An Act touching the Marchauntes of Italy: 1 Richard III (1484), cap. 9

Purveu toutz foitz que cest acte ou ascune part dicell, ne ascune autre acte fait ou a×aire en le dit parlement, en null maner extende ou soit prejudiciall ascun destourbance damage ou empediment au ascun artiÞcer ou marchaunt estraunge, de quell nacion ou paiis il soit ou soira, de ou pur amesnance en cest Roialme ou vendicion par retaille ou autrement dascuns maners livres escriptez ou enpressez, ou pur lenhabitacion deinz le dit Roialme pur mesme lentent, ou au ascun escrivener alluminour liour ou enpressour autrement dit imprintour de tielx livres, quelx il ad ou avera a vendre par voie de marchandise, ou pur leur demeure en mesme le Roialme pur lexcercicion de les ditz occupacions; cest acte ou ascune part dicell nient contristeant.

Provided alwey that this Acte or any part therof, or any other Acte to be made in this present parliament, in no wise extende or be prejudicall any lette hurte or impediment to any Artificer or merchaunt straungier of what Nacion or Countrey he be or shalbe of, for bryngyng into this Realme, or sellyng by retaill or otherwise, of any maner bokes wrytten or imprynted, or for the inhabitynge within the said Realme for the same intent, or to any writer lympner bynder or imprynter of such bokes, as he hath or shall have to sell by wey of merchaundise, or for their abode in the same Realme for the exercisyng of the said occupacions; this Acte or any parte therof notwithstandyng.

(SRealm, ii, p. 493)

Introduction

In an age which has produced much agonizing over how to reconcile the life of the mind with a materialist physics, we are likely to feel an immediate affinity with an earlier theorist who combined the project of explaining human psychology with a commitment to the claim that ‘the totality of things is bodies and void’ (Epistula ad Herodotum 39). In common with the vast majority of modern psychologists and philosophers of mind, Epicurus was committed to atomistic materialism – and indeed, unlike that of most modern psychologists and philosophers, his commitment actually extended to arguing for the truth of that position. It was not a thesis which he accepted merely on authority. Like that of Aristotle in the generation before him, Epicurus’ psychology needs to be seen as part of an attempt to provide a complete natural philosophy. At least part of what he has to say about the psuchē is directly intended to show that his atomic theory is capable of explaining such complex natural phenomena as perception, thought and action. All of what he has to say is intended to be consistent with that physical theory.

This, however, places fewer constraints on what will count as a successful theory of the relation between the mental and the physical than is sometimes supposed. We are perhaps apt to be over-impressed by Epicurus’ espousal of atomism and to assume that, just by accepting the thesis that all material objects are divisible into atomic parts, he took on the task of showing that all the properties of material objects can be reduced to the states and movements of those parts.

Who were the rabbis of second-century Palestine (the ‘tannaitic’ period)? What was their role in Jewish society? What was their relationship with their fellow Jews? In what areas did they exercise authority? What were the institutional bases of their power? In sum, what was the nature of the society in which the rabbis lived and worked? These are the primary questions to be addressed by this chapter.

I admit at the outset that these questions are not fully answerable, and that the answers, whether full or partial, do not yield a complete portrait of the social history of second-century Palestine. A thorough study of Palestinian society would have to treat all the elements of the population: Jews of all sorts (not just rabbis and not just those Jews who came into contact with rabbis), pagans (of all sorts), Christians (of all sorts), and Samaritans (of all sorts). Some of the inhabitants were rich, most were poor; some lived in cities, most lived in towns and villages; some were artisans and traders, most were farmers. The land was as diverse as its population and was divided into politico-geographical regions (Galilee, Samaria, Judaea, Idumaea, the coastal plain, the trans-Jordan, etc.) and sub-regions (notably upper Galilee and lower Galilee). The power structure which governed this complex land was also complex. In addition to the central Roman administration, both civil and military, many cities (poleis) had jurisdiction over substantial amounts of terrain. Other areas (toparchies) were governed from the towns and villages. Each religious group, whether or not recognized by the Roman state, had its own functionaries and temples.

The Peripatetics

Late antiquity learned two logics: categorical syllogistic and hypothetical syllogistic. Categorical syllogistic studies categorical arguments. An argument is categorical if all its components (its premisses and its conclusion) are categorical propositions. A proposition is categorical if it ‘says one thing of one thing’ – or better, if it is simple in the sense of not containing two or more propositions as components. Hypothetical syllogistic studies hypothetical arguments. An argument is hypothetical if at least one of its components is a hypothetical proposition. A proposition is hypothetical if it contains at least two propositions as components.

It is a plausible guess that this terminology was developed in the Hellenistic Peripatos. The phrase ‘hypothetical argument’ is attested for Chrysippus (D.L. VII. 196); Galen says that ‘the ancients’ spoke of hypothetical propositions (Institutio logica III. 3), Alexander that they spoke of ‘mixed’ syllogisms (In Aristotelis Analytica priora commentaria 262. 31–2); and ‘the ancients’ in such contexts are usually the Peripatetics. Philoponus says that Theophrastus used the phrase ‘wholly hypothetical syllogism’ (In Aristotelis Analytica priora commentaria 302.9).

