Read more
In early modern Europe, literature and literate knowledge were produced within societies organised along hierarchical lines. What difference did that make to literature and literate knowledge? How were they inflected by social hierarchy? This volume asks these questions of genres, disciplines, practices, and writers ranging across Western Europe.
List of contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1: NEIL KENNY: Introduction
- Language, Social Literacy, and Social Status
- 2: WARREN BOUTCHER: 'Noble ambition': New Social Literacies and Traditional Hierarchies in Early Modern European Literature and History
- 3: HELENA SANSON: Women's Social Status and their Access to Learning in Multilingual Early Modern Italy
- 4: CHRISTINE STEVENSON: English Builders in Translation
- Roles of Cultural Production in Social Status
- 5: IAN MACLEAN: The Social Status of Publishers of Learned Texts in Europe 1560-1630
- 6: SARAH GWYNETH ROSS: Literary Collaboration and Social Legitimacy in an Actor's Oeuvre: The Peculiar Case of Francesco Andreini (d.1624)
- 7: JANE STEVENSON: Marta Marchina, Poetry and Social Mobility in Baroque Rome
- Representing Social Status: Genres and Discourses
- 8: RICHARD OOSTERHOFF: The Idiota's Authority: Fifteenth-Century Hierarchies in Dialogue
- 9: SUSAN WISEMAN: Making 'Gypsies' in the English Reformation? Laws, Words and Texts (1530-1621)
- 10: JONATHAN PATTERSON: 'Greatness going off' in Renaissance Antony and Cleopatra Tragedies
- 11: RICHARD MCCABE: Tragedy, or the Fall of Middle-Class Men
- A Two-Way Relation
- 12: SIMON PARK: The Scribes of the Old Pillory: Hired Hands and their Customers in Sixteenth-Century Lisbon
- 13: COLIN BURROW: Authorship and Social Status in Early Modern England
- Index
About the author
Neil Kenny is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Professor of French at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy, where he is involved in language policy work as Lead Fellow for Languages. His publications include The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany (2004), Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France (2015), and Born to Write: Literary Families and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern France (2021), all with Oxford University Press.
Summary
The literature and literate knowledge that were produced in Europe from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries emanated from societies that were rigidly hierarchical. What difference did that fact make to the literature and literate knowledge? How did social hierarchy shape the production of literature and literate knowledge (by writers, patrons, printers) and their reception (by readers and audiences)? Literature, Learning, and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern Europe is the first book to ask these question of Western Europe, in relation to a wide range of genres, disciplines, practices, and writers. The picture that emerges is of literature and literate knowledge largely bolstering social hierarchies while also questioning at times the very basis on which societies measured the status and worth of their members.
Additional text
There is much to learn and consider in this erudite and engaging volume. Besides its novel insights, it offers a robust and salutary reminder of the extent to which social hierarchies preoccupied early moderns throughout Europe, and how central the production and distribution of status was to the meaning-making of early modern texts. While laying down a map for the broad dimensions of the relationship, Kenny and his contributors have opened a door that will no doubt inspire exploration for years to come.
