Contributors Luca Baratta graduated from the University of Florence in 2010 with a thesis entitled The Crying Sinne of Bloud: Le streghe del Lancashire tra storia e letteratura. He is currently a PhD candidate in Languages, Literatures and Comparative Cultures at the same institution. At Florence University, he worked as a Tutor in 2009- 2010. He also served in the National Voluntary Service (2010-2011). His doctoral research project deals with the ‘perception of the monstrous in Early Modern England’. Janet Clare is professor of Renaissance Literature and Director of the Andrew Marvell Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Hull, UK. Among her publications are Art Made Tongue-tied by Authority: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (second edition, 1999), Drama of the English Republic, 1649-1660 (2005) and Revenge Tragedies of the Renaissance (2006). With Stephen O’Neill, she has co-edited Shakespeare and the Irish Writer (2010). She is currently working on Shakespeare and textual traffic. David Cressy is a historian of early modern Britain, interested in English society, culture, and religion from the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth century. He is currently George III Professor of British History and Humanities Distin- guished Professor of History at Ohio State University. His publications include Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980), Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1997), England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution 1640-1642 (Oxford, 2006), and Dangerous Talk: Scandalous, Seditious and Treasonable Speech in Pre-Modern England (Oxford, 2010). Ann Kaegi is a lecturer in English at the University of Hull. She has written on Shakespeare, civic politics and political persuasion in early modern drama, and contributed an introduction and revised notes to the Penguin Shakespeare edition of Henry V. Roberta Mullini is professor of English Literature and History of English Thea- tre at the University of Urbino. She has written extensively on late medieval and Shakespearean theatre and drama (Corruttore di parole. Il fool nel teatro di Shakespeare, 1983; La scena della memoria. Intertestualità nel teatro Tudor, 1988; Dramma e teatro nel Medio Evo inglese, 1376-1558, 1992; Mad merry Heywood, 1997), but also on First World War Poetry (Killed in Action, 1977), and on David Lodge’s novels (Il demone della forma, 2001). She is currently studying forms of early modern marginal spectacles, in particular those of London quacks, and the relationship between Shakespeare and contemporary medical literature. Donatella Pallotti is associate professor of English Literature at the University of Florence. Her research interests focus primarily on early modern culture, Journal of Early Modern Studies, n. 2 (2013), pp. 299-300 http://www.fupress.com/bsfm-jems ISSN 2279-7149 (online) 2012 Firenze University Press 300 contributors Modernism, stylistics and literary pragmatics. She has written on the stylistics of poetry, Donne’s poetry, Shakespeare’s and Isabella Andreini’s sonnets, psalm translation in verse, women’s prophecy, spiritual testimonies, and on the moral debate on dance. She has also devoted attention to Joyce’s Giacomo Joyce and Ulysses. She is currently working on seventeenth-century radical literature and on the representations of rape in early modern culture. She is editor, with Paola Pugliatti, of Journal of Early Modern Studies. Natália Pikli, PhD, is senior lecturer at the Department of English, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, where she has been teaching courses on Shakespeare, me- dieval and early modern English Literature and contemporary literature. Her research focuses on Shakespeare and early modern popular culture, the carni- valesque and cultural memory. She has published extensively on these topics both in English and in Hungarian (eg. ‘Across Cultures: Shakespeare and the Carnivalesque Shrew’, European Journal of English Studies 14, 3, 2010). Her other scholarly interests include the present-day reception of Shakespeare and contemporary English and Hungarian poetry and drama. Paola Pugliatti has been professor of English Literature at the University of Florence and has also taught at the Universities of Messina, Bologna and Pisa. She has written extensively on Shakespeare and on the European Renaissance and has also devoted attention to the study of literary genres (drama and the novel in particular) both in a critical and in a theoretical perspective. Another field of interest is modernist literature and in particular James Joyce’s Ulysses. Her latest book-length studies are Beggary and Theatre in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2003) and Shakespeare and the Just War Tradition (Ashgate, 2010). She is editor, with Donatella Pallotti, of Journal of Early Modern Studies. Ciara Rawnsley is a PhD candidate in English and Cultural Studies at the Uni- versity of Western Australia. Her thesis focuses on identifying and exploring previously neglected sources of Shakespeare’s plays: in particular, the traditional oral folk- and fairy tales which would have been in circulation in Elizabethan England. She aims to illustrate not only why, but also how Shakespeare drew on these old stories, and in the process offer an innovative perspective on both the plays and the playwright’s creative processes. James Sharpe gained his BA (First Class Honours) and DPhil from the University of Oxford. He entered employment at the University of York in October 1973, after holding temporary appointments at Durham and Exeter Universities. He teaches, researches and publishes mainly in the field of early modern English history, and especially on the history of crime, and on witchcraft. His major books on witchcraft include Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550 – 1750 (Hamish Hamilton, 1996) and The Bewitching of Anne Gunter: A Hor- rible and True Story of Deception, Witchcraft, Football and the King of England (Profile Books, 1999). He is currently researching in the history of violence.