A Companion to the Global Renaissance

Featuring twenty one newly-commissioned essays, A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion demonstrates how today's globalization is the result of a complex and lengthy historical process that had its roots in England's mercantile and cross-cultural interactions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
* An innovative collection that interrogates the global paradigm of our period and offers a new history of globalization by exploring its influences on English culture and literature of the early modern period.
* Moves beyond traditional notions of Renaissance history mainly as a revival of antiquity and presents a new perspective on England's mercantile and cross-cultural interactions with the New and Old Worlds of the Americas, Africa, and the East, as well with Northern Europe.
* Illustrates how twentieth-century globalization was the result of a lengthy and complex historical process linked to the emergence of capitalism and colonialism
* Explores vital topics such as East-West relations and Islam; visual representations of cultural 'others'; gender and race struggles within the new economies and cultures; global drama on the cosmopolitan English stage, and many more

The storied achievements of the Renaissance were not simply the result of a cultural rediscovery of shared European classical traditions. A Companion to the Global Renaissance presents a more complex perspective that considers England's commercial and cross-cultural interactions with the New and Old Worlds of the Americas, Africa, and the East, as well as with Northern Europe. By illustrating how English culture and literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were shaped by emerging long-distance mercantile, proto-colonial, and cultural economies of exchange, this innovative collection presents a new history of globalization. After introducing globalization's theoretical underpinnings, twenty one newly-commissioned essays collectively illustrate how twentieth-century globalization was the result of a lengthy and complex historical process linked to the emergence of capitalism and colonialism. These wide-ranging chapters examine such topics as England's trading companies and the flow of labor and capital; exploration and cartography; travel and empire; domestic consumerism, money, and material culture; East-West relations and Islam; visual representations and aesthetic theories of and by cultural 'others'; gender and race struggles within the new economies and cultures; the global dimensions of Renaissance literature; and global drama on the cosmopolitan English stage. With academic rigor and critical authority, A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion challenges popular notions of Renaissance history and presents fascinating new insights into the roots of globalization.

List of Illustrations ix
 
Notes on Contributors x
 
Acknowledgments xvi
 
Introduction: The Global Renaissance 1
Jyotsna G. Singh
 
Part I: Mapping the Global 29
 
1 The New Globalism: Transcultural Commerce, Global Systems Theory, and Spenser's Mammon 31
Daniel Vitkus
 
2 "Travailing" Theory: Global Flows of Labor and the Enclosure of the Subject 50
Crystal Bartolovich
 
3 Islam and Tamburlaine's World-picture 67
John Michael Archer
 
4 Traveling Nowhere: Global Utopias in the Early Modern Period 82
Chloë Houston
 
Part II: "Contact Zones" 99
 
5 The Benefi ts of a Warm Study: The Resistance to Travel before Empire 101
Andrew Hadfield
 
6 "Apes of Imitation": Imitation and Identity in Sir Thomas Roe's Embassy to India 114
Nandini Das
 
7 A Multinational Corporation: Foreign Labor in the London East India Company 129
Richmond Barbour
 
8 Where was Iceland in 1600? 149
Mary C. Fuller
 
9 East by North-east: The English among the Russians, 1553-1603 163
Gerald MacLean
 
10 The Politics of Identity: William Adams, John Saris, and the English East India Company's Failure in Japan 178
Catherine Ryu
 
11 The Queer Moor: Bodies, Borders, and Barbary Inns 190
 
Ian Smith
 
Part III: Networks of Exchange: Traveling Objects 205
 
12 Guns and Gawds: Elizabethan England's Infi del Trade 207
Matthew Dimmock
 
13 Cassio, Cash, and the "Infidel 0": Arithmetic, Double-entry Bookkeeping, and Othello's Unfaithful Accounts 223
Patricia Parker
 
14 Seeds of Sacrifice: Amaranth, the Gardens of Tenochtitlan and Spenser's Faerie Queene 242
Edward M. Test
 
15 "So Pale, So Lame, So Lean, So Ruinous": The Circulation of Foreign Coins in Early Modern England 262
Stephen Deng
 
16 Canary, Bristoles, Londres, Ingleses: English Traders in the Canaries in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 279
Barbara Sebek
 
17 "The Whole Globe of the Earth": Almanacs and Their Readers 294
Adam Smyth
 
18 Cesare Vecellio, Venetian Writer and Art-book Cosmopolitan 305
Ann Rosalind Jones
 
Part IV: The Globe Staged 323
 
19 Bettrice's Monkey: Staging Exotica in Early Modern London Comedy 325
Jean E. Howard
 
20 The Maltese Factor: The Poetics of Place in The Jew of Malta and The Knight of Malta 340
Virginia Mason Vaughan
 
21 Local/Global Pericles: International Storytelling, Domestic Social Relations, Capitalism 355
David Morrow
 
Index 378

This exciting new Companion explores the interactions between Europe and other peoples of both the New and Old worlds during the English Renaissance, and their effect on the literature, culture, art, and history of the period.