Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The 2017 volume opens with a trio of essays probing identity, iconography, and devotional imagery in connection with the sacred spaces of St. Paul’s Cathedral and of the Bichi Chapel frescoes in the Church of St. Agostino in Siena, as well as with Francisco de Zurburan’s Crucifixion with a Painter. The majority of the volume'sessays concern early modern drama: botany and the body in Titus Andronicus; Ovidian sleep in Romeo and Juliet, The Winter’s Tale, and Othello; chivalry in Richard II and 1 Henry IV; transhumanist discourse in Othello; obedience and devils in Dr. Faustus, and domesticity and commerce in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. The focus then shifts to the non-dramatic with reconsiderations of the intertextualities in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece and the paratextualities in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. The final essay, on the Faerie Queene, explores the intended and unintended literary consequences of pairing humor with death.

Contributors: Jasmin W. Cyril, Lisandra Estevez, Tony Perrello, Emily Johnson Roberts, Rachel M. De Smith Roberts, Deneen M. Sensai, Margaret Simon, Elisha Sircy, Susan C. Staub, Frances Teague, John N.Wall, Lewis Walker.

The journal is edited by Jim Pearce of North Carolina Central University and Ward J. Risvold of the University of California, San Diego.