Awards

• Winner of Honorable Mention 2007 Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize awarded by the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts.

Overview

Drawing on entirely new evidence, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580-1630 examines the history of English dramatic form and its relationship to the mathematics, technology, and early scientific thought during the Renaissance period. The book demonstrates how practical modes of thinking that were typical of the sixteenth century resulted in new genres of plays and a new vocabulary for problems of poetic representation. In the epistemological moment the book recovers, we find new ideas about form and language that would become central to Renaissance literary discourse; in this same moment, too, we find new ways of thinking about the relationship between theory and practice that are typical of modernity, new attitudes towards spatial representation, and a new interest in both poetics and mathematics as distinctive ways of producing knowledge about the world. By emphasizing the importance of theatrical performance, the book engages with continuing debates over the cultural function of the early modern stage and with scholarship on the status of modern authorship. When we consider playwrights in relation to the theatre rather than the printed book, they appear less as 'authors' than as figures whose social position and epistemological presuppositions were very similar to the craftsmen, surveyors, and engineers who began to flourish during the sixteenth century and whose mathematical knowledge made them increasingly sought after by men of wealth and power.

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9780199595457

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Reviews

Review from previous edition This is interdisciplinary work of impressive ambition and range, by someone who is arguably one of the most brilliant young scholars in the world working on Renaissance literature Stephen Pumfrey, ISIS The best first book of 2006 Studies in English Literature ambitious...fascinating material Elisabeth Dutton, Times Higher Education Supplement a dense, rewarding study... Henry Turner presents a compelling picture of the early modern stage finding a metaphor for itself in the practical arts, and consequently developing as a complex system for making knowledge: 'a way of thinking forward about human action through models and artificial inventions'. Sam Thompson, TLS The English Renaissance Stage is a major book by a major critic that will change the ways in which we read the intersections of literature and mathematics in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts without question one of the best pieces of Renaissance scholarship... in a decade... phenomenal ... a real pleasure. Paula Blank, The College of William and Mary Students are able to read short extracts from correspondence, legislation, theoretical and literary material, which substantiate the contexts they have been led to consider...this introduction to early English theatre distils much scholarship and should stimulate further explorations. NTQ, Volume 23/4

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