Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 1430–1530 (review)

As Daniel Wakelin admits early in his deeply-researched, wide-ranging, and often witty book, “The most rigorous historians and the most hostile critics have recently seen the humanist not as the saviour of civic life but as a banal grammarian” (16). No banal grammarians here: by glossing humanist glosses and reading humanist readings, Wakelin restores interest in an unusual list of English writers and illuminates an important but little-known period (1430–1530) in the history of humanism. Wakelin uncovers a pervasive, vernacular humanist activity in England that differs from both earlier and later Latinate-humanist engagements with antiquity. Scholars of more traditionally defined “Renaissance” humanism will benefit from Wakelin’s longer and thus tempered view of the usual claim to sixteenth-century novelty; likewise, medievalists curious about later uses made of Vegetius, Boccaccio, or Chartier, not to mention Cicero and Seneca, will benefit from a look at the divergent afterlives presented here. Reading this book, one feels unspoken arguments in the wings — Christine de Pizan, for instance, is only mentioned here a few times, and John of Salisbury not at all, but Wakelin’s approach from readership habits and the history of print culture would further develop what Jeffery Richards and others have said about Christine’s humanism, and what some political theorists have said about Salisbury.

Not that the book isn’t already packed with writers known and little-known. The usual suspects are here — More, Colet, Medwall, Elyot — but so are good readings of the Somnium Vigilantis, of Thomas Chaundler’s Libellus, and of Osbern Bokenham; Stilicho enters as a resonant exemplum (the savvy arguments of A. S. G. Edwards here extended). Wakelin also recovers Thomas Lupset (ca. 1496–1530) and returns often to that most prolific author, Anonymous, revealing the humanist elements surrounding such treatises as On Husbandrie. Likewise, annotations of copies of Boethius (Caxton’s, especially) yield amusing material that connects us with actual readers in all their variety. The importance of French for English humanists is a recurring but perhaps too-quiet note here, as in a discussion of the fall-of-princes traditions that will interest Shakespeareans and Baldwin scholars (“The Real Reading of the Fall of Princes”). Chapters on William of Worcester and on Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester offer intriguing new readings of these more familiar figures. Duke Humfrey, according to Wakelin, was more than just a showy, book-buying aristocrat; beyond David Rundle’s and others’ notions, Wakelin presents a complex picture of Humfrey’s patronage, book ownership, and reading. (For one thing, Humfrey was not the only humanist intellectual whose contemplative “reading [was] wedged tightly into the active life” [31].) Unifying this richly varied material is the book’s focus on the activities of readers; sub-threads on, for example, debating and eloquence prove humanist discourses to have been less stable and more contested in the fifteenth century than is generally appreciated.

Discussion of early print culture is strongest in one chapter, “Print and the Reproduction of Humanist Readers.” Printers like Colard Mansion and his junior colleague William Caxton promote the vernacular humanism already thriving. I wish Wakelin had also treated Antoine Vérard, whose work and whose English connections would expand further this view of early printers’ humanist tendencies. Wakelin also considers some of Caxton’s engagements with Continental humanism and treats Berthelet and his highly variable readers (“Tudor Readers and their Freedom”). Tudor printing added newly empowered Ciceronian elements to the scene, accelerating and enriching humanist textual practices, as we might expect when a new medium broadens readerships so suddenly.

The wealth of primary evidence here includes some 120 manuscripts, around seventy incunables, and a wide array of sixteenth-century books. In this wealth there are very few errors that matter. “Allusion, Translation, and Mistranslation” (especially pages 78–92) needs much stronger grounding in translation theory; “mistranslation” is a misnomer for the phenomena of crosscultural transformation so well detailed here, which could be more fruitfully...