Description: This book analyzes the discourses and practices that defined Renaissance theater, as related to the development of encyclopedic texts and vice versa. Looking at what "theater" meant to medieval and Renaissance writers and critics, William West sets Renaissance drama within one of its cultural and intellectual contexts. Although the study focuses on the Renaissance, it also draws on and analyzes substantial classical and medieval material. It is of equal interest to intellectual historians, theater historians and students of early literature.
Brief description: William West has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, and the University of Nevada, Reno, and is currently assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has published on encyclopedism, the arts of memory, symbolic economies, and the epistemology of early modern performance in journals such as English Literary Renaissance, Renaissance Drama, and Comparative Literature. He is currently at work on a book on the significance of confusion and misunderstanding in early modern drama.
Review Quotes: "[West] covers medieval and Renaissance demonstrations of the ars combinatorium and theatrical performances, and with taste as well as erudition...This is an important contribution to the history of ideas seen from a very rewarding perspective." Renaissance Quarterly