The age of Thomas Nashe

Traditional literary criticism once treated Thomas Nashe as an Elizabethan oddity, difficult to understand or value.

He was described as an unrestrained stylist, venomous polemicist, unreliable source, and closet pornographer.

But today this flamboyant writer sits at the center of many trends in early modern scholarship.

Nashe?s varied output fuels efforts to reconsider print culture and the history of the book, histories of sexuality and pornography, urban culture, the changing nature of patronage, the relationship between theater and print, and evolving definitions of literary authorship and 'literature' as such.