Giordano Bruno and the embassy affair

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Margaret Frazer

Recently widowed and still grieving, Cristiana Helyngton finds her life wrenched apart by her late husband's greedy and ambitious relatives, who are determined to have control of her lands and her daughters. Kidnapped, defamed, and imprisoned in a nunnery, she must find a way to save herself before she can save her children. For Dame Frevisse of St. Frideswide's nunnery, Cristiana is at first simply a duty among others, but questions rise and troubles deepen--and then turn deadly. Cristiana, to secure her freedom and save her daughters, must use a secret entrusted to her by her husband as he was dying-but it is a secret that could bring down those lords nearest the king and destroy, rather than save, those most dear to her. Frevisse, drawn into trouble far deeper than she initially imagined, must decide where her deepest loyalties lie: to the truth-or to England's peace. And whatever she chooses, in the end her help may be of little use against the ruthless men threatened by the secret on which all of Cristiana's hopes depend.

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Rory Clements

The Elizabethan navy has a secret weapon: an optical instrument so powerful it gives England unassailable superiority at sea. Spain will stop at nothing to steal it and seize the two men who understand its secrets - its operative William Ivory, known as the 'Queen's Eye', and its inventor, the maverick magician Dr Dee.

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A.L. Rowse

Presents the original text of Shakespeare's play side by side with a modern version, discusses the author and the theater of his time, and provides quizzes and other study activities.

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David Collings

According to David Collings, Wordsworth interpreted the outbreak of war between England and France in 1793 as a cataclysmic event, one whose utterly disfiguring effect he would trace in his work over the next decade. Expanding upon this extravagant interpretation of events, Collings argues, Wordsworth constructed a poetics of cultural dismemberment - a way for culture to imagine that it survives in the midst of its own destruction. In Wordsworthian Errancies, Collings challenges prevailing critical approaches to Romantic poetry by describing and critiquing this deconstructive account of culture in Wordsworth's poetry. Drawing ideas from deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, and queer theory, Collings's reading reveals a radically new Wordsworth, one who is far more concerned with various "queer" modes of sexuality than previously suspected. In a provocative reading of The Prelude, for example, Collings argues that Wordsworth associated his poetic power with homoerotic masochistic fantasies and with his involuntary delight in traumatic events. He also redefines the debate concerning the politics of Wordsworth's poetry: disputing recent critics who claim that Wordsworth retreated from history into a poetry of the self, Collings argues instead that the very notion of the solitary, autobiographical subject derived from Wordsworth's sense of cultural trauma. The suspect dimension of Wordsworth's poetry, Collings concludes, is not its retreat from history but rather its claim that history is disaster.