Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624)

Professor Elizabeth Story Donno, in her recent Elizabethan Minor Epics (New York, 1963), has made an important contribution to both scholarship and teaching. Not only has she brought together for the first time in one volume most of the extant Elizabethan minor epics, but in so doing, she has hastened the recognition that the minor epic, or "epyllion" as it has often been called in modern times, is a distinctive literary genre as deserving of study as the sonnet, the pastoral, or the verse satire. The purpose of the present volume is to supplement and complement Professor Donno's collection by making available in facsimile seven minor epics of the English Renaissance omitted from it. With the publication of these poems all the known, surviving minor epics of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods will for the first time be made available for study in faithful reproductions of the earliest extant editions.