The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World

What were the possibilities of prose as a literary medium in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? And how did it operate in the literary and social world? The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World brings together ten new essays by leading scholars of the literatures of England, Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, and the colonial Americas, to answer these questions in wide-ranging ways. Several of the essays shed new light on landmark prose works of the period; some discuss what lesser-known writings reveal about the medium; others move between the literary and the non-literary to reflect on the medium’s intersections with history, fiction, subjectivity, the state, science and other aspects of social and cultural life. Overall, this collection will provoke an international reconsideration of the remarkable visibility and diversity of the medium of prose in the early modern period.

List of illustrations; Notes on the contributors; 1. Introduction: the project of prose and early modern literary studies Roland Greene and Elizabeth Fowler; 2. Cannibal, cartographer, soldier, spy: the peirai of Mendes Pinto's Peregrinação Ronald W. Sousa; 3. 'niu ureiting': the prose of language reform in the English Renaissance Paula Blank; 4. Relations of prose: knights errant in the archives of early modern Italy Stephanie H. Jed; 5. Opening gates and stopping hedges: Grafton, Stow and the politics of Elizabethan history writing David Scott Kastan; 6. The subject of America: history and alterity in Montaigne's 'Des Coches' Timothy Hampton; 7. Anatomizing the commonwealth: language, politics and the Elizabethan social order William H. Sherman; 8. From polemical prose to the Red Bull: the Swetnam controversy in women-voiced pamphlets and the public theatre Ann Rosalind Jones; 9. Bacon's New Atlantis and the laboratory of prose Amy Boesky; 10. History, law and the eyewitness: protocols of authority in Bernal Díaz del Castillo's Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España Rolena Adorno; 11. Fictions of immanence, fictions of embassy Roland Greene; Index.

What were the possibilities of prose as a literary medium in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? How did it operate in the literary and social world? In this 1997 book, leading scholars of the literatures of Europe and the Americas demonstrate the increasing importance and diversity of prose in the early modern period.