The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500-1640

The Oxford Handbook of English Prose1500-1640 is the only current overview of early modern English prose writing. The aim of the volume is to make prose more visible as a subject and as a mode of writing. It covers a vast range of material vital for the understanding of the period: from jestbooks, newsbooks, and popular romance to the translation of the classics and the pioneering collections of scientific writing and travel writing; from diaries, tracts on witchcraft, and domestic conduct books to rhetorical treatises designed for a courtly audience; from little known works such as William Baldwin's Beware the Cat, probably the first novel in English, to The Bible, The Book of Common Prayer and Richard Hooker's eloquent statement of Anglican belief, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. The work not only deals with the range and variety of the substance and types of English prose, but also analyses the forms and styles of writing adopted in the early modern period, ranging from the Euphuistic nature of prose fiction inaugurated by John Lyly's mannered novel, to the aggressive polemic of the Marprelate controversy; from the scatological humour of comic writing to the careful modulations of the most significant sermons of the age; and from the pithy and concise English essays of Francis Bacon to the ornate and meandering style of John Florio's translation of Montaigne's famous collection. Each essay provides an overview as well as comment on key passages, and a select guide to further reading.

Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and visiting Professor at the University of Granada. He is the author of a number of works on early modern literature, including Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Literature, Travel and Colonialism in the English Renaissance, 1540-1625 (Oxford University Press, 1998); Sand Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge, 1994). He has also edited, with Matthew Dimmock, Religions of the Book: Co-existence and Conflict, 1400-1660 (Palgrave, 2008); with Raymond Gillespie, The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Vol. III: The Irish Book in English, 1550-1800 (Oxford, 2006); with Paul Hammond, Shakespeare and Renaissance Europe (Cengage, Arden Critical Companions, 2004); and Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England (Palgrave, 2001). He is a regular reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement.