"Reading a wide range of Early Modern authors and exploring their political, philosophical and scientific contexts, this book charts the movement away from reliance on collective experience, and the construction of the individual as the locus of authentic perception, thought and feeling, which occurs between the fourteenth and early eighteenth centuries. According to Nick Davis, much English writing of the period takes part in this development, examining it, resisting it, and advancing it in several forms. Among the writers discussed are Chaucer, Langland, Thomas More, Spenser, Nashe, Jonson, Middleton, the Shakespeare of the Henry IV - Henry V plays and The Winter's Tale, Hobbes, Bunyan, Defoe and Pope. From there, the book goes on to explore the legacy of Early Modern writing in our contemporary constructions of private experience"--