William Muggins, an impoverished but highly literate weaver-poet, lived and wrote in London at the turn of the seventeenth century, when few of his contemporaries could even read. A Weaver-Poet and the Plague’s microhistorical approach uses Muggins’s life and writing, in which he articulates a radical vision of a commonwealth founded on labor and…[Read more]

This essay argues that Thomas Tusser’s popular book of georgic verse, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, offered a counter to developments in courtly poetry under Elizabeth I. Critics have long disparaged Tusser’s poetry as naïvely rustic, but Tusser was not an uneducated peasant who happened to pick up enough literacy to pen a book of poem…[Read more]

“Tanner weaves a compelling scholarly narrative, spellbinding in its encyclopedic circumference….her text provides comprehensive historical and ideological context to comprehend the paintings as they would have been understood by their highly educated sixteenth-century patron and Renaissance humanist viewers.” Renaissance Quarterly, Volume…[Read more]

In this chapter, I make two interconnected observations. I first consider how musicals inhabit and promote a ‘post-truth’ worldview similar to those reflected in current populist resurgences throughout the West. I argue that it is musical theater’s penchant for the unreal that in recent decades has given it traction within both secular,…[Read more]