This Concise Companion launches students into the study of English Renaissance literature through the central contexts that informed it.

• Places the poetry within contexts such as: economics; religion; empire and exploration; education, humanism and rhetoric; censorship and patronage; royal marriage and succession; treason and rebellion; “others” in England; private lives; cosmology and the body; and life-writing.
  
• Incorporates recent developments in the field, as well as work soon to be published.
  
• Entices students to explore the subject further.
  
• Provides new syntheses that will be of interest to scholars.
  
• All the contributors are highly regarded scholars and teachers.

Donna B. Hamilton is Professor of English at the University of Maryland. Her previous publications include Virgil and 'The Tempest': The Politics of Imitation (1990), Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England (1992), Religion, Literature and Politics in Post-Reformation England (co-edited with Richard Strier, 1996), Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560-1633 (2005), and an edition of Middleton's The Puritan (2005).