Renaissance Papers is a collection of the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The conference accepts papers on all subjects relating to the Renaissance – music, art, history, literature, etc. – from scholars all over North America and the world. Of the nine essays in the 2002 volume, three have to do with John Donne; among the topics here are Donne and Pietro Aretino, Donne and All the World, andauthorial intention in the Holy Sonnets. Two essays deal with Shakespeare, specifically the discourse of dilution in 2 Henry IV and the Ovidian underworld in Othello. Other essays treat Marvell and the temporality of paranoia; poetry, patronage, and identity in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene; and the visual culture of the Elizabethan prodigy house.

Contributors: Nicholas Crawford, Dennis Flynn, Heather Hirschfeld, Pamela Royston Macfie, Anne E. McIlhaney, Graham Roebuck, Gary Stringer, James M. Sutton, Alzada Tipton.

M. Thomas Hester is professor of English at North Carolina State University