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

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