This volume fills an important gap in the analysis of early modern history and culture by reintroducing scholars to the significance of the horse. A more complete understanding of the role of horses and horsemanship is absolutely crucial to our understanding of the early modern world. Each essay in the collection provides a snapshot of how horse culture and the broader culture - that tapestry of images, objects, structures, sounds, gestures, texts, and ideas - articulate. Without knowledge of how the horse figured in all these aspects, no version of political, material, or intellectual culture in the period can be entirely accurate.

KAREN RABER is Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi, USA. She is author of Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama (Delaware 2002), and co-editor with Ivo Kamps of Measure for Measure: Texts and Contexts (Bedfor/St. Martin's 2004).

TREVA J. TUCKER is a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Southern California, USA. Her article, Eminence over Efficacy: Social Status and Cavalry Service in Sixteenth-Century France appeared in the Sixteenth Century Journal in 2001.