Series: Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture

This collection demonstrates how, in early modern literary studies, close reading has its greatest force when we bring our attentive practices of textual analysis not only to the form but also the matter of our texts. The short, innovative essays included in this collection use original research to show how both form and materiality in the early modern period are...

This volume posits that clothing in the early modern period was conceived of as the prime interface between the human body and its multiple environments. Both a second skin and a human-made artefact, dress can indeed be considered as the most immediate site for the elaboration of any sort of ecology, in its etymological sense of a 'discourse' of the...

Doubtful Writing offers a major reassessment of philosophical uncertainty in one of the early modern period's foremost doubters. It argues that Montaigne's engagement, his endless 'commerce' with two dogmatists, Seneca and Plutarch, produced a radical new mode of doubtful writing—one with which Montaigne could conduct and communicate a double, unresolved, and contradictory mode of thinking. Seneca and Plutarch have long...