Categorical syllogistic was thought of as essentially Peripatetic, hypothetical syllogistic as essentially Stoic; and although it was known that the Stoics and Peripatetics had disputed with one another in logic no less than in ethics and physics, it was often supposed that the two syllogistics were partners, each adequate in its own area. This irenic view is misleading. The Peripatetics thought that their categorical syllogistic embraced the whole of logic: any argument which submitted to formal treatment at all submitted to categorical syllogistic. And the Stoics held the same for their hypothetical syllogisms.

The nature of Jewish liturgical expression in the period immediately preceding the destruction of the Second Temple and the loss of any semblance of Jewish political independence in 70 ce is clearly of interest to a wide body of scholarship. Historians of Jewish religious practice, analysts of Christian origins and students of the cultic forms in existence in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds all have sound reasons for seeking to reconstruct for themselves what may for the moment, pending the more accurate assessment and definition that I hope to offer, be referred to as ‘the early liturgy of the synagogue’.

In pursuit of this reconstruction, liturgists have sometimes turned for guidance to the authoritative Jewish prayer-books of almost a thousand years later, or even of the more modern period, and sought to extrapolate backwards, making assumptions that defy the vast chasms of history, geography and ideology that separate one millennium from another. Those who have adopted such a position have transplanted some or all of the rabbinic rites and customs of tenth-century Babylon or early mediaeval Europe to first-century Judaea and the surrounding Jewish Diaspora and declined to distinguish the continuity of some liturgical traditions from the patent novelty of others. However methodologically untenable the theory underlying such an approach, the picture painted of proto-rabbinism and its liturgical practice was a clear one, unobfuscated by doubts and complications.

Recent, more reliable research in the field tends, on the other hand, to stress the lack of concrete evidence, the questionable admissibility of sources even one or two centuries after the destruction of the temple, and the complex nature of Judaism in the time of Jesus and Hillel, thus shying away from a commitment to simple description and taking refuge in a welter of doubt and hesitancy.

This volume begins with the manuscript book in Britain as it was when Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400. It ends with the printed book as it was in 1557, the year in which the English book-trade was consolidated with the grant by Philip and Mary of a charter to the Stationers’ Company of London. In this year also were published, in London, the English Works of Thomas More and, in Geneva, an important translation into English of the New Testament, the forerunner of the Geneva Bible.

The first of these two books was printed and published, as its contents had been written before the Reformation, in the Catholic interest, then again briefly in the ascendant in England. It drew verbally on a vernacular poetic tradition in its echoes of Chaucer’s phraseology, as well as spiritually on the authority of the Church, laying particular stress on the Church’s role as arbiter of scriptural interpretation. The second book was the successor of several earlier reformed English Bible translations, of which one in particular had received the endorsement of Henry VIII. Taken together, these two volumes reflect changes and upheavals in British society during a century and a half. At the same time, they bear witness to continuities.

The defining event of the sixteenth century was the Reformation. The break with Rome left its mark not only on the ecclesiastical, political, and economic spheres, but also on the private. Politically, the doctrine of the royal supremacy was advanced by the creation of an Anglican church headed by the English King. A principal way in which the monarchy justified its new power was through analogy to the “natural” structure of the private family: as the father was in his household, so the King was in his country, the uncontested center of authority. It was in the interest of the monarchy to produce an ideology which authorized the private household as the primary unit of social order and which reinforced the notion that the householder was absolute ruler within his household. Economically, repudiation of the Roman religion permitted the seizure of English lands and goods formerly held by churches, monasteries, and abbeys. The church had owned as much as a third of the country, and when the Crown not only appropriated these properties but also began to give them away and then sell them off, a relatively static land market exploded into activity.

Possibly the most heated critical controversy in English Renaissance studies has concerned the question of personal identity, the existence of the self. New Historicists and cultural materialists have maintained that the self is always a social construct, branding their opponents as naive essentialists. From a less parochial viewpoint, the argument may seem reminiscent of the heredity-versus-environment debate that vexed sociologists earlier in the century or, indeed, the universal-versus-particular controversies during the Renaissance itself. If, with Shakespeare's Prospero, we take rational speech to be the distinguishing mark of humans, we may not be surprised that the “either/or” choice can be resolved into “both.” Modern linguistics has found that structures of language are deeply embedded within the human mind. Human speech, then, is both innate and acquired, consisting of a “Universal Grammar” and a learned dialect, corresponding nicely to an essential identity that is complemented by the cultural construct.

