English Humanist Research Articles

Poetry, Patronage, and the Art of the Land-grab: A Newly Discovered Letter to Thomas Wyatt

Abstract Between early summer 1540 and the new year of 1541, Alexander Nowell composed the only surviving Latin letter from England to Sir Thomas Wyatt. On behalf of the Dean and Chapter of Norwich Cathedral, he asks Wyatt, Sir Francis Bryan, and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, to help the new foundation resist the expropriation of its properties. The letter fills in several biographical lacunae for this prominent trio of courtiers. It provides primary evidence of Wyatt’s membership and sponsorship of English humanist networks. It offers the first sure evidence of Wyatt’s contact with Surrey, corroborating the evidence of Surrey’s poetry. It reveals the association of Wyatt, Surrey, and Bryan with evangelical figures: Nowell, later Dean of St Paul’s, was already a central figure in Oxford reform. And it presents an intricate example of the chains of patronage that reached, in the wake of the dissolution, across the universities, the new fleet of cathedral foundations, and the heights of the Henrician court.

Becoming Visible

While in England the memory of Thomas More had been erased from public life after his execution (6 June 1535), English Catholics exiled in the Spanish Netherlands preserved his figure and legacy. Furthermore, the inclusion of More’s engraving in 16th-century portrait books of distinguished personalities–the so-called viri illustres genre–, contributed to the promotion of the famous English humanist in continental Europe. Soon, More’s integrity and wisdom were extolled not only in works printed in Catholic countries but also in other territories that no longer accepted Rome’s authority. This paper analyses the depiction (both image and text) of the English humanist in all these works. The visual and textual rhetoric of these engravings shows their mutual dependence.

The Contingency of Form in Renaissance Poetics

AbstractMetaphrasis is an exercise of the English humanist schoolroom that harbors both a theory of form and a method of reading. From the perspective of metaphrasis, the central question one asks of a form is not what it is. Metaphrasis encourages us to ask, instead: What is the range of this poem's formal possibilities? What variety of forms might this poem take? What variety of forms should this poem take? Or what variety of forms would this poem take under a specific set of alternative conditions, whether we conceive of those conditions along historical, aesthetic, or ethical axes? In this essay, I take up a single stanza from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1596), and I argue that where form establishes the parameters of possibility for a poem, the critical activity of metaphrasis permits us to imagine the world of the poem otherwise.

Introduction: Margin Release

Introduction: Margin Release

La experiencia de la hospitalidad en la callípolis utópica de Tomás Moro

The callipolis or “beautiful city” is one of the paradigms of the Theory of the Fictive City, understood as the city that is born specifically from the literary aesthetic construction. The callipolis has its foundations in the archaic cosmogony, which conceived the city as an idealization of celestial perfection. It is in close relation with the Utopia of Thomas More and with the New World, which, for the English humanist, is the place where the common good, justice and happiness can exist in fullness. Through the narrations of his alter ego Raphael Hythlodaeus, the Portuguese discoverer of the island, More lives the experience of hospitality in Amaurot, the utopian callipolis , as an exercise of acceptance of the new, the otherness and the tolerance. In his neologism, “Utopia”, More harbors the love for knowledge, for faith and for the harmony of beings, even if it is in a “no place”.

The Renaissance Reform of the Book and Britain: The English Quattrocento by David Rundle

