Forming Sleep: Representing Consciousness in the English Renaissance. Nancy L. Simpson-Younger and Margaret Simon, eds. Cultural Inquiries in English Literature, 1400–1700 2. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. viii + 238 pp. $99.95

[...]whether the sleeping body was approached theologically, medically, or otherwise, it invited meditation not just on the senses but also on how the soul and consciousness operated. Giulio J. Pertile's chapter is of clear interest as it goes beyond the strict case-study perspective of the other essays and offers a rich survey of how sleep was represented—often in terms of insomnia and liminal states between the conscious and the unconscious—in Renaissance sonnets including Italian and French ones, but also Daniel's, Sidney's, and Wroth's sonnet sequences. [...]a focus, however, allows for insightful discussion of, for example, humoral theory (in Cassie M. Miura's chapter on Burton) and more broadly of the human faculties (in N. Amos Rothschild's chapter on Milton) and their relation to sleep.