Stephen Greenblatt is one of the most influential practitioners of new historicism. This Reader makes available in one volume Greenblatt’s most important writings on culture, Renaissance studies, and Shakespeare. It also features occasional pieces on subjects as diverse as story-telling and miracles, demonstrating the range of his cultural interests. Taken together, the texts collected here dispel the idea that new historicism is antithetical to literary and aesthetic value.

Stephen Jay Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor at Harvard University, where he teaches English. A founding editor of the journal Representations, he is a key figure in what is known as New Historicism (or cultural poetics). Beginning with the publication of Renaissance Self-Fashioning in 1984, his books have had a transformative effect on scholarship and teaching of Shakespeare and the English Renaissance. He is also the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare (1997).

Michael Payne is John P. Crozer Professor of English Literature at Bucknell University. His recent publications include A Dictionary of Critical and Cultural Theory (1996), Reading Knowledge (1997), and Renaissance Literature: An Anthology (2003) – all published by Blackwell Publishing.