{"title":"Published In Cooperation With The Folger Shakespeare Library","description":"\u003cp\u003eDive into the world of Shakespeare with books published in cooperation with the Folger Shakespeare Library. These editions offer insightful commentary and accessible introductions, perfect for students and avid readers alike. Start your journey here.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"ghosts-holes-rips-and-scrapes-book-zachary-lesser-9780812252941","title":"Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes","description":"Four years before the publication of the First Folio, a group of London printers and booksellers attempted to produce a \"collected works\" of William Shakespeare, not in an imposingly large format but as a series of more humble quarto pamphlets. For mysterious reasons, perhaps involving Shakespeare's playing company, the King's Men, the project ran into trouble. In an attempt to salvage it, information on the title pages of some of the playbooks was falsified, making them resemble leftover copies of earlier editions. The deception worked for nearly three hundred years, until it was unmasked by scholars in the early twentieth century. The discovery of these \"Pavier Quartos,\" as they became known, was a landmark success for the New Bibliography and played an important role in establishing the validity and authority of that method of analysis. While more recent scholars have reassessed the traditional narrative that the New Bibliographers wrote, no one has gone back to look at the primary evidence: the quartos themselves.  In Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes Zachary Lesser undertakes a completely fresh study of these playbooks. Through an intensive bibliographical analysis of over three hundred surviving quartos, Lesser reveals evidence that has gone entirely unseen before: \"ghosts\" (faint, oily impressions produced when one book is bound next to another); \"holes\" (the tiny remains of the first simple stitching that held pamphlets together); and \"rips and scrapes\" (post-production alterations of title pages). This new evidence-much of it visible only with the aid of enhanced photographic methods-suggests that the \"Pavier Quartos\" are far more mysterious, with far more consequential ramifications for book history and Shakespeare scholarship than we have thought.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49738817667345,"sku":"NGR9780812252941","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008094634257,"sku":"NIN9780812252941","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812252942.jpg?v=1752315741"},{"product_id":"disknowledge-book-katherine-eggert-9780812224856","title":"Disknowledge","description":"\"Disknowledge\": knowing something isn't true, but believing it anyway. In Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England, Katherine Eggert explores the crumbling state of learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even as the shortcomings of Renaissance humanism became plain to see, many intellectuals of the age had little choice but to treat their familiar knowledge systems as though they still held. Humanism thus came to share the status of alchemy: a way of thinking simultaneously productive and suspect, reasonable and wrongheaded.  Eggert argues that English writers used alchemy to signal how to avoid or camouflage pressing but discomfiting topics in an age of rapid intellectual change. Disknowledge describes how John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, John Dee, Christopher Marlowe, William Harvey, Helkiah Crooke, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare used alchemical imagery, rhetoric, and habits of thought to shunt aside three difficult questions: how theories of matter shared their physics with Roman Catholic transubstantiation; how Christian Hermeticism depended on Jewish Kabbalah; and how new anatomical learning acknowledged women's role in human reproduction. Disknowledge further shows how Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Margaret Cavendish used the language of alchemy to castigate humanism for its blind spots and to invent a new, posthumanist mode of knowledge: writing fiction.  Covering a wide range of authors and topics, Disknowledge is the first book to analyze how English Renaissance literature employed alchemy to probe the nature and limits of learning. The concept of disknowledge-willfully adhering to something we know is wrong-resonates across literary and cultural studies as an urgent issue of our own era.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49740450529553,"sku":"NGR9780812224856","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007932825873,"sku":"NIN9780812224856","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/081222485X.jpg?v=1752316093"},{"product_id":"ghosts-holes-rips-and-scrapes-book-zachary-lesser-9781512826081","title":"Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes","description":"Four years before the publication of the First Folio, a group of London printers and booksellers attempted to produce a \"collected works\" of William Shakespeare, not in an imposingly large format but as a series of more humble quarto pamphlets. For mysterious reasons, perhaps involving Shakespeare's playing company, the King's Men, the project ran into trouble. In an attempt to salvage it, information on the title pages of some of the playbooks was falsified, making them resemble leftover copies of earlier editions. The deception worked for nearly three hundred years, until it was unmasked by scholars in the early twentieth century. The discovery of these \"Pavier Quartos,\" as they became known, was a landmark success for the New Bibliography and played an important role in establishing the validity and authority of that method of analysis. While more recent scholars have reassessed the traditional narrative that the New Bibliographers wrote, no one has gone back to look at the primary evidence: the quartos themselves.  In Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes Zachary Lesser undertakes a completely fresh study of these playbooks. Through an intensive bibliographical analysis of over three hundred surviving quartos, Lesser reveals evidence that has gone entirely unseen before: \"ghosts\" (faint, oily impressions produced when one book is bound next to another); \"holes\" (the tiny remains of the first simple stitching that held pamphlets together); and \"rips and scrapes\" (post-production alterations of title pages). This new evidence-much of it visible only with the aid of enhanced photographic methods-suggests that the \"Pavier Quartos\" are far more mysterious, with far more consequential ramifications for book history and Shakespeare scholarship than we have thought.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50464062898449,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50464063389969,"sku":"NGR9781512826081","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52751640133905,"sku":"NIN9781512826081","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1512826081.jpg?v=1763224614"},{"product_id":"making-pagans-book-john-kuhn-9781512825091","title":"Making Pagans","description":"How early modern theatrical practice helped construct the category of “pagan” as a tool of European self-definition and colonial ambition  In Making Pagans, John Kuhn argues that drama played a powerful role in the articulation of religious difference in the seventeenth century. Tracing connections between the history of stagecraft and ethnological disciplines such as ethnography, antiquarianism, and early comparative religious writing, Kuhn shows how early modern repertory systems that leaned heavily on thrift and reuse produced an enduring theatrical vocabulary for understanding religious difference through the representation of paganism—a key term in the new taxonomy of world religions emerging at this time, and a frequent subject and motif in English drama of the era.  Combining properties such as triumphal chariots, trick altars, and moving statues with music, special effects, and other elements, the spectacular set-pieces that were mostly developed for plays set in antiquity, depicting England’s pre-Christian past, were frequently repurposed in new plays, in representations of Native Americans and Africans in colonial contact zones. Kuhn argues that the recycling of these set-pieces encouraged audiences to process new cultural sites through the lens of old performance tropes, and helped produce fictitious, quasi-ethnographic knowledge for spectators, generating the idea of a homogeneous, trans-historical, trans-geographical “paganism.” Examining the common scenes of pagan ritual that filled England's seventeenth-century stages—magical conjurations, oracular prophecies, barbaric triumphal parades, and group suicides—Kuhn traces these tropes across dozens of plays, from a range of authors including Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, John Dryden, and Philip Massinger.  Drawing together theater history, Atlantic studies, and the history of comparative religion, Making Pagans reconceptualizes the material and iterative practices of the theater as central to the construction of radical religious difference in early modernity and of the category of paganism as a tool of European self-definition and colonial ambition.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51032433885457,"sku":"NIN9781512825091","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1512825093.jpg?v=1763222841"},{"product_id":"possible-knowledge-book-debapriya-sarkar-9781512823356","title":"Possible Knowledge","description":"The Renaissance, scholars have long argued, was a period beset by the loss of philosophical certainty. In Possible Knowledge, Debapriya Sarkar argues for the pivotal role of literature—what early moderns termed poesie—in the dynamic intellectual culture of this era of profound incertitude. Revealing how problems of epistemology are inextricable from questions of literary form, Sarkar offers a defense of poiesis, or literary making, as a vital philosophical endeavor.  Working across a range of genres, Sarkar theorizes “possible knowledge” as an intellectual paradigm crafted in and through literary form. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers such as Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, Cavendish, and Milton marshalled the capacious concept of the “possible,” defined by Philip Sidney as what “may be and should be,” to construct new theories of physical and metaphysical reality. These early modern thinkers mobilized the imaginative habits of thought constitutive to major genres of literary writing—including epic, tragedy, romance, lyric, and utopia—in order to produce knowledge divorced from historical truth and empirical fact by envisioning states of being untethered from “nature” or reality.  