bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
C
axton,
W
illiam
Authors: Brown Meaghan
Published: May 2017

William Caxton (1415/24–1492), the first Englishman to print books, was an accomplished merchant, diplomat, and translator, and is now best known for bringing the printing press to England in 1475 or 1476. His activities in importing, translating, and printing books significantly shaped the book trade and the literary public in England.
C
hapman,
G
eorge
Authors: Fleck Andrew
Published: May 2017

George Chapman (1559/60–1634) may almost literally have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but the defining humour of his life must have been anxious and uncertain poverty. A prolific playwright, an innovative poet, an autodidactic translator, and a mercenary soldier, Chapman pieced together a tenuous existence on the edge of destitution. Despite his many brushes with misfortune, Chapman did find a few loyal patrons whose support allowed him to complete the work for which he is probably best known, the first English translation of Homer.
C
heke,
J
ohn
Authors: McDiarmid John F.
Published: May 2017

John Cheke (1514–57) was the central figure in a group of Protestant humanists, including Thomas Smith, William Cecil, Roger Ascham, and Thomas Wilson, who proceeded from study at Cambridge to high positions at court and in the church under Edward VI and, in some cases, again under Elizabeth I. Cheke and his circle shaped royal policy, religious reform, and literary culture in England in the middle of the sixteenth century.
C
hettle,
H
enry
Authors: Williams Grant
Published: May 2017

Henry Chettle (d. 1603/7) was a printer and playwright who most probably penned two famous epithets for Shakespeare long attributed to Robert Greene: ‘upstart crow’ and ‘absolute Johannes Factotum’ (Jowett 1993). That the case for reattribution of such important documentary evidence has been made a number of times and has left little impact on scholarship underscores the ease with which Chettle has been consigned to the margins of literary history. Chettle was among the most prolific of Elizabethan playwrights, but only one of his 13 plays ever saw print. His under‐representation as a solo dramatist makes it difficult for scholars to ascertain his role as a collaborator in the six plays that survive from the 36 to which he contributed. The indifference of scholarship to the likelihood that Chettle first described the most famous writer in the English language demonstrates how easy it has been for Chettle's voice to be drowned out by those of other Elizabethans who have a stronger archival presence.
C
hillingworth,
W
illiam
Authors: Paleit Edward
Published: May 2017

William Chillingworth (1602–44) was a theologian and Anglican churchman. His chief work,
The religion of Protestants a safe way to salvation
(1638), took shape at Great Tew, the country house of his friend Lucius Cary, Lord Falkland. Its distinctively moderate, sceptical rationalism was influential within later Anglican thought and contributed to the development of secular theories of certainty later in the century. Chillingworth also wrote 10 smaller works which, like his magnum opus, touch on certainty in faith and the Church of Rome's claims to infallibility; nine of his sermons and a few letters were published in the eighteenth century.
C
leveland,
J
ohn
Authors: Groot Jerome De
Published: May 2017

John Cleveland (1613–58) was one of the foremost of the Royalist poets and polemicists who took the propaganda battle to the Parliamentarians in the 1640s (along with others like the journalist Sir John Berkenhead) by writing politically motivated but widely popular verse and pamphlets, which circulated extensively in manuscript as well as in print. He established a particular form of savage political satire that adapted the bodily, sexualized nature of vulgar, popular writing at the time. Cleveland's ‘Epitaph on the earl of Strafford’ is one of the major political poems of the Civil Wars, transcribed and copied out by scholars, aristocrats, and politicians in their commonplace books. It occasioned multiple responses and rewritings. The simplicity of the verse and the politically scabrous message are typical of Cleveland:
C
oppe,
A
biezer
Authors: McDowell Nicholas
Published: May 2017

Abiezer Coppe (1619–?1672) was one of the most notorious religious radicals of the English Civil Wars. He was allegedly a ringleader of the group of antinomian radicals active between 1648 and 1650 who were known by their opponents as the ‘Ranters’. The Ranters were charged with believing that committing acts commonly regarded as sinful, particularly swearing, drinking, and extramarital sex, was proof of their transcendence of sin on earth and their freedom from moral law. However, the sensational, polemical image of the Ranters does not always match the evidence we have from their surviving writings of the complexity of their beliefs. Moreover Coppe's strange and powerful literary style has made him of great interest in the last 25 years to literary critics as well as to historians of religion and of the English Civil Wars; extracts from his works regularly appear in anthologies of English literature and are believed to anticipate the prophetic writings of Christopher Smart and William Blake.
C
otton,
C
harles, The Younger
Authors: Major Philip
Published: May 2017

Charles Cotton (1630–87) was a Royalist poet, translator, and bibliophile. His literary reputation is based largely on the considerable commercial success he enjoyed (and, judging by his perennial impecuniousness, needed) after the Restoration, notably with his much imitated and reprinted
Scarronides
(1664–65), a burlesque of Virgil's
Aeneid
, and his co‐authorship (with his close friend and protégé Izaak Walton) of the highly acclaimed fifth edition of
The compleat angler
(1676), a touchstone of Royalist and Anglican literature of contemplative retreat. To these well‐received later works may be added
The scoffer scoft
(1675), a witty burlesque of Lucian, a zestful three‐volume translation of Michel de Montaigne's
Essays
(1685–86) which remained the standard text for more than two centuries, and a translation from the French of Pierre Corneille's tragedy
Horace
(1671).
C
ranmer,
T
homas
Authors: Ward Allyna E.
Published: May 2017

Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) was the first Protestant archbishop of Canterbury and the key contributor to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. He is most remembered for his role in securing Henry VIII's divorce from Katherine of Aragon and for his contributions to the Book of Common Prayer. Additionally, he was the archbishop who crowned Anne Boleyn and heard her final confession; the godfather of Prince Edward (later Edward VI); an early proponent of Henry's marriage to his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves; a subsequent proponent of Henry's divorce from Anne of Cleves; and one of the accusers of Henry's fifth wife, Katherine Howard. These facts alone show the extent to which Cranmer was at Henry VIII's total service. He was also fully committed to reforming the English church and although he signed his name to a submission to Catholic doctrines and faith when he was imprisoned during the reign of Mary I, he would, at the very last moment, recant.
C
rowley,
R
obert
Authors: Minton Gretchen E.
Published: May 2017

Robert Crowley (c.1517/19–1588) was a Protestant printer, pamphleteer, poet, and cleric. He was part of a group of reformers known as ‘gospellers’ who called for further reform during the reigns of Henry
VIII
and Edward VI and who have often been associated with the emergence of nonconformist factions. Crowley's editions, poetry, and prose tracts all reflect the religious and political climate during Edward's and Elizabeth's reigns, while also showing a connection with medieval literary traditions.
D
enham,
J
ohn
Authors: Power Henry
Published: May 2017

Sir John Denham (1614/15–1669) was a poet, translator, and courtier. He was educated at Trinity College, Oxford, though he seems to have left without taking a degree. He then studied common law at Lincoln's Inn, and was called to the bar in 1639. His earliest surviving work is a translation from Virgil's
Aeneid
(books
II
to VI, with gaps) undertaken in 1636. This survives in the commonplace book of Lucy Hutchinson (Denham had been a student at Lincoln's Inn alongside Hutchinson's brother, Allen Apsley, in the 1630s), and formed the basis for his later translations from Virgil. In 1641 Denham was called as a witness for the defence at the trial of Thomas Wentworth, first earl of Strafford, and wrote an elegy following Strafford's execution. The version now commonly printed was evidently revised after the Restoration, as it refers to the 1661 reversal of Strafford's attainder, but an earlier version survives.
E
lizabeth
I
Authors: Hackett Helen
Published: May 2017

As well as ruling England from 1558 to 1603, Elizabeth I (1533–1603) was a prolific and skilful writer, composing poems, speeches, translations, letters, and prayers. She also presided over one of the most remarkable periods of English literature, and was herself the subject of much of that literature.
E
velyn,
J
ohn
Authors: Vine Angus
Published: May 2017

John Evelyn (1620–1706) was a diarist and writer whose interests ran from education to horticulture, and from bibliography to numismatics. He was also a respected advocate of the arts, publishing works on sculpture, painting, and architecture, and was one of the founding fellows of the Royal Society.
G
oodman,
C
hristopher
Authors: Cavanagh Dermot
Published: May 2017

Christopher Goodman (1521/22–1603) made an explosive contribution to sixteenth‐century political thought.
How superior powers oght to be obeyd of their subjects
(1558) was one of the period's most radical expressions of ‘resistance theory’. Along with other polemical works of its kind, such as John Ponet's
A shorte treatise of politike power
(1556), the origins of Goodman's text lay in the experience of exile and dispossession shared by a number of evangelical Protestants during the reign of Mary I (1553–58). Queen Mary's policy of reunion with the Roman Catholic Church and her comprehensive attempt to restore its authority was a catastrophe for all those who shared Goodman's commitments. He had enjoyed a successful career as an academic at Oxford and as a clergyman during the reign of the strongly Protestant Edward VI (1547–53); he graduated BA (1541) and then MA (1544), becoming Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in 1548. During this period, Goodman was attached to the circle of the influential Italian theologian Peter Martyr (Pietro Martire Vermigli), the regius professor of divinity and a leading religious radical. The accession of Mary meant that both men had to abandon their careers and livelihoods and, after a brief period in hiding in London, Goodman went into exile. He stayed first with Martyr in Strasbourg and then joined the English exile congregation in Frankfurt. In 1555 this church divided, and those like Goodman who were committed to a pres‐byterian form of church government left for Calvin's Geneva. He became minister to this group and was joined there by his great friend and ally John Knox. It was at this time that Goodman composed
How superior powers
.
H
ake,
E
dward
Authors: Woodcock Matthew
Published: May 2017

The works of writer and lawyer Edward Hake (
fl
. 1564–1608) encompass an eclectic variety of genres including moralizing verse satire, translation, royal panegyric, and exposition of legal theory. Little is known of Hake's background though he notes in
A touchestone for this time present
(1574) that he was educated by the psalmist John Hopkins. Hake studied at Barnard's Inn, London, from 1564 to 1567 and later at Gray's Inn. After advancing through civic and public offices in Windsor, Berkshire, he returned to London and practised law. He remained there during the 1603 plague and was still signing pleadings as a barrister in 1608 (Eccles 1982).
H
all,
E
dward
Authors: Lucas Scott
Published: May 2017

