Literature, Learning, and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern Europe: (246 Proceedings of the British Academy)

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements 1: NEIL KENNY: Introduction Language, Social Literacy, and Social Status 2: WARREN BOUTCHER: 'Noble ambition': New Social Literacies and Traditional Hierarchies in Early Modern European Literature and History 3: HELENA SANSON: Women's Social Status and their Access to Learning in Multilingual Early Modern Italy 4: CHRISTINE STEVENSON: English Builders in Translation Roles of Cultural Production in Social Status 5: IAN MACLEAN: The Social Status of Publishers of Learned Texts in Europe 1560-1630 6: SARAH GWYNETH ROSS: Literary Collaboration and Social Legitimacy in an Actor's Oeuvre: The Peculiar Case of Francesco Andreini (d.1624) 7: JANE STEVENSON: Marta Marchina, Poetry and Social Mobility in Baroque Rome Representing Social Status: Genres and Discourses 8: RICHARD OOSTERHOFF: The Idiota's Authority: Fifteenth-Century Hierarchies in Dialogue 9: SUSAN WISEMAN: Making 'Gypsies' in the English Reformation? Laws, Words and Texts (1530-1621) 10: JONATHAN PATTERSON: 'Greatness going off' in Renaissance Antony and Cleopatra Tragedies 11: RICHARD MCCABE: Tragedy, or the Fall of Middle-Class Men A Two-Way Relation 12: SIMON PARK: The Scribes of the Old Pillory: Hired Hands and their Customers in Sixteenth-Century Lisbon 13: COLIN BURROW: Authorship and Social Status in Early Modern England Index

About the Author :
Neil Kenny is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Professor of French at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy, where he is involved in language policy work as Lead Fellow for Languages. His publications include The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany (2004), Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France (2015), and Born to Write: Literary Families and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern France (2021), all with Oxford University Press.

Review :
The volume places the subject of learning firmly at the heart of the history of European societies and their evolution. There is much to learn and consider in this erudite and engaging volume. Besides its novel insights, it offers a robust and salutary reminder of the extent to which social hierarchies preoccupied early moderns throughout Europe, and how central the production and distribution of status was to the meaning-making of early modern texts. While laying down a map for the broad dimensions of the relationship, Kenny and his contributors have opened a door that will no doubt inspire exploration for years to come.