Approaching imaginative modes such as hypothesis, conjecture, prediction, and counterfactuals as instruments of possible knowledge, Sarkar exposes how the speculative allure of the “possible” lurks within scientific experiment, induction, and theories of probability. In showing how early modern literary writing sought to grapple with the challenge of forging knowledge in an uncertain, perhaps even incomprehensible world, Possible Knowledge also highlights its most audacious intellectual ambition: its claim that while natural philosophy, or what we today term science, might explain the physical world, literature could remake reality. Enacting a history of ideas that centers literary studies, Possible Knowledge suggests that what we have termed a history of science might ultimately be a history of the imagination.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51032437293329,"sku":"NIN9781512823356","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52663348822289,"sku":"NLS9781512823356","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/151282335X.jpg?v=1763223524"},{"product_id":"mixed-faith-and-shared-feeling-book-musa-gurnis-9780812250251","title":"Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling","description":"Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling explores the mutually generative relationship between post-Reformation religious life and London's commercial theaters. It explores the dynamic exchange between the imaginatively transformative capacities of shared theatrical experience, with the particular ideological baggage that individual playgoers bring into the theater. While early modern English drama was shaped by the polyvocal, confessional scene in which it was embedded, Musa Gurnis contends that theater does not simply reflect culture but shapes it. According to Gurnis, shared theatrical experience allowed mixed-faith audiences to vicariously occupy alternative emotional and cognitive perspectives across the confessional spectrum.  In looking at individual plays, such as Thomas Middleton's A Game of Chess and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Gurnis shows how theatrical process can restructure playgoers' experiences of confessional material and interrupt dominant habits of religious thought. She refutes any assumption that audiences consisted of conforming Church of England Protestants by tracking the complex and changing religious lives of seventy known playgoers. Arguing against work that seeks to draw fixed lines of religious affiliation around individual playwrights or companies, she highlights the common practice of cross-confessional collaboration among playhouse colleagues. Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling demonstrates how post-Reformation representational practices actively reshaped the ways ideologically diverse Londoners accessed the mixture of religious life across the spectrum of beliefs.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52952044962065,"sku":"NIN9780812250251","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53615759786257,"sku":"CIN0812250257G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780812250251.jpg?v=1766071968"},{"product_id":"poet-and-the-antiquaries-book-megan-l-cook-9780812250824","title":"The Poet and the Antiquaries","description":"Between 1532 and 1602, the works of Geoffrey Chaucer were published in no less than six folio editions. These were, in fact, the largest books of poetry produced in sixteenth-century England, and they significantly shaped the perceptions of Chaucer that would hold sway for centuries to come. But it is the stories behind these editions that are the focus of Megan L. Cook's interest in The Poet and the Antiquaries. She explores how antiquarians-historians, lexicographers, religious polemicists, and other readers with a professional, but not necessarily literary, interest in the English past-played an indispensable role in making Chaucer a figure of lasting literary and cultural importance.  After establishing the antiquarian involvement in the publication of the folio editions, Cook offers a series of case studies that discuss Chaucer and his works in relation to specific sixteenth-century discourses about the past. She turns to early accounts of Chaucer's biography to show how important they were in constructing the poet as a figure whose life and works could be known, understood, and valued by later readers. She considers the claims made about Chaucer's religious views, especially the assertions that he was a proto-Protestant, and the effects they had on shaping his canon. Looking at early modern views on Chaucerian language, she illustrates how complicated the relations between past and present forms of English were thought to be. Finally, she demonstrates the ways in which antiquarian readers applied knowledge from other areas of scholarship to their reading of Middle English texts.  Linking Chaucer's exceptional standing in the poetic canon with his role as a symbol of linguistic and national identity, The Poet and the Antiquaries demonstrates how and why Chaucer became not only the first English author to become a subject of historical inquiry but also a crucial figure for conceptualizing the medieval in early modern England.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52995970007313,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52995970498833,"sku":"NIN9780812250824","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780812250824.jpg?v=1767666244"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/published-in-cooperation-with-the-folger-shakespeare-library-book-series.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}