Imagining Inheritance from Chaucer to Shakespeare

A study of the idea of inheritance in late medieval and early modern imaginative literature that shows continuities and coherence across the traditional divide of these periods.

Introduction: Imagining Premodern Inheritance; Part I.

Fictions of the Will; 1 'A Very Perfect Forme of a Will': The Fictional Testament; 2 Out of Bounds: Testamentary Fiction From The Tale of Gamelyn to As You Like It; Part II.

Natural Philosophy; 3 Petrified Unrest: Succession and Descent in Lancastrian Verse; 4 The Home-Bred Enemy: Inheritance and Constancy in Tudor and Stuart Writing; Part III.

World Histories; 5 Heavenly Inheritances; 6 The System of the World: Inheritance, Money, Modernity; Epilogue