This collection brings together essays by well-known feminist scholars from the wide range of disciplines that make up Renaissance Studies. It forms an accessible introduction to the ways in which feminism has replaced the universal, abstract 'Renaissance Man' of traditional scholarship with strategies for the analysis of the conceptual work of gender in the formation of European modernity.
Contrary to the view that Shakespeare was careless with plot details, Circumstantial Shakespeare reveals how he actually used circumstance to imply offstage actions, times, and places in terms of the motives and desires of his characters, thus creating coherent dramatic worlds and a sense of the feelings of characters inhabiting them.
England's Insular Imagining is vital reading for anyone interested in British nationhood. It shows how the English used Geoffrey of Monmouth's mythical 'British History' (1137) first to justify an attempted Scottish conquest, then to make Scotland's nationhood vanish in new literary, legal and cartographic figurations of English sea-sovereignty.