Reviewed by: The Renaissance Reform of the Book and Britain: The English Quattrocento by David Rundle Mimi Ensley Renaissance, periodization, manuscript studies, humanism David Rundle. The Renaissance Reform of the Book and Britain: The English Quattrocento. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 362 pp., 54 black and white illustrations + 16 color illustrations. $99.99. ISBN: 978-1-107-19343-7. David Rundle's The Renaissance Reform of the Book and Britain challenges the notion that England's was a belated engagement with Renaissance humanism. The book thereby problematizes existing conceptions of "medieval" and "Renaissance" in Britain.While scholars have become increasingly comfortable upsetting traditional period divisions and questioning grand narratives about England's Renaissance, Rundle adds to such work through his particular focus on scribes, scripts, and manuscripts. This work thus supplements and enriches such existing studies as Daniel Wakelin's Humanism, Reading, and English Literature (2007) and David R. Carlson's English Humanist Books (1993). While Rundle's paleographical work is the book's methodological backbone, he uses this bibliographical focus to support several case studies centered around particular characters—the book's "heroes," as Rundle sometimes calls them. The reader encounters such well-known figures as Pieter Meghen and Poggio Bracciolini alongside understudied personages like George of Kynninmonth, whom Rundle deems Scotland's first humanist, and Petrus Lomer, a humanist scribe active in England in the early fifteenth century. Rundle's "heroes" originate om and migrate between such locales as Venice, Oxford, Scotland, Rome, Westminster, and the Low Countries, weaving together a story of humanism in which Italy is one node among many in the spread of humanist practices. Indeed, the cosmopolitan nature of humanist scribes and their influences is one of several interrelated themes in Rundle's book. The humanist reform of the book, Rundle argues, was not a case of Italians spreading their scribal practices unidirectionally; instead, non-Italians had considerable agency in the development of humanist scripts and manuscript designs. [End Page 350] Moreover, in addition to the geographic mobility of scribes, Rundle emphasizes their "graphic mobility," their ability to incorporate elements of humanist scripts but not abandon other forms entirely. That a scribe could shift between a variety of modes with ease is a claim central to the book's arguments about periodization. The rise of humanist bookhands in England is not a starting point for inevitable progress away om the "medieval." Rather, humanist scripts became an additional tool in the scribe's existing retinue. Rundle develops these claims across six main chapters and a conclusion, all of which merge careful paleographical study with historical contextualization to revise existing narratives about the Renaissance in England. Chapter 1 sets up the rest of the book, as Rundle describes the key features of littera antiqua and humanist scribal practices. Here, and throughout the book, Rundle centers humanist work occurring in England and by non- Italians, turning om Poggio Bracciolini and Niccolò Niccoli to Tito Livio Frulovisi, whose four years of work in England influenced English practices. Next, Chapter 2's argument is primarily temporal, showing that England's engagements with the humanist scripts was not belated but instead began well before the Tudors. In Rundle's words, the "earlier decades of the fifteenth century provide not a prelude but the defining first acts" of humanism's story in England (51). To show this, Rundle traces networks of influence, what he calls "palaeographical prosopography," demonstrating how the scripts of Italians in England shaped their non-Italian associates' works. Where Chapter 2 examines humanist scripts produced in England, Chapter 3 looks to British scribes abroad. While Rundle finds records of relatively large numbers of non-Italians at work as scribes in Italy, British copyists are more difficult to track down with certainty. Still, George of Kynninmonth, "Scotland's first humanist," proves a fascinating non-English case study and further demonstrates the polygraphism central to Rundle's claims. In Chapter 4, focus shifts to the Low Countries, and Rundle demonstrates how scribes om the Netherlands, including Theodric Werken and Pieter Meghen, were significant in shaping humanist work in England. The chapter also includes an intriguing section about the effects of printed books on the scribes featured, suggesting that...

Non temere sed iudicio. Prozesse der Urteilsfindung in und um Thomas Morus’ Utopia

Non temere sed iudicio. Prozesse der Urteilsfindung in und um Thomas Morus’ UtopiaThis article sheds light on the term iudicium (“judgment”) and its use in Thomas More’s Utopia. The methodological approach comprises a lexicographic examination of iudicium and semantically related terms, which serves as a basis for the subsequent close reading of core passages of Utopia. The chosen extracts are indicative of a meticulously calibrated game that the English humanist engages in: thematic bipolarities between books one and two generate fields of tension, in which processes of judgment emerge as vital catalysts to transport innovative ideas, which call for changes of the juridical status quo as well as the prevailing corruption of values in contemporary England. The concluding examination of the paratexts surrounding Utopia (i.e. letters of the author to his humanist friends) and their thematization of iudicium contribute an additional layer to the literary‑aesthetic understanding and the intended reception of this epochal work.

