bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
C
owley,
A
braham
Authors: Power Henry
Published: May 2017

Abraham Cowley (1618–67) was a poet, translator, and essayist. He was renowned in his lifetime for his lyric poetry, and for his adaptations and imitations of Pindar, Anacreon, Horace, and Virgil. His posthumously published essays also found a wide audience. He was revered in his own lifetime, and by the succeeding generation of poets, but his reputation has declined steadily since the eighteenth century. His work is playful, complex, and unusually rich in metaphor.
C
rashaw,
R
ichard
Authors: McDowell Sean H.
Published: May 2017

While the critical fortunes of all the metaphysical poets have fluctuated, sometimes dramatically, between the original circulation of their work and the twenty‐first century, none has experienced a more varied reception than Richard Crashaw (?1612–49). Since the publication of H. J. C. Grierson's landmark edition of
Metaphysical poets
(1921), which revived Crashaw for the English‐speaking world, and of L. C. Martin's
The poems, English, Latin, and Greek, of Richard Crashaw
(1927), which made available his complete poetic canon, Crashaw has been celebrated for the wit, sensuality, and spiritual vision of his hymns and odes and derided for excessive emotionalism, indulgence in grotesquery, and even mental disturbance. While a few of his secular poems (e.g., ‘Music's duel’ and ‘Wishes. To his supposed mistress’) are widely anthologized in college textbooks, he is known today primarily for his religious verse, published in the seventeenth century in three collections, the Latin
Epigram‐matum sacrorum liber
(1634),
Steps to the temple
(1646; rev. edn 1648), and the posthumous
Carmen Deo nostro
(1652). Even so, the many labels and clichés attached to his work in various college textbooks continue to obscure his artistry, even for those aware of the importance of his Catholicism.
C
udworth,
R
alph
Authors: Hutton Sarah
Published: May 2017

Ralph Cudworth (1617–88) was one of the most important religious and philosophical thinkers of the seventeenth century. He was, with Henry More, the most significant of the Cambridge Platonists, whose tolerant, rational Christianity inspired the Latitudinarian movement. Cudworth wrote much, but published few books in his lifetime. His major work, the dauntingly erudite
The true intellectual system of the universe
(published 1678), presents a coherent anti‐determinist philosophy but was never completed as planned. He published a handful of sermons, the most famous being his sermon preached before the House of Commons in 1647. His unpublished manuscripts are devoted mainly to the subject of free will. Some of these were published posthumously:
A treatise concerning eternal and immutable morality
in 1731, and
Of freewill
in 1848. Although dubbed a Platonist, he drew on a wide knowledge of ancient philosophy, especially Stoicism. This humanistic dimension of his thought belies his philosophical modernity, evidenced by his debt to René Descartes. Although critical of some aspects of Cartesianism, he used Descartes's concept of body as inert extension as a premise for dualism on the grounds that since corporeality is by definition passive, it is necessary to posit an active immaterial agent, that is mind or spirit, to explain life, thought, and motion. Cudworth's philosophy responds to what he saw as the errors of modern philosophy and theology, especially the materialist philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and predestinarian Calvinism.
D
elaval,
E
lizabeth
Authors: Trapedo Shaina
Published: May 2017

Lady Elizabeth (Livingstone) Delaval (1649–1717) was an aristocrat, an attendant at court, and an amateur memoirist. Her unpublished meditations offer insight into the life of a noblewoman living and writing in England during the latter half of the seventeenth century. Delaval was the only child of Sir James Livingston, earl of Newburgh, and Katherine Howard. Lord Newburgh's Royalist activities forced him to flee with his wife, who died in exile. The young Delaval was left with her paternal aunt, Lady Stanhope, at Nocton, Lincolnshire. Even after her father's return and his subsequent remarriage, she was raised by her grandmother and Lady Stanhope without much involvement from her father.
E
dwards,
T
homas
Authors: Hughes Ann
Published: May 2017

Thomas Edwards (c.1599–1648), Presbyterian preacher and polemicist, is best known as the author of
Gangraena
, a ramshackle and intemperate ‘heresiography’, attacking the growth of gathered churches, separatist religious sects, and heterodox opinions in England in the 1640s.
Gangraena, or a catalogue and discovery of many of the errors, heresies blasphemies and pernicious practices of the sectaries of this time
, published in three parts in February, May, and December 1646 and amounting to more than 800 pages, was one of the most notorious and significant publications produced during a conflict in which print was central to mobilization and debate.
E
lyot,
T
homas
Authors: Shrank Cathy
Published: May 2017

The only son of Sir Richard Elyot (one of the king's serjeant‐at‐arms, justice of the assize for the western circuit, and a judge in the court of common pleas), Sir Thomas Elyot (c.1490–1546) would have been trained for public service from his youth. In the preface to his 1538 Latin–English dictionary, Elyot presents himself as self‐taught, educated in his father's house and ‘not instructed by any other teacher from his twelfth year, but led by himself into liberal studies and both sorts of philosophy [i.e., natural and moral]’ (translation: Lehmberg 2004). However, despite fashioning himself as an autodidact, Elyot attended the Inns of Court, having been admitted to his father's inn, the Middle Temple, in November 1510. He may also have studied at Oxford (Lehmberg 2004). That said, neither of these institutions would have provided him with the humanistic grounding which so obviously informs his writings.
Emblem Books
Authors: Engel William E.
Published: May 2017

