bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
N
orton,
T
homas
Authors: Cavanagh Dermot
Published: May 2017

Thomas Norton (1530/32–1584) is best known to literary history as the co‐author of a landmark in the history of English dramatic tragedy,
Gorboduc
(1561/62). Jointly composed with Thomas Sackville, the play broke new ground in a number of ways. It was the first tragedy to be written in blank verse and was formally ambitious in several respects: a full‐scale neoclassical imitation of Senecan tragedy,
Gorboduc
was composed in five acts and featured choric commentary, long scenes of deliberative oratory, stichomythic exchanges, and a sensational plot. Equally significant was its use of English or British history as material for a political drama, and the play demonstrated that vernacular theatre could engage in sophisticated forms of reflection on questions of state and governance.
Owen,Jane
Authors: Mello M. Barbara
Published: May 2017

Jane Owen (d. c. 1625) was a recusant Catholic from Godstow, Oxfordshire, known to religious, literary, and feminist scholars for her treatiseAntidote against purgatory(written sometime after 1617). In this text Owen responds to the Protestant denunciation of purgatory as a Catholic fiction designed to generate church revenues; in so doing, she participates in a broader Counter‐Reformation defence of the existence, and indeed the spiritual necessity, of purgatory. There is little information regarding Owen's life, but the title page to her treatise suggests that she was active in the recusant Catholic community in England and on the Continent, with Saint‐Omer's English College Press in the province of Artois posthumously publishing her writings in 1634. The publisher claims the qualities of virtue and right‐worthiness for Owen, and represents her as a gentlewoman whose engagement with and understanding of Catholic arguments concerning the condition of the soul in purgatory should make her an exemplary figure for English women. Owen's work calls attention to women's activism in religious and social work during the Counter‐Reformation.
O
xlie,
M
ary
Authors: Sullivan Garrett A.
Published: May 2017

The surviving corpus of Mary Oxlie (
fl
. 1616) is a single poem, the commendatory verse ‘To William Drummond of Hawthornden’, which appeared in the posthumous edition of Drummond's
Poems
published in 1656. Drummond (1585–1649), arguably best known today for his account of conversations with Ben Jonson during the latter's 1618 visit to Scotland, was widely held to be the foremost Scots poet of the seventeenth century; it has been speculated that Oxlie, along with other women writers such as Anna Hume, participated in a literary circle centred on Drummond. While Oxlie was referred to as a ‘Scotch Poetess’, there is some confusion about her birthplace, which might have been in the north of England. Indeed, next to nothing is known about her beyond her poem, which was ascribed to ‘Mary Oxlie of Morpet’ in the 1656
Poems
, but to ‘Mary Morpeth’ in a 1675 discussion of ‘women among the moderns eminent for poetry’ by John Milton's nephew Edward Phillips, who himself wrote ‘Vpon the incomparable Poems of Mr. William Drummond’ for the 1656
Poems
. Phillips also alludes to Oxlie's authorship of other works, but no other trace of any additional verse survives.
Painter,William
Authors: Walter Melissa
Published: May 2017

An English translator and clerk at the Tower of London, William Painter (?1540–95) is best known for hisThe palace of pleasure(vol. 1, 1566; vol. 2, 1567), which contains about 100 stories from Italian, French, and classical sources – with plots centred on love, jealousy, wit, and exemplary individuals – that influenced the development of English drama and the early history of the English novel. Narratives found in Shakespeare'sRape of Lucrece, Romeo and Juliet, All's well that ends well, Timon of Athens, andEdward IIIappear in thePalace, which additionally served as a source for John Webster'sThe Duchess of Malfi, John Marston'sThe Dutch courtesan, Philip Massinger'sPicture, and other plays.
P
alsgrave,
J
ohn
Authors: Moore Helen
Published: May 2017

John Palsgrave (d.1554) is a highly significant figure in the history of English and French language study and lexicography. His
Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse (Elucidation of the French tongue
) (1530) was written in three parts, each of which was remarkable for its time. Book I includes the first attempt to transcribe French pronunciation; book II is the first English–French grammar; and book III (described by Palsgrave as a ‘vocabulyst’ or ‘vocabuler’) is the first English–French dictionary. Palsgrave's vision in attempting the work places him at the forefront of Renaissance language teaching and scholarship. When Palsgrave began his enterprise, no comparable work on vernacular languages existed; English and French were in a transitional period of development between medieval and modern forms; and there was no established discourse of vernacular language study on which he could draw. Despite this, Palsgrave managed to develop sound methods for analysing and describing what are now staple features of modern linguistics and lexicography such as regional and social variation, borrowing, semantic change, and register; it is all the more remarkable that he achieves this simultaneously for English and French.
P
arr,
K
atherine
Authors: Felch Susan M.
Published: May 2017

Katherine Parr (1512–48) was the sixth and last queen of Henry VIII. She was a patron of Protestant writers and, in the words of Janel Mueller (2011), ‘the first woman to publish work of her own under her own name, in England and in English’. The second child of Sir Thomas Parr and Maud Green, both of whom served in the court of Henry VIII, Parr was married first to Edward Borough and second to John Neville, third Baron Latimer. She married Henry VIII in 1543 and after his death married Sir Thomas Seymour, the lord admiral and uncle to Edward VI, dying shortly after the birth of her daughter. During Henry VIII's campaigns in France, she ruled England as regent general and signed official papers with the initials of her maiden name, ‘K.P.’ Letters and other archival material attest to her fluency in French, Latin, and Italian, as well as English.
P
aynell,
T
homas
Authors: Moore Helen
Published: May 2017

