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The introduction sets the forthcoming chapters in the broader context of musical life in Early Modern France and Italy, with reference to existing scholarship on the subject. The occasions and locations in which musical performance took place are outlined, and the scope of the book is defined, stressing the close connections between France and Italy. A growing number of studies of secular music-making consider the social and ideological framework for performance, but usually without serious consideration of architectural settings. Yet these were crucial to the acoustic quality of the performance, for both players and listeners. The chapter therefore underlines the need for an interdisciplinary approach, to establish the background for the study of the emergence of the permanent theatre.

This chapter looks at the ‘his genitive’ in earlier stages of English. It is concluded that except for a brief period in Early Modern English, there is no evidence for a possessor doubling construction parallel to those found in many Germanic languages. The possessor doubling construction found in Early Modern English appears to have arisen as a re-analysis of the phrase-final -s genitive.

This chapter discusses that the book tried to place Edmund Spenser in the context of different and coexisting conceptions of the past, particularly those influenced by religious, nationalistic, and scholarly perspectives on history. It investigates Early Modern England's absorption, use, and critical awareness of diverse modes of historical narrative, and argues for the significance of these modes in determining the writer's or reader's outlook on distant events. It illustrates the ways in which the poet engaged with the languages of history surrounding him. It concludes that the poet has a profound, playful, and above all, multiform sense of the past for he was deeply knowledgeable about the historical writing of his day—using it extensively across the full range of his literary production.

The Introduction provides the literary and methodological context out of which T.S. Eliot's lifelong preoccupation with Early Modern literature arose. It presents the significance of Eliot's writings on Early Modern drama (principally) and poetry for subsequent critics and writers, but takes into consideration his own contention that his views of the Early Modern canon were themselves derived from the critical context just prior to his own work. The importance of late nineteenth-century ideas about Early Modern writing upon him is described, mainly through consideration of a connection between the criticism and the novel Marius the Epicurean by Walter Pater. The later part of this opening discussion makes the case for the book's methodology, by arguing, contra various scholars, that Eliot's knowledge of the literary and critical resonances of the earlier literature impacted on his imagination and determined the development of his poetry and drama.

This chapter examines combinations of determiners and possessives in earlier English. While the combination determiner + possessive is well attested in other Germanic languages, the combination possessor and determiner is rarer and has received scant attention. Arguments for the non-definiteness of possessives based on their co-occurrence with determiners are dismissed.

Presents improved estimates of the cost of living and the real wages of labourers in the western part of the Netherlands. The results show that even in this relatively dynamic economy there was a decline in real wages during the Early Modern Period.

This chapter deals with the study of the discourse status of noun phrases occupying a topicalized, left-dislocated, or (in there-sentences) postverbal position, and discusses the connection between the quantitative spread of these patterns and the increase in the range of the discourse functions fulfilled by such noun phrases. Using a corpus of Early Modern and Late Modern English, the variables taken into account are: overall frequencies for topicalization, left-dislocation, and there-sentences; the type of information conveyed by the noun phrases in question; and the anaphoric distance between the noun phrases and their antecedents. The connection between the informative characterization and propagation of the three constructions and the genre(s) in which they are attested are also discussed. In light of the corpus data, which contains samples of both formal writing and speech-based discourse, the chapter assesses whether the unmarked informative functions of the noun phrases occurring in the database examples of topicalization, left-dislocation, and there-sentences are fulfilled more naturally in formal or informal language.

It was ancient pantomime's destiny to play a seminal role in the emergence of classical ballet, and subsequently, in the twentieth century, of avant‐garde Tanztheater. It is well known that the founding fathers of opera in the Florentine Camerata looked to ancient myth, and above all what they believed to have been the all‐sung form taken by ancient theatrical tragic performances, as the model for their new medium. But considerably less exposure has been given to the genealogy traced by the inventors of ballet in Enlightenment Italy, Spain, France and England, to the dancers described in the ancient texts on pantomime. The ancient dances, brought to such a high level of artistry and skill by the ancient star performers named Pylades or Bathyllus, Hylas, or Paris, fundamentally informed, many centuries later, the nature of modern dance theatre in Early Modern culture. The final chapter in this volume therefore briefly outlines some of the uses to which some late seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century dance theorists, such as Weaver and Noverre, put their knowledge of ancient pantomime in their treatises on dance.