Emblems were part of virtually every literary form and aesthetic practice of the Renaissance. No domestic or public space was left unfilled by some appropriate emblematic decoration (Manning 2002). The designs for such ornamentation in many cases can be traced to specific emblem books (Bath 1994). To this end, books of emblems frequently were indexed topically by virtues, vices, and other commonplace themes. Strictly speaking, an emblem consisted of a picture, motto, and poem. The
pictura
, or image, was likened to the body of the device, and the
inscriptio
, or word, to the soul; the
subscriptio
, or verse commentary, brought out a connection between the two main components.
G
ascoigne,
G
eorge
Authors: Austen Gillian
Published: May 2017

George Gascoigne (1534/35–77) was the most influential English writer of the mid‐ to late 1570s, responsible for important innovations in several genres, including tragedy and comedy, blank verse, prose fiction, sonnets and sonnet sequences, complaint, essay, and reportage. His work was quickly outdated in 1579 when Edmund Spenser published
The shepheardes calender
, but Gascoigne's literary reputation remained very high throughout the 1580s and 1590s. His lack of personal popularity had held him back in the system of patronage and prompted him to adopt a range of poetic and authorial personae under which he presented his work. Gascoigne produced both courtly and moralistic works and wrote for manuscript presentation as well as print; some of his most successful work was written for performance before Elizabeth I and her court at Kenilworth in 1575. Gascoigne published some of his work anonymously, and this – together with the transient nature of performance and the private nature of manuscripts – led to a distortion of his reputation after the death of Elizabeth in 1603. In the twentieth century, his reputation came to rest primarily on the published works which bore his name, those presented under his ‘reformed prodigal’ persona, but the most recent criticism acknowledges his courtly successes and recognizes the significance of his literary innovations and the extent of his influence on later Elizabethan writers.
G
ilbert,
H
umphrey
Authors: Jowitt Claire
Published: May 2017

Sir Humphrey Gilbert (1537–83) was an Elizabethan explorer, mariner, and soldier. He is known chiefly as an advocate for attempts to seek a north‐west passage to the Pacific in the 1560s, for his successful but ruthless military service in Ireland in the 1570s, and for his attempts to explore and colonize North America after he was granted letters patent by Elizabeth I in 1578 authorizing the planting of an English colony in the New World.
G
odolphin,
S
idney
Authors: Williams Deanne
Published: May 2017

Sidney Godolphin (1610–43) was a courtier and poet. His small body of work consists of about 30 poems, including songs and sonnets, epitaphs and epistles, and a partial translation of book 4 of Virgil's
Aeneid
, ‘The passion of Dido for Aeneas’. Godolphin's poem, ‘The Muses fairest light in no darke time’, appears in the book of commendatory verses in honour of Ben Jonson,
Jonsonus virbius
(1638), and his translation of Virgil was printed in 1658. His work remains in manuscripts (Bodleian Library, MS Malone 13; Bodleian Library, MS Locke c. 10; British Library, MS Harleian 6917; British Library, MS Lansdowne 489) until the first edition of his works, edited by George Saints‐bury, appeared in 1906.
Godwin,Francis
Authors: Poole William
Published: May 2017

Francis Godwin (1562–1633), bishop successively of Llandaff (1601) and of Hereford (1617), was an antiquary and science‐fiction writer. He was born at Hannington, Northamptonshire to Thomas Godwin (1517–90) and his wife, Isabella (d. before 1584) and graduated from Christ Church, Oxford. Early in the 1590s, Godwin commenced a biographical register of all the English bishops from the beginning of Christianity in England to the current day. This was published in 1601 as Acatalogue of the bishops of England, since the first planting of Christian religion in this island, and as a reward Godwin was promoted to the poor see of Llandaff in the same year. Godwin republished the catalogue with additions in 1615, but the press made a mangle of it, and so the next year a corrected translation into Latin appeared, exposing Godwin's work to the international market, and aiding his translation to the bishopric of Hereford in late 1617. In addition to the publication of the LatinDe præsulibus, 1616 also saw publication of Godwin'sRerum Anglicarum … annals;this is a chronicle, in the vein of William Camden'sAnnales rerum Anglicarum, et Hibernicarum, regnante Elizabetha (History of Elizabeth, completed in 1617), of the reigns of Henry VIII, Mary I, and Edward VI. Godwin's text was not as well received as Camden's annals, although it was soon being recommended as part of the accepted curriculum of national historiography. But it was popular, being reprinted in London in 1628, with a translation into French in 1647, and a Continental edition of the Latin text from The Hague in 1653. Godwin's son Morgan also translated theAnnalesinto English in 1630. Reprinted in 1675 and 1676, its last impression was coupled with Francis Bacon's superiorHistorie of the reigne of King Henry the seventh. As an antiquary, however, Godwin's reputation rests on his catalogue of bishops, which remained a standard source well into the eighteenth century. In 1743 the English text was republished in Cambridge with additions up to that year. After years of ill health, Godwin died in 1633.
G
reene,
R
obert
Authors: Melnikoff Kirk
Published: May 2017

