Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading and English Literature 1430-1530

Medium Aevum, Fall-Winter, 2008 by Mishtooni Bose

Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading and English Literature 1430-1530 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), xii 254 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-921588-1. 53.00 [pounds sterling].

The title of Daniel Wakelin's study promises the smooth ride of a grand narrative. It is no discredit to his painstaking work to say that, like some of the subjects in this study, he consciously eschews such a thing at every turn, preferring to make uncompromising demands on a reader whom he escorts over notably cobbled terrain with usually uncertain vistas. He is an urbane and assiduous guide through a narrative that remains courageously true to the faltering beginnings, repeated dead ends, and often unclear aims that it recounts. For whatever the allure of its cannily database-friendly title, this is the very opposite of a whiggish history. As Wakelin states in his opening chapter, '[h]umanism ushers in an age neither of gold nor of iron bur something more various and complex' (p. 5). His assertion that '[a]ctivities and not ideas are what we can trace' holds true as he tracks down the marginalia, manuscript exchanges, stray references, and wilful misreadings that comprised the particular phase of English humanism with which he is chiefly concerned: its inchoate, fifteenth-century phase, when what he aptly and firmly defines as studia humanitatis, 'the study and imitation of classical antiquity' (p. 7) for its own sake, crept up on the English, catching the imagination of a social cadre that would later come to be called 'men of letters', and beginning to make its presence felt in university curricula and on the Stationers' Register.

Wakelin has done all the essential work, reading many manuscripts, following intriguing and unpromising leads alike, and the resulting critical narrative has richly earned its right to be episodic, to concentrate on momentary phenomena that stubbornly refused to grow into anything larger and more coherent, and thus to strip this period in English cultural history right back to the bare bones. Admirably resistant as he is to the recycling of established perspectives, however, he wisely gives no resistance to the weight of the evidence. Consequently, there is little in the narrative superstructure, as opposed to its often revelatory details, that will entirely surprise a reader versed in the studies of, for example, Carlson, Weiss, Rundle, and Saygin. For Wakelin, as for others before him, Duke Humfrey and William Worcester are the familiar gravitational force fields in the early stages of the narrative. The reader is yet more prepared for what lies ahead: Tiptoft, Medwall, More, Lupset, and Elyot. And Wakelin does not try to minimize the combined impact of schoolbooks and the printing press in consolidating the cultural and institutional position that humanism eventually came to enjoy. But given that in the 1430s-1460s large-scale, systematic humanist activities remained very far off, the distinctive contribution of this study is its attentiveness to what Wakelin calls 'vernacular humanism', a new openness to antiquity that can be discerned, however fitfully, in a plethora of texts including Lydgate's Fall of Princes. Having stated at the outset that 'the readers of humanist literature were unpredictable', he proves himself steadfastly faithful to their flightiness and their variable attention spans, settling down to watch as something that begins as little more than marginal name-dropping mutates into something approaching a scholarly and moral discipline. Two of the high points of Wakelin's patient, nuanced analyses are, first, his compelling evocation of William Worcester 'coolly' reading 'the French versions of two works on the cardinal virtues' in 1450, as Jack Cade and his men trained their sights on the palace of Worcester's patron Sir John Fastolf: 'he did not escape from the world in turmoil but, in fine Ciceronian style, reflected upon it' (p. 103); and second, his measured evaluation of the republican ideology in William Worcester's Boke of Noblesse, as it becomes clear that 'ideas about the commonweal are ... a reflection of ... Worcester's study of antiquity' (p. 121). Wakelin has as good an eye for the crystallizing vignette as he has for the textual variant or unexpectedly revealing marginalium: thus everything comes into focus for the reader treated, via one of Erasmus' letters, to the spectacle of the young Thomas Lupset compulsively discarding his books of scholastic logic in order to purchase works in Greek. Even in a whig-free zone such as this, there are moments when everything shifts, and these are some of them. But debunking and demystifying are the predominant modes and aims of this honest, unflappable narrative. Having invited his reader to spend pages in Worcester's company, he calmly points out that 'Worcester's commonweal of readers was most likely imaginary' (p. 125). There are several moments like this in a narrative allergic to teleology, in which 'the thoughts that fit into margins are small ones' (p. 17). Things do just fizzle out sometimes. The cumulative impression given by the book's early chapters is that English humanism in its early phases was an uncertain and often lonely business, having to be willed into existence by successive small groups of individuals who stubbornly persisted in imagining larger readerships, sustainable friendships, communities, and commonwealths. And, as Wakelin is well aware, someone hostile to humanism might contend that the imaginary commonwealth has been its natural habitat ever since.