Literature, learning, and social Hierarchy in early modern Europe / edited by Neil Kenny.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Kenny, Neil, editor.

Series:

Proceedings of the British Academy ; 0068-1202 vol. 246.

Proceedings of the British Academy, 0068-1202 ; 246

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature and society--Europe--History.

Literature and society.

European literature--History and criticism.

European literature.

Books and reading--Social aspects--Europe--History.

Books and reading.

Europe--Intellectual life.

Europe.

Europe--History--1492-1648.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xi, 291 pages) : illustrations (some colour), portraits (some colour), facsimiles

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 2022.

Biography/History:

"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 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."--Page ix.

Summary:

"Before the ascendancy of the language of social class, European societies were conceived as hierarchies of orders, degrees, estates, dignities, and ranks. What was the relationship, from the fifteenth century to the seventeenth, between that social hierarchy and another major facet of early modern life—literature and learning (understood in a broad sense as literate cultural activity and production)? Literature and learning were not just contiguous with social hierarchy, but also overlapped with it. The volume fosters Europe-wide consideration of this relationship, rather than providing a systematic survey organized by territory, genre, discourse, or period. The territories featured are largely Western European—England, France, Germany and the Low Countries, Italy, and Portugal. The genres, discourses, and practices featured include poetry, theatre, masque, architecture, philosophy, law, printing, publishing, translating, and scribe-hiring. First, the volume examines the role of languages—especially elite written ones such as Latin, cosmopolitan vernaculars, or technical vocabulary—in enabling some groups to acquire social literacies and practices. The focus is not just on these processes of acquisition but also on the accompanying exclusions, resistances, doubts, and contradictions. Next, the role of cultural production in generating social status is examined in relation to printers and publishers, theatre actors, and a woman poet from an artisanal milieu. Some chapters then focus more on the literary and other representations themselves, examining how they represent social hierarchy and the place within it of certain groups. The closing chapters emphasize that the relationship of literature and learning to social hierarchy is profoundly two-way."--Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction / Neil Kenny

Part I Language, Social Literacy, and Social Status

‘Noble ambition’: New Social Literacies and Traditional Hierarchies in Early Modern European Literature and History / Warren Boutcher

Women’s Social Status and their Access to Learning in Multilingual Early Modern Italy / Helena Sanson

English Builders in Translation / Christine Stevenson

Part II Roles of Cultural Production in Social Status

The Social Status of Publishers of Learned Texts in Europe, 1560–1630 / Ian Maclean

Literary Collaboration and Social Legitimacy in an Actor’s Oeuvre: The Peculiar Case of Francesco Andreini (d.1624) / Sarah Gwyneth Ross

Marta Marchina, Poetry, and Social Mobility in Baroque Rome / Jane Stevenson

Part III Representing Social Status: Genres and Discourses

The Idiota’s Authority: Fifteenth-Century Hierarchies in Dialogue / Richard J. Oosterhoff

Making ‘Gypsies’ in the English Reformation? Laws, Words, and Texts (1530–1621) / Susan Wiseman

‘Greatness going off’ in Renaissance Antony and Cleopatra Tragedies / Jonathan Patterson

Tragedy, or the Fall of Middle-Class Men / Richard McCabe

Part IV A Two-Way Relation

The Scribes of the Old Pillory: Hired Hands and their Customers in Sixteenth-Century Lisbon / Simon Park

Authorship and Social Status in Early Modern England / Colin Burrow.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

1-80596-077-6

1-80596-048-2

0-19-197673-3

OCLC:

1369676460