Tudor Autobiography

Histories of autobiography in England often assume the genre hardly existed before 1600. But Tudor Autobiography investigates eleven sixteenth-century English writers who used sermons, a saint’s biography, courtly and popular verse, a traveler’s report, a history book, a husbandry book, and a supposedly fictional adventure novel to share the secrets of the heart and tell their life stories. In the past such texts have not been called autobiographies because they do not reveal much of the inwardness of their subject, a requisite of most modern autobiographies. But, according to Meredith Anne Skura, writers reveal themselves not only by what they say but by how they say it. Borrowing methods from affective linguistics, narratology, and psychoanalysis, Skura shows that a writer’s thoughts and feelings can be traced in his or her language. Rejecting the search for “the early modern self” in life writing, Tudor Autobiography instead asks what authors said about themselves, who wrote about themselves, how, and why. The result is a fascinating glimpse into a range of lived and imagined experience that challenges assumptions about life and autobiography in the early modern period.

This volume presents a selection of papers from the 6th International Conference of the Tudor Symposium, held at the University of Sheffield in 2009. It brings together new explorations of Tudor literature from scholars based all over Europe: France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Norway, and the United Kingdom. The papers cover the long mid-Tudor period, from Skelton and more to the young Shakespeare, but with a central emphasis on the middle decades of the sixteenth century. Topics range widely from philosophy and social commentary to more traditionally literary kinds of writing, such as lyric and tragedy (both dramatic and non-dramatic). The volume as a whole offers an attractively kaleidoscopic image of the variety of new work being carried out in the area in the new millennium.

This book reveals the most popular instrument in the world as it was in the age of Elizabeth I and Shakespeare.

The Autobiography of Henry VIII is the magnificent historical novel that established Margaret George's career. Evocatively written in the first person as Henry VIII's private journals, the novel was the product of fifteen years of meticulous research and five handwritten drafts. Much has been written about the mighty, egotistical Henry VIII: the man who dismantled the Church because it would not grant him the divorce he wanted; who married six women and beheaded two of them; who executed his friend Thomas More; who sacked the monasteries; who longed for a son and neglected his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth; who finally grew fat, disease-ridden, dissolute. Now, in her magnificent work of storytelling and imagination Margaret George bring us Henry VIII's story as he himself might have told it, in memoirs interspersed with irreverent comments from his jester and confident, Will Somers. Brilliantly combining history, wit, dramatic narrative, and an extraordinary grasp of the pleasures and perils of power, this monumental novel shows us Henry the man more vividly than he has ever been seen before.

The first comprehensive guide to Elizabethan ideas about the mind What is the mind? How does it relate to the body and soul? These questions were as perplexing for the Elizabethans as they are for us today—although their answers were often startlingly different. Shakespeare and his contemporaries believed the mind was governed by the humours and passions, and was susceptible to the Devil’s interference. In this insightful and wide-ranging account, Helen Hackett explores the intricacies of Elizabethan ideas about the mind. This was a period of turbulence and transition, as persistent medieval theories competed with revived classical ideas and emerging scientific developments. Drawing on a wealth of sources, Hackett sheds new light on works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Sidney, and Spenser, demonstrating how ideas about the mind shaped new literary and theatrical forms. Looking at their conflicted attitudes to imagination, dreams, and melancholy, Hackett examines how Elizabethans perceived the mind, soul, and self, and how their ideas compare with our own.

Explores life-writing forms - almanacs, financial accounts, commonplace books and parish registers - which emerged during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Soldier, courtier, author, entertainer, and amateur spy, Thomas Churchyard saw action in most of the principal Tudor theatres of war, was a servant to 5 monarchs, and had a literary career spanning over half a century during which time he produced over 50 different works in a variety of forms and genres. Drawing on extensive archival and literary sources, Matthew Woodcock reconstructs the extraordinary life of a figure well-known yet long neglected in early modern literary studies.

projects, and an extensive bibliography. --Book Jacket.