"This collection of essays by established scholars takes a number of different perspectives on the sixteenth century. How do shifts in definition, across a number of disciplines, facilitate or stall the articulation of the self-regarding subject? Do representations of geographical space, religious practice, and literary genre support the argument for the emergence of early modern subjects? Or do they rather reveal alternative agendas in sixteenth-century thinking? Each of these essays provides an account of its material, provoking fresh investigation and problematisation of the period immediatley before the high Renaissance in England."--Jacket.