Edward Hall (1497–1547) is best known for his massive history work
The union of the two noble and illustre families of Lancastre and Yorke
(1548), an account of English affairs from around 1399 to 1547 that revolutionized English historiography and provided a rich source for subsequent chroniclers and literary authors alike, including William Shakespeare. Edward Hall (or Halle) was born in London and educated at Eton, King's College, Cambridge, and Gray's Inn. While his lifelong occupation was that of a lawyer, Hall also pursued a lengthy public career, serving in at least four of Henry VIII's parliaments and in a number of posts in London, including that of under‐sheriff (1535–47).
H
arington,
J
ohn, The Elder
Authors: Radley Noël Clare
Published: May 2017

John Harington, the elder, of Stepney (c.1517–82) was a courtier and poet associated with the Tudor court from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I. Harington is best known for compiling the Arundel Harington manuscript, a miscellany of verse including, among other things, the writings of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Queen Elizabeth, and Sir Philip Sidney. The manuscript contains Harington's own compositions and those of his son, the more famous Elizabethan courtier and poet, Sir John Harington of Kelston (the younger; 1560–1612). Harington the elder did not take a university degree but studied with the composer Thomas Tallis, and his early writings were probably set to music. His most notable service was to the Protestant Sir Thomas Seymour, which led to Harington's imprisonment in 1549 (the year Seymour was executed under Edward VI), but Harington was also known for obtaining favour with Elizabeth I under whom he served in two parliaments.
Harington,John, The Younger
Authors: Moulton Ian Frederick
Published: May 2017

Sir John Harington (1560–1612) was a courtier, writer, and godson of Queen Elizabeth I. Notorious as the author of the scatological satire,The metamorphosis of Ajax(1596), Harington was also the first English translator of Ariosto's epicOrlando furioso(1591) and the author of topical epigrams, political pamphlets, and personal letters.
H
arrington,
J
ames
Authors: McDowell Nicholas
Published: May 2017

James Harrington (1611–77) is best known as the author of the most substantial work of republican political theory to emerge from the English Revolution of 1640–60:
The commonwealth of Oceana
(1656), in which the land of Oceana is a thinly veiled version of England.
Oceana
is a difficult work to categorize and interpret with certainty, as Harrington chose to convey his theoretical arguments through generic features familiar from utopian literature and romance – a poetic quality which reflects his interest in verse, and in particular Virgil, whom he translated – and his style is syntactically complex. He was also the author of a substantial number of shorter, more straightforward works on political issues, several of which were not published until the landmark edition of Harrington's works produced by the republican and deist John Toland in 1700. Much of our knowledge of Harrington's life comes from Toland, who seeks to emphasize Harrington's radicalism, as well as from the contemporary biographical accounts of Anthony a Wood and John Aubrey, who describes himself as an ‘old friend’ of Harrington. Since J. G. A. Pocock's 1977 edition of the political works and his categorization of Harrington as a Machiavellian classical republican, the meaning and intention of
Oceana
have been to the fore in debates about republicanism and liberty in the seventeenth century. There has been a tendency more recently to assert Harrington's debt rather to the anti‐classical political and natural philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Rahe 1994; Scott 2000; 2004).
H
arvey,
W
illiam
Authors: Murphy Kathryn
Published: May 2017

William Harvey (1578–1657), a physician who discovered the circulation of the blood, was born on 1 April 1578 in Folkestone, Kent. He was educated from 1588 at the King's School, Canterbury, and from 1593 at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was supported by a scholarship stipulating the study of medicine. He graduated BA in 1597, and remained in Cambridge until 1599.
H
aughton,
W
illiam
Authors: Kermode Lloyd Edward
Published: May 2017

All we know of William Haughton's life comes from his will and from the ‘Diary’ of Philip Henslowe, owner of the Rose Theatre. We do not know his dates of birth or death. Henslowe's first mention of Haughton is as ‘yonge horton’ on 5 November 1597. Other playwrights working for Henslowe at the same time and not referred to as ‘young’ are in their mid‐twenties, so Haughton has been estimated to be about 20 years old at that time, thus born in the mid‐1570s. Haughton's wit and apparent knowledge of languages have led scholars to speculate on his association with the universities, but no connection is definitive. His will reveals that at the time of his death he was in debt, and had a wife named Alice and children. We cannot find any other family members to be able to say something about his social standing or genealogical history. In March 1600 Henslowe bailed Haughton out of the South Bank prison the Clink, and around the same time there are notes in the ‘Diary’ that Haughton was borrowing small amounts of money (two shillings on two occasions) from Henslowe. This would suggest that, in spite of contributing to a significant number of plays in the preceding two years, Haughton was not financially stable. This is not an oddity: one of his early collaborators, the much better‐known Thomas Dekker, also borrowed money from Henslowe and struggled to survive spells of imprisonment.
H
erbert,
M
ary (
S
idney), Countess of
P
embroke
Authors: Coles Kimberly Ann
Published: May 2017

