Contributors to this special issue investigate the act of reception as a reiterative process on a continuous spectrum with cultural production. Receivers of texts, events, and reputations are mediators who take those things and creatively reconstitute them according to their own agendas and contemporary imperatives, the authors argue. Embracing international, comparative, and new material contexts for early modern reception studies, the essays in this issue address poetry, romance, letters, history, hagiography, autobiography, literary reviews, and recent digital projects concerned with the history of reading and reception.
Contributors: Danielle Clarke, Sarah Connell, Marie-Louise Coolahan, Julia Flanders, Jaime Goodrich, Nina Lamal, John McCafferty, Natasha Simonova, Rosalind Smith, Joel Swann