisfaction about the “courteous cruell” queen in their literary works and letters. The relationship between the two men was also complex, united as they were in politics, arguing for a strong interventionist role for England in Europe, but divided in poetics. Sidney advocated a classical model for English vernacular poetry while Spenser favoured a homegrown English strain harking back to Chaucer and Skelton. Thoroughly researched and written in an accessible style with close readings of all the major works of Sidney and Spenser that are linked to Elizabeth I, along with a look at their correspondence, this book provides a new way of interweaving the narratives of history and literature, and will be of interest to the academician and the lay reader alike in its analysis of the workings of gender, desire, politics and poetics in the reign of Elizabeth I.

Honorable Mention, Literature, 2012 PROSE Awards, Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers2012 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine In one of his letters Hart Crane wrote, “Appollinaire lived in Paris, I live in Cleveland, Ohio,” comparing—misspelling and all—the great French poet’s cosmopolitan roots to his own more modest ones in the midwestern United States. Rebelling against the notion that his work should relate to some European school of thought, Crane defiantly asserted his freedom to be himself, a true American writer. John T. Irwin, long a passionate and brilliant critic of Crane, gives readers the first major interpretation of the poet’s work in decades. Irwin aims to show that Hart Crane’s epic The Bridge is the best twentieth-century long poem in English. Irwin convincingly argues that, compared to other long poems of the century, The Bridge is the richest and most wide-ranging in its mythic and historical resonances, the most inventive in its combination of literary and visual structures, the most subtle and compelling in its psychological underpinnings. Irwin brings a wealth of new and varied scholarship to bear on his critical reading of the work—from art history to biography to classical literature to philosophy—revealing The Bridge to be the near-perfect synthesis of American myth and history that Crane intended. Irwin contends that the most successful entryway to Crane’s notoriously difficult shorter poems is through a close reading of The Bridge. Having admirably accomplished this, Irwin analyzes Crane’s poems in White Buildings and his last poem, "The Broken Tower," through the larger context of his epic, showing how Crane, in the best of these, worked out the structures and images that were fully developed in The Bridge. Thoughtful, deliberate, and extraordinarily learned, this is the most complete and careful reading of Crane’s poetry available. Hart Crane may have lived in Cleveland, Ohio, but, as Irwin masterfully shows, his poems stand among the greatest written in the English language.