The son of either a saddler or a cordwainer‐turned‐innkeeper, Robert Greene (1558–92) was born in Norwich in July 1558 (Collins 1905; Richardson 1980). In his minority, he probably attended Norwich's free grammar school where he would have studied Latin and been exposed to a humanist canon of classical texts. Greene continued his education at Cambridge, being admitted to St John's College in 1575 as a sizar (Parr 1962). After receiving his BA in 1580 at St John's alongside Henry Constable, Abraham Fraunce, and Brian Melbancke among others, he matriculated at Clare Hall, where he received his MA three years later with the translator Thomas Bowes. Greene was apparently not one of Cambridge's most exceptional students, graduating thirty‐eighth in a class of 41 at St John's and fifth in a class of 12 at Clare Hall. In 1588, Oxford conferred a second MA upon Greene, as a courtesy between the universities.
G
uilpin,
E
verard
Authors: Darcy Robert
Published: May 2017

Everard Guilpin (c.1572–after 1607) gained prominence in the flurry of poetic satire that reached print in the last years of Elizabeth's reign. The eldest son of John Guilpin and Thomasin Everard of Norfolk, Guilpin attended Highgate grammar school and was enrolled in Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1588, as a pensioner. In 1591 he entered Gray's Inn and, like many other young men who arrived in London to study law at the Inns of Court, became secondarily active as a poet. He contributed to the verse manuscript culture of the 1590s, and went into print anonymously in 1598 with
Skialetheia, or a shadowe of truth
. The caustic tone of
Skialetheia
is set with its opening address ‘To the Reader’: ‘Insteede of Ingling termes for thy good will / Reader fall to, reade, iest, and carpe thy fill.’ Guilpin thereafter embarks on a collection of 70 shorter epigrams (some as brief as a couplet), followed by seven longer poems of formal verse satire. Although heavily influenced by classical models, and featuring epigrams to ‘Titus’, ‘Liuia’, ‘Syluio’, and so on,
Skialetheia
hints at its origins in a very contemporary London, as epigrams reference ‘Poules’ – St Paul's Cathedral and churchyard, the centres of literary business, gossip, and printing – as well as particular types, like ‘Nauia’ who divides his time between the Inns of Court and the Royal Exchange, and the gallant ‘Cornelius’ who ‘sits o'er the stage / With the Tobacco‐pipe now at his mouth’; also mentioned is the undisguised Thomas Deloney. The seven satires take as their respective targets poetry, hypocrisy, painted women, inconstancy, jealousy, vanity, and opinion, again clothing a classical genre in the specific garb of late Elizabethan London.
H
abington,
W
illiam
Authors: Paleit Edward
Published: May 2017

William Habington (1605–54), or Abington, was a Catholic courtier and poet. He composed
Castara
, a collection of love poems first published in 1635, and a courtly tragicomedy,
The queene of Arragon
(1640), as well as two minor historical works. His poetry celebrates chaste passion and marriage, eschewing the promiscuous eroticism of his ‘Cavalier’ contemporaries, while
The queene of Arragon
deals intriguingly with the obligations and privileges of monarchy just before the Short Parliament.
H
akluyt,
R
ichard
Authors: Day Matthew
Published: May 2017

Richard Hakluyt (1552–1616) is best known for his role in the collection, dissemination, and publication of travel narratives and documents of the early modern period. Though not the first to publish a collection of such writings in English,
The principall navigations, voiages and discoveries of the English nation
(1589) was the most important early modern travel compilation, particularly in its much‐enlarged second edition,
The principal navigations, voiages, traffiques and discoveries of the English nation
(1598–1600). These two editions preserved texts which would otherwise be lost and were seminal examples of a genre which became immensely popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hakluyt's contribution to the publication of travel writing, however, was not restricted to these two editions.
H
alkett,
A
nne
Authors: Eardley Alice
Published: May 2017

During the course of a lifetime spanning much of the seventeenth century, Anne Halkett (1623–99) produced an impressive total of 21 manuscript volumes, 14 of which are now extant, together with 30 stitched books, none of which survive. Her works include mothers’ legacies, occasional and select meditations, a medical treatise (now lost), poetry, and journal entries, but she is best known for her autobiographical text (or memoirs) which has often been celebrated for its retrospective account of the author's royalist activities during the English Civil Wars and for its engaging, highly literary, style.
H
all,
J
ohn, of
D
urham
Authors: McDowell Nicholas
Published: May 2017

John Hall (1627–56) was a poet, translator, educational reformer, and polemicist close to many of the significant political and cultural figures of his age, and was employed in 1649 as one of the official propagandists of the Commonwealth government. Hall was baptized in Durham on 20 August 1627 and educated at Durham School. His university career was delayed by the outbreak of civil war, and he ended up studying on his own in the library of Durham Cathedral until February 1646, when he was admitted to St John's College, Cambridge. A manuscript completed in 1645 on the best method of reading history testifies to Hall's youthful engagement with the classics (Raymond 1998). In 1641 he had been introduced to the 15‐year‐old Thomas Stanley, eldest son of a substantial Hertfordshire landowner, who was visiting Durham from Cambridge. Stanley and Hall immediately became close, and Stanley seems to have acted as patron of Hall's studies in Durham.
Harriot,Thomas
Authors: Sullivan Garrett A.
Published: May 2017

