Whichever Common People Do

Abstract

NEIL RHODES’S NEW ACCOUNT of the development of literary culture in the sixteenth century feels timely. Perhaps books about teaching always do, to teachers. While English literature holds out, wobblingly, on the Russell Group Informed Choices guide to ‘Facilitating Subjects’ at A-level (entries for English subjects down nearly a fifth since 2015, and 9 per cent in the past year alone), this book thinks historically about literary reach and literary point, what ought to constitute a literary agenda, and what stumps one. It asks whether the ideological – and the world-weary – undergraduates (and the ideological and the world-weary one-time undergraduates) of the English Renaissance thought you could make any money – or anything of yourself – in the big wide commonwealth with an arts degree from Cambridge; and if, indeed, not, what human or spiritual ‘profitability’ might be spun out of it instead. If it was all spin. At the fraught literary intersections and impersonations of ‘for the people’ and ‘of the people’, and between the shaking hands in Horatian negotiations of compromising and conciliating dulce and utile, Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth-Century England is a rigorous taxonomy of versions of the word ‘Common’ as defined through early modern writings of literary love and labour – and also, very much, vice versa (Rhodes is clear that, although its impetus is social, this is a book based in texts). Interested in interrogating the soapbox terminologies (ethical, aesthetic, religious, political) of literary-pedagogical undertakings, its most important keywords are ‘Renaissance’, ‘Reformation’, ‘Protestantism’, and ‘Humanism’. Rhodes’s main design is to make these four concerns lock arms – as he argues they too often don’t in early modern scholarship – to answer the question of what prompted the English Renaissance, and what prompted it to be so late.