The Poetry House
 
The Poetry House
St.Andrews, Fife
KY16 9AJ

School of English
 
Room Editors
Scotland, England, Ireland and Wales
Renaissance 1500-1700


The best gateway site for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry can be found on Voice of the Shuttle. This will take you to Anniina Jokinen's excellent Luminarium pages where you can find sites devoted to all the major (Spenser, Donne, Milton, for example) and many minor writers of the period.
Neil Rhodes
The individual author pages contain extensive full-text collections of poetry, together with information on lives and lists of critical reading. There are sites on women poets (Mary Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips) and on schools such as the Metaphysicals and the Cavalier Poets. Each poet has his or her own musical accompaniment.

For more scholarly editions of Renaissance poetry, as well as many works in other genres you should try Renascence Editions, which contains about 140 texts, including Daniel's Defence of Rhyme, Gascoigne's The Steele Glas, Sidney's Astrophel and Stella and Defence of Poesie, and an impressive collection of works by Spenser. Another good site containing texts by Renaissance writers is OpenHere’s section on sixteenth century literature.

Neil Rhodes is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews. He received his M.A. and D.Phil. from Oxford. His areas of specialisation include Renaissance literature and culture, especially Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson and James VI and I; eloquence, rhetoric and the origins of English; early modern encyclopedism and the pre-history of the computer; modern British and Irish poetry.

If you would like to study Renaissance Poetry further at university undergraduate or postgraduate level, click here.


Recommended Sites

Voice of the Shuttle
http://vos.ucsb.edu/shuttle/eng-ren.html

Renascence Editions
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/ren.htm

OpenHere pages on sixteenth century literature
http://www.openhere.com/arts/literature/world-literature/british-literature/16th-century/


More specialised sites:

Elizabethan sonneteers
http://members.aol.com/ericblomqu/eliz.htm

Searchable texts of Marlowe’s work
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Texts/Marlowe.html

Seventeenth-century women poets
http://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/englisch/kurse/17c/index.htm


 

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