Thomas Harriot (c.1560–1621) was an important mathematician whose work on algebra has been seen as an unacknowledged influence on René Descartes. Also an accomplished astronomer, he was one of the first Englishmen to use a telescope, produced detailed drawings of the moon, and anticipated Galileo in surmising that planets other than the earth were likely to have satellites. However, Harriot is probably better known today for his involvement with the ventures of his friend and patron Sir Walter Ralegh, most notably Ralegh's effort to establish a settlement in the New World. Harriot'sA briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia(1588), which draws on his own experience as a member of the Roanoke colony, is the product of that effort. A 1590 edition of theReport, published in Frankfurt by Theodore de Bry, features engravings based on drawings by John White, of which 23 offer ‘a faithful record of the now vanished Algonkian Indians of Virginia’ (Hadfield 2002b), and five portray ancient Picts ‘to showe how that the Inhabitants of the great Bretannie haue bin in times past as sauuage as those of Virginia’. This edition has been lauded as ‘one of the monuments of early modern printing’ (Smith 2001).
Hartlib,Samuel
Authors: Lewis Rhodri
Published: May 2017

Samuel Hartlib (c.1600–62), intelligencer and educational reformer, was born in the royal Prussian city of Elbing (Elbl?g in present‐day Poland), a prosperous trading port on the Baltic coast with strong links to the British Isles. The son of a well‐to‐do merchant and his English third wife, Hartlib appears to have been educated at Brieg and the University of Königsberg, but he also studied at the University of Cambridge for at least the years 1625–26. Like many other inhabitants of north‐central Europe, Hartlib was forced into exile as the Thirty Years War began to swing decisively against the Protestant cause. So it was that, in 1628, he relocated to London.
H
awes,
S
tephen
Authors: Griffiths Jane
Published: May 2017

Stephen Hawes (c.1474–after 1529) is best known as the author of a series of dream‐visions that combine allegory and moral instruction with a highly self‐conscious attempt to outline a visionary poetics, one or more of which may have influenced Edmund Spenser's
Faerie Queene
.
H
ayward,
J
ohn
Authors: Pentland Elizabeth
Published: May 2017

Sir John Hayward (?1564–1627), a civil lawyer and historian, is best known as the author of
The first part of the life and raigne of King Henrie IIII
(1599), which was published in London by John Wolfe with a dedication to Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex. The work, which focused on the downfall of Richard II and the first year of Henry's reign, was the first English history to be modelled on the writings of the Roman historian Tacitus, and marks a turning point in English historiography. The book's popularity has been attributed to its association with Essex, whose career seemed to parallel that of Bolingbroke, but the implications of this comparison were troubling both to Essex and to Queen Elizabeth, who considered the book seditious. As Essex fell out of favour, Hayward found himself repeatedly questioned about his motives for writing the work, and though he denied any seditious intent, he spent the final years of Elizabeth's reign in prison. Upon his release, he asserted his royalist position through a series of political pamphlets that found favour with James I. His literary and legal careers flourished, and he rose to prominence, alongside William Camden, as one of the pre‐eminent historians of his time. Hayward's other works include several lives of English monarchs, political treatises, and a number of devotional works, the first of which,
The sanctuarie of a troubled soule
(1601), was written during the early months of his imprisonment. The troubles that Hayward experienced upon publishing his history of Henry IV have been especially significant for research on Elizabethan historiography, censorship, treason, and, more broadly, for studies concerned with the intersections of politics, law, and literature during this period.
H
erbert,
G
eorge
Authors: West Philip
Published: May 2017

George Herbert (1593–1633) is widely held to be the greatest of early modern devotional poets. The 166 poems in
The temple
(1633) meditate on private spiritual experience of divine grace, celebrate the rites, festivals, and sacraments of the Church of England, and offer moral advice in the hope that ‘a verse may find him who a sermon flies / And turn delight into a sacrifice’ (‘Perirrhanterium’). Herbert's language and style are everywhere imbued with the Bible, especially the Psalms and Gospels, and are also strongly influenced by the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer. His main literary influences are the secular and sacred poems of Philip Sidney and John Donne, and his use of paradox and conceit bears certain similarities to the work of the latter, a close family friend. Herbert was formally accomplished, experimenting with a variety of metres and creating dozens of original stanza forms. Despite this virtuosity, he often deliberately rejected ‘brave [i.e., splendid, showy] language’ and rhetorical smoothness, desiring instead that his verse should be ‘clad with simplenesse’ in the manner of the Gospels (‘Frailtie’). Published posthumously in the same year as Donne's
Poems, The temple
received widespread and immediate acclaim, and for 50 years it remained constantly in print and was regarded as the pinnacle of poetic devotion. Christopher Harvey's inferior imitation
The synagogue
(1640) was frequently bound with editions of
The temple
, but Herbert also found worthy disciples in Henry Vaughan (
Silex scintillans
, 1650 and 1655) and Richard Crashaw (
Steps to the temple
, 1646). Herbert's ‘holy
life
and
verse’
(Vaughan's phrase, but widely echoed) were admired by both royalists and parliamentarians during the Civil War and Interregnum, while Restoration dissenters continued to read and adapt his poems even after his critical reputation had diminished. In the eighteenth century
The temple
strongly influenced Methodist hymn‐writing, and in the nineteenth, following Samuel Taylor Coleridge's admiration of his style, Herbert was increasingly appreciated for his extraordinary achievements as a lyric poet, rather than as the epitome of Anglican piety.
H
eywood,
J
ohn
Authors: Happe Peter
Published: May 2017

