Designed for both students and general readers, this introduction to Renaissance and Reformation literature offers a description of early modern habits of writing and reading, of publication and stage performance. It considers the ways in which early modern writers constructed the past and designed the present, wrote about people and places, recovered and adapted classical genres, and tackled religious and secular controversies.

All these topics are illustrated with a profusion of excerpts from early modern texts, including works by More, Erasmus, Wyatt, Spenser, Philip and Mary Sidney, Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, Campion, Daniel, Donne, Southwell, Dekker, Taylor 'the water-poet', Aemilia Lanyer, Jonson, Chapman, Middleton, Mary Wroth, Ralegh, Greville, Wotton, Herbert and Milton. Throughout, readers are reminded that the consequences of the English reformations were as important as the better known influences of the Renaissance.

Michael Hattaway is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of Elizabethan Popular Theatre (1982) and Hamlet: The Critics Debate (1987), the editor of As You Like It and Henry VI Parts I-III for the New Cambridge Shakespeare, and also of A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture (2000), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's History Plays (2002), and plays by Jonson and Beaumont.