La fille qui n’a point d’amy: Secular and Ecclesiastical Friends of an Abandoned Girl

Transmitted in different textures and versions in Flemish, French, Italian, and German sources between about 1480 until 1549, the song À qui dir’elle sa pensée/La fille qui n’a point d’amy enjoyed an incredibly long life. The four-voice version in RISM 15022 seems to have inspired an anonymous mass in VatS 23. The two-voice arrangement, however, was the most long-lived. The latest source of the duo, Rotenbucher’s Diphona amoena et florida published in Nuremberg by Montanus and Neuber in 1549 (RISM 154916) is also the only source carrying a composer attribution. Like most duos in Rotenbucher’s collection, the original text is substituted with a Latin contrafactum. The present essay identifies for the first time the-mainly classical-sources of many of the contrafacted texts, and reveals that Nunquam vixisti, o pauper, the contrafactum of our duo, is in effect a Latin translation of a poem from the Greek Anthologia Palatina authored by none other than the English humanist Thomas More. In addition, the essay tackles the issue of the identity of ‘Jacotin’, the composer named in the Rotenbucher contrafactum.

Da memória da utopia: a função autonoética dos programas comemorativos dos 500 anos da publicação de Utopia, de Thomas More, no Reino Unido, França e Portugal

In 2016, the commemorative programmes of the 500th anniversary of the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia celebrated not only the life of the English humanist but also his work. It is still to be understood, however, if the memory of the past was summoned to make us better understand the past (intransitive memory) or to make us better understand the present and its future possibilities (transitive memory). This study, made under the theoretical umbrella of Memory Studies, examines the commemorative programmes held in the UK, France, and Portugal, underlining the significance of More’s work for the definition of the diachronic identity of those nations.

Utopia as a Tool for Change: A Review of Publications on Utopia in France (2016 and the First Semester of 2017)

Utopia as a Tool for Change: A Review of Publications on Utopia in France (2016 and the First Semester of 2017)

Dramatic texts in the Tudor curriculum: John Palsgrave and the Henrician educational reforms

AbstractIn 1540, the English humanist scholar, schoolmaster, and royal chaplain John Palsgrave (d. 1554) published a bilingual Latin‐English annotated edition of the Dutch humanist and reformer Wilhelm Gnapheus’ (1493–1568) widely popular play Acolastus (1529). Palsgrave's Acolastus reflects a growing trend in England and on the continent to Christianize Terence for classroom use, to expurgate or simply move away from the morally ambiguous classical playwrights. More importantly, the English edition of Acolastus was meant to form part, as a proposed standardized text, of the educational reforms of the late 1530s initiated by the government in accordance with the Protestant policy to reorganize grammar schools and unify their curriculum. As part of these reforms, Palsgrave elevated the educational function of dramatic texts by selecting a contemporary neo‐Latin play as a model for textual exegesis in class and by making it the main source of Latin language practice. Palsgrave's extensive annotations reveal how dramatic texts were taught, analysed, and applied not only to practical rhetorical training performed on stage, but also to the grammatical and ethical reading of literary texts in the lower forms of English grammar schools. Furthermore, Palsgrave's annotations attest to a much broader pedagogical application of English translations, highlighting a conscious vernacularization within the humanist curriculum that took place considerably earlier in the sixteenth century than has been hitherto assumed.

Fire under the Ashes: An Atlantic History of the English Revolution, by John Donoghue

Fire under the Ashes: An Atlantic History of the English Revolution, by John Donoghue. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2013. xii, 373 pp. $45.00 US (cloth). An early-modern Londoner walking in a north-easterly direction from St Paul's would soon reach the principal setting for John Donoghue's evocative Fire under the Ashes: Coleman Street. However, far from offering a parochial perspective on a well-trodden part of London's urban history, Donoghue locates the street in a grander--and global--scale. It is the centre of a compelling study of how the English Revolution should be understood as an Atlantic event. The cast of characters Donoghue resurrects include godly radicals, republicans, merchant revolutionaries and New England puritans. What emerges is an ambitious effort to demonstrate how the trans-Atlantic circulation of people, ideas and goods contributed to some of the most important events, and political and religious ideas of the Revolution. Moreover, the people Donoghue traces were, on the one hand, integral to the early days of English imperialism, and, in the opposing other hand, laid the foundation for abolitionist thought. In short, the Revolution resulted in a dialectic between advocates for slavery, and those for freedom. Donoghue's work demonstrates the fecund possibilities of interconnecting several, often distinct historiographies and fields of research under the general rubric of Atlantic history. The book benefits from a generation of scholarship emphasizing the influence that the Atlantic could have over the political, religious, and economic experiences of people living in the British archipelago. Fire under the Ashes rests upon a close reading of the networks of associates who lived, worked or passed through Coleman Street, and their connections and movement to the English colonies. Indeed, with such an approach Donoghue provides scholars of the English Revolution with fresh perspectives upon the conventional narrative of the 1640s and 1650s, and the lasting significance of those tumultuous decades. Through a series of, by turns, escalating and cascading arguments, Donoghue switches between the local of Coleman Street, with its close links to the antinomian underground of the 1630s, to the global, signified by English colonies, trading companies and settler-Native American relations. Chapters on New and Old England alternate in a structure that serves the author's aim to move beyond national historiography [and] recapture the seventeenth century view of colonisation and the English Revolution and interrelated, interdependent developments in a wider Atlantic history (p. 3). Chapter one introduces the Coleman Street Ward, establishing its radical credentials. Donoghue illustrates how it was home to both the founding participants in a militant Protestant empire grounded in English humanist thought, and, conversely, to people who sought to build opposition to the political enslavement of the poor and itinerant class. Chapter two moves to New England, and demonstrates how the network of associates in Coleman Street spread across the Atlantic. …

Rhetoric of Counsel in Thomas Elyot's Pasquil the Playne

Pasquil the Playne, a dialogue written by the English Humanist Thomas Elyot (1490–1546), was inspired by Elyot's unsuccessful experience as a counselor to Henry VIII. Seizing on this biographical context, historians have read the dialogue as a product of Elyot's disillusionment, identifying Elyot with the blunt, truth-telling Pasquil. In contrast this paper reads Pasquil the Playne as a multi-voiced Lucianic dialogue, which gives expression to several perspectives on the rhetoric of counsel. This reading problematizes questions of appropriateness (prepon) and right timing (kairos) in giving advice to a prince. Moreover, Elyot exploits the open-ended spirit of the Lucianic dialogue to attempt to develop in the reader the prudential reasoning (phronesis) essential to wise counsel.

Utopía e ironía en el contexto de Tomás Moro

The usual conception of the idea of Utopia is that of a social entity that, because of its own perfection, cannot exist in the real world. This conception is preeminent not only in modern and contemporary thinking, but also in the interpretations of More’s Utopia: according such idea, in the utopian republic, the humanist creates a perfect state, but unreal, and because of that, he places it in the island named noplace. This interpretation forgets the auto-ironical elements in Utopia, whose presence in the work avoids reading it according the scheme ideal perfection-real imperfection. We try a more “hermeneutic” reading of the english humanist’s work.

Humanism, Reading, and English Literature 1430-1530

Was humanism without Latin a dead letter? The early quattrocento scholars who brandished the term studia humanitatis as their new slogan would have said so; their commitment to the language of Cicero was at the expense of the volgare. We might wish it were not so, and strain to link humanism with vernaculars far removed from the Italian peninsula. There is a lazy way of achieving this, by taking ‘humanism’ to be a Weltanschauung which spread across Europe and could be adopted in many tongues. Or there is a more forensic—and less tried—course which involves isolating what is particular in humanist practice and detecting moments when those habits or gestures were transferred to literatures in other traditions. Dr Wakelin follows this second route and with painstaking skill and shrewd insight compiles a new tale very much worth telling. Wakelin takes his story from the circle around Humfrey, duke of Gloucester, in the 1430s to Elyot and Lupset writing a century later. What he detects is that, alongside English interest in humanist writings in their original Latin, there developed a tradition of vernacular engagement with the studia humanitatis, expressed through the practice of translation and the adoption of humanist gestures. Like English humanist interest itself, this tradition of engagement did not have to wait for Henry VII and his successors to begin. It developed within manuscript culture; but, at the end of the fifteenth century, it became ‘institutionalised’—and, one might say, downgraded to a classroom skill, as Wakelin suggests in his discussion of John Anwykyll's remedial grammatical textbooks. The writers who walk across the pages of this book include John Lydgate, William Caxton and Thomas More but, for the most part, they are either lesser names such as Osbern Bokenham and Henry Medwall, or authors and readers who lurk in anonymity.