John Heywood spent most of his long life (c.1497–c.1578) in or near the English royal court, as a musician, boy and man. After a brief but obscure period at Broadgates Hall in Oxford University, he became a writer of interludes in the 1520s and a participant in their presentation for many years. He wrote poetry and later in life he published four collections of proverbs. He was a lifelong Catholic and maintained his religious faith through the vicissitudes of the onset of the Reformation at the time of the royal divorce and the subsequent changes in official religion at court in the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary (to whom he was closest), and Elizabeth I. It was only after the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity (1564) that he went into voluntary exile in the Low Countries. His family connections, arising from his marriage to Joan Rastell (by 1523), ensured that he was very close to the momentous changes in public affairs and many of his writings reflect his responses to them, embodying his Catholic viewpoint. His wife was the niece of Sir Thomas More, and Heywood worked with her father, John Rastell, and with her brother William, both of whom were active as printers during the 1520s and 1530s. His social position was sustained by royal patronage and gifts. King Henry's pension for his musical activities, beginning in 1529, was continued for the rest of his life and it was increased by Queen Mary in 1555. Henry also supported Heywood's receiving the freedom of the City of London in 1523 and he entered the Mercers’ Company in 1530, by now a citizen of some substance. Later, in 1552 he had status at court as groom of the chamber and he delivered a Latin oration at St Paul's during the coronation ceremony for Queen Mary in 1553. Several of his poems are directed to her and reflect his abiding sense of loyalty.
H
eywood,
T
homas
Authors: Love Genevieve
Published: May 2017

An actor, playwright, shareholding member in a theatrical company, and apologist for the theatre, Thomas Heywood (c. 1573–1641) was a working professional who understood theatrical operations intimately and capitalized on nearly all the opportunities his profession afforded. Complementing Heywood's plays in popularity are his many and varied prose works, including
Gynaikeion, or nine bookes of various history concerninge women
(1624) and
The hierarchie of the blessed angels
(1635). However, he is best known today for his defence of the theatrical trade,
An apology for actors
(1612), and for a few plays, chiefly his now canonical contribution to the genre of domestic tragedy,
A woman kilde with kindnesse
(1607). His claim, made in the preface to
The English traveller
(1633), that he had ‘either an entire hand, or at least a main finger’ in the writing of 220 plays, may be nearly as well known. Heywood's lengthy and varied theatrical career is marked by his coexistence at the conventional heart of his profession and at its outlying extremes.
H
iggins,
J
ohn
Authors: Human Elizabeth
Published: May 2017

John Higgins (c. 1544–c. 1620) was a translator, a poet, and a linguist. Little is known of his life: he may have studied at Christ Church, Oxford; he spent two years teaching grammar; and by 1574 he was vicar of Winsham, in Somerset. He is remembered for his additions to
A Mirrour for magistrates
.
H
oby,
M
argaret
Authors: Totaro Rebecca
Published: May 2017

Lady Margaret Hoby (1571–1633) was the first known English woman diarist. She was baptized in 1571, the only daughter of Arthur Dakins (d.1592), gentleman, landowner, and justice of the peace of Linton in East Yorkshire, and his wife, Thomasine Gye (d.1613). At an early age, Margaret lived in the home of Henry Hastings, third earl of Huntingdon (1535–95), knight of the garter, and heir presumptive to the crown through his mother, Margaret Pole (née Plantagenet), eighth countess of Salisbury (1473–1541). With the support of Hastings, Hoby married advantageously and repeatedly. Her first marriage was to Walter Devereux (c.1569–91), the brother of Robert Devereux, the second earl of Essex (1565–1601), who was the infamous long‐time favourite of Queen Elizabeth I before being executed for treason. They married in 1588 or 1589, and he died in battle in 1591. Within weeks, she was courted by both Thomas Sidney (d.1595), brother of poet Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86), and Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby (1566–1644), son of Sir Thomas Hoby (1530–66), a famous English diplomat known now for his translation of Baldassare Castiglione's
The courtier
(1561). Margaret married Thomas Sidney in 1591. She was married to Sidney roughly a year longer than to her first husband when Sidney died, leaving her a widow once more. A deathbed request of Hastings made it impossible for her to refuse to marry the suitor who had come in second in 1591, Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby. In the years following their 1596 nuptials, Hoby's political influence among Puritans grew, as did his estate. He became a justice of the peace in Yorkshire and a member of parliament.
H
olinshed,
R
aphael
Authors: Logan Sandra
Published: May 2017

Little is known of the life of Raphael Holinshed (c. 1525/29–1580), who is remembered solely for his contributions as the primary author and general editor of his
Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande
, among the most important English historical and antiquarian projects of the sixteenth century. The
Chronicles
represent a monumental achievement in collection, compilation, and original English historical writing, and embody a significant transformation of the chronicle history genre. Before the sixteenth century, mythical histories and accounts of important events or eras circulated in manuscript form usually in Latin, but also in the vernacular, and were sometimes published, while annals – yearly records written in Latin by monks or abbots – were seldom published. Holinshed's
Chronicles
, one of the first histories of England written in the English language, differ in nearly every way from such works. They were produced by a group of authors rather than by a single author, sometimes presenting conflicting views of events, or multiple perspectives. They draw on a wide array of sources, which were translated, paraphrased, incorporated wholly, or used as the basis for original narrative, thereby making available the sequences and the materials of history in a newly published form. They include events up to the year before publication in both editions, and were priced for access by a broad reading audience. Finally, through their separate treatments of England, Scotland, and Ireland, the
Chronicles
acknowledge the nations of the British Isles as religiously, politically, and socially distinct.
H
oskyns,
J
ohn
Authors: Lukins Rory
Published: May 2017