Mary Sidney Herbert (1561–1621) is listed by John Bodenham in his verse miscellany
Bel‐vedere
(1600) – along with Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare – as one of the notable writers of his time. Herbert's 1592 translation of Robert Garnier's
Marc Antoine
was the first dramatic rendering of the Antony and Cleopatra story in English, and the influence of her
Antonius
upon a revived interest in soliloquy predicated upon classical models is widely acknowledged. Her lyric transcription of the Psalms, however, is the principal source of her poetic reputation, then and now. Writers of the period who commend Herbert's verse psalms include Samuel Daniel, John Davies, John Donne, Michael Drayton, Sir John Harington, Ben Jonson, Aemelia Lanyer, and Thomas Moffett. The impress of the psalter translation is in evidence in the contemporary devotional lyric compositions of Barnabe Barnes, Nicholas Breton, Henry Constable, Francis Davison, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, and Abraham Fraunce – and its influence upon the later religious poetry of Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and John Milton has been critically recognized since Louis Martz placed it at the start of a developing tradition of seventeenth‐century devotional lyric (Martz 1954; Hamlin 2004; Coles 2008).
H
errick,
R
obert
Authors: Connolly Ruth
Published: May 2017

The canonical status of Robert Herrick (1591–1674) rests on his 1648 collection
Hesperides
. The title refers only to his secular poems; the divine are called
His noble members
and given their own title page. Herrick's personal supervision of the volume makes it a landmark in the history of authorship and its ostentatiously Royalist frontispiece signals its importance within London's counter‐revolutionary literary culture during the Second Civil War. The collection's poetry was composed in the decades between 1610 and 1647 and reflects in its often noted variety the shifting poetic sensibilities of Jacobean and Caroline literature. Herrick was a native Londoner, born in 1591 to a family of prosperous London goldsmiths. His father's suicide in 1592 led to the break‐up of his family and Herrick was fostered by his uncle, Sir William Herrick, who subsequently apprenticed him to the same profession, though not before providing him with what was likely to have been a solid grammar school education. The adolescent apprentice's ambitions exceeded those proposed for him by his uncle, and his skill in composing poetry may have pointed him towards an alternative calling. The most expert poem datable to these years, ‘The country life: to his brother Master Thomas Herrick’, written in or before 1613, shows the influence of Ben Jonson's ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’, a poem then circulating solely in manuscript. Jonson, one of the city's leading literary figures, was himself a former apprentice bricklayer, and his literary and personal example is likely to have been formative for Herrick.
H
oby,
T
homas
Authors: Woolfson Jonathan
Published: May 2017

A traveller and diplomat, Thomas Hoby (1530–66) produced the first translation into English of a key text for the culture of sixteenth‐century Europe, Baldassar Castiglione's
Il libro del cortegiano
(of which the first Italian edition dates to 1528). Hoby's
Courtyer of Count Baldessar Castilio
was first printed in 1561 with subsequent editions in 1577, 1588, and 1603, and the work established him as a major transmitter of Italian Renaissance culture to England. The second son of William Hoby of Leominster, Hertfordshire, and the half‐brother of the courtier and diplomat Sir Philip Hoby, he was educated at St John's College, Cambridge, from 1545 to 1547, in the sophisticated Protestant and humanist environment dominated by the intellectual leadership of the classical scholar John Cheke. Hoby's career as a translator was stimulated by travels in Europe, Italy in particular, between 1547 and 1555. Married from 1558 to Elizabeth, one of the three learned daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke, he died in 1566 in Paris three months into his posting as English ambassador to France.
H
ooker,
R
ichard
Authors: Cefalu Paul
Published: May 2017

Richard Hooker (1554–1600) was the most influential Anglican theologian of the latter half of the sixteenth century. Having completed his training as a theologian at Oxford, he was ordained as a priest in 1579, after which Queen Elizabeth appointed him as master of the Temple Church in London in 1585. Hooker's most important work consists of the eight‐volume treatise
Of the lawes of ecclesiasticall politie
, the first four books of which were published in 1593, the fifth of which was published in 1597, and the last three of which were published posthumously.
H
owell,
J
ames
Authors: de Groot Jerome
Published: May 2017

James Howell (1594–1666) was a polymath, intellectual, and writer who became increasingly politically active during the Civil War period. Born in Llangamarch in Powys, Wales, into an ancient Welsh family that allegedly traced its lineage to the son of Rhodri the Great, Howell lived through the major political and literary developments of the period. His father was a reasonably successful minor churchman, and his brother became bishop of Bristol. As a Welshman Howell attended Jesus College, Oxford, and afterwards became one of those young men seeking patronage so common throughout the 1620s and 1630s, who drifted between diplomacy, tutoring, and travel.
H
ume,
A
lexander
Authors: Stegner Paul D.
Published: May 2017

Alexander Hume (?1560–1609), Scottish poet and minister, is best known for his volume of religious poetry
Hymnes, or sacred songs
(1599). His pastoral poem ‘Of the day estivall’, a survey of the natural world and human labours over the course of a summer's day, continues to be anthologized in collections of Scottish and Renaissance verse. Hume also wrote several theological and devotional works, including
Ane treatise of conscience
(1594),
Foure discourses of praise unto God
(1594),
A treatise of the felicitie, of the life to come
(1594), ‘Christian precepts serving to the practice of sanctification’ (1599), and a manuscript treatise ‘Ane afold admonitioun to the ministrerie of Scotland’ (c.1607). The authorship of some of his texts has on occasion been difficult to determine because another Scottish Alexander Hume, a schoolmaster and grammarian, published theological treatises during the same period.
H
umphrey,
L
aurence
Authors: Merchant Eleanor
Published: May 2017

