Reading Authority and Representing Rule in Early Modern England

Kevin Sharpe has been the leading scholar in interdisciplinary approaches to the study of early modern Britain for more than two decades. An historian of culture and politics, he pioneered the introduction of the perspectives and methods of other disciplines - literary criticism, the history of the book, reception studies and studies in visual culture - to the study of the English Renaissance state. Over the last decade he has been working primarily on the relations between politics, written texts and the visual representation of authority in portraits, prints, medals, coins and pageants. Refiguring the history of society and state as a cultural as well as an institutional or narrowly political history, Sharpe's full interdisciplinary practice has enabled a rich historicization of a variety of texts. Reading Authority and Representing Rule in Early Modern England brings together Sharpe's recent work on the publicization and reception of authority in early modern England, developing themes from his earlier works in methods and approaches to cultural history and the explication of written and visual texts.>