English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475-1525; Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England

English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475-1525; Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England

Early Calvinist Resistance Theory: New Perspectives on an Old Label

In the article The Use of Natural Law in Early Calvinist Resistance Theory, David VanDrunen, Robert B. Strimple Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics at Westminster Seminary (California), analyzes natural law as it appeared in the writings of several sixteenth—century resistance theorists—John Knox, Christopher Goodman, John Ponet, Theodore Beza, Francois Hotman, and the unknown writer of Vindiciae contra Tyrannos. Van Drunen's article is much needed, since Richard Tuck, in his otherwise astute 1979 study on natural law, does not adequately address Reformation-era developments, focusing instead on Thomas Hobbes, Samuel Pufendorf, and other seventeenth-century theorists. Nevertheless, I take issue with Van Drunen's assertion that these writers were all “committed to the theology of Calvin” and were “early Calvinist resistance theorists.” One could make the case that most of these writers were, but there is one notable exception: English reformer, humanist, bishop, and polemicist John Ponet.

Ascham's The Scholemaster, Italianate Englishmen, and the Protestant Circe

The Scholemaster (1570) is widely acknowledged as one of the great works of the English humanist tradition. However, in his radical appropriation of the Homeric story of Odysseus and Circe—part of Roger Aschams sixteen-page diatribe against Italy, Italians, and “Italianate Englishmen” that closes Book 1 of the treatise—there emerges an unresolved tension between his reverence for classical learning and his own version of Protestant docta pietas. He tendentiously re-imagines Homer's wily protagonist as a docile figure of piety and self-control and he willingly ignores much of the rich classical tradition as he portrays Circe as merely a temptress of wayfaring travelers. This discussion examines Aschams re-imagining of Homer's story in light of several key sixteenth-century historical and theological sources, concluding that Ascham views good education as the sole and necessary defense against the enchantments of his Italianate Circe.

Faith and Forgiveness: Lessons in Statecraft for Queen Mary Tudor

The last work of English humanist Henry Parker, Lord Morley, An Account of Miracles Performed by the Holy Eucharist, contained valuable advice for the realm's first ruling queen, Mary Tudor. Cognizant of the special challenges facing a female ruler, Morley delineated guidelines enabling the new queen to combine an active public life with traditional pious devotions to which Mary was committed. He drew examples from recent and distant English history, citing the regimens of Mary's own great-grandmother Lady Margaret Beaufort and of twelfth-century queen Edith Maude. In direct response to political and economic dilemmas, Morley's work assured the queen of the rectitude of her religious stance. Morley's historical examples attempted a complex balance, reinforcing the power of the monarchy and moderating its harshest instincts. Morley also cited examples from his own life, not only to describe a proper role model for the queen but to explain and find forgiveness for his survival through more than seven decades ofTudor rule.

A Forerunner

In the course of this book we shall frequently appeal to what we call an Arnoldian filter, a principle we wish to urge for choosing much of what should form part of education in schools. This priniciple is based on a remark in Matthew Arnold's Preface to Culture and Anarchy,1 that culture is a matter of getting ‘to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world’ (1935, p.6, emphasis added). Arnold's work here and elsewhere is often seen as a key monument in English humanist thought. Trilling claims that ‘he established criticism as an intellectual discipline among the people of two nations and set its best tone’ (1949, p.3). It may not be of merely historical interest to consider some of the concerns that drove Arnold to offer culture in his sense as a contribution to contemporary and future society.