David Landreth works on the literature and culture of Tudor and early Stuart England. His main expertise is in materialism (in its Marxist, ancient, and "new materialist" manifestations); he is also engaged by problems of word and image, religiosity, and humanist learning. His current project looks at the scholarly and poetic project of "Renaissance"--the rebirth of the past in the present--as a scene of tumultuous feeling, both positive and negative, and construes both "feeling" and "past" in terms that are as materialist and sensuous as he can push them to be. The emotional patterns that have emerged as central to this investigation trace a strange set of interactions among envy, charity, glory, and shame in Renaissance approaches to matters from the medieval and classical past.