Essays on literary criticism, the links between social and religious history and literature, Shakespeare, and Herbert.

Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The 2009 volume features essays from the conference held at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.The volume opens with two essays focused on Renaissance literary criticism: one treating the Vergilian scholarship of Cristoforo Landino, the other analyzing the critical principles of Stephen Gosson's School of Abuse. Thevolume then turns to links between social and religious history and English Renaissance literature, with essays on representations of family in spiritual and political tracts, on the representation of office holders in English Renaissance drama, and on the rhetoric of colonialism in Elizabeth Cary's history of Edward II. Following these historical essays are three taking a more formal approach to Shakespeare's plays. These address the patterned behavior of couples in The Taming of the Shrew, characters representing eros in Love's Labors Lost, and Shakespeare's adaptation of Chaucerian narrative structures. The volume closes with a meditation on regeneration in the lyrics of George Herbert.

Contributors: Brian Blackley, Ed Gieskes, Christopher Hodgkins, Helen Hull, Katherine Pilhuj, William Russell, Jonathan Sircy, John Stevens, Ruth Stevenson.

Christopher Cobb is Assistant Professor of English at Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, Indiana.