Laurence Humphrey (1527–89) was an English Protestant intellectual whose distinguished career and substantial body of work, spanning the reigns of four monarchs, reveals a significant and historically overlooked contribution to vernacular and neo‐Latin literary culture and a deeply held commitment to reforming Protestantism in mid‐sixteenth century England.
J
inner,
S
arah
Authors: Tigner Amy L.
Published: May 2017

Sarah Jinner (
fl
. 1658–64) was a compiler of almanacs, an astrologer, and a medical practitioner; writing during the Commonwealth and Restoration, she published four almanacs in 1658, 1659, 1660, and 1664; the title of each of the final three is a variation on that of the first,
An almanac or prognostication for the year of our Lord 1658
. No other biographical information concerning Jinner is extant, except what can be gleaned from her almanacs. Her writing style indicates that she was well educated, and the prognostications' somewhat veiled religious and political commentary reveals her to have been critical of the Cromwellian government and supportive of royalist endeavours. Along with cookbook writer Hannah Wolley (c.1622–c.1674), Sarah Jinner is considered one of the first professional women writers, and Jinner was certainly the first female to publish almanacs, at least under her own name. These works by women speak to the period's relative freedom of the press, which allowed not only publications from female pens but also ones that included information particular to female reproductive health and, in Jinner's case, politics and prophecy.
J
ocelin,
E
lizabeth
Authors: Gibson Jonathan
Published: May 2017

The only known work of Elizabeth Jocelin (also Joscelin, 1596–1622) is a short book of religious advice entitled
The mothers legacie, to her vnborne childe
(1624). Jocelin wrote it while she was pregnant, rightly anticipating that the experience of giving birth would kill her. Influential on later texts in the genre to which it gave its name,
The mothers legacie
was admired by nineteenth‐century editors for its piety and pathos, and is a key text for twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century critics interested in early modern women's writing and publication strategies.
K
endall,
T
imothy
Authors: Schurink Fred
Published: May 2017

Timothy Kendall (
fl
. 1572–78) was born in Oxfordshire and educated at Eton, Oxford, and Staple Inn, where he was a student when he published his poetic miscellany
Flowers of epigrammes, out of sundrie the moste singular authours selected, as well auncient as late writers
in 1577. Apart from an appearance in Cheshire in the following year, where he composed a manuscript poem on the death of Geoffrey Chaucer, nothing further is known about Kendall's life.
K
yd,
T
homas
Authors: Erne Lukas
Published: May 2017

Thomas Kyd (1558–94) was an Elizabethan dramatist, one of Shakespeare's most influential dramatic precursors along with Christopher Marlowe and John Lyly, and author of
The Spanish tragedie
, probably the most popular play on the early modern English stage. Written in or around 1587, the play was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 6 October 1592, was published later the same year, and went through no fewer than four editions in the 1590s and a total of 11 editions by 1633, more than any of Shakespeare's plays during the same period. Kyd's play became the object of countless allusions and parodies, received additions after Kyd's death at least once but probably twice, was revived by several companies (including the Lord Strange's Men and the Lord Admiral's Men), was in the repertory of itinerant players who travelled to the Continent from the late sixteenth century on, and was adapted in three German and three Dutch versions before the end of the seventeenth century (Smith 1998; Erne 2001). The posthumous fame of Shakespeare's plays must not blind us to the fact that none of his plays could rival the early popularity of
The Spanish tragedie
.
Latimer,Hugh
Authors: Pratt Aaron T.
Published: May 2017

Hugh Latimer (c. 1485–1555) is perhaps best known to modern readers from the account of his execution alongside Nicholas Ridley in the numerous editions and abridgements of John Foxe'sActes and monuments. While he may have ended his life as a Protestant martyr, Latimer was also widely recognized by his contemporaries for the popular sermons that he delivered during his life. Though he seldom wrote them down himself, more than two dozen are extant thanks largely to his amanuensis Augustine Bernher, the Protestant publisher John Day, and the financial support of Latimer's patron, Katherine Brandon, duchess of Suffolk. His sermons remained relatively popular well into the seventeenth century; they were issued in some 23 editions by the dawn of England's Civil War. In approximately 1601, nearly a half‐century after he was burned at Oxford, the annotations of an unknown English preacher testify also to Latimer's influence beyond the printed page. In an extant copy of the 1572 edition of his most reprinted book, a collection of hisFrutefull sermons, this reader marked the text in a manner indicating that he intended to ‘borrow’ several sermons for delivery from his own church pulpit.
L
eigh,
D
orothy
Authors: Snook Edith
Published: May 2017

Dorothy Leigh (d. in or before 1616) is the author of
The mothers blessing
, the most frequently reprinted text by a woman in the seventeenth century. We know from the work itself that she was the mother of three sons, George, John, and William, and a widow at the time of writing; she died sometime before 1616 when
The mothers blessing
was published. The most recent biographical research suggests that her father was William Kempe of Essex and that she was the wife of Ralph Leigh of Essex, who served under Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, in Spain. Her birth date is unknown.
Letters in Print
Authors: Schneider Gary
Published: May 2017

