Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Late Medieval Poetry by Katherine C. Little (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Late Medieval Poetry by Katherine C. Little Martine Van Elk katherine c. little, Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Late Medieval Poetry. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. ix, 256. isbn: 978–0–268–03387–3. $38. When Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale moves from the Sicilian court to the Bohemian countryside, the genre of pastoral is problematized immediately. Florizel and Perdita represent classical pastoral, centered on otium (idealized leisure) and love, and they highlight the traditional contrast between a corrupt court and an ideal countryside. But they are accompanied on stage by the comically realistic Old Shepherd and his son, who witness violence, know the habits of bears, count money, and are tricked by a wandering vagrant. Whereas Florizel gladly dresses up as a shepherd to court his love, the real shepherds abandon their sheep as soon as they find the baby Perdita and her riches—for these men, sheep herding is not an idealized profession but a life of hardship. Shakespeare’s juxtaposition of two types of literary shepherd resonates with Katherine Little’s recent study of early modern pastoral and its relationship to medieval literature. The usual critical approach to pastoral, she explains in the introduction, is to see it as a genre that did not exist in the Middle Ages; Virgil’s Eclogues, the central inspiration for pastoral poetry, were not imitated until the sixteenth century, the story goes, and when poets did turn to Virgil for inspiration, they made a clean break with the literary past. By contrast, Little finds that medieval literary traditions ‘haunt’ early modern pastoral. By approaching pastoral from the perspective of rural labor, she sheds light on the socio-economic, political, and religious significance of shifts in representations of the shepherd and rural labor more generally. For medieval writers, shepherds were workers like plowmen or they were used to symbolize priests in ecclesiastical pastoral; it did not occur to these writers to associate shepherds with leisure or love. Since labor was central to good works, shepherds often figured positively as models for human penance and morality, which gave them a potentially radical, reformist charge. The medieval shepherd contrasts with the Virgilian class-less shepherd, who was a poet and figure of otium. Yet, Little argues that the turn towards Virgil did not mean that pastoral erased the shepherd as rural laborer. Situating pastoral in the context of political and economic shifts of the period, including enclosures, rural rebellion, and the emergence of a proto-capitalist economy, she shows that the pastoral shepherd continued to be troubled by a his medieval counterpart. Little’s book moves chronologically from medieval literature to Spenser. After exploring rural labor in the mystery plays and works by Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and others, Little discusses the first English uses of Virgilian eclogue by [End Page 148] Barnabe Googe and Alexander Barclay, for whom the shepherd could be both a figure of leisure and a laborer. The anti-enclosure movement complicated matters further as the shepherd gained a new identity as a figure for proto-capitalism and came to be contrasted, rather than associated, with the plowman. Moreover, the Reformation would radically change how rural labor was represented. For Protestant thinkers like William Tyndale and Hugh Latimer, good works were not a means to salvation, so labor was emptied of its positive moral meaning and even denigrated. At the same time, sixteenth-century texts in the Piers Plowman tradition continued to represent work positively, revealing a wider ambivalence about Protestant transformations in perceptions of labor. Little’s study ends with two chapters devoted to Edmund Spenser. She shows that a variety of incarnations of the shepherd are present in his Shepheardes Calendar, leading to a deliberate generic ‘instability…due, at least in part, to the incompatibility of the Langlandian tradition with the eclogue’ (169). The Faerie Queene takes a step in a more radical direction: in Book Six, the shepherds are captured, taken into slavery, and eventually killed. The dangers of pastoral’s mystification of rural labor and its origins, then, are paradoxically expressed in a text that also celebrates pastoral. Moving deftly from Langland...