Early Modern

Books written during or set in the Early Modern period or the Renaissance in Europe or the New World.

Although the chronological limits of the period are open to debate, the timeframe spans the period after the late portion of the Middle Ages (c. 1500) through the beginning of the Age of Revolutions (c. 1800) and is variously demarcated by historians as beginning with the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, with the Renaissance or the Age of Discovery and ending with the French Revolution in 1789.

Hamlet
Othello
King Lear
The Tempest
Romeo and Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Macbeth
Dr. Faustus
Paradise Lost
The Merchant of Venice
Twelfth Night
Much Ado About Nothing
Titus Andronicus
Don Quixote
The Winter's Tale
Keith Thomas
The fourteenth-century preacher, John Bromyard, used to tell the story of the shepherd who, asked if he knew who the Father, Son and Holy Ghost were, replied, 'The father and the son I know well for I tend their sheep, but I know not that third fellow; there is none of that name in our village. ...more
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England

but now I muſt recant and confeſſe that our Normane Engliſh which hath growen ſince William the Conquerour doth admit any of the auncient feete, by reaſon of the many poliſillables euen to ſix and ſeauen in one word, which we at this day vſe in our moſt ordinarie language: and which corruption hath bene occaſioned chiefly by the peeviſh affectation not of the Normans themſelues, but of clerks and ſcholers or ſecretaries long ſince, who not content with the vſual Normane or Saxon word, would conu ...more
George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie

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