Constance Jordan

From Longman's new Cultural Edition series, Hamlet,edited by Constance Jordan, includes the play and contextual materials from the era of Shakespeare. This edition represents Shakespeare's text as it appears in the most authoritative of early editions, the Folio, published in 1623, and it supplies students with useful footnotes to the interpretation of the text. It also includes brief samples of works by Shakespeare's contemporaries in a section entitled Contexts; which will help students understand the historical setting and cultural ideas that helped shape the meaning of Shakespeare's play. By listening to these voices from the past, students can approach the play with some knowledge of why Hamlet asks the questions he does and of why the character himself, the creation of a distant century, also seems so much a part of our own world. The Longman Cultural Edition series is composed of teaching texts edited by prominent scholars. In addition to the recently published Cultural Editions Frankenstein, Pride and Prejudice, and Othello, titles in the series for this year include Dickens' Hard Times, Beowulf, and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Considering a wide range of Renaissance works of nonfiction, Jordan asserts that feminism as a mode of thought emerged as early as the fifteenth century in Italy, and that the main arguments for the social equality of the sexes were common in the sixteenth century. Renaissance feminism, she maintains, was a feature of a broadly revisionist movement that regarded the medieval model of creation as static and hierarchical and favored a model that was dynamic and relational. Jordan examines pro-woman arguments found in dozens of pan-European texts in the light of present-day notions of authority and subordination, particularly resistance theory, in an attempt to link gender issues to larger contemporary theoretical and institutional questions. Drawing on sources as varied as treatises on marriage and on education, defenses and histories of women, popular satires, moral dialogues, and romances, Renaissance Feminism illustrates the broad scope of feminist argument in early modern Europe, recovering prowoman arguments that had disappeared from the record of gender debates and transforming the ways in which early modern gender ideology has been understood. Renaissance scholars and feminist critics and historians in general will welcome this book, and medievalists and intellectual historians will also find it valuable reading.