John Hoskyns (1566–1638) was a poet, rhetorician, lawyer, and judge bestknown today for his rhetorical manual,
Directions for speech and stile
, which was not published under his name until 1935, but which circulated in manuscript and deeply influenced seventeenth‐century rhetorical thought. Born in Monkton, Herefordshire, Hoskyns enrolled at Winchester College in 1579, eventually matriculating to New College, Oxford, in 1585. He took a BA in 1588 and an MA in 1592 before moving on to Gray's Inn to study law. During his school years, Hoskyns developed close relationships with figures who would become luminaries of English literary history, befriending John Davies, John Donne, Henry Wotton, Thomas Coryate, Thomas Bastard, John Marston, Ben Jonson, and Sir Walter Ralegh. Hoskyns was, in fact, one of the regular members of a group of wits that met at the Mitre and Mermaid taverns and was sometimes referred to as the Mermaid Club.
H
owell,
T
homas
Authors: Wilson‐Lee Edward
Published: May 2017

Thomas Howell (
fl
. 1560–81) published three volumes of verse during his service in a succession of households belonging to the Talbot and Herbert families, and is notable both for the example he provides of country house literary culture in the mid‐sixteenth century and as a witness of the early patronage activities of Mary Sidney Herbert, countess of Pembroke. As well as containing the earliest known reference to Mary's brother Philip Sidney's
Arcadia
, Howell's writings vividly evoke the fraught existence of retainers in noble houses and demonstrate the use of courtly love lyric and occasional verse in negotiating the delicate social and economic relationships involved in domestic service.
J
ames
VI
and
I
Authors: Rickard Jane
Published: May 2017

James Stuart (1566–1625), king of Scotland and England, was not only an important literary patron but also a prolific author in his own right. Born in Edinburgh in 1566, he was crowned King James VI of Scotland when he was only 13 months old. Upon the death of Elizabeth I of England in 1603, James acceded to the English throne, adding to his first title the second of James I of England. James reigned over England and Scotland until his death in 1625. He wrote in a wide range of genres, including poetry, scriptural exegeses, and social and political treatises. To a degree unprecedented among early modern monarchs, he exploited writing and print as a means of representing himself to his subjects.
J
ekyll,
E
lizabeth
Authors: Clarke Elizabeth
Published: May 2017

The manuscript ‘signed’ Elizabeth Jekyll is MS b. 221 in the Osborn collection of the Beineke Library at Yale University. It contains a spiritual journal starting in 1643 and ending a few months before the writer's death. There is also a transcription of a copy of Alicia Lisle's ‘Dying speech’ at her execution at Winchester for aiding the rebel soldiers of James Scott, earl of Monmouth, in 1685, which seems to have been taken from an unlicensed pamphlet probably dating from 1685. Also included, in the same hand, are three poems and what appear to be sermon notes, and at the back a record of family births and deaths.
J
ewel,
J
ohn
Authors: Stewart Alan
Published: May 2017

John Jewel (1522–71), bishop of Salisbury, was one of the leading churchmen of the early Elizabethan period. He contributed to English literary history by penning the
Apologia pro Ecclesia Anglicana (Apology of the Church of England
) (1562), and by setting the tone for the religious print controversies that persisted throughout Elizabeth's reign.
J
ohnson,
C
icely and
T
hurgood,
R
ose
Authors: Baker Naomi
Published: May 2017

Cicely Johnson (
fl
. 1617/18–1636/37) and Rose Thurgood (b. c.1602) are the authors of two of the earliest known English conversion narratives. Thurgood's ‘A lecture of repentance’ (1636/37) and Johnson's untitled account (c. 1636/37) (listed by a later hand in the manuscript table of contents as ‘Fanatical reveries’) are bound together in the same manuscript volume in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester (English Manuscript 875). The narratives offer a fascinating insight into the lives of Puritan women in the early decades of the seventeenth century. Thurgood's account in particular provides a rare opportunity to witness the mental, emotional, and spiritual struggles of an impoverished seventeenth‐century woman.
J
ordan,
T
homas
Authors: Wilcher Robert
Published: May 2017

Thomas Jordan (1614/20–1685) was an actor, playwright, and poet whose career spanned the 1630s to 1670s. There are no records of his birth, baptism, or parentage, unless he was the son of Samuel Jordan baptized on 9 November 1614 at St James's, Clerkenwell. Gerald E. Bentley (1941, 1956) conjectured that he was born about 1620, because he played a boy's role in Thomas Rawlins's
The tragedy of Messallina
around 1634 and his earliest publication,
Poeticall varieties
(1637), was greeted as the work of an ‘Infant‐Poet’. David Kathman (2005) cites a 1665 Chancery deposition in which Jordan gave his age as 48, suggesting a birth date in 1617. On 23 August 1636 he recited a speech that he had composed for a royal entertainment mounted at an estate in Oxfordshire (McGee 2003). Allan H. Stevenson (1942) thought he was probably among the King's Revels actors who followed James Shirley to Dublin when plague closed the London theatres in May 1636. The baptism of a son to Thomas Jordan was recorded on 28 December 1637 at St John's, Dublin. In 1642 he was living in Shoe Lane, Holborn, when Martha, daughter to ‘Thomas Iordan Player’ and his wife Susan, was baptized at St Andrew's on 29 April, but it is not known how many of the other baptisms and burials of children and wives gathered from parish registers by Wayne H. Phelps (1979) relate to him.
K
nolles,
R
ichard
Authors: Vitkus Daniel
Published: May 2017

