Early Modern Bonds of Trust

From Shakespeare to Milton
Explores the role of trust and risk to personal, communal and institutional relationships in early modern English texts.

The concepts of trust and risk provide important insights into the social and cultural life of early modern England but remain relatively unexplored in early modern literary studies.

This collection addresses that gap by exploring a wide range of literary genres and texts including comic drama, lyric verse, emblem books, ledgers, wills, polemical prose and religious epic. Contributors explore issues of personal trust through the faith and lies that characterize Shakespeare’s sonnets, Donne’s sermons and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Following the idea of trust and risk into community brings us to a discussion of The Merry Wives of Windsor, the spiritual trust of faith communities and the network of relationships that are traceable though surviving records of women’s wills. Following this progression outwards from the personal to the communal, the final essays in the collection consider the role of institutional trust, specifically the early modern obsession with credit in its various guises. The Merchant of Venice, Volpone and The Winter’s Tale act as illustrative examples of credit’s significance for understanding trust and risk in the early modern period. Taken together the range of texts and genres considered reveal new insights into early modern English literature and its socio-economic context.

Contributor: Helen Wilcox (Edited by), Joseph Sterrett (Edited by), Alison Findlay (Edited by)

UK Delivery:

• Free delivery on all orders of £10 or more.
• £1.49 delivery fee on orders below £10.
• UK orders are shipped via Royal Mail 2nd Class.

International Delivery:

• Flat rate delivery charges vary by country.

Dispatch and Delivery Times:

• All orders are shipped from our warehouse in Northampton, UK within 48 hours of receipt during working hours.
• UK mainland orders typically arrive within 3-5 working days via Royal Mail 2nd Class.
• International estimated delivery times:
• Europe & Channel Islands: 7 to 10 working days
• USA: 7 to 15 working days
• Rest of the World: 9 to 21 working days

View our full delivery infomation here.