The seventeenth-century French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche thought that philosophy could learn a valuable lesson from prayer, which teaches us how to attend, wait, and be open for what might happen next. Death Be Not Proud explores the precedents of Malebranche’s advice by reading John Donne’s poetic prayers in the context of what David Marno calls the “art of holy attention.”

If, in Malebranche’s view, attention is a hidden bond between religion and philosophy, devotional poetry is the area where this bond becomes visible. Marno shows that in works like “Death be not proud,” Donne’s most triumphant poem about the resurrection, the goal is to allow the poem’s speaker to experience a given doctrine as his own thought, as an idea occurring to him. But while the thought must feel like an unexpected event for the speaker, the poem itself is a careful preparation for it. And the key to this preparation is attention, the only state in which the speaker can perceive the doctrine as a cognitive gift. Along the way, Marno illuminates why attention is required in Christian devotion in the first place and uncovers a tradition of battling distraction that spans from ascetic thinkers and Church Fathers to Catholic spiritual exercises and Protestant prayer manuals.

This is an essential volume, and there’s no scholar better equipped to edit it than Elizabeth Heale, whose expertise on early women’s writing in manuscript is unsurpassed. The Devonshire Manuscript is a vital source of Tudor literary history, illustrating the circulation of lyrics by Tudor poets such as Sir Thomas Wyatt, and offering evidence of collaborative forms of production and circulation that challenge prior assumptions about early forms of authorship, readership, and literary culture more broadly. Yet despite its importance, the Devonshire Manuscript has been all but inaccessible until now. With its extensive notes, thoughtful introduction, and carefully edited text, Heale’s edition will be a valuable reference work for scholars as well as an important textbook for students encountering the Devonshire Manuscript for the first time.
—Jennifer Summit
Professor of English, Stanford University

Dissing Elizabeth focuses on the criticism that cast a shadow on the otherwise celebrated reign of Elizabeth I. The essays in this politically and historically revealing book demonstrate the sheer pervasiveness and range of rhetoric against the queen, illuminating the provocative discourse of disrespect and dissent that existed over an eighty-year period, from her troubled days as a princess to the decades after her death in 1603.
As editor Julia M. Walker suggests, the breadth of dissent considered in this collection points to a dark side of the Cult of Elizabeth. Reevaluating neglected texts that had not previously been perceived as critical of the queen or worthy of critical appraisal, contributors consider dissent in a variety of forms, including artwork representing (and mocking) the queen, erotic and pornographic metaphors for Elizabeth in the popular press, sermons subtly critiquing her actions, and even the hostility encoded in her epitaph and in the placement of her tomb. Other chapters discuss gossip about Elizabeth, effigies of the queen, polemics against her marriage to the Duke of Alençon, common verbal slander, violence against emblems of her authority, and the criticism embedded in the riddles, satires, and literature of the period.