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This year's printing of books on Renaissance literature and culture clearly testifies to the vitality and the versatility of scholarship in the field. Important trends include ongoing and increasingly sophisticated attention to material culture, increasingly fluid boundaries between literary criticism and history, residual influences of "high" literary theory, a partial resurgence of formalism (including philology), and ever-expanding investigations of marginal or semiforgotten authors. Philology, however, is represented by only one book this year, Kenneth Haynes's English Literature and Ancient Languages, which nevertheless demonstrates the enduring value of ears finely attuned to the basic ingredients of poetic style, in this case, to various kinds of language borrowing and linguistic purism from Anglo Saxon to Latin. Haynes skillfully traces the effects of expansive and constrictive phases of literary usage from William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd all the way to James Joyce and Ezra Pound, with particularly interesting excursions into John Milton and Gerard Manley Hopkins. This was but one of the many texts that strongly impressed me with the field's ability to expand and accommodate what one might call a "multi-scholarly world" within Renaissance studies. Especially positive in my view is an expanding body of scholarship on areas once relegated to the margins of intellectual history, such as early modern theories of medicine, the passions, reason-both human and animal, rational ethics, and though it has never been marginalized, theology. Politics of course have not gone away but political studies have also expanded into more sophisticated territory with more genuinely historical groundwork than in the heady days when literati first broke standard New Critical taboos on contaminating aesthetics with politics. Among other things, this has meant that real monarchs and their writings have continued their resurgence after the temporary disappearance noted in last year's review by Patrick Cheney. Since Cheney summarized the literary trends not only of the past year but of the previous decade, I gratefully refer readers interested in these trends to his 2007 review (SEL 47, 1), which also contains useful information on which presses are specializing in which kinds of Renaissance studies. I have observed no real changes since then.
Works on monarchs and the monarchy this year include two documents from the reign of Elizabeth I, one edited by Louise Durning and one...