Letters appearing in print had numerous practical functions and embodied a multiplicity of cultural meanings in Renaissance England. Letters were printed to engage religious controversy, for spiritual instruction, as news reportage, for political propaganda, as monuments to literary fame, as expressions of nationalism, and as historical documents. Manuscript (handwritten) letters were regularly transferred to print. Some would circulate in manuscript before being posthumously published in print; others were printed after being intercepted. On the other hand, letters of all sorts were expressly written
for
the print medium, although such letters often coopted the appearance of manuscript composition and circulation in order to appear authentic. The conventions, characteristics, and cultural meanings of manuscript letters were exploited in preparing print letters to serve a range of rhetorical purposes. However, the manuscript letter's expressions of sincerity, modesty, politeness, authenticity, and veracity did not signify in the same manner when a letter appeared in print precisely because the print letter was recontextualized within the public sphere and opened up to multiple readers. It is sometimes impossible to tell if a letter was constructed for print or transferred to it; however, determining if letters were authentic or prepared for the press, genuine or counterfeit, is often less important than recognizing the rhetorical or persuasive aim of the print letter or collection within its specific socio‐cultural context.
L
indsay,
D
avid
Authors: Elliott Elizabeth
Published: May 2017

The most widely read of the Middle Scots poets from the Reformation down to the eighteenth century, Sir David Lindsay (or Lyndsay) of the Mount (c. 1486–1555) is best known as the author of
Ane satyre of the thrie estaitis
(1552), Scotland's earliest surviving play text and one of the finest examples of the morality genre. Born around 1486, Lindsay began his career as a courtier during the reign of James IV. In the course of more than 30 years of royal service, he travelled widely on diplomatic business in his capacity as a herald, and played a key role in court ceremonial. He married Janet Douglas in 1522. By 1542 he was a knight, and had become Lyon King of Arms, Scotland's chief heraldic officer. Following the death of James V in 1542, Lindsay was less closely involved in court affairs, and his later works adopt a wider perspective, reflecting on the political and religious upheaval of the early Reformation. Lindsay died in 1555.
Llwyd,Humphrey
Authors: Jones Grace
Published: May 2017

Humphrey Llwyd (c. 1527–68) was a humanist scholar, royal servant, and politician. He was born in Denbigh in Wales around 1527, attended university at Oxford between 1547 and 1551, and spent most of his adult career in the service of Henry Fitzalan, earl of Arundel. He also served as a member of parliament for East Grinstead in 1559 and as a member for the Denbigh Boroughs in 1563. In 1566–67 he accompanied Fitzalan on a tour of the Continent, visiting Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands. He died in 1568 at the age of 41.
L
odge,
T
homas
Authors: Williams Grant
Published: May 2017

The cultural import and impact of the writings of Thomas Lodge (1558–1625) have yet to be seriously assessed. The study of Lodge's writings has remained underdeveloped primarily because of canonical prejudices, which still plague Elizabethan writers who are deemed ‘minor’ authors in the pantheon surmounted by Shakespeare; Lodge's romance
Rosalynde
has garnered fame by way of its connections to
As you like it
and not, for example, through its publication history of 11 editions before 1640 – Shakespeare's comedy seeing just two in the same period. The significance of Lodge's texts has been confined to their value within the traditional canon's privileging of belletristic craftsmanship. Even though Lodge tried his hand at sundry genres over his lifetime, he consistently loses out when it comes to the execution of literary technique: his first defence of poetry against the puritanical Stephen Gosson has been eclipsed by later apologists, most notably Philip Sidney; his
Scillaes metamorphosis
, antedating the epyllion craze of the 1590s, has been overshadowed by Shakespeare's
Venus and Adonis;
his
A fig of Momus
(1595), though another exemplar, has been lost in the shuffle of the later satires by Joseph Hall, John Donne, and John Marston; and his sonnet sequence
Phillis
(1593) and his two plays,
The wounds of civill war
(1594) and A
looking glasse for London and England
(1594), have simply slipped into canonical oblivion. As Charles Whitworth (1996) concludes, every stab he made at a different genre did not set him above his peers. Even if we take a more generous view of his contribution to building the English canon, as Wesley D. Rae (1967) does, the significance of his diverse writings cannot be exhausted by a traditional aesthetic paradigm, which inadequately explains how texts are implicated in cultural production.
L
odwick,
F
rancis
Authors: Poole William
Published: May 2017

Francis Lodwick or Lodowyck (1619–94) was a writer on artificial language, theology, and utopia. Of French‐Flemish extraction, he was born in London in 1619 into a trading family who were active members of the Dutch Church of Austin Friars. Lodwick was probably educated through the teaching organized by the Dutch Church; he did not attend university, but instead became a wealthy London trader. Nevertheless, he read comfortably in English, Dutch, French, German, and Latin; collected books in dozens of other languages and scripts; and wrote with a fine, Dutch‐influenced calligraphic hand. His chief diversion from business was book‐collecting, and at his death he owned two large libraries, probably stored in different premises. Shelf‐lists for both survive (British Library, Sloane MSS 855, 859), showing that Lodwick not only owned around 5,000 titles but also included his own manuscript works in the more personal and heterodox of his two collections.
Lupton,Thomas
Authors: Mukherjee Ayesha
Published: May 2017

