This chapter tracks the emergence and evolution of the concept of the British nation from the twelfth century through to the present, from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s first attempt to fashion an image of a distinct British nation to the severe challenges the national unit of the United Kingdom has faced in the wake of Brexit and other recent developments. The chapter explores the issue of how the nation is constituted and constructed and, specifically, the role that literature (and culture more generally) plays both in facilitating that construction and in interrogating it. The particular – often fraught – place of Wales, Scotland and Ireland within a formation dominated by England is also explored, together with issues relating to internal colonialism and global imperialism. Among the other issues touched on are class, education, gender and race.

Chapter 3 redirects the scholarly trend of characterizing Spenser’s works as defined by personal and political discontent, and it instead examines their relationship to sixteenth-century models of contentedