Come Live With Me and Feed My Sheep: Invitation, Ownership, and Belonging in Early Modern Pastoral Literature

Abstract

pastoral has most often been understood as a literature of place, of community, or of ethos. Critics such as Paul Alpers and Nancy Lindheim have revised the traditional view of pastoral as characterized mainly by the tensions between the court and the country landscape to emphasize instead the community of shepherds interacting in this rural setting and the ethos of those characters.1 However, pastoral texts, along with their settings and characters, are conveyed to us through language, and a closer examination of the patterns of language that construct the pastoral is needed. One such pattern in particular affords readers the opportunity to see how pastoral connects the materials of the rural landscape with the social life of its resident communities and their ethos: the speech act of invitation. The role of this speech act in pastoral literature has not received enough critical attention, though it is a constitutive element of the pastoral world. In pastoral works, an invitation accomplishes a number of things by calling attention to both material items and social relationships. The invitation demonstrates that the pastoral landscape has something to offer, whether it is a rustic feast, country entertainments, or simply a homely cottage in which to rest for the night. And as it is extended from one person to another, the invitation highlights the community of pastoral that exists amidst the material aspects of rural life.