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Introduction
- University of Notre Dame Press
- Chapter
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Introduction The divide between the medieval and the early modern (or Renaissance) periods is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in studies of the pastoral mode, in which the literature of the Middle Ages is often entirely absent. Either these studies begin with the sixteenthcentury pastoral of Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender or William Shakespeare’s plays, or they begin with the eclogues of Theocritus (or Virgil) and then skip the Middle Ages entirely to focus, once again, on sixteenth-century texts.1 More importantly, the underlying assumption of much of this work is that it is precisely the “newness” of the pastoral mode in the sixteenth century that makes it so rich and complex a literary mode, a position eloquently argued by Paul Alpers.2 This focus on novelty appears even in studies that present themselves as historical, most famously the series of essays by Louis Montrose on Elizabethan pastoral.3 For Montrose, the only history that matters is that of immediate context—that is, the social and political world of the Elizabethan court. Despite the wide range of approaches to pastoral , then, all of the studies implicitly reinforce a very traditional periodization : a clean break between the Middle Ages and the early modern period. At first glance, the neglect of medieval literature in the study of pastoral makes perfect sense. It is relatively easy to argue that there 1 was no pastoral—at least as far as this term refers to a classically influenced pastoral—before the rediscovery of Virgil’s Eclogues, which were first printed in England by Wynkyn de Worde in 1512. Or before the popularization and dissemination of the Adulescentia (1498), the eclogues by Baptista (Spagnuoli) Mantuanus, who was known as Mantuan in England. Mantuan’s eclogues quickly became a school text and were, therefore, read widely in sixteenth-century England.4 Medieval authors were not, in contrast to their early modern successors, particularly interested in Virgil’s Eclogues: although the Eclogues survive from the medieval period in almost as many manuscript copies as the Aeneid, very few authors allude to them or take them as a model.5 Even if one defines the pastoral somewhat more broadly than imitations of Virgil’s Eclogues—that is, to refer to any text with a similar interest in shepherds or shepherding—one is still hard-pressed to come up with anything resembling the pastoral of the sixteenth century and beyond. There are, of course, the nativity plays in the mystery cycles, which are commonly invoked to provide evidence of the continuity of pastoral , as in W.W. Greg’s comprehensive but dated Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama or Helen Cooper’s Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance. But it is worth noting the paucity of this evidence; the mystery plays are the only examples of medieval literature in the English vernacular that demonstrate any sustained interest in the shepherd as a character; even Greg notes that the “stream of pastoral . . . is reduced to the merest trickle” in the Middle Ages.6 Moreover, the mystery plays are somewhat difficult to assimilate to a classically influenced pastoral. Cooper uses a different term altogether, “bergerie,” to refer to them: bergerie “embraces both the realistic and artistic aspects of the shepherd world.”7 But her coining of a new term, one unfamiliar to an English tradition, also underlines, however unwittingly, the difference between these texts and the imitations of Virgilian pastoral that come later. Finally, perhaps the most recent study to compare the nativity plays to Renaissance pastoral finds them “alien” to it.8 Indeed, the difficulty of arguing for a medieval pastoral that is in any significant way continuous with the pastoral of the early modern period is evident in the one study that attempts to link the two periods: Cooper’s Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance, which ends up reinforcing the very divide that it means to 2 Transforming Work [3.235.22.225] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:18 GMT) call into question, namely, that between medieval traditions and the Italian, Arcadian pastoral that “displaced” them.9 The absence of a medieval pastoral that is continuous with the early modern period does not mean, however, the absence of any medieval influences on early modern pastoral; perhaps the question has been posed the wrong way thus far. Instead of assuming that the first writers of pastoral understood it exclusively by means of Virgil and Mantuan because that is how we, as later readers, understand it, we could try to recover the specificity...