Thomas Paynell (d. ?1564) was an Austin friar who at the dissolution of the monasteries in England became a prolific translator of works covering religious, medical, and secular subjects; he has been described as ‘a striking demonstration of the breadth of the tradition of learned pietism in England’ (McConica 1965). Paynell was chaplain to Henry VIII and orator to both Mary and Elizabeth. The range and longevity of his translating career make him an important figure in the early sixteenth century, and a forerunner of the great translators of the Elizabethan period. He translated into English significant works of Continental humanism such as Erasmus's
De contemptu mundi
(?1532) and Juan Luis Vives's
Office and duetie of an husband
(?1555); medical texts on subjects such as diet (the
Regimen sanitatis Salerni
, 1528), syphilis (
De morbo gallico
, 1533), and plague (
A moche profitable treatise against the pestilence
, 1534); and works of Catholic piety of which the selection from St Augustine's sermons (
Twelve sermons
, 1553) is typical. He also translated two texts of a more literary character: the long‐standing medieval favourite
De excidio Troiae
attributed to Dares Phrygius (as
The faythfull and true storye of the destruction of Troye
, 1553) and
The treasurie of Amadis of Fraunce
(?1572), a selection of letters and orations from the highly popular romance. In many ways Paynell's output is demonstrative of the overlapping of medieval and early modern culture in the sixteenth century: the
Regimen
, for example, articulates medieval medical principles yet was one of the sixteenth century's longest‐lasting vernacular medical texts, alongside Sir Thomas Elyot's
The castel of helth
(?1536).
P
eacham,
H
enry
Authors: Smyth Adam
Published: May 2017

Henry Peacham (1578–c. 1644) was a writer of educational texts, a poet, and an illustrator. In his early literary work (his emblem collections and conduct books), he enjoyed a capacity to discern, and write towards, the taste and expectation of his time. Peacham's career also demonstrates an important shift in Renaissance literary culture, away from a system of aristocratic patronage and towards a more professionalized world of commercial print. He experienced the opportunities, disappointments, and strains of both cultures.
P
eele,
G
eorge
Authors: Connolly Annaliese
Published: May 2017

A dramatist and poet who wrote in a range of genres, George Peele (1556–96) is often grouped with the contemporary ‘university wits’, including Robert Greene, Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, John Lyly, Thomas Lodge, and Thomas Nashe, who were educated at either Oxford or Cambridge and went on to write for the Elizabethan stage. Today Peele is remembered chiefly for three of his plays: the courtly entertainment
The arraignment of Paris
, the exotic revenge tragedy
The battle of Alcazar
, and the romance comedy
The old wives tale
.
P
eend,
T
homas
Authors: Schurink Fred
Published: May 2017

Thomas Peend (de la Pend) (
fl
. 1559–66), son and heir of John Peend of Leeds in Kent, matriculated as a pensioner at Christ's College, Cambridge in May 1559 and was admitted to the Middle Temple five years later, on 15 May 1564 (Venn & Venn 1922–54; Sturgess 1949). There he published the two translations in fashionable genres for which he is remembered, both in 1565:
The pleasant fable of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis
, from Ovid's
Metamorphoses
, and
The history of John Lord Mandozze
, based on Bandello's
Novelle
. Peend apparently composed no further works apart from a commendatory poem to John Studley's translation of Seneca's
Agamemnon
(1566), and nothing more is known about his life.
P
hillips,
J
ohn
Authors: Pincombe Mike
Published: May 2017

John Phillips (or Phillip) (d.1594/1617), has yet to make his presence felt in the canons of English Renaissance literary history, despite the range and volume of his work in print and manuscript – to say nothing of several lost works. For all this industry, Phillips has left little or no trace in the documentary archive, though he seems to have been a person of at least a little substance according to the information to be gleaned from his own works. Here we learn that Phillips's father was a member of the London Cloth workers’ company; that he studied at Queens’ College, Cambridge; and that he was a student in divinity. There is not a scrap of documentary evidence for any of these apparent ‘facts’; but a careful study of his work does produce a more or less consistent portrait of a reasonably well‐educated and no doubt pious man, from a family in trade but probably with some connections with the gentry, and certainly one who wished to give the impression that he was on some kind of terms with the members not only of the aristocracy but also of the civic hierarchy of London.
Platt,Hugh
Authors: Mukherjee Ayesha
Published: May 2017

Hugh Platt (Plat) (1552–1608) was a scientist, medical practitioner, socio‐economic analyst, trader, and poet who addressed diverse subjects from the discovery of food and fuel substitutes to alchemical procedures. His occupational range has invited varied evaluations: he has been reviled as a ‘quack’, praised as a ‘virtuoso’, and described as an imitative poet, professor of secrets, agricultural expert, gardening authority, forerunner of Francis Bacon because of his emphasis on experimental science, and ‘dearth scientist’ for his zeal in remedying socio‐economic crises. Born in 1552, Platt was the son of a wealthy brewer and managed his family estates in London, Middlesex, and Hertfordshire. Educated at St John's College, Cambridge, he graduated BA in 1571–72, and was admitted to Lincoln's Inn. Platt was married first to Margaret Younge (1573) and then, upon her death, to Judith Albany (1584), an intriguing and much‐admired figure in her husband's writing.
Poole,Elizabeth
Authors: Malson‐Huddle Elizabeth
Published: May 2017

