Literature, Learning, and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern Europe

The literature and literate knowledge that were produced in Europe from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries emanated from societies that were rigidly hierarchical. What difference did that fact make to the literature and literate knowledge? How did social hierarchy shape the production of literature and literate knowledge (by writers, patrons, printers) and their reception (by readers and audiences)? Literature, Learning, and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern Europe is the first book to ask these question of Western Europe, in relation to a wide range of genres, disciplines, practices, and writers. The picture that emerges is of literature and literate knowledge largely bolstering social hierarchies while also questioning at times the very basis on which societies measured the status and worth of their members.

1 - Introduction
2 - 'Noble ambition': New Social Literacies and Traditional Hierarchies in Early Modern European Literature and History
3 - Women's Social Status and their Access to Learning in Multilingual Early Modern Italy
4 - English Builders in Translation
5 - The Social Status of Publishers of Learned Texts in Europe 1560-1630
6 - Literary Collaboration and Social Legitimacy in an Actor's Oeuvre: The Peculiar Case of Francesco Andreini (d.1624)
7 - Marta Marchina, Poetry and Social Mobility in Baroque Rome
8 - The Idiota's Authority: Fifteenth-Century Hierarchies in Dialogue
9 - Making 'Gypsies' in the English Reformation? Laws, Words and Texts (1530-1621)
10 - 'Greatness going off' in Renaissance Antony and Cleopatra Tragedies
11 - Tragedy, or the Fall of Middle-Class Men
12 - The Scribes of the Old Pillory: Hired Hands and their Customers in Sixteenth-Century Lisbon
13 - Authorship and Social Status in Early Modern England

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.