“On 5 June 1557, Richard Tottel published a collection of 271 poems composed by noblemen, courtiers, and gentlemen of the early sixteenth century. Eight weeks later, 31 July, he published a revised and expanded version of 280 poems, the arrangement of which became the standard for at least ten further editions in the Elizabethan period. Q2 omitted thirty poems from Q1, added thirty-nine new poems, and in twenty-seven places altered the sequence of poems from the first edition. In eight weeks, as Hyder E. Rollins points out, Songes and Sonettes was ‘completely changed’ and ‘thoroughly revised.’ Q2 was the text most likely read by the many editors, authors, and printers who compiled poetic collections in the Elizabethan period, including Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare. Modern readers, however, have had access only to Q1 in Rollins’s Tottel’s Miscellany (1929). This edition, based on Q2, thus provides readers with a copy of a text that has not been readily available since the latter half of the sixteenth century.”

“An exploration through maps of the land and time in which Shakespeare wrote. This beautiful new book looks at the England, Europe, and wider world in which William Shakespeare worked through maps and illustrations that reveal the way that he and his Tudor contemporaries saw their land and their place in the world.”

“Wiltenburg  has translated a selection of early modern texts that, though generally written by men, have women and their status, roles, and relationships as their subject. The translations are presented side-by-side with the original works”

“A masterpiece in the tradition of the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales, Juan Ruiz’s fourteenth-century Spanish narrative poem combines the comic and the serious, the bawdy and the practical, the satiric and the tender, the devout and the blasphemous. In a first prose translation, Professors Mignani and Di Cesare succeed in conveying the vitality and sly humor of the original. The poem consists of a loosely unified series of fourteen amorous adventures of the Archpriest of Hita, interlaced with debates, fabliaux, fables, and exempla. Ruiz suggests that while man ought to seek buen amor (true love, or love of God), he is prone to loco amor, or worldly love. The Book proposes to show human folly so that men may be forewarned of the bad and choose the good. The episodes related in the stanzas and in songs in various lyrical styles parody such conventions as courtly love, epic battle, or church ritual. Ruiz was clearly fascinated by the concrete, as well as the allegorical, for his episodes have dates and actual settings, and popular speech is incorporated into his verses. In their introduction, the translators survey the major scholarly studies of the poem and offer their own critical reading of it. Their annotated bibliography and notes to the translation will be useful to students as well as scholars.”

“Christine de Pizan attracted an international audience of admirers her during her lifetime, including many readers in England. The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes (1521) is the earliest English translation of Le Livre de la cité des dames (ca. 1405) and the only version printed in French or English before the twentieth century. Her work stands as an early stronghold against misogynist thinking, with more than one hundred stories about women’s capacity for intelligence and virtue assembled under the auspices of Reason, Rectitude, and Justice to form an allegorical City of Ladies. Modern readers can now rediscover Christine de Pizan’s landmark defense of women in the French and English of its original readers. This new edition offers rich material for scholars interested in gender studies, history, humanism, and the field of Anglo-French literature. The facing page format lets readers closely compare the fifteenth-century Middle French of its female author with the sixteenth-century English text by a male translator. A critical introduction and scholarly annotations enhance its usefulness as a resource for students and critics.”

“The Celtic tales on which the Grail legend is based emphasize the theme of the Quest. Through his exploration of several versions of this myth that appeared in the Middle Ages, Jean Markale digs deep beneath the Christian veneer of these tales, allowing us to penetrate to the true meaning of the Grail and its Quest, legacies of a rich Celtic spirituality that has nourished the Western psyche for centuries. He also examines how these myths were later used by the Knights Templar, as well as how their links with Alchemy and Catharism played a decisive role in the shaping of Western Hermetic thought.”