Elizabeth Poole (c.1622–c.1668), prophetess, activist, and writer, presented her visions to the Army Council to support their political endeavours and argued against the execution of King Charles I. Few records of her life survive. Her father was recorded as a householder at West St Paul's in London in 1638, and her baptism was probably on 20 October 1622 at St Gregory by St Paul in London. At 16, she joined a Particular Baptist congregation led by William Kiffin, probably in defiance of her father, who believed Kiffin had converted his children and servants to a heretical faith (Mack 1992).
P
rimrose,
D
iana
Authors: Pentland Elizabeth
Published: May 2017

Nothing is known with certainty about the life of Diana Primrose, author of the poem sequence
A chaine of pearle. Or a memoriall of the peerles graces, and heroick vertues of Queene Elizabeth, of glorious memory
(1630).
P
rynne,
W
illiam
Authors: Cooper Tim
Published: May 2017

William Prynne (1600–69) was the most prolific writer of seventeenth‐century England, who disagreed with nearly everyone in the course of his career. He published more than 200 pamphlets, which averages out at one page of published text for every day of his life. Writing was an obsession, ‘as necessary as meat and drink’, claimed one observer, ‘a thing without which he cannot live’ (Lamont 1996). But practice did not make perfect. His style was generally tedious, prolix, and repetitive. His title pages were crammed full of words, his margins replete with references – a trait that led to his nickname, ‘Marginal Prynne’.
Psalms and Psalters, Metrical
Authors: Quitslund Beth
Published: May 2017

Translating, paraphrasing, or imitating passages from the biblical book of Psalms in the form of vernacular or classical verse made up a common lyric genre in the early modern period. Between 1549 and 1700, at least 25 complete metrical psalters containing the whole of the book of Psalms were produced in English, and the list of important poets who composed selected metrical psalms includes Thomas Wyatt; Henry Howard, earl of Surrey; George Gascoigne; Edmund Spenser; Philip Sidney; his sister Mary Sidney Herbert, countess of Pembroke; Thomas Carew; Richard Crashaw; George Herbert; Henry Vaughan; and John Milton. Among the eminent figures better known for other accomplishments who also published metrical psalms are Elizabeth's first archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker; Francis Bacon; James VI and I; and Edwin Sandys, the Virginia Company administrator who also facilitated the sailing of the
May flower
for Plymouth. Like Petrarchan lyric, metrical psalmody entered English letters as a new form during the reign of Henry VIII, and although it flourished through the seventeenth century, metrical psalmody since then has been comparatively rare. It is thus a distinctively early modern literary phenomenon.
P
urchas,
S
amuel
Authors: Aune M. G.
Published: May 2017

Samuel Purchas (1577–1626), clergyman, editor, and compiler of travel writing, was born in Thaxted, Essex, the son of a cloth merchant. Through ambition, personal connections, and print and publication, Purchas secured a serious of increasingly prestigious positions within the church, including chaplain to the archbishop of Canterbury. He is best known as the compiler of the largest anthology of travel writing in English at the time. The acknowledged successor to Richard Hakluyt, Purchas edited and assembled
Hakluytus posthumus, or Purchas his pilgrimes: containing a history of the world in sea voyages and lande travells by Englishmen and others
(1625). The work ran to four volumes and contained a great variety of unpublished material. It would influence countless voyagers as well as writers such as John Milton and most famously Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his ‘Kubla Khan’.
Q
uarles,
F
rancis
Authors: Fleck Andrew
Published: May 2017

Francis Quarles (1592–1644) was a master of pious verse whose reputation rests on his sentimental book of poetic emblems. However, the popular poet also wrote biblical paraphrases in verse, allegorical closet drama, prose defences of royal authority, and a lengthy adaptation and continuation in verse of an episode from Sir Philip Sidney's pastoral romance, the
Arcadia
. A man of many middling talents, Quarles continued to be read long after his death, and his poetry still poses challenging questions about the relationship between word and image.
R
ainolds,
J
ohn
Authors: Wilson Emma Annette
Published: May 2017

John Rainolds (1549–1607), scholar and theologian, was one of the most formidable and influential polymaths in the Elizabethan and early Stuart age. Rainolds taught both the dramatist John Lyly and anti‐theatrical writer Stephen Gosson, and he played the female part Hippolyta in Richard Edwards's play
Palamon and Arcyte
(though by the 1590s he took a fiercely anti‐theatrical stance in a series of epistolary exchanges between himself, William Gager, and Alberico Gentili). A Protestant convert, he was engaged first by secretary of state Sir Francis Walsingham and then by King James VI and I to lead Puritan factions in public theological debates from the 1580s to the 1600s. His most enduring legacy to modern scholarship, though, is his spearheading of the new English‐language translation of the Bible in the early 1600s, the King James Authorized Version.
R
ichardson,
E
lizabeth
Authors: Dowd Michelle M.
Published: May 2017

The author of several books of meditations and prayers in both print and manuscript, Elizabeth Richardson (1576/77–1651) is best known for her contribution to the popular seventeenth‐century genre of the mother's legacy.
A ladies legacie to her daughters
, a collection of prayers dedicated to Richardson's four daughters, was published in 1645. Along with earlier legacy books published by Elizabeth Grymeston (1604), Dorothy Leigh (1616), and Elizabeth Jocelin (1624), Richardson's
Legacie
formed an important part of the early modern maternal advice writing tradition that would remain influential into the nineteenth century. In addition to analysing the
Legacie
as an example of maternal instruction, critical studies of Richardson have emphasized the significance of her writings to Protestant print culture, early modern women's life‐writings, and women's manuscript culture.
R
ogers,
J
ohn
Authors: Gribben Crawford
Published: May 2017

