David, Donne, and Thirsty Deer

For fifty years Anne Lake Prescott has been a central force in the study of Anglo-French literary relations in the early modern period. Her work anticipates recent scholarship on history, religion and gender. This selection of her essays combines a tight focus on textual and historical particularities with an expansive sense of context--what she calls the 'cultural forcefield surrounding and sustaining the poem.'

The essays connect different fields. They consider the reformation as it affects ideas of poetic vocation and the sense of time, and show how the Biblical David became a model for Renaissance poets and also for slandered courtiers. Several essays deal with Edmund Spenser's epic and his sonnet sequence, and many bring understudied texts to illuminate Donne, Ronsard, the Sidneys and other early modern writers. Three little-known French poems with lesbian speakers illuminate Donne's "Sappho to Philaenis", while the language of ruin in Mary Sidney's psalm translations prepare for her treatment of religious renewal. An introduction by Ayesha Ramachandran, Susan Felch and Susannah Monta places Prescott's work in the context of early modern scholarship.

The essays collected here--penetrating, generous and witty--use close reading to illuminate the large cultural issues of the early modern period.