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“No quyckar merchaundyce than lybrary bokes”:John Bale’s Commodification of Manuscript Culture*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Abstract
While John Bale (1495–1563), in his contributions to the 1549 text The Laboryouse Journey & Serche of Johan Leylande, attempted to mark a decisive break in England’s literary history by radically differentiating, in Bale’s view, the light of England’s evangelical present from the darkness of its Catholic past, he felt compelled to deal with the persistence of the darkness he saw embodied by his contemporaries’ treatment of English texts. Bale understood this treatment in an economic sense, insistently playing on the terms commodity and profit, which were invoked similarly by a moral economic discourse and an emerging politico-economic discourse articulated by Sir Thomas Smith (1513–77). Thus English literary texts appear in Bale’s construction of national community both as trade-objects that circulate in an international economy, and as ideal tokens of English identity itself.
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- Copyright © 2007 Renaissance Society of America
Footnotes
*
I wish to thank my advisors at the University of Alberta — John Considine, Garrett Epp, and Jonathan Hart, in particular — who have patiently commented on previous versions of this piece. Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Arthur Marotti, and the anonymous Renaissance Quarterly reader also provided valuable commentary, for which I am grateful, on this essay’s final revisions.
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