John Rogers (1627–after 1664), Independent theologian, Fifth Monarchist agitator, legal theorist, and physician, has been the focus of increasing scholarly interest over the last two decades. His work has been considered by literary critics as much as by intellectual and religious historians, and its significance has most often been associated with the conversion narratives recorded in his most important text,
Ohel or Bethshemesh
(1653).
R
owlands,
S
amuel
Authors: Lemon Rebecca
Published: May 2017

Samuel Rowlands (c. 1565–c. 1628) was a popular satirist and poet, writing in the vein of Thomas Dekker and Robert Greene although he never achieved their levels of fame. While Rowlands did not seem to write his way into posterity, and while he has attracted a degree of critical attention for his generous literary ‘borrowings’, he nevertheless produced at least 28 publications on topical issues, and his texts were frequently reprinted. Through his favourite genres of the popular pamphlet, the epigram, and poetry written in a heroic stanza of six lines, he provides an invaluable window into London life: he expounds on tobacco, bibulous gossips, roaring girls and boys, whoremongers, city gallants, bookselling, taverns, and credit; and from his pamphlets, poems, and epigrams can be gleaned a whole host of characters, ranging from courtiers to renegades.
S
ander,
N
icholas
Authors: Rankin Mark
Published: May 2017

Nicholas Sander (c. 1530–81), Roman Catholic controversialist and theologian, was one of the leading Catholic writers in exile during the first half of Elizabeth I's reign. He is the author of the most important defence of papal primacy during this period and is responsible for the first printed Catholic history of the English Reformation in English.
S
andys,
G
eorge
Authors: Pentland Elizabeth
Published: May 2017

George Sandys (1578–1644) was a seventeenth‐century poet, travel writer, and colonist. Today, he is best known for his verse translation of Ovid's
Metamorphoses
(1626, 1632), completed while he was living in Jamestown, Virginia, and for his
Relation of a journey begun an. dom. 1610
(1615), an account of his travels through parts of Europe and the Near East. His other major works include a metrical
Paraphrase upon the Psalmes
(1636), much admired in his time, and
Christs passion
(1640), a translation of a Latin drama by Hugo Grotius. As a translator of classical and contemporary texts, Sandys was involved in one of the central literary activities of the period. Modern criticism has tended to focus on his relationship to literary traditions and his influence on English writers from Francis Bacon to Alexander Pope.
S
axton,
C
hristopher
Authors: Edwards Jess
Published: May 2017

Christopher Saxton (1542/44–1610/11) was a surveyor and cartographer and the author of the first English national atlas. Saxton was born at Sowood in the West Riding of Yorkshire and brought up in Dunningley, near Wakefield. He went to Cambridge, and was apprenticed as a map‐maker to John Rudd, vicar of Dewsbury, in around 1570. He is thought to have died in 1610 or 1611.
S
elden,
J
ohn
Authors: Cohen Jason E.
Published: May 2017

John Selden (1584–1654) was a late‐humanist scholar whose investigations focused on Hebraic and classical literature, law, and history, fields that complemented his professional activities as a parliamentarian and jurist. Selden was born in Sussex, attended school in Chichester and matriculated from Hart Hall, Oxford. In 1602 he moved to London and studied common law at the Inns of Court; during this time, he also developed relationships with the likes of John Donne, Samuel Daniel, and Samuel Purchas and formed a friendship with Sir Robert Bruce Cotton that gave him access to Cotton's extensive library. Selden's literary career began with Roman and Anglo‐Norman legal histories (
Analecton Anglobrittanicon
, 1615) whose approach was informed by Francis Bacon's innovations in natural philosophy. Following the imperatives of Baconian objectivity as applied to history, Selden rooted his scholarship in first‐hand accounts and primary documents rather than relying on opinionated histories or accounts of divine influences on human events. He named this principle ‘Synchronisme’ in the historical ‘illustrations’ he composed for poems in Michael Drayton's
Poly‐olbion
(1612). Selden paired this application of humanism and Baconian objectivity to historical scholarship with an astonishing control of languages: Paul Christianson (2004) records that in addition to Latin, Greek, German, and romance tongues, Selden worked with Chaldean, Samaritan, Old English, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Persian, and Ethiopic. Selden's methodological innovation and facility with ancient languages enabled his mature corpus to examine how Judaic precedents influenced English state and church policy. His contributions include defining treatments of tithing (
Historie of tithes
, 1618), maritime law (
Mare clausum
, 1635), and marriage doctrine (
Uxor Ebraica
, 1646).
Sermons
Authors: Carlson Peter
Published: May 2017

A sermon is a discourse or text, sometimes intended for print, but usually presented publicly in a church or other religious location, for the purpose of moral, theological, or social exhortation, instruction, or inspiration. It is exegetical, based upon a particular scriptural or other approved religious text, or upon its liturgical location in the church year. In every era, but particularly during the English Renaissance, the sermon occupies a uniquely multidisciplinary position, and cannot be understood simply as theology, or simply as text. There was no single style, theological position, or rhetorical aim for the Renaissance sermon, nor was there a clear trajectory of the sermon during the period. Sermons reveal as much complexity and variety as any other literary form, and demand many of the same methodological approaches as any other genre.
S
eymour Sisters
Authors: Hosington Brenda M.
Published: May 2017

