Humanism, Reading, and English Literature 1430-1530

Abstract

This book traces the influence of humanism on English literature during the fifteenth century, much earlier than the influence is usually thought to be felt. It considers humanist influences on the reception of some of Chaucer's work and on important authors such as John Lydgate, Osbern Bokenham, William Caxton, Sir John Tiptoft, Henry Medwall, and Sir Thomas Elyot, and in many anonymous translations, political treatises, and documents such as On Husbondrie, Knyghthode and Bataile, and Somnium Vigilantis. At its heart is a consideration of William Worcester, the 18h-century scholar. The method is a blend of literary criticism and codicology, informed by an interest in the ‘history of reading’ more common in studies of the late 16th and 17th centuries than of earlier periods. The book examines evidence in manuscript and early print of the English study and imitation of antiquity, in marginalia on classical works, and in the ways in which people copied and shared translations. It then examines how various English works were shaped by such reading-habits and, in turn, how those English works reshaped the reading-habits of the wider community. Humanism thus, contrary to recent strictures against it, appears not as ‘top-down’ dissemination but as a practical process of give-and-take between writers and readers. Humanism also prompts writers to imagine their potential readership in ways which challenge them to re-imagine the commonweal, common good, or imagined community of the realm, and the intellectual freedom of the reader.