Catherine Nicholson | The New York Review of Books

Livelier Than the Living

In the Renaissance, reading became both a passion and a pose of detachment—for those who could afford it—from the pursuits of wealth and power.

A Marvelous Solitude: The Art of Reading in Early Modern Europe

by Lina Bolzoni, translated from the Italian by Sylvia Greenup

Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England

by J.K. Barret

June 20, 2024 issue

Where the Mistery Lurkes

“Change remains the lifeblood of literary tradition.”

October 28, 2023

Theater for a New Audience

From the beginning, the First Folio helped to fashion Shakespeare’s work into a canon of vernacular drama.

Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book

by Emma Smith

Shakespeare’s Book: The Story Behind the First Folio and the Making of Shakespeare

by Chris Laoutaris

Shakespeare’s Syndicate: The First Folio, Its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade

by Ben Higgins

November 2, 2023 issue

Try This at Home

September 21, 2023 issue

Right Busy with Sticks and Spales

The historian Nicholas Orme lets us glimpse what the sixteenth century was like for children.

Tudor Children

by Nicholas Orme

June 22, 2023 issue

Improving Paradise

For Milton, innocence was interesting—a significant innovation on his biblical source material.

Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton

by Katie Kadue

Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England

by Timothy M. Harrison

Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton

by Nicholas McDowell

Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton

by Joe Moshenska

June 23, 2022 issue

Who’s Afraid of Edmund Spenser?

September 23, 2021 issue

The Triumph of Mutabilitie

Edmund Spenser’s long, daunting The Faerie Queen combines political allegory with some of the most flickering, ambiguous poetry in English.

Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth-Century Book

by Hazel Wilkinson

Spenserian Moments

by Gordon Teskey

July 1, 2021 issue

Letter

Michael Beard

Who’s Afraid of Edmund Spenser?

September 23, 2021 issue