Anne, Margaret, and Jane, the three Seymour sisters, were children of Edward Seymour, who became Lord Protector Somerset, and Anne Stanhope. They achieved a measure of fame in both England and France on account of their Latin elegy on the death of Marguerite de Navarre in 1549, the first poem of its kind to be published by any English woman. Their
Annae, Margaritae, Ianae, sororum virginum, heroidum Anglarum, in mortem Diuae Margaritae Valesiae, Nauarrorum Reginae, hecatodistichon
was published in Paris in 1550 by their tutor, Nicolas Denisot, and re‐edited by him a year later with a French title,
Le tombeau de Marguerite de Valois, Royne de Navarre
, and contributions by a constellation of Pléiade poets. Both volumes attest to the fact that a Latin poem written by three young girls could make a stir, although their work was forgotten by subsequent writers on Renaissance female authors.
S
idney,
P
hilip
Authors: Maslen R. W.
Published: May 2017

For many, Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) encapsulates the English Renaissance. Poet, thinker, politician, soldier, lover, would‐be explorer, almost a prince, eager to forge new things – new states, military alliances, works of art, political and poetic theories – with material quarried from the past, he was an energetic bundle of contradictions, who set the seal on his reputation by having the grace to die young, before his potential could be undermined by compromise. No cleverer, wittier, or more self‐critical writer worked in Elizabethan England, and none for whom the notion of contradiction itself was more integral to his or her art.
S
kelton,
J
ohn
Authors: Griffiths Jane
Published: May 2017

John Skelton (c. 1463–1529) is a poet whose work raises significant questions about periodization, canon formation, and our understanding of the development of English literature in the sixteenth century. He is also delightfully protean, inventive, and unpredictable, marked by extreme pride in his poetic vocation and a determination that his readers, too, should acknowledge it.
S
mith,
T
homas
Authors: Withington Phil
Published: May 2017

Sir Thomas Smith (1513–77) is a Tudor success story. The second son of John Smith, a yeoman in Saffron Walden in Essex, he was a grammar‐school boy who entered Queens' College, Cambridge in 1526 at the age of 13, graduated in 1530, and was awarded his MA in 1532. This was the launch pad of a dazzling academic career which segued into public service. Smith taught the foremost statesmen and writers of the age, not least William Cecil, Gabriel Harvey, and Edmund Spenser. He was a central figure in the University of Cambridge network that exerted so much power in the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I. He occupied public office himself, acting as counsellor to Protector Somerset, serving as a member of parliament for Liverpool, and becoming ambassador to France and eventually secretary of state under Elizabeth. And he used literary texts to influence political decision‐making when other channels and sources of patronage were blocked. The close relationship between scholarship, literariness, and politics that Smith personified was entirely consistent with his humanism; and he should be remembered, above all else, as the most accomplished English humanist of his generation.
S
outhwell,
A
nne
Authors: van Elk Martine
Published: May 2017

Lady Anne Southwell (?1573–1636) was a Calvinist poet and author of a commonplace book. Anne was born in Devon to Puritan parents: Thomas Harris, a lawyer and member of parliament, and Elizabeth Pomeroy. In 1594 she was married to Sir Thomas Southwell, a member of a distinguished family in Norfolk. He was a nephew of the famous Jesuit Robert Southwell, though he himself was Protestant. With the coronation of James I in 1603, Thomas was knighted, but Anne failed to gain a position at the new queen's court. Letters suggest that she was involved in a scandal, though the nature and seriousness of it remain unclear. The Southwells were sent to Ireland, where they lived in Castle Poulnelong, close to Kinsale, and had two daughters. The marriage may have been an unhappy one, and some critics believe Anne's poems suggest adultery on Sir Thomas's part. Not long after his death in 1626, she married Captain Henry Sibthorpe, who served in the English army in Munster. After two years, they moved back to England, first to Clerkenwell and finally to Acton, where they lived until her death in 1636. Anne and Henry never gained favour at court. Nonetheless, her burial in the chancel of St Mary's Church in Acton implies at least local prominence.
Spenser,Edmund
Authors: Dolven Jeff
Published: May 2017

Edmund Spenser (c.1552–99), poet and colonial administrator in Ireland, was born in London, and buried near Geoffrey Chaucer in Westminster Abbey. A monument erected there in 1620 proclaimed him ‘the Prince of Poets in his tyme; whose Divine Spirrit needs noe othir witnesse then the works that he left behinde him’ (Maley 1994). That witness includes accomplished poems in a wide variety of genres, among them the pastoral eclogues ofThe shepheardes calender(1579); a sonnet sequence,Amoretti(1592); and the pillar of his reputation, the epic romanceThe Faerie Queene(1590, 1596).
S
t
G
erman,
C
hristopher
Authors: Stewart Alan
Published: May 2017

Christopher St German (c.1460–1540/41), a legal theorist and Reformation controversialist, has traditionally been of interest to historians and legal scholars. However, in recent years an increasing number of literary scholars – especially those interested in Reformation politics and the intersection of law and literature – have become intrigued by his writings. And these writings continue to grow. For centuries, many of the 16 works attributed to St German by John Bale in 1559 were considered lost, and St German was deemed ‘that most annoying of creatures, a prolific author who published anonymously’ (Rex 2008). But the researches of J. A. Guy (1985) and Richard Rex (2008) have considerably expanded the St German canon, and his
oeuvre
is being reappraised.
Stanbridge,John
Authors: Wakelin Daniel
Published: May 2017

