Praise for Common

I was thrilled to see this review of my PhD supervisor, Neil Rhodes's recent book, Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth-Century England:

"As humanities scholars scurry to complete monographs at a speed that satisfies the demands of tenure and promotion, it has become sadly rare to produce scholarly books with a magisterial vista that engages a broad expanse of readers. Neil Rhodes's Common is an admirable exception to this trend. At its best, the book offers a fresh, new version of C. S. Lewis's 1954 English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press), one that not only includes (and culminates with) drama but also speaks to the social, political, and religious 'backgrounds' of English Renaissance literature." ― Jessica Wolfe, Sixteenth Century Journal

Rhodes brings into focus three classes of writing that Lewis side-lines in his famous survey of Sixteenth Century literature: plays -- as Wolfe mentions here -- translations -- which Rhodes shows to be the fountainhead of the remarkable developments in English in this century -- and functional texts. Texts in the latter two categories (which not infrequently overlap) were among many of the most widely sold, widely used texts of the century, such as Erasmus's immensely popular Adagia (a book of classical proverbs and sayings), Copia (a textbook for the orator), and The Education of a Christian Prince (a how-to book for Christian rulers). The Book of Common Prayer also falls within these latter two categories, which is precisely why Lewis dismisses it as not worthy of interest. Rhodes, by contrast, underlines its importance within the vernacular writing of the inter-related, inter-dependent movements known as Reformation and Renaissance.

Scholars of the sixteenth-century tend to be interested in literature or religion, either Renaissance or Reformation; Rhodes demonstrates that we cannot properly understand either one without looking at them both together. “Translating for the commonwealth,” Rhodes says “or for the ‘common profit’ as it was often expressed, was the means by which the Reformation drove the later literary revival, inspired by the most profitable gift of all, the gift of tongues” (p. 152). At its core translation involves conflict (between the source-language and target-language), which is a particular focus of the study. By tracing the English conflict over the common -- both in the sense of “belonging to all” and the sense of “debased” -- Rhodes provides an engaging and original exploration of the century that gave us the Great Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and the plays of Shakespeare.