The Oxford handbook of English prose, 1500-1640 / edited by Andrew Hadfield.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Part I. Translation, education, and literary criticism. Englishing Eloquence: Sixteenth-Century Arts of Rhetoric and Poetics -- All Talk and No Action? Early Modern Political Dialogue -- Commonplacing and Prose Writing: William Baldwin and Robert Burton -- Romance: Amadis de Gaule and John Barclay's Argenis -- Montaigne and Florio -- Italianate Tales: William Painter and George Pettie -- Classical Translation -- Lazarillo de Tormes and the Picaresque in Early Modern England -- Part II. Prose fiction. William Baldwin's Beware the Cat and Other Foolish Writing -- The Adventures Passed by Master George Gascoigne: Experiments in Prose -- 'Turne Your Library to a Wardrope': John Lyly and Euphuism -- Robert Greene -- Nashe's Stuff -- Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia -- Topicality in Mary Wroth's Countess of Montgomery's Urania: Prose Romance, Masque, and Lyric -- Part III. Varieties of early modern prose 1: Public prose. Utopia and Utopianism -- English Scientific Prose: Bacon, Browne, Boyle -- Richard Hakluyt -- Raphael Holinshed and Historical Writing -- Astrology, Magic, and Witchcraft -- Jest Books -- Political Prose -- Modes of Satire -- News Writing -- Part IV. Varieties of early modern prose 2: private prose. Letters -- Diaries -- Life Writing -- Essays -- Domestic Manuals and the Power of Prose -- Part V. Religious Prose. Immethodical, Incoherent, Unadorned: Style and the Early Modern Bible -- The Style of Authorship in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments -- The Marprelate Controversy -- Sermons -- The Book of Common Prayer -- Richard Hooker's of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie -- Part VI. Major prose writers. Gabriel Harvey -- John Knox, George Buchanan, and Scots Prose -- Robert Burton and The Anatomy of Melancholy -- 'When all Things shall confesse their ashes': Science and Soul in Thomas Browne.