John Stanbridge (1463–1510) was born in Northamptonshire. In 1475 he began studying at Winchester College in southern England, whence he moved to its sister establishment of higher education, New College, part of the University of Oxford. In 1486 he began working as the assistant to the grammar master at the recently founded Magdalen College School, also in Oxford, and then progressed to being the master himself. He was ordained to holy orders and left Magdalen College School in 1493 to teach in other schools and to serve as a priest and canon. He died in 1510 (Orme 1998).
S
terry,
P
eter
Authors: Mukherjee Ayesha
Published: May 2017

The works of Peter Sterry (1613–72) vividly evoke the intellectual world of a Cromwellian chaplain during the Puritan triumph and after. His letters, treatises, poems, and sermons reveal the altered sensibilities, imagination, and language of post‐Interregnum nonconformism. They re‐evaluate Puritan failure and, through a detailed account of nonconformist life, establish a transformed ideology of community. Sterry's corpus as a whole reflects on a variety of religious and artistic themes – eschatology, ‘Christ as mother’, the
ars moriendi
, Aristotelian tragedy, and Druid communities; it engages with authors as diverse as Ovid, Marsilio Ficino, Jakob Boehme, and John Donne; and it experiments with a range of styles and genres – poems, meditations, letters, catechisms, sermons, devotions, allegory, and writings for children. Sterry's prose has been compared to John Milton's in its grandeur, and to John Bunyan's and George Fox's in its intensity. His works can also be more obviously compared to those of other Interregnum writers such as John Owen, Thomas Goodwin, William Erbery, William Sedgwick, and Morgan Llwyd. Sterry has not, however, attracted as much scholarly interest as he deserves: a biography by Vivian de Sola Pinto (1968), an edited volume (Matar & Croft 1981), and a series of articles by Nabil Matar (1982–94) constitute the main body of scholarly work on him.
S
tubbes,
P
hilip
Authors: Kidnie Margaret Jane
Published: May 2017

Philip Stubbes (
fl
. 1581–95) was a popular late sixteenth‐century pamphleteer who was perhaps best known in his own time as the author of a biography of his wife, Katherine, called
A christal glasse for Christian women
, a tract that includes a supposed verbatim record of her deathbed words. It was first published in 1591, and reprinted at least 24 times to 1637. Today, he is best known for his two parts of
The anatomie of abuses
, published in 1583 (the first volume was revised for each of three subsequent publications to 1595), which provide early modern historians and literary critics with valuable, because rare, evidence of Elizabethan customs and practices in a period of rapid economic and social change. He achieved a certain celebrity in his own time, being either quoted, alluded to, or mocked in the pamphlets and drama of writers as various as Richard Brome, William Cartwright, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, and William Prynne. His dates and place of birth and death are unknown, but a revised edition in 1610 of his prayer‐book
A perfect pathway to felicitie
, expanded by 15 prayers, suggests he lived into the seventeenth century. He was married to Katherine Emmes in Burton‐upon‐Trent on 6 September 1586, and the parish records note the baptism of his son John on 17 November 1590 (Furnivall 1877–79). According to the title page of
A christal glasse
, his wife died six weeks after the birth. Stubbes seems to have been resident in London by 1593 since he signs the dedicatory letter to
A motive to good workes
from his lodging ‘by Cheapeside’.
S
uckling,
J
ohn
Authors: Lukins Rory
Published: May 2017

Sir John Suckling (1609–?1641), poet, dramatist, and literary patron, is perhaps best known in literary history as one of the poets associated with the court of Charles I, a group sometimes referred to as the Cavalier poets. Very little of Suckling's poetry was published during his lifetime, but appeared in a posthumous edition entitled
Fragmenta aurea
in 1646. Born in Twickenham and baptized on 10 February 1609, Suckling was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, though he left before taking a degree. He entered Gray's Inn in February 1627, but left only a month later following the death of his father in March 1627. Following his departure from Gray's Inn, Suckling served the crown as both a soldier and a statesman on the Continent, where he also briefly studied mathematics at Leiden University. After returning from Europe, Suckling quickly developed a reputation as a wit given to excessive gambling and court intrigue. After his death in or around 1641, Suckling became a divisive figure in the ideological conflicts of the English Civil War, celebrated as a martyr by Royalists, and often attacked viciously by Puritan and republican camps.
S
wetnam,
J
oseph
Authors: O'Leary Niamh J.
Published: May 2017

Joseph Swetnam (d.1621), a pamphleteer from Bristol, is best known for his
The araignment of lewde, idle, froward, and unconstant women
(1615), which sparked a series of responses. Nothing is known of his family, with the exception of his daughter, Elizabeth, who was married to Rice Merricke in Bristol on 4 November 1613. Swetnam had no formal education (van Heertum 2004).
S
ylvester,
J
oshua
Authors: Test Edward M.
Published: May 2017

Joshua Sylvester (1562/63–1618), a minor English poet and merchant, is best known in England for his influential translations of French poet Guillaume de Saluste, sieur du Bartas, particularly the Christian epic
La sepmaine, ou creation du monde
. Completed in 1605, this translation, published as
Bartas: his deuine weekes and workes
, was immensely popular and influential in England: nine editions were published between 1592 and 1641; Gabriel Harvey considered the
Deuine weekes
on a par with works by Homer and Virgil; and John Milton's Christian epic,
Paradise lost
, was influenced by Sylvester's translation.
T
himelby,
G
ertrude
Authors: Hackett Helen
Published: May 2017

