English Humanist Books

Both these books share what has become in recent years a prevailing desire to humanize the humanists, as it were: to remind us that humanists did not live by Ciceronian sententiae alone, but required bread and were obliged to develop elaborate strategies of salesmanship in order to secure it.While this unromantic vision of the humanists has always existed -it was first expressed by contemporaries who felt their own social and political franchise endangeredthe work of Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, in particular, has provided a fresh impetus to see Renaissance humanism in all its glorious confusion of mixed motives, uncertain results, and scrappy opportunism.Yet neither of the books under review proposes a mere subversion of humanist activity.Rather, both authors complicate the essential tools of the working humanist: the carefully crafted volumes presented to actual or potential patrons; the printed texts that spread an author's fame; the commonplace books that represented years of gathering and framing (seeming mundane techniques that Mary Thomas Crane transforms into something rich and strange).However different their approaches and concerns, Carlson and Crane are immersed in the physical materials of humanist endeavour and it is their concern with "matter"in more than one sensethat enriches and problematizes their critical projects.English Humanist Books is "a book about books: why they were made the way they were and how they were used" (p. 1) in the crucial period when print and humanism were beginning to transform the cultural landscape of Europe.For Carlson, the various fabrications of the humanist text illuminate the relations between the hired intellectual and his masters.The elaborations of its physical forminexpensive manuscripts intended for private circulation, deluxe presentation manuscripts, the range of printed texts and the curious hybrids where print and manuscript mimicked each otherserve as a graded scale on which to construct a sociology of humanist exchange.In this system, social inequities complicated scholarly ones and Carlson explores the ways in which these seekers of employment tried, with varying success, to exploit a patron's sometimes whimsical need to follow intellectual fashion and to engage in acts of conspicuous consumption.For the humanist a well-timed and well- wrought textual gift could be a crucial investment.Since patrons favoured richly appointed manuscripts, there was the inherent risk of any speculative market, but courting a patron empty-handed was simply a non-starter.Carlson proceeds by means of a series of case studies.Relatively

Art · Framing (construction · Humanism · Literature · Political science · Classics · History · Law · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Medieval Literature and History · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

• Mary Tudor, Lord Morley, and St. Thomas Aquinas

  Jaime Goodrich•ANQ A Quarterly Journal of Short…•2011

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