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Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture

Refusing to Behave in Early Modern Literature

By Laura Seymour

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£85.00

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About this book

Examines the interrelation of the bodily and the textual in four early modern literary examples of bad behavior
  • Broadens the scope of current understandings of early modern literature by identifying and analysing the significance of genre to representations of resistance to behavioural norms
  • Brings together a variety of texts that are not usually considered side by side (Elizabethan and Jacobean devil plays, non-conformist life writing, picaresque prose), using this carefully-chosen mix of texts to explore social norms as a generic concern
  • Provides a definitive study of texts lacking a substantial critical apparatus, like Grim the Collier of Croydon
  • Comparatively analyses early modern Anglophone texts alongside Spanish picaresque prose thus opening out new avenues in comparative literary studies

Refusing to Behave in Early Modern Literature explores texts shaped by collisions between the idiosyncrasies of individual bodyminds and the values of small communities such as religion, sect, social milieu, congregation and family. The book encompasses the period from the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century, examining early modern shrew and devil plays, picaresque and rogue literature, and Quaker life-writing. Refusing to Behave examines the ways in which Thomas Dekker, Thomas Ellwood, Mateo Alemán and his translator James Mabbe, and the anonymous author of Grim the Collier of Croydon use textual tricks to provoke bodily responses in readers, and also draw on readers’ bodily experiences to enrich their textual descriptions. This study broadens the scope of current understandings of early modern literature by identifying and analysing the significance of genre to representations of resistance to behavioural norms.

Reviews

Seymour’s brilliant book exfoliates texts to show how the kinaesthetic experience of the characters can be written to evoke the reader’s kinaesthetic experience. Reading her reading makes us aware of the ways our body is involved in making meaning while we read. Her book is a model of how to incorporate research on embodied cognition into literary studies.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: The Body At Play in Early Modern Texts

Chapter 1: Ungracious Grace: Proprioception and Staging Taste in Thomas Dekker’s If This Be Not a Good Play The Devil is In It The Devil Saying Grace: Folklore and Oxymoron A Gust of Wind that Fans the Fire: Monks Hotting Up Mistrusting the Self Conclusion

Chapter 2: Walking without God — (mis)learning through the gait in Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599 and 1604) and James Mabbe’s The Rogue (1622)

Guzmán’s Pedagogical Texts: God and the Beggar’s Book Conclusion: Against Learning – Guzmán and the Widow Chapter 3: Plain Plasticity— Thomas Ellwood’s The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood (1714) Masculinity and Self-Shaping: A Simple Perspective? Conclusion

Chapter 4: Chaste and Silent – Again. Vitality and the bound and loosed body in I.T.’s Grim the Collier of Croydon; or, The Devil and His Dame (c.1600)

Tyed Tongues Vitality: Outside of Language Conclusion
About the author

Laura Seymour

Laura Seymour is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Swansea University. She is PI of the collaborative project AMEND – Early Modern European Neurodivergence (2025-2030), funded by the Wellcome Trust. Laura is the author of Refusing to Behave in Early Modern Literature (2022), Shakespeare and Neurodiversity (2025) and Early Modern Neurodivergence (2026) and various articles and book chapters on neurodivergence and early modern literature.

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