Renaissance Transformations: The Making of English Writing 1500-1650 asserts the centrality of historical understanding in shaping critical vision. This collection of distinctive new essays explores the dynamic cultural, intellectual and social processes that moulded literary writing in the Renaissance. Acutely attentive to the complexities that we confront in our attempts to understand the past, this book explores important relations among literary form, material and imaginative culture which compel our attention in the twenty-first century. Addressing three crucial areas at the forefront of current academic inquiry - ‘Making Writing: Form, Rhetoric and Print Culture’, ‘Shaping Communities: Textual Spaces, Mapping History’ and ‘Embodying Change: Psychic and Somatic Performances’ - this innovative, timely volume is of fundamental importance to all those who study and teach Renaissance literature, history and culture. Contributors are Danielle Clarke, Andrew Hadfield, Margaret Healy, Thomas Healy, Bernhard Klein, Michelle O'Callaghan, Neil Rhodes, Jennifer Richards Michael Schoenfeldt, William Sherman, Alan Stewart, and Susan Wiseman.