This dissertation expands the familiar concept of literary history in order to argue for the historiographic function of literary form in early modern poetry and drama. I propose that the “literary history” of early modern England is not merely the history of literature, but also these writers’ methods of evoking history by means of the literary. For Christopher Marlowe, George Herbert, and many of their contemporaries, the formal capacities of poetry offered methods for describing relationships between events in time, interpreting those events, and mobilizing those interpretations—in short, the formal capacities of poetry become ways of doing history. In the most familiar critical sense, literary history denotes canon-formations, literary influence, and the development of genres, trends, and fashions in poetic style. I demonstrate that early modern poets themselves recognized this sense of literary history, understanding their formal decisions in light of the history of poetic form. When Tudor and Stuart writers adopted a particular style or set of conventions, I argue, they did so with an awareness of how easily these styles could become—or had become—dated. While critics have demonstrated the political valences of writers’ recourse to specific genres and styles, I also insist on the specifically temporal and historical implications of poetic form as such, arguing that poets’ formal decisions, irrespective of earlier uses of those forms, encode ways of looking at and interpreting the past. The temporalities of verse—the way its meter produces forward momentum, its rhyme recalls earlier lines, its lyric voice arrests time—become, for the poets and dramatists I study, tools for understanding historical events and periods. By attending to the inherent temporality of poetry, I uncover the historical arguments poets and dramatists make, even in texts not overtly concerned with historical topics. Indeed, I suggest that the very structure of poetry can become a way of thinking about the past and the passage of time.

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“Circulating Knowledges: Literature and the Idea of the Library in Renaissance England” pairs literary texts and libraries to illustrate how literary creation and library building in England from 1500 to 1700 were deeply invested in one another. The history of English Renaissance libraries has generally been analyzed from the viewpoints of religious history and historiography, seen by scholars as a story of Protestant librarians attempting to preserve (or invent) a history of Protestant England. Many literary critics —citing Thomas Bodley’s notorious distaste for “stage plaies”—have typically reduced institutional libraries to elitist boogeymen hostile to popular or vernacular literature. Revising these narratives, this dissertation brings together a large corpus, including works by Thomas More, John Lyly, Edmund Spenser, Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, and Margaret Cavendish, to illustrate how literary depictions of England’s fledgling libraries shaped their creation and development, while the practices of these inchoate libraries in turn influenced literary texts. “Circulating Knowledges” advances its argument on several fronts. First, I show that developments (or a perceived lack of development) in library organization, access, and use appeared in literary texts, which often depicted literary libraries in response to these developments. Second, I home in on moments when literary texts that seem not at all interested in libraries become unexpectedly fruitful texts through which to develop literary thinking about libraries. In the process of excavating this literary interest in libraries, I demonstrate that Renaissance literature concerns itself not only with depicting, commenting on, or objecting to the developments in library creation happening during the period, but also in imagining alternative possibilities for how libraries might function, conceptions of a library that often outstripped what was materially possible in the period: these conceptions I term “the idea of the library.” In detailing literature’s preoccupation with developments in Renaissance library systems, I offer new perspectives on the period’s literary attitudes toward the creation, transmission, and protection of knowledge, all questions which the building—or imagining—of a library brings to the forefront.

In 1530, a German physician named Otto Brunfels published an herbal entitled Herbarum Vivae Eicones (Living Images of Herbs). In it, he planned to map the names of medicinal herbs known in and native to Germany onto their Greek and Latin names. Brunfels’ audience included fellow physicians and in order to assist with the identification of the herbs in his book, his publisher employed a woodcut artist to produce realistic images of them, a novelty in the genre of printed herbals. Over time, Brunfels’ work was superseded by 16th-century botanists and his legacy was relegated to the illustrations of his herbs, while his contributions to the naming and description of them were dismissed as unoriginal. However, a closer examination reveals Brunfels’ herbal as a transitional text bridging the gap between the herbal tradition and the development of the science of botany. In addition to citing Pliny the Elder as his primary authoritative influence, Brunfels also references a number of 15th-century Italian humanist scholars who were neither botanists nor physicians, but who were known for their critiques of the early printed editions of Pliny’s Historia Naturalis and even of Pliny himself as a natural history authority. Thus, Brunfels’ herbal is tied to the manuscript and printing history of Pliny and to humanist attempts to correct and stabilize his text. Moreover, in the course of his work, Brunfels encountered a number of herbs that were known to him, but whose Latin and Greek nomenclature he could not accurately identify. As a result, he was forced to describe in his own words, in original Latin, these herbae nudae with German nomenclature but with unknown Greek and Latin names. In addition, Brunfels encounters considerable disagreement among the ancient authorities about the naming and classification of other herbs and he is again forced to insert his own opinion, which he calls iudicium nostrum. I argue that Brunfels’ original Latin is a very early example of what would eventually become formal botanical Latin. Brunfels’ herbal is situated in such a way that it looks backward whilst simultaneously looking forward. It is an object of reception, appropriating terminology and methods from Pliny the Elder and from the humanist scholars who debated the quality of the printed editions of his work and the accuracy of the information provided in it. It is simultaneously the subject of reception, demonstrating a halting, hesitant vocabulary and style of Latinity that would eventually come to be identified with botany as a discipline. Chapter 1 addresses Pliny’s ideas of what constitutes knowledge (cognitio) about plants in the Historia Naturalis, via his arguments against improper nomenclature (nomina nuda) and the alignment of herbal medicine with magic (magicae herbae). Pliny’s advocacy for proper methodology (experience over book learning) is also examined. Chapter 2 turns to the manuscript tradition of Pliny’s text and the first two printed editions, in 1469 and 1470, which were corrupt and resulted in an unstable, inaccurate text. In Chapter 3, the reactions of the Italian humanists to these early printed editions are considered, along with the transition from critiques of the editors and printers to debates about inaccuracies that can be traced to Pliny himself. Chapter 4 turns to Otto Brunfels and traces his reliance on Pliny as well as on the Italian humanists, especially Ermolao Barbaro, who claimed to “heal” the errors in Pliny and stabilized his text. Brunfels’ original descriptions of herbs are also discussed. In the conclusion, Brunfels’ work is compared with that of botanists who postdated him, including Leonhard Fuchs, Kaspar Bauhin, and Karl Linnaeus.