A currently recognized representation of the Tudor aesthetic in the sixteenth century is Hans Holbein's double portrait of “The Ambassadors” painted in the spring of 1533 in London (Figure 1), yet its significance and its actual meaning have been debated. For Stephen Greenblatt, the painting represents a cultural poetic that is essentially humanistic. The work is seen from the perspective of the courtly and social and it emphasizes the vast and varied knowledge humanism had come to represent at the Henrician court: 'Jean de Dinteville, seigneur de Polisy and Francis Fs ambassador to the English court, and his friend Georges de Selve, shortly to be bishop of Lavaur, stand at either side of a two-shelved table. They are young, successful men, whose impressively wide-ranging interests and accomplishments are elegantly recorded by the objects scattered with careful casualness on the table: celestial and terrestrial globes, sundials, quadrants and other instruments of astronomy and geometry, a lute, a case of flutes, a German book of arithmetic, kept open by a square, and an open German hymn book, on whose pages may be seen part of Luther's translation of the “Veni Creator Spiritus” and his “Shortened Version of the Ten Commandments” ...'

As early as 1484, William Caxton translated the fables of Aesop from the French version of Steinhowel; over the course of the following century numerous editions of Aesop and Aesopian beast-fables were to appear, in verse and prose, and in Latin as well as in English. A version in Scots by Robert Henryson was published in 1570, and one in “tru ortography” in 1585. As Annabel Patterson has shown, these fables or “apologues” proved extraordinarily adaptable to a wide array of purposes: superficially attractive in themselves as entertaining little narratives making minimal demands on a humble listener's attention span, they could be used to advance or subvert the ruling class's agenda. In the final quarter of the century, Edmund Spenser adopted the genre as a recognizable part of his repertory, and thereby signaled its place in the native literary tradition that he was advertising and “illustrating” (in the sense of Du Bellay's “Defense and Illustration” of the French language, both embodying and ennobling it, making it more lustrous).

Students with a keen sense of curiosity - or possibly merely a keen sense of mischief - could fruitfully exercise either predilection by asking their teachers for a brief definition of lyric. The complexities of responding to that demand, like the problems a similar query about tragedy would generate, demonstrate the complexities of the literary types in question. But despite the difficulty of defining lyric, exploring the forms it took during the English Renaissance can illuminate this mode as a whole, some of its most challenging and exciting texts, and the workings of the early modern era. Aristotle posits an apparently clear-cut division of all literature into lyric, epic, and drama, basing the distinctions on the mode of presentation: lyric is sung, epic recited, and drama staged. This division remains influential, lying behind the work of Northrop Frye and many other modern theorists.

'We should note the force, effect, and consequences of inventions which are nowhere more conspicuous than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, namely, printing, gunpowder, and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world'. Francis Bacon, Novutn Organum To grasp the conditions of writing in the early English Renaissance, we need to imagine a world poised between manuscript and print cultures. Although William Caxton set up the first press in England in 1476 and set into motion a slowly unfolding debate about the meaning and significance of print technology, a lively manuscript culture continued to thrive alongside the print marketplace for the next hundred years or more. The result is a fascinating cross-fertilization between two kinds of textual production, each with its own practices and forms. In turn, these new forms of production gave rise to new conceptions of authorship and meaning. It is impossible “to divorce the substance of a text on the one hand,” observes D. F. McKenzie, “from the physical form of its presentation on the other.”

In the prologue to John Dryden's revised version of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (1678), Dryden had “Mr. Betterton, representing the ghost of Shakespeare” rise up and intone to the audience, 'Untaught, unpractic'd, in a barbarous age, /I found not, but created first the stage.' Before Shakespeare was the void - an uncouth, dark time with nothing to offer England's first master dramatic poet. There are traces of Dryden's perspective in the titles of this chapter and the one that follows it. While the age of Shakespeare proudly sets forth “Dramatic Achievements,” the pre- Shakespearean era can offer only “Experiments.” To be sure, we have abandoned Dryden's formulation in some ways. No scholar would now contend that Shakespeare took nothing from the drama that preceded him; indeed, a flourishing twentieth-century scholarly industry has devoted itself precisely to demonstrating how Shakespeare's achievement needs to be understood as the culmination of earlier developments in the Tudor theatre. Shakespeare was neither “untaught” nor “unpractic'd”in an earlier English drama, but found much to emulate and adopt.

In 1575, when Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare were eleven years old, Ben Jonson three, and John Lyly and George Peele Oxford students, they could hardly have envisaged their eventual careers as actors, playwrights, theatrical administrators and investors. There were no permanent theatres in London. Playing in the area was irregular, produced by traveling companies performing occasionally in inn yards. Yet the next year saw the construction of a playhouse at Newington Butts, the opening of the Theatre in Shoreditch to the north, and the movement of the Chapel Children into a hall theatre in the Blackfriars, thus establishing both the types of theatres - outdoor, multistory “public” amphitheatres and smaller, enclosed “private” theatres - and the types of company personnel - adult men, with a few boys to act the women's parts, or entirely boy choristers - that would obtain until the closing of the theatres in 1642. In 1583 a playing company bearing the Queen's name was established. In 1594 a reorganization officially restricted playing to two companies at two playhouses, the Lord Chamberlain's Men at the Theatre and the Lord Admiral's Men at the Rose.