Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530-1580 (review)

This book sets out to redeem the mid-sixteenth century from the curse of C. S. Lewis's characterization of it as the "drab age" of Renaissance English literature by focusing on the period's developing ideas of nationhood as a "key to understanding the rich, untapped vein" of its texts (26). Cathy Shrank argues convincingly that the sense of the English nation often traced to late Elizabethan writings actually arises much earlier, in imaginative texts that shape the concerns and strategies of their more familiar successors. As humanism "changed direction" after the age of "internationalists" like More and Erasmus, "new generations of writers . . . used their humanist education to nurture national pride" (13), laboring to redefine Englishness in relation to classical and Continental cultures, and also to compose themselves as English authors in relation to the nation. Although Shrank singles out the break with Rome as the primary motive force behind new interest in nationhood, her focus is largely secular, complementing rather than competing with studies like John King's English Reformation Literature (1982). To more recent work on English national identity, most notably Richard Helgerson's Forms of Nationhood (1992) and Claire McEachern's Poetics of English Nationhood (1996), she contributes a crucial backstory, tracking shifts and continuities in a range of familiar themes, including promotion of English vernacular, rewriting of English history and literary history, and negotiation of the learned writer's role in national affairs.

Resisting the tendency of some historicist studies to treat writers and their works anecdotally, Shrank devotes each of her first five chapters to a single author, her sixth to two: Andrew Borde, John Leland, William Thomas, Thomas Smith, Thomas Wilson, and finally Spenser and Sidney. In most she juxtaposes more conventionally literary texts with writings from "seemingly 'factual' or prosaic genres," yet without the usual consequence of reducing all texts to the level of undifferentiated discourse. With bracing attention to form and style, she argues instead for the literariness of each of her chosen texts, highlighting their "inventiveness, subtexts, and even playfulness" (12).

Shrank is at her best when she is unearthing patterns of interest in long-neglected works. Her opening chapters are thus the book's strongest, surveying seldom-read texts by two authors who sought to make England "a second Rome" (23). The first explores the private and public writings of Andrew Borde, ex-Carthusian, doctor, and government informant reporting to Cromwell. When Borde promotes English independence and self-sufficiency, he simultaneously overwrites his suspect past, advancing two parallel projects of legitimation. Despite his reformist persona, Borde's writings "cling to tenets of the 'old' faith," reflecting the "uncertainty and confusion" of the first years after the break with Rome (29). A second chapter on John Leland traces other tensions inherent in portraying Reformation England as classically cultivated, particularly in the face of the wanton destruction of texts in monastery libraries. Shrank sets Leland's antiquarian writings alongside his less familiar Latin poetry to show that "patriotic humanism" unifies what has sometimes been criticized as the work of a "disorganizedpedant" (77, 68).

The second half of the book moves out of the Henrician era and into the age of "a more vernacular humanism" that blends classical and contemporary models for English nationhood (105). Chapter 3 examines the work of William Thomas, "one of the first writers to call for education in the English tongue" and an early proponent of the "dichotomous view of Italy's charms" familiar from laterElizabethan texts (23, 105). In chapters on Thomas Smith and Thomas Wilson, Shrank continues to trace variant strategies for promoting the English vernacular and applying humanist learning to national politics, contrasting Smith's commitment to a participatory commonwealth with Wilson's more exclusive, authoritarian vision. Ambivalences in Wilson's work recall the skepticism of More and Erasmus regarding the efficacy of humanist rhetoric in the world, and prefigure similar doubts in The Shepheardes Calender and the Old Arcadia...