The corpus of Thomas Lupton (fl. 1572–84) demonstrates anxieties about public morality, national economy, and religion. He wrote in an array of literary registers: commendatory verses, plays, dialogues, polemical tracts, and recipe compilations. A chronological survey of his dedicatory epistles suggests he sought patronage from 1578 to 1583. His recipe compendium,A thousand notable things, of sundry sortes(1579), is dedicated to Margaret Clifford, countess of Derby, with whom he fell out of favour by the end of the year. The first part of his utopian dialogue,Siquila too good to be true(1580), is dedicated to the then rising courtier Christopher Hatton; the second part,The second part of Too good to be true(1581), and an anti‐Catholic tractA persuasion from papistrie(1581) were more ambitiously dedicated to William Cecil, Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth, respectively. With the latter piece, Lupton was drawn into a religious controversy surrounding the lapsed clergyman John Nichols who returned to Protestantism in 1581 and published a series of attacks on Rome. The Jesuit counter‐attack by Robert Persons alluded to but also dismissed Lupton's work; Lupton responded sharply withThe Christian against the Iesuite(1582), dedicated to secretary of state Sir Francis Walsingham. His final work,A dreame of the diuell and Diues(1583), a dialogue on greed, may have gained him patronage from the dedicatee Francis Russell, earl of Bedford. This was similar in tone and theme to his early moral interlude,All for money(1578).
M
arlowe,
C
hristopher
Authors: Digangi Mario
Published: May 2017

By his death at the age of 29, Christopher Marlowe (1564–93) had composed some of the most memorable lyrics of the Elizabethan era and had transformed English popular theatre through a handful of innovative and iconoclastic plays. He had also achieved a reputation for holding dangerous opinions that later matured into a full‐blown legend: Marlowe the spy, atheist, and sodomite. This legend is based largely on invention, conjecture, and the creative interpretation of some intriguing historical documents (Erne 2005), such as a manuscript in which the informant Richard Baines claimed to be reporting Marlowe's shockingly blasphemous views (e.g., that ‘Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest’). The so‐called Baines Note cannot simply be taken as a truthful account of what Marlowe said or believed, and some critics have in any case expressed doubts about the validity of using Marlowe's biography to interpret his literary works. Nonetheless, for many readers, Baines's portrait of a heretical, sceptical, and anti‐authoritarian Marlowe plausibly describes the creator of a body of work that is frequently characterized as path‐breaking, parodic, and subversive.
M
arston,
J
ohn
Authors: Geng Penelope
Published: May 2017

Poet, playwright, and polemicist John Marston (1576–1634) abandoned the Middle Temple for the theatre at the age of 23, and a decade later, the theatre for the church. In his literary works, Marston manifests various personae – cynic, neo‐Stoic, and frank speaker – which he uses to cultivate controversy as a means to stand out in the pell‐mell literary world of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean London. A self‐styled critic of the arts and of morality, Marston declared ‘it is my custom to speak as I think and write as I speak’ (‘To the reader’,
The malcontent
, 1604). Yet his works also shrewdly engage the current tastes of his audience, notably drawing on his English audience's fascination with Italy. Genoa, Venice, and Urbino serve as settings for several of his plays, and they also contain quotations from or allusions to the works of Niccolò Machiavelli, Baldassare Castiglione, Giovanni Battista Guarini, and Pietro Aretino. In highly rhetorical language, Marston thickens the dialogue with Italian or Latin sentences, loads his script with neologisms, and constructs elaborate, even sublime, conceits. Through his participation in the ‘War of the Theatres’, his self‐promotion in the printed prefaces of his works, and his prolific publications of satirical verses and plays, Marston caught the attention of his contemporaries. Admirers thought him among the ‘best and chiefest of our moderne writers’ (Robert Chester,
Loves martyr
, 1601), the others being William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and George Chapman. Critics saw him as ‘Furor Poeticus’ who ‘cuts, thrusts, and foins at whomsoever he meets’ (
The return from Parnassus
, 1599–1601).
M
artin,
D
orcas
Authors: White Micheline
Published: May 2017

Dorcas Martin, née Eccleston (1537–99) is known to feminist literary scholars as the translator of a short French catchecism,
An instruction for Christians, conteining a fruitfull and godlie exercise, as well in wholsome and fruitfull praiers, as in reverend discerning of Gods holie commandements and sacraments
. The text may have been published before 1581, but it was definitely printed by John Charlewood in 1581 and then reprinted in Thomas Bentley's
The monument of matrones: conteining seven severall lamps of virginitie, or distinct treatises
in 1582 (White 1999). Martin's catechism appears in Bentley's second lamp, where it sits alongside lengthy works by Queen Elizabeth, Queen Katherine Parr, Lady Elizabeth Tyrwhit, and Lady Frances Aburgavennie, and shorter works by Lady Jane Grey, John Bradford's mother, and the martyrs Agnes, Eulalia, and Anne Askew.
M
elville,
E
lizabeth
Authors: Reid‐Baxter Jamie , Ross Sarah C. E.
Published: May 2017

Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross (c. 1575–1640), a Scottish poet, was the author of
Ane godlie dreame
, first printed in Scots at Edinburgh in 1603 and republished at least 12 times down to 1737 in anglicized form. Melville's known
oeuvre
has expanded radically with the discovery in 2002 of 29 verses in a single manuscript volume of sermons by Robert Bruce, the militantly Presbyterian minister banished from Edinburgh in 1600, and of several other lyrics in disparate print and manuscript sources.
M
ontagu,
W
alter
Authors: Poynting Sarah
Published: May 2017

Walter Montagu (1603–77) was born in London, the second son of Henry Montagu, first earl of Manchester. He is best known for his play
The shepheards paradise
, performed by Queen Henrietta Maria and a cast of courtier women in 1633; he was also a translator and essayist. However, he was not primarily a writer: his career encompassed the roles of spy, diplomat, inveterate political conspirator, art collector, and French abbé. Despite owning a copy of the Second Folio of Shakespeare's plays, the catalogue of folio works in his library compiled after his death suggests that his interests lay rather in science, history, and philosophy than in literature. A notable linguist, he was employed as a go‐between in the 1624 negotiations for the marriage of Prince Charles and Henrietta Maria, when he began important relationships both with the latter and with her sister‐in‐law Anne of Austria that lasted for the rest of their lives. As favourite of George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, he was involved in clandestine activities against the French government which continued, in collaboration with Henrietta Maria amongst others, into the period when he was writing
The shepheards paradise
, following which he was exiled by Charles I in 1633. Montagu's homecoming in 1635 was temporary: he left again the same year after dramatically announcing his conversion to Roman Catholicism; another spell in England from 1637 to 1641 came to an end when his dismissal from court was demanded by Parliament. An attempt to re‐enter in disguise in 1643 resulted in a four‐year imprisonment in the Tower of London and, in 1649, exile on pain of death. After taking orders in the early 1650s, he made his career in France, as lord abbot of St Martin's, Pontoise, and grand almoner to Henrietta Maria and her daughter Henriette Anne. He died in 1677 in Paris.
M
ore,
H
enry
Authors: Hutton Sarah
Published: May 2017

Philosopher, poet, and theologian, Henry More (1614–87) was the most prolific of the Cambridge Platonists, who were renowned for the tolerant, rational approach to religion which inspired the Latitudinarian movement. In his own time, More enjoyed a reputation as a distinguished English philosopher. A Platonist in the Renaissance tradition, he drew inspiration from Plato and Plotinus, among ancient philosophers, and Origen among Christian thinkers. More was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, in 1614 to Calvinist parents. He entered Christ's College, Cambridge in 1631, became a fellow of Christ's in 1639, and spent his entire career in Cambridge until his death in 1687. However, he was neither an isolated nor an uncontroversial figure. His anti‐Calvinism was out of kilter with post‐Civil War Cambridge, while his Origenism and his staunch defence of liberty of conscience brought accusations of heresy after the Restoration.
M
oryson,
F
ynes
Authors: Aune M. G.
Published: May 2017

Fynes Moryson (1565/66–1630), travel writer, is one of several Englishmen and Scots, including William Lithgow, Thomas Coryate, George Sandys, and Sir Henry Blount, who, beginning in the late sixteenth century, travelled widely through Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia and returned home to write personal narratives of their adventures. In his desire to travel, Moryson was typical of young Oxford or Cambridge graduates of the Renaissance. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Moryson extended his travels as far as the Holy Land and published his travel journals. Though perhaps not the most objective of travel writers, Moryson was among the best educated and most observant.
N
edham,
M
archamont
Authors: Peacey Jason
Published: May 2017

A prolific journalist and pamphleteer, as well as a trained physician, Marchamont Nedham (1620–78) was one of the most important political authors of the seventeenth century, significant both for his distinctive and early contribution to English republican thought, and for his witty and acerbic style, often mimicked but rarely matched by contemporaries. Nedham was born in 1620 in Burford in Oxfordshire, where his father was employed by a local gentry family, and was educated by his mother's second husband, the local minister and schoolmaster, before progressing to All Souls College, Oxford, as a chorister, and graduating BA in 1637. His first employment was as usher, or undermaster, at Merchant Taylors' School in London, although he subsequently became a clerk at Gray's Inn. Nedham began his journalistic career in 1643 as a contributor to the Parliamentarian newspaper
Mercurius Britanicus
, and later became its editor. By September 1647, however, he was writing for the Royalists, as editor of
Mercurius pragmaticus
, although upon being imprisoned by the Republicans in June 1649, he quickly secured release and accommodated himself to the new regime, becoming one of the Republic's most important salaried propagandists, and editor of its flagship newspaper,
Mercurius politicus
. In this role, Nedham survived the constitutional shift from Republic to Protectorate, and effectively operated a newspaper monopoly from 1655 until 1659. He was removed from office with the return of the Rump Parliament in May 1659, although his journalistic skill and loyalty to the Republic quickly saw him restored to
Politicus
, where he remained until April 1660. Even the Restoration did not end his literary career, and Nedham was pardoned by Charles II in September 1660. After a brief flurry of loyal tracts, Nedham spent much of the next 16 years practising, and writing about, medicine, but he returned to polemic in the late 1670s with three pamphlets attacking Anthony Ashley Cooper, first earl of Shaftesbury, the leading Whig critic of the government, as well as pamphlets calling for war with the French, which appeared shortly before his death in November 1678.