The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500-1640

The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500-1640 is the only current overview of early modern English prose writing. The aim of the volume is to make prose more visible as a subject and as a mode of writing. It covers a vast range of material vital for the understanding of the period: from jestbooks, newsbooks, and popular romance to the translation of the classics and the pioneering collections of scientific writing and travel writing; from diaries, tracts on witchcraft, and domestic conduct books to rhetorical treatises designed for a courtly audience; from little known works such as William Baldwin's Beware the Cat, probably the first novel in English, to The Bible, The Book of Common Prayer and Richard Hooker's eloquent statement of Anglican belief, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. The work not only deals with the range and variety of the substance and types of English prose, but also analyses the forms and styles of writing adopted in the early modern period, ranging from the Euphuistic nature of prose fiction inaugurated by John Lyly's mannered novel, to the aggressive polemic of the Marprelate controversy; from the scatological humour of comic writing to the careful modulations of the most significant sermons of the age; and from the pithy and concise English essays of Francis Bacon to the ornate and meandering style of John Florio's translation of Montaigne's famous collection. Each essay provides an overview as well as comment on key passages, and a select guide to further reading.

1 - Englishing Eloquence: Sixteenth-Century Arts of Rhetoric and Poetics
2 - All talk and no action? Early modern political dialogue
3 - Commonplacing and Prose Writing: William Baldwin and Robert Burton
4 - Romance: Amadis de Gaul and William Barclay's Argenis
5 - Montaigne and Florio
6 - Italianate Tales: William Painter and George Peele
7 - Classical translation
8 - Lazarillo de Tormes and the Picaresque in Early Modern England
9 - William Baldwin's Beware the Cat and Other Foolish Writing
10 - The Adventures Passed by Master George Gascoigne: Experiments in Prose
11 - 'Turne Your Library to a Wardrobe': John Lyly and Euphuism
12 - Robert Greene
13 - Thomas Nashe
14 - Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia
15 - Topicality in Mary Wroth's Countess of Montgomery's Urania: Prose, Romance, Masque, and Lyric
16 - Utopia and Utopianism
17 - English Scientific Prose: Bacon, Browne, Boyle
18 - Richard Hakluyt and travel writing
19 - Raphael Holinshed and historical Writing
20 - Astrology, magic, and witchcraft
21 - Jest books
22 - Political Prose
23 - Polemic/Satire
24 - News Writing
25 - Letters
26 - Diaries
27 - Life writing
28 - Essays
29 - Domestic conduct books
30 - Immethodical, Incoherent, Unadorned: Style and The Early Modern Bible
31 - The Style of Authorship in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments
32 - The Marpelate Controversy
33 - Sermons
34 - The Book of Common Prayer
35 - Gabriel Harvey
36 - Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
37 - John Knox, George Buchanan, and Scots Prose
38 - Robert Burton and The Anatomy of Melancholy
39 - 'When all things shall confesse their ashes': Science and Soul in Thomas Browne

Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and visiting Professor at the University of Granada. He is the author of a number of works on early modern literature, including Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Literature, Travel and Colonialism in the English Renaissance, 1540-1625 (Oxford University Press, 1998); Sand Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge, 1994). He has also edited, with Matthew Dimmock, Religions of the Book: Co-existence and Conflict, 1400-1660 (Palgrave, 2008); with Raymond Gillespie, The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Vol. III: The Irish Book in English, 1550-1800 (Oxford, 2006); with Paul Hammond, Shakespeare and Renaissance Europe (Cengage, Arden Critical Companions, 2004); and Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England (Palgrave, 2001). He is a regular reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement.