"Leah Marcus's The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes is a fascinating study of why James and Charles promoted some types of rural sport and festival and of how certain literary texts participated in promoting or critiquing royal policy. . . . Marcus provocatively links texts not often studied in conjunction with one another, and she provides strong and detailed readings of those texts."—Jean E. Howard The present study will focus on a marginal group of ceremonies related to the rites of church and state but practiced only sporadically in the seventeenth century--the traditional popular pastimes associated with seasonal holidays like Christmas, May Day, Whitsuntide, St. Bartholomew's Day and Michaelmas. Janel Mueller is a professor of English, the William Rainey Harper Professor in the College, and dean of the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Native Tongue and the Word: Developments in English Prose Style, 1380-1580 . Leah S. Marcus is the Edwin Mims Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Her books include Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents and Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton . With Mary Beth Rose, Mueller and Marcus edited Elizabeth I: Collected Works .