Making 'English eloquence': 'Tottel's Miscellany' and the English Renaissance.

摘要

The 1557 edition of Tottel's Miscellany is commonly known as the publication event that began the Renaissance in England. This project regards the 1557 publication of this early and influential poetry anthology as a watershed moment in the formation of the English literary canon. It revises received accounts of Renaissance literary history by revealing the social and political processes behind the dissemination of courtly lyric poetry, as well as by interrogating the book's canonization of courtly authors, such as Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, and of elite poetic forms, such as the sonnet. I argue that in the unstable political context of the 1550s, the Miscellany's poems became desirable tools with which non-courtly readers could negotiate their own changing social and religious identities using poetic language and forms endowed with the authority of the court. After the iconoclasm of the Henrician Reformation and during the violence of the Marian Counter-Reformation, the Miscellany offered English readers new icons of cultural coherence---the courtier poets---and a new cultural identity, as members of a learned community dedicated to cultivating "English eloquence." Nevertheless, I suggest, the book's print features reveal how carefully it constructed literary values that favored the elite forms and authors, and its multiple voices and perspectives challenge the division between elite and popular culture it helped to construct. By understanding the relationship between this landmark book's textual composition and its cultural context, we can appreciate more fully how the critical judgments of Tottel and his readers still actively shape the modern academic canon.