Richard Knolles (late 1540s–1610), historian and translator, was born in Northamptonshire and attended Oxford University, beginning his studies at Lincoln College in about 1560. He became a fellow of the college and remained there in that capacity until at least 1572. Knolles then left Oxford to take up a post as master of the grammar school founded at Sandwich in 1563 by his patron, Sir Roger Manwood. After Sir Roger died in 1592, his son Sir Peter Manwood, who was well connected among the leading scholars and antiquaries of the time, encouraged Knolles to write and probably helped him obtain books and source materials from Robert Cotton and others. Under Sir Peter's patronage, Knolles completed three major works: he wrote
The generall historie of the Turkes
, published in 1603; and he subsequently produced two lengthy translations – of Jean Bodin's
De la république
and of William Camden's historical and topographical survey of Britain and Ireland,
Britannia
. Knolles never married and is not known to have travelled outside of England. He died in 1610, but may have lived just long enough to learn that Philemon Holland's translation of Camden's
Britannia
was to be printed and that his own was therefore likely to languish in manuscript. Knolles's reputation rests primarily on his
Generall historie of the Turkes
, a monumental work of narrative synthesis that reached almost 1,200 pages in its first folio edition of 1603. It was admired by Samuel Johnson, who (in
The Rambler
, 18 May 1751) praised its style as ‘pure, nervous, elevated, and clear’, and it was a favourite of Lord Byron who, writing shortly before his death at Missolonghi in 1824, declared, ‘Old Knolles was one of the first books that gave me pleasure when I was a child; and I believe it had much influence on my future wishes to visit the Levant, and gave perhaps the Oriental colouring which is observed in my poetry.’
L
eland,
J
ohn
Authors: Schwyzer Philip
Published: May 2017

John Leland (1503/6–1552) was among the most ambitious, innovative, and influential scholars of his generation. A Latin poet, bibliographer, topographer, and antiquary whose ideas and projects were born out of the dynamic context of the Henrician Reformation, his work marks the foundation of the early modern sciences of time and space. Succumbing to mental illness at a relatively early age, Leland was able to publish only a very small part of what he had accomplished, which was itself but a tiny portion of what he had projected. Yet his notes would prove an inexhaustible source of information and inspiration – as well as frustration – for an array of later Tudor and early Stuart writers, including John Bale, John Stow, William Harrison, and William Camden. Both Leland's achievements and his failures are revelatory of the enormous cultural and political stakes attached to the study of British history and topography in the early modern period.
L
isle,
W
illiam
Authors: Sharma Manish
Published: May 2017

William Lisle (or L'Isle) (c. 1569–1637), ‘Esquire to the King's body’ under James I, was a distinguished translator and a pioneering scholar of Anglo‐Saxon language and literature. His parents were Edmond Lisle of Tandridge, Surrey, and Dorothy Rudston, daughter of Thomas Rudston of Cambridgeshire. Lisle was educated at Eton College, starting there around 1580, and continued his studies at King's College, Cambridge in 1584, where he received his bachelor's and master's degrees. In 1593 he supplicated for incorporation at Oxford. Lisle became eventually a fellow of King's, remaining in this post until 1608. Perhaps not coincidentally, in this year Lisle was involved in a brawl in the college that injured Roger Goad, the vice chancellor of Cambridge University. Lisle subsequently wrote to Lord Salisbury, chancellor of the university, pleading that he not be removed from his post. It is not clear if he was subject to official action. Lisle died at his family estate in Wilbraham, Cambridge, in 1637. There is a monument to his memory in Walmer, Kent, where he is buried.
L
ithgow,
W
illiam
Authors: Aune M. G.
Published: May 2017

William Lithgow (1582–c.1645), travel writer and poet, was born in Lanark, Scotland, to a wealthy merchant family. He attended his local grammar school and despite no apparent university education, was well versed in languages and history. He is among a small group of men who travelled through Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa in the late sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries in the tradition of peripatetic humanist scholars and who published their travel writing with an eye towards self‐promotion. Lithgow's writings are of particular interest because of their extensive detail and his blunt observations and judgements on the cultures and places he visited. Lithgow did not travel simply as the curious scholar; he actively sought to express his Scots Protestant identity, especially in Italy, Spain, and the Holy Land, through a combination of confrontational scepticism and obstinate piety. After concluding his international travels, he journeyed through the British Isles, writing poetry and what is best described as early observational journalism.
L
lwyd,
M
organ
Authors: Cooper Tim
Published: May 2017

