Introduction Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass; Part I. Priority of Objects: 1. The ideology of superfluous things: King Lear as period piece Margreta de Grazia; 2. Rude mechanicals Patricia Parker; 3. Spenser's domestic domain: poetry property and the Early Modern subject Louis A. Montrose; Part II. Materialisations: 4. Gendering the Crown Stephen Orgel; 5. The unauthored 1539 volume in which is printed the Hecatomphile, The Flowers of French Poetry and Other Soothing Things Nancy J. Vickers; 6. Dematerialisations: textile and textual properties in Ovid, Sandys, and Spenser Ann Rosalind Jones; Part III. Appropriations: 7. Freedom service and the trade in slaves: the problem of labour in Paradise Lost Maureen Quilligan; 8. Feathers and flies: Aphra Behn and the seventeenth-century trade in exotica Margaret W. Ferguson; 9. Unlearning the Aztec Cantares (Preliminaries to a postcolonial history) Gary Tomlinson; Part IV. Fetishisms: 10. Worn worlds: clothes and identity on the Renaissance stage Peter Stallybrass; 11. The Countess of Pembroke's literal translation Jonathan Goldberg; 12. Remnants of the sacred in early modern England Stephen Greenblatt; Part V. Objections: 13. The insincerity of women Marjorie Garber; 14. Desire is death Jonathan Dollimore; Index.