With a panoramic sweep across continents and topics, Early Modern Improvisations is an interdisciplinary collection that analyzes the relationship between early modern literature and history through lenses such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and politics.

The book engages readers interested in texts that range from Shakespeare and Tudor queens to Anglican missionary work in North America; from contemporary feminist television series to Ancient Greek linguistic and philosophical concepts; from the delicate dance of diplomatic exchange to the instabilities of illness, food insecurity, and piracy. Its range of contributions encourages readers to discover their own intersections across literary and historical texts, a sense of discovery that this collection’s contributors learned from its dedicatee, John Watkins, a major literary and cultural historian whose work moves effortlessly across geographical, temporal, and political borders. His work and his personality embody the spirit of creative improvisation that brings new ideas together, allowing texts and figures of history to haunt later eras and encourage new questions.

This volume is aimed at scholars and students alike who wish to explore early modern culture and its reverberations in ways that engage with a world outside the grand narratives and centralized institutions of power, a world that is more provisional, less scripted, and more improvisational.

Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial (CC-BY-NC)] 4.0 license.

Katherine Scheil, Professor of English, University of Minnesota, writes on Shakespeare and women, including Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway (2018) and She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America (2012). She is finishing a book on the history of women in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Linda Shenk, Professor of English, Iowa State University, conducts transdisciplinary research on collaborative storytelling—from Elizabethan drama, diplomacy, and court culture to co-creating climate resilience among researchers and communities. She has published in ELR, WIREs Climate Change, Environmental Humanities, and Explorations in Renaissance Culture.