A Doctor of Another Facultie: Robert Aylett and Early Modern Interdisciplinary Poetics

Abstract

Despite having written hundreds of Spenserian stanzas, appearing in multiple volumes of divine poetry throughout the mid-seventeenth century, ecclesiastical lawyer Robert Aylett has been little remarked by Spenser scholars. His poems, it is widely agreed by his few commentators, are not very good. Aylett’s own texts and paratexts, however, plead indulgence of their readers on the grounds that their writer is neither a poet nor a divine but a lawyer, meddling amateurishly, with Kate Narveson’s “bible readers and lay writers,” in the domains of both literary and theological professionals. As well as one of the period’s overlooked Spenserians, then, Aylett is also useful as a figure for disrupting Richard Helgerson’s “literary system” of professional, amateur, and laureate poets, to find a space instead for the committed interdisciplinarian who commits his interdisciplinarity chiefly by way of poetics. This essay sets Aylett’s writing in the light of current and contemporary critical approaches to interdisciplinarity, to consider the motives and mechanics of borrowing rhymes to speak devotion. [E. O. W.]