From Booklist
Describing his imagined Cleopatra, William Shakespeare, the greatest genius to emerge in an era of geniuses, wrote that "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety." He might well have been describing his own enduringly fascinating age, one in which, note this encyclopedia's editors, "We find a playwright who is also a spy; a king who is also a composer; a mathematician who also explored the New World, a travel writer who never traveled, and a devout queen whose zeal made her a byword for martyrdom."It has taken the coordinated effort of some 250 scholarly contributors from throughout the English-speaking world to capture the Tudor age's variety and vitality, from the accession of Henry VII to the throne, in 1485, to the death of his formidable granddaughter, Elizabeth I, in 1603. In addition to its numerous in-depth biographical entries, the encyclopedia covers the visual arts, literature, science, education, music, politics and government, religion, social history, economic history, and the complex interplay among these cultural strains in an era of intellectual, scientific, political, and religious ferment.Within their A-Z arrangement, emblematic articles include those on the Spanish Armada, the Book of Common Prayer, the cloth industry, homosexuality, jewelry, literary criticism, marriage and marriage law, the history of science, and technology and production. Article-specific bibliographies are supplemented by topical bibliographic essays in the appendixes. These essays differentiate primary from secondary sources. In addition to bibliographic references and the name of its author, each article concludes with a generous list of see also references. The volume of each of these lists testifies to the interrelatedness of topics and themes throughout the encyclopedia.In depth and reliance on the latest in scholarship, the articles in Tudor England resemble those in Britain in the Hanoverian Age, 1714-1837 (Garland, 1997) and similar single-volume encyclopedias from Garland covering the social and intellectual history of various periods of British history. In both scope and depth, it surpasses John Wagner's useful Historical Dictionary of the Elizabethan World (Oryx, 1999). Like these related sources, Tudor England captures its age in an easy-to-retrieve, thoroughly indexed format. REVWR
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Book Description
This is the first encyclopedia to be devoted entirely to Tudor England. 700 entries by top scholars in every major field combine new modes of archival research with a detailed Tudor chronology and appendix of biographical essays.
Entries include:
* Edward Alleyn [actor/theatre manager]
* Roger Ascham
* Bible translation
* cloth trade
* Devereux family
* Espionage
* Family of Love
* food and diet
* James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell
* inns
* Ket's Rebellion
* John Lyly
* mapmaking
* Frances Meres
* miniature painting
* Pavan
* Pilgrimage of Grace
* Revels Office
* Ridolfi plot
* Lady Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke
* treason
* and much more.


About the Author
Arthur F. Kinney, of Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies, is the author of a number of books in Renaissance poetics, literary history, and literature, as well as reference books (Titled Elizabethans) and edited documents (Nicholas Hilliard's The Art of Lymning). He is the founding editor of the book series Massachusetts Studies in Early Modern Culture and the journal English Literary Renaissance. St

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This is the first encyclopedia to be devoted entirely to Tudor England. 700 entries by top scholars in every major field combine new modes of archival research with a detailed Tudor chronology and appendix of biographical essays.

Entries include:* Edward Alleyn [actor/theatre manager] * Roger Ascham * Bible translation * cloth trade * Devereux family * Espionage * Family of Love * food and diet * James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell * inns * Ket's Rebellion * John Lyly * mapmaking * Frances Meres * miniature painting * Pavan * Pilgrimage of Grace * Revels Office * Ridolfi plot * Lady Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke * treason * and much more.

FROM THE CRITICS

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