Studies of the three kingdoms have focussed chiefly on how between 1603-49 the realms of Scotland and Ireland inter-related with the major realm, of England. Though such studies have enriched the histories of each kingdom, it might also be said that understanding developments across the ‘Three Kingdoms’ in the early seventeenth century has become unduly Anglo-centric because of the sheer coverage given to England. By concentrating on Irish-Scottish relations however, another world can be perceived, where the objectives of England were not as critical as is often supposed. Summarising the recent surge in Irish-Scottish studies Edwards observes how King James’s notion of using Ireland to forge a closer Anglo-Scottish/Protestant union foundered on the divergent aspirations of the thousands of Scottish planters who settled in Ireland and the relationships formed with the Irish and English. Instead of submitting to English power, the Scots advanced their own position in large parts of Ireland, especially in Ulster. Many Scots preferred co-existence and/or co-operation with the Irish, as tenants, business associates, even marriage partners rather than helping the English subjugate them. This exposed the limits of English power in Ireland just as the Anglo-Scottish union was coming asunder precipitating the wider British civil wars.

The morphosyntactic analysis of the verbs that were capable of impersonal use in Old English (OE) was undertaken with the aim of determining the role that the impersonal construction had in the OE grammatical system, its function, and use. This chapter places the findings for OE into the context of the further diachronic development of impersonal verbs and the impersonal construction in Middle English (ME) and Early Modern English (EModE). Since a corpus study of ME and EModE is outside the scope of the present investigation, all statements made here either rely on the evidence provided by the Middle English Dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary online resources or on secondary literature. The material is preselected for the purpose of pointing out tendencies in the diachronic development of individual verbs and their range of syntactic uses, such as the loss of impersonal uses and the development of syntactic alternatives.

This chapter discusses the conflict that arises from different readings of the past, with the historical visions in Poly-Olbion as an example. It explains that this conflict provides the snapshot of a changing situation that is of vital importance for understanding Edmund Spenser. It examines Drayton's and Selden's position as a Spenserian, as well as how they view the Poly-Olbion. It adds that each age develops its own readings of the past. It discusses the main goal of this book, which is to build upon a very long tradition of ‘reading Spenser historically’. It highlights that above all, it is the choice of form that determines and expresses a writer's historiographic perspective. It explains that in Early Modern history, the method of history and substance depend greatly on one another. It investigates the different forms of history in the works of Spenser.

This chapter suggests that the interest in reanalysis as a mechanism of change, while rightly focusing attention on syntactic structure, also contributes to a blinkered view of diachrony. It exemplifies this view with accounts of two widely discussed changes: the Middle English emergence of for noun phrase (NP) to verb phrase (VP) infinitivals, and the Early Modern English emergence of the be going to future. These accounts illustrate an approach whose goal is not just to characterize reanalyses but to understand what lies behind them. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 3.2 comments on the modern interest in reanalysis and then treats alleged reanalysis changes as cases of analogy or grammaticalization. Section 3.3 shows that radical reanalysis in syntactic change has been overemphasized, and that most of the changes involved in one well-known alleged case (the English for NP to VP pattern) are broadly analogical. Section 3.4 proposes a new account of the emergence of the English be going to future. This case shows how the combinatorial properties of a source pattern give rise to the properties of an emergent one in grammaticalization. Section 3.5 concludes.

This essay examines the evidence behind the brutal reputation of Sir Frederick Hamilton. Drawing upon contemporary pamphlet literature, state papers and private correspondence, it suggests his methods owed as much to prevailing Irish and Scottish military practice as to continental influences. By investigating Hamilton’s pre-1641 Irish career it determines the circumstances that may have moved him to adopt a hard line with the Irish rebels. A scion of a leading Scottish Catholic family in Ireland, Hamilton embraced Protestantism, yet struggled to develop a career of his own under successive English Protestant administrations in Dublin. Awarded a sizeable plantation estate in Leitrim he experienced financial difficulties before departing on military service to Swedish in 1631. Upon returning, he fell out with government officers, but the slow response of servitors to the rebellion in autumn 1641 enabled him to assume the leading role in counter-insurgency measures in northern Connacht and west Ulster. His brutal methods provoked a major rebel backlash against English and Scottish settlers across the region. Though initially his endeavours earned him praise from Dublin, by 1643 his hopes of advancement to a senior command in Derry were frustrated, and he departed for Scotland.