Unpopular Literature? John Heywood’s The Spider and the Flie

Abstract

This article examines an idiosyncratic, lavishly illustrated mid-Tudor English printed book, John Heywood’s The Spider and the Flie (1556), a book condemned both in the sixteenth century and since as incomprehensible and virtually unreadable. The article argues, rather, that the book’s gestation period was long and complex, but that, once this is understood, the book becomes readily comprehensible, in both its structure and implications. It looks briefly at evidence for ownership of the book, and then moves to discuss what it, along with Heywood’s collected volumes of proverbs and epigrams, can contribute to a discussion of early-modern popular literature, the subject of the UNA Europa funded network, Popular Respublica Litteraria, to which this article is a contribution.