Morgan Llwyd (1619–59) was one of a small number of very significant seventeenth‐century Welsh Puritan writers and ministers. He was born in Merionethshire in 1619, into a family that belonged to the
uchelwyr
, a gentry‐like class with a long tradition of supporting the arts. He moved to Wrexham as a schoolboy and was converted under the preaching of the notable Welsh Puritan Walter Cradock. He married in 1641 and moved with his wife to Llanfaches, where they joined a Congregationalist church. When it was forced to relocate with the outbreak of the First Civil War, they followed it to Bristol. With the city under Royalist threat, Llwyd then followed the Parliamentary army across England until 1647, when he returned to Wrexham. It is not known if he was ordained, but he served as an Independent minister at Wrexham and an itinerant preacher in north Wales until his death in 1659. In that time he proved himself as an accomplished writer and poet in both Welsh and English. He published 12 books, three of which were in English, wrote around 50 poems, and corresponded with leading figures of the Interregnum period.
L
ove,
M
ary
Authors: Harris Johanna
Published: May 2017

Mary Love (
fl
. 1639–63), daughter of the London merchant Matthew Stone, became ward in 1639 to the London alderman John Warner. There she met Warner's chaplain, Christopher Love (1618–51), who served as Parliamentary army chaplain in Colonel John Venn's Windsor regiment between October 1642 and May 1645. In the first of her published letters, Love implies that Christopher was responsible for her conversion (or perhaps radicalization): ‘If ever God did good to my Soul, thou wast the chief Instrument of it, for I never looked after God till I saw thy face.’ They married on 9 April 1645, at St Giles‐in‐the‐Fields, and had five children between 1646 and 1651, two of whom survived infancy.
L
ovelace,
R
ichard
Authors: McDowell Nicholas
Published: May 2017

Richard Lovelace (1618–57) is still, as one critic puts it, ‘the first name to come to mind when we think of Pope's mob of elegant gentlemen or hear the phrase
cavalier poet
, with all its overtones of the amorous and the amateurish’ (Hammond 1985). Several of Lovelace's lyric poems, such as ‘To Althea, from prison’ and ‘To Lucasta, going to the wars’, have long been synonymous with the ‘Cavalier spirit’ of love, wine, and royalism – even though most of the poems published in
Lucasta
(1649) were written in the 1630s, before the outbreak of the Civil War. But it is becoming increasingly apparent that Lovelace was a more complex personality and poet than this representation has allowed. If the early lyrics invoke the example of John Donne and defiantly celebrate drinking and friendship in reaction to the perceived dominance of Puritan moralism and the social fractures of the Civil War, the final poems in
Lucasta. Postume poems
(1659/60) anticipate Augustan satire in their disillusioned scorn for the money‐grabbing attitudes of the postwar poet.
M
ajor,
E
lizabeth
Authors: Stretter Robert
Published: May 2017

Elizabeth Major (
fl
. 1656) is the author of a lengthy devotional treatise entitled
Honey on the rod: or a comfortable contemplation for one in affliction; with sundry poems on several subjects
, her only known work. Published in 1656 under the imprimatur of clergyman Joseph Caryl (1602–73),
Honey on the rod
consists of two parts: the
Contemplation
, a prose dialogue between ‘Consolation’ and ‘Soul’, and a collection of poems entitled
Sin and mercy briefly discovered
.
Marginalia
Authors: Hooks Adam G.
Published: May 2017

The notes, commentary, citations, and symbols, both printed and written, which appear in the blank space – the margins – surrounding the text in a book or manuscript are referred to collectively as marginalia. Printed marginalia, as an integral part of a book's design, generally served as a guide for the reader, dividing the text into sections, pointing out important details, providing the necessary citation for a quotation, explaining difficult words, or offering a comment on the text. Whether produced by an author, an editor, or a scholar, printed marginalia provided an interpretive or authoritative frame through which readers necessarily approached the text. Renaissance readers were in turn encouraged to mark up their books, actively engaging with the text, and the marginal notes or symbols they inserted indicate passages of particular interest to them. The presence of marginalia, of both kinds, reveals that reading was an interactive process in which writing was not simply consumed, but also produced. As crucial material evidence of the intellectual and practical responses of readers, marginalia have become central to Renaissance studies, showing how readers understood and used the texts they encountered.
M
assinger,
P
hilip
Authors: White Martin
Published: May 2017

The playwright Philip Massinger (1583–1640) is studied and performed only rarely today, but in his own time he was a major figure on the London theatre scene. His career spanned 25 years, during which time he wrote tragedies, comedies, and romances at the rate of about two or three plays a year. He wrote mainly for the two leading companies of the day: Lady Elizabeth's, and later Queen Henrietta's, Men at the indoor Cockpit (or Phoenix) playhouse in fashionable Drury Lane; and the King's Men at the Globe and Blackfriars, whose chief playwright he was from 1625 until his death. In total, some 56 plays can be attributed to him, of which 21 are lost and 20 are collaborations, leaving us with only 15 solo works, two of which survive in manuscript:
Believe as you list
(1631; British Library, Egerton MS 2828) and
The parliament of love
(1624; Bodleian Library, MS Dyce 39).
M
ay,
T
homas
Authors: Fleck Andrew
Published: May 2017

The dramatist, historian, and translator Thomas May (c. 1596–1650) suffered a number of posthumous insults. Born with great expectations, May experienced hard times and lived by his pen. Because his loyalties changed at a crucial point in English history, he was derided by his former friends and came to be seen as an unprincipled hack who wrote for hire. He suffered a final, posthumous indignity at the Restoration when his body was disinterred from Westminster Abbey, home to many great English poets, and his final resting place given to his rival, the poet laureate William Davenant.