study of early modern literacies in Western Europe, Islam, and East Asia in the Bloomsbury History of Education in the Renaissance and a chapter (in Japanese) on early modern gender and authorship in Rethinking Authorship in Japan, East Asia, and Europe (Iwanami-shoten).
Edward “Mac” Test is currently Professor and Chair of English at Boise State University. He is a translator, poet, and Renaissance scholar. He has published a book of poetry, three books of translated poetry, and numerous essays and reviews. Most recently he published Sacred Seeds: New World Plants in Early Modern English Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), which was short-listed for the British Society of Literature and Science annual book prize. He is the recipient of several grants and fellowships, including the Idaho Humanities Council Research Grant, National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) summer seminar, Boise State University Research Grants, Alexa Rose Foundation; and fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Huntington Library and the John Carter Brown Library. Test is currently working on the first English translation of the Comedia famosa de la monja alférez (“The Famous Comedy of the Lieutenant Nun” attributed to Juan Pérez de Montalbán), and a translation of the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita’s Ciudades de Agua (“The Cities of Water”).
Virginia Mason Vaughan is Professor Emerita and Research Professor of English at Clark University. She is the author of Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Vaughan edited Antony and Cleopatra for the Third Norton Shakespeare (2015) and wrote Antony and Cleopatra: Language and Writing for Arden Shakespeare (2016). With Alden T. Vaughan, she coedited The Tempest for the Third Arden Series (1999; rev. ed. 2011) and coauthored Shakespeare in America for Oxford Shakespeare Topics (2012). Her most recent publication, Shakespeare and the Gods (2019), is a study of Shakespeare’s mythological allusions.
Daniel Vitkus is Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds the Rebeca Hickel Endowed Chair in Early Modern Literature. He is the author of Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and of numerous articles and book chapters on early modern culture. Vitkus has edited Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (Columbia University Press, 2000) and Piracy, Slavery and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England (Columbia University Press, 2001). He also serves as editor of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies.
Acknowledgments
The first edition of this volume was published in 2009, and I am delighted to launch an expanded and updated second edition (2021), A Companion to the Global Renaissance: Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, 1500–1700. My gratitude always to Emma Bennett, my first commissioning editor at Wiley (Blackwell), for her vision and encouragement as the project evolved. My thanks to all the authors from the 2009 edition whose updated essays will generate an expanding “conversation” with the new additional chapters.
Since 2009, it has been heartening to witness a further global “turn” in early modern studies, with an increasing emphasis on connected histories and cultural cross-pollinations beyond Europe. This second edition, I hope, will contribute to these ongoing endeavors. I am grateful to scholars who have shared this global vision. For their scholarship, friendship, conversations, comments, and input on this volume, I must thank Guido Van Meersbergen, Nandini Das, Matthew Dimmock, Ladan Niayesh, Ian Smith, Bernadette Andrea, Gerald MacLean, João Vicente Melo, Jean Howard, Mihoko Suzuki, Eva Johanna Holmberg, Abdulhamit Arvas, Colm MacCrossan, and Daniel Vitkus.
I am particularly grateful to commissioning editors at Wiley, Catriona King and Nicole Allen for believing in this second edition and helping me to develop the new proposal. Nicole’s input has also been invaluable in launching the book off the ground. Finally, I appreciate managing editor, Liz Wingett, for her assistance and advice in the production process.
At Michigan State University, my special thanks to my colleague Pete Johnston for his generosity and technical genius in preparing images for the volume. Gratitude to the Special Collections at MSU Libraries for their assistance at every stage of this project. And finally, appreciation to Sandra Beals for her wonderful, painstaking work in formatting the chapters for submission.
Thanks also to St. Catherine’s College Oxford, where I was a Visiting Fellow in the English Department, 2019 (Michaelmas Term), and during my fellowship I prepared this second edition for a new contract.
In 2009, I dedicated this book to my parents, who were global, cosmopolitan citizens of the world. I dedicate this edition to their memory.
Preface
I revisit the global Renaissance in this second edition, recognizing that in the past decade, including in our recent tumultuous times, the horizons of our world have expanded to include many more voices, vistas, and experiences. In the field of early modern studies, these shifts have meant several realignments in our disciplinary formations, with an increasing emphasis on global interconnections and cultural cross-pollinations, as well as a renewed focus on the lineages of Western colonialism over lands they “discovered.” In the introduction to the first edition of A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion in 2009, I began with a recognition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries comprising an era of expansion in the Western world: the volume covered the “discovery” of the New World in the Americas; growing interactions and encounters with the East, ranging from the Islamic empires on Europe’s borders to the far East, from Java to Japan; north and sub-Saharan Africa; and explorations to the North Seas. At the same time, importantly, I welcomed a global “turn” in early modern scholarship, recognizing a radical conceptual shift in our approach to the period. Traditionally, the term “Renaissance” had been deployed to emphasize the revival of classical antiquity and to valorize this resurgence of European art and culture of fifteenth-century Italy as the birthplace of the “Renaissance Man” (Burckhardt, 303–352). My framing argument for the first edition drew on the emerging globally oriented scholarship starting in the late 1990s that led to a more expansive, shifting early modern world picture. Cumulatively, these studies offered an increasingly cross-cultural, global, view – with varying emphases on trade, mercantilism, and cross-cultural exchanges, as well as on ideological struggles involving religious, racial, and social difference (see for example, Dimmock, Jardine, Kamps and Singh, Matar, Smith, and Vitkus).
The repositioned meaning of “Renaissance” that emerged from this perspective was invoked as being more multidimensional and culturally fluid than the one traditionally centered in Italy. It thus questioned the assumption that the Renaissance was a purely Western movement. It recognized, for instance, that while European humanists had a strong interest in recovering their intellectual roots in classical antiquity, academic subjects such as mathematics also intersected with commercial practices based on Arabic and other non-Western technologies and modes of learning in various fields (Parker 9, 40–46; Brotton, 11). Overall, this global “turn” decentered a singular and fixed idea of the Renaissance; it did so by evoking varied cross-cultural encounters that included diverse actors related to Mughal and Ottoman courts, trading companies, Japanese rulers, and Mesoamerican rituals, among several others, while also charting the circulation and exchange of objects comprising the global material culture of the period. Similar recognitions of non-Western contributions, ranging from Muslim Spain, Mamluk Egypt, Ottoman Turkey, and Persia to what is considered the Renaissance have continued apace in early modern scholarship in recent years (Loomba 2019, 3) – an endeavor I continue in this second edition. The term “Renaissance,” which I have chosen to retain as the title for the second edition, is thus loosened from its earlier Eurocentric coordinates to be reclaimed as global within this edition’s wide-ranging chapters.
If in the first edition England was the dominant subject – albeit in shifting relationships with other kingdoms, cultures, and peoples – this second edition, with its original, updated essays