This chapter assesses the reception and the significance of the early modern sonnet by focusing on poetic treatises of the second half of the sixteenth century, when the fashion for sonnets peaked in Italy, France and England. In Italy, where the sonnet had reached formal maturity and a canonical status based on established models, poets were seeking room for innovation to compete with their prestigious forebears, exploring new forms of both sonnet and poetic collection and further dignifying the fourteen-line poem. In France, by contrast, poets and theorists sought to codify the sonnet, imitating the Italians and rejecting earlier vernacular poetry, often insisting on its epigrammatic dimension – they did not, however, discuss the development of sonnet collections. In England, the sonnet (mediated by French precedents) took a much longer time to be codified, and retained during and after the considered period its original meaning of ‘little song’, or short lyric poem. Addressing general questions of poetics related to the prosody and vocabulary of the English language seems to have held more stakes than determining the specificities of the English sonnet, whose textbook definition mostly corresponds to how it was seen by late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English treatises.

This chapter explains that the Elizabethan grammar school education, which Spenser and Shakespeare would have received, involved learning to read Latin texts in Latin and to engage in double translation, i.e., sophisticated exercises in translating from Latin to English and back again. Brink surveys the unusually liberal education that Spenser would have received at Merchant Taylors’ School and suggests that Richard Mulcaster influenced Spenser’s decision to write in English. Mulcaster forcefully advocated educating the lower classes and even supported educating women. In this chapter, the reader is introduced to the typological reading encouraged by studying Alexander Nowell’s Catechism. The reader is shown how typological reading is likely to have influenced Spenser’s symbolism in Book I of the Faerie Queene.

The early modern English sonnet has rarely been assessed as a category, and recent works have rather chosen the wider category of lyric – one whose historicity poses a number of difficulties. Despite the expansion of the canon in the last decades, and the related development of stimulating critical approaches based on gender, nationhood, race or religious studies, our vision of the sonnet is still affected by the ‘parody theory’, which oversimplifies the perspective of the sonneteers, discourages research on their works and does not recognise that parodies can also testify to the success of their targets. The loose codification of the sonnet and the variety of the contexts in which sonnets appear need to be taken into account and to be placed in the context of Petrarchan poetics in other countries, in particular France and Italy. The present volume proposes to do so using the input of book history and the tools of a historicised formalism, focusing in particular (but not only) on the key period of the 1590s.

Barnabe Barnes, who published Parthenophil and Parthenophe in 1593, and A Divine Centurie of Spirituall Sonnets in 1595, is a unique example of an author releasing two printed sonnet sequences, one secular, one sacred, in two years’ span. The chapter argues that the two works might be understood as a Petrarchan diptych consistent with Barnes’s authorial strategy. The godly poems of A Divine Centurie seem devised to remind the reader of the lewd verse of Parthenophil and Parthenophe and to highlight the connections between the two works; the purpose of such intricacy was probably for Barnes to produce a representation of himself as having undergone a moral conversion – a Petrarchan career pattern that Richard Helgerson described in his Elizabethan Prodigals. Though Barnes’s staged conversion was probably targeted at the Bishop of Durham, the fact that his second sonnet sequence was printed, and therefore also aimed at a wider readership, calls for further hypotheses. Barnes’s recantation might have had to do with his desire to protect his reputation from the damaging effects of the Harvey–Nashe quarrel in which he was indirectly involved.

Northern Memories concerns how English writers of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries remembered Scandinavia, especially Iceland and Norway; how by remembering Scandinavia and its people they furthered contemporary sentiments not simply about that region but about the emerging global role of Great Britain; and how they often did so by selectively collapsing the contemporary world and the Middle Ages, providing memories of both in the process. More than simply a literary issue, the construction of an Anglo-Scandinavian ethnicity served as an organising principle for cultural politics, providing ways to read past and present alike as testaments to British exceptionalism. Much of what English critics of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries remembered about medieval English geography, history, religion, and literature, they remembered by means of Iceland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. As British visitors and thinkers encountered the Scandinavian ‘present’ in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, they similarly found evidence for the British past. Rather than a source study that traces the genealogy of cultural ideas, political contacts, or literary influences, this book is above all a theoretical inquiry about the persistence, independent imitation, and reproduction of Nordic tropes for the imagining of Britain and its medieval past.

Chapter 7 contextualizes the relationship between events occurring in 1579–780, such as the publication of John Stubbs’s Gaping Gulf and the Shepheardes Calender. This political discussion serves as the background for close readings of the Aprill and November eclogues. Spenser’s Aprill has been described as an early offering in the cult of Elizabeth, but he undercuts his eulogy to Elizabeth in Aprill by ironic mythological references to Niobe. Rather than making use of the story of Astraea, the just maid, who ushers in a golden age, Spenser turns his back on the symbolism that would identify Elizabeth with Augustus and a golden age. In a close reading of the November eclogue, using Vergil’s Eclogues, Brink shows that this eclogue, like Virgil’s elegy on Julius Caesar, points to the possibility that Elizabeth’s death will lead to civil war. The November eclogue, instead of triumphantly commemorating Elizabeth’s accession to the throne on 17 November, becomes a dirge.

Historical memory is situational, the result of a cultural process of construction and representation. As obviously ruinous, perverse, and even demonic as the Nazis’ methods and beliefs were, their use of Nordic imagery and ideas depends on many of the same kinds of historiographic manoeuvres and even some of the same tropes that are traced in this book. As much as the Nazis’ notions of world dominance differed from the aspirations of every English writer considered, both groups shared the strategy of incorporating a Nordic past in their cultural memories. What might be called a parallel descent from Germanic prehistory thus has unsettling epistemic implications. If memory is conditioned not only by what is being remembered but by who is doing the remembering, as many critics maintain, then the process itself – the tropes it uses and the fact that it combines them – is in some ways subject-neutral. It is such malleability and reproducibility that would allow for the creation of competing views from the same recirculated images – totalitarianism as well as fantasy. These may be the qualities that give historical memory its greatest power.