Gertrude Thimelby (1617–68) wrote poetry as a member of a Catholic literary circle which has come to be known as the Astons of Tixall. She was born in 1617, the daughter of Sir Walter Aston of Tixall and Colton in Staffordshire. In 1620 her father went to Spain on an embassy, taking his wife and children with him. Sir Walter stayed in Spain for six years, and at some point converted to Catholicism. It is not known how long Gertrude spent in Spain; she did not accompany her father, now Baron Aston of Forfar, on his second embassy in 1635–38. In 1645 she married Henry Thimelby, whose sister Katherine (also a poet) was the wife of Gertrude's brother Herbert. Gertrude and Henry lived at Corby, near the Thimelby seat of Irnham in Lincolnshire, a centre of Catholic activity. After her husband's death in 1655 Gertrude moved to St Monica's convent in Louvain, where her sister‐in‐law Winifred Thimelby, a notable letter‐writer, was prioress. Gertrude became a nun in 1658, and died in 1668.
T
homas,
W
illiam
Authors: Woolfson Jonathan
Published: May 2017

The background of the author and administrator William Thomas (d. 1554) remains obscure. Almost certainly of Welsh origin, he rose to become a member of parliament and clerk of the Privy Council in the later Edwardian era. An advocate of the development of English language, civility, and society, he transmitted in his writings an unusually extensive knowledge of Italy and its culture, laying the basis for the later Tudor fascination with that country. He was an impetuous figure whose extraordinarily productive literary career was cut short by execution in 1554, allegedly for having plotted the assassination of Mary I.
T
hornton,
A
lice
Authors: Levin Carole
Published: May 2017

The life of Alice Wandesford Thornton (1626–1707) spanned much of the seventeenth century. While hers might not seem a particularly unusual or distinctive life, her decision in her old age to reflect upon and write about her experiences produced an autobiography that illuminates for subsequent generations the life of a royalist woman living through a period of personal hardships and national strife. Reading her
Autobiography
, which exists in several different manuscript versions, illuminates her childhood, the family's difficulties, her marriage, her numerous pregnancies, and her deep religious faith. It also charts her reaction to enormous political changes in the century, especially the execution of the king.
T
ichborne,
C
hidiock
Authors: Stewart Alan
Published: May 2017

Chidiock Tichborne (c. 1558–86) is known to English literary history as the author of a single poem, usually entitled ‘Tichborne's lamentation’, which opens with the line ‘My prime of youth is but a froste of cares.’ To historians, he is known as one of the conspirators in the so‐called Babington Plot of 1586, one of a series of alleged attempts by Catholics to assassinate Elizabeth and replace her on the throne with Mary Queen of Scots.
T
urbervile,
G
eorge
Authors: Stewart Alan
Published: May 2017

George Turbervile (1543/44–97?) was one of the most important English poets of the mid‐sixteenth century, although he was eclipsed even during his lifetime. Born in Whitchurch, Dorset into a gentry family, the son of Henry Turbervile and Jane Hampfield, Turbervile attended Winchester College, and New College, Oxford, leaving in 1562. Although no record exists, it is likely he spent time at the Inns of Court, since many of his friends were of that circle.
U
nderdowne,
T
homas
Authors: Schurink Fred
Published: May 2017

Thomas Underdowne (1545/46–93), son and heir of Stephen Underdowne of Chiddingly, Sussex, was born in 1545 or 1546. According to Anthony a Wood he was educated at Oxford, but left without a degree; his familiarity with the classics certainly argues a university education. He was rector of two churches in Lewes, Sussex from 1580 until his death in 1593, where he was noted for his nonconformity (Challen 1962; Goring 2003; Freeman 2004). Best known for his translation of the late classical author Heliodorus' recently rediscovered Greek prose romance
Aethiopica
(c.1569), which had a major impact on the literature of Renaissance England, Underdowne also wrote two other works inspired by the classics, both based on the writings of the Roman poet Ovid:
The excellent historye of Theseus and Ariadne
(1566/67) and
Ovid his invective against Ibis
(1569).
U
rquhart,
T
homas
Authors: Kuhn John
Published: May 2017

Little is known about the early life of Thomas Urquhart (1611–60?), eccentric Scottish writer, translator, and polymath. Born to wealthy and influential parents, Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty and Christian Elphinston, he enrolled at the University of Aberdeen in 1622 but left without graduating, disappearing from Scottish records for ten years. Though Urqu‐hart later claimed to have spent this time abroad, nothing is known of his itinerary. Records of family monetary disputes indicate his return by the mid‐1630s; following this, he fought against the Covenanters during the outbreak of the Bishops' Wars in Scotland. After the defeat of Charles I's army, Urquhart travelled south to make his debut at the embattled Caroline court. Knighted in 1641, Sir Thomas returned to Scotland the following year to manage the Cromarty estate, which became encumbered by debt after his father's death in 1642. Urquhart's participation in Royalist military campaigns in the late 1640s and early 1650s was cut short by his capture during the New Model Army's rout of Royalist forces at Worcester in 1651.
W
arner,
W
illiam
Authors: Sanford Rhonda Lemke
Published: May 2017

