English Fictions of Communal Identity, 1485–1603 (review)

Joshua Phillips begins his analysis of sixteenth-century English expressions of collective identity with a quotation from a Marian livery company charter which declares that the men of the company ‘may be in fact, deed and name one body by themselves for ever’. This is Phillips’s starting point for exploring how literature and rhetoric during the reigns of the Tudor monarchs preserved and endorsed ideas of collective identity and enterprise.

Phillips’s source range is eclectic. Although he has excluded lyric poetry, government documents (despite quoting the Marian charter), wills, and theological writings, he has used a wide range of texts in his study, including romances (especially Malory), fantasy writings (notably More’s Utopia), Edwardian Protestant writings, translations of the classics, and contemporary fictional works by Greene, Lodge, Sidney, and Nash. The common denominator among these texts, even the Edward Protestant writings, is that they are works of fiction.

Out of this body of writings, among them comedies, tragedies, mythological writings, and Protestant flights of fancy, Phillips seeks to adduce evidence for the enduring salience of ideas of the commons and of collective identities in post-medieval England. He reads these sources with a mind to the economic infrastructure of sixteenth-century England, whereby these fictions of collective identities ‘help to explain a property-based economy to itself while reminding it of the central importance of the commons’ (p. 5).

Drawing on this prose evidence, Phillips succeeds in advancing a fresh and stimulating appraisal of the fictional works and their interaction with a sixteenth-century readership. Asserting the capacity for society to have produced texts and meanings which conveyed a sense of collective identity, Phillips uses his evidence to reveal (borrowing Benedict Anderson’s concept) ‘imagined communities’ whose members were alert to collective bonds.

While his source base is sixteenth-century, Phillips’s conclusions also testify to recent patterns of thought indebted to sociology, behavioural economics, feminist theory, and legal studies, which have promoted the idea that the individual may not necessarily be a basic unit of knowing and acting. Phillips uses these insights to subvert traditional distinctions between the medieval person – thinking of himself as a member of a race or people – and the individualist outlook of the Renaissance. Instead he asserts that ‘we miss the extent to which group identification continued to be central to the experience of reality in the sixteenth century and beyond’ (p. 9).

Phillips skilfully interweaves these theoretical insights with the practical realities of sixteenth-century communal life, including linkages based on clientage, patronage, kinship and marriage, legal institutions, as well as more nebulous links derived from local custom, neighbourly proximity, and friendship.