The first genuinely interdisciplinary study of creativity in early modern England

This book assesses the conceptual and structural factors influencing approaches to artistic invention in seventeenth-century England. Understanding creativity in this period is a particular challenge for the modern scholar because so many of the basic tenets we take for granted in considering creativity today - such as the primacy of the author and notions of human imagination, inspiration, originality and genius - were only fully developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This book explores ways in which we can seek to understand what it meant to be creative in early modern England, highlighting a wide range of ideas, beliefs and approaches and placing them in the context of the prevailing intellectual, social and cultural trends of the period.