Mighty Europe 1400-1700

In a series of ten historical and literary studies, this volume analyses the complex narrative of changing political identities in early modern Europe and maps out some of the dominant ways in which -European-ness- was articulated in documents of the period. As the collection unfolds, its contributors explore these themes from a whole range of geographical perspectives, including not only accounts of British culture, but also those describing cultural relations and political identities with regard to Italy, Spain, France, the Papacy, the Netherlands, Bohemia and the Americas, for example. Concentrating upon early modern nations at a time when they were just beginning to formulate recognizable collective identities, the studies contained in this volume offer a clear picture of the ways in which current literary and historical scholarship may yield penetrating insights into the broader question of how the very idea of Europe evolved amongst its native inhabitants during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The Editor: Andrew Hiscock is Reader in English at the University of Wales Bangor. He has published widely on early modern literature, particularly English and French drama in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His most recent monograph is The Uses of this World: Thinking Space in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Cary and Jonson and he is at present researching into literary discourses of memory in evidence during the period 1520-1620.

Contents: Andrew Hiscock: Introduction - Narrating Europe - John Kerrigan: British Marvell, 1660-1697 - Astrid J. Stilma: Justifying War: Dutch Translations of Scottish Books around 1600 - Hugh Adlington: John Donne, Confessional Identity, and the Civitas Dei in Early Seventeenth-Century Europe - Zden-k Vibíral: Religious Identities and Political Discourse in Early Modern Bohemia - Philip Crispin: Louis XII, Julius II and Pierre de Gringore's Sottie du Jeu du Prince des Sots (1512) - Ekaterina G. Domnina: 'The riches of England are greater than those of any other country in Europe': A Venetian Image of Early Modern England - Richard Dutton: Volpone : Venice in London, London in Venice - Manuel J. Gómez-Lara/María José Mora: The 'Anglicized Italian': Parodic Reversal of a Cultural Topos in Restoration Comedy - Moisés Orfali: The Spanish Apologia against the Black Legend - Andrew Hiscock: 'A Dialogue between Old England and New': Anne Bradstreet and her Negotiations with the Old World.