A poet and a lawyer in the Court of Common Pleas, William Warner (c. 1558–1609) is best known for his literary work
Albions England
, a verse history of England. This capitalizes on the post‐Spanish Armada patriotic zeal that propelled other works about England's history, including Shakespeare's history plays, Michael Drayton's
Poly‐olbion
(1612), and some of the great mapping projects of the period. The first four books appeared in a 1586 quarto edition and encompassed foundational stories of Britain from myth and legend prior to and following the Trojan War, early invasions and conquests, and ended with a prose section dealing with Aeneas; two more books were added in 1589, which conveyed the history up to the close of Henry VII's reign; the 1592 edition of nine books proceeded through Elizabeth's reign, and the 1596 edition of 12 books contained extensive narratives of travel and exploration, including the travels of ‘John Mandevil’. The 1602 edition, enlarged to 13 books, also included Warner's prose ‘Epitome of the whole history of England’ of nearly 50 pages. Through
A continuance of Albions England
(1606), published after the accession of James I, Warner filled in more details in the history of the kingdoms of Scotland and Wales, and looked back to the fall of the Roman Empire.
W
heathill,
A
nne
Authors: Felch Susan M.
Published: May 2017

Nothing is known of Anne Wheathill (d. after 1584) other than what is recorded in her single printed book,
A handfull of holesome (though homelie) hearbs, gathered out of the goodlie garden of Gods most holie word; for the common benefit and comfortable exercise of all such as are devoutlie disposed
(1584). On the title page she describes herself simply as a gentlewoman, and in the prefatory letter to her readers she notes that as an unmarried woman she decided to use her ‘precious treasure of time’ to encourage ‘true religion’ among all her ‘brethren and sisters in the Lord’. The 49 prayers that comprise Wheathill's book demonstrate a high degree of biblical literacy and a sermonic mode of discourse attuned to the intricacies of allusion and exposition. Published within months of John Whitgift's consecration as archbishop of Canterbury, the prayers evince the instability of a period that saw increasing tensions between the Episcopal and Puritan wings of the English Church.
W
hythorne,
T
homas
Authors: Mousley Andy
Published: May 2017

The little‐known Thomas Whythorne (1528–96) is an intriguing figure because his life can be construed in relation to an eclectic variety of institutions and phenomena: commerce, the church, Renaissance individualism, the ambiguous politics of service, the humanist ‘republic of letters’, and professionalization. As a servant, of sorts, who aspired to become independent, Whythorne reflects the social mobility and attendant status anxieties of the period. It is tempting, therefore, to suggest that Whythorne's was a life which encapsulated several of the key pressures, contradictions, and developments of his age. His so‐called ‘autobiography’ was an attempt to make sense of his far‐flung experiences, and is a principal contributor to his historical significance. If by ‘autobiography’ we mean a type of ‘ego document’ which assumes an individual's life, thoughts, and feelings are inherently worthy of exhaustive record, then autobiography thus defined was not an established genre in Whythorne's time. That he undertook an enterprise approximating to it is therefore of some import.
W
ight,
S
arah
Authors: Baker Naomi
Published: May 2017

Sarah Wight (b. 1631) was an adolescent visionary whose experiences were transcribed and published by her Independent Baptist minister, Henry Jessey, in
The exceeding riches of grace advanced by the spirit of grace, in an empty nothing creature, viz. Mris Sarah Wight
(1647). The account describes the mental and spiritual anguish suffered by Wight from the age of 12, when she was stricken with guilt after lying to her mother about the whereabouts of her hood and after obeying an order against her conscience. In despair, she contemplated drowning herself, throwing herself from the roof of a building, and letting herself be eaten alive in the dog‐house in Moorfield. In March 1647, at the age of 15, Wight stopped eating. On the brink of death, blind and deaf, she began to have overwhelming experiences of grace which she described ecstatically to the radical sectarians and political notables who soon started to flock to her bedside. Jessey initially believed himself to be describing Wight's exemplary death, but his transcription of her experiences turned into even more sensational reading when she was later physically as well as spiritually restored. After over 75 days without food and with very little to drink, he informs us, on 11 June 1647 she was abruptly able to eat, get out of bed, and walk.
A
brams,
M. H.
Authors: Carroll Joseph
Published: May 2017

Meyer Howard Abrams (b. 1912) is one of the most respected scholar‐theorists of the twentieth century. His special field is Romantic poetry and poetics, but he has done scholarly work that draws on an encyclopedic historical knowledge of literary theory from all periods, and he has engaged in major debates in contemporary literary theory. He has also played a pioneering role as an anthologist, serving, among other things, as founding editor of
The Norton Anthology of English Literature
(1962). Unlike Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom, two of the most prominent and influential of his peers who were also Romanticists and literary theorists, Abrams is not himself intellectually or imaginatively a Romantic, neither of the Blakean mystical cast, like Frye, nor of the Shelleyan hierophantic cast, like Bloom. His groundbreaking works on Romantic intellectual and aesthetic sensibilities –
The Mirror and the Lamp
(1953) and
Natural Supernaturalism
(1971) – focus on tradition and seek to unveil the dynamic structures behind the Romantic desire for infinity, transcendence, and “negative capability.” Abrams's interest in tradition indicates an affinity with the Enlightenment and with neoclassical theorists like David Hume, Samuel Johnson, and Edmund Burke, rather than with those more commonly associated with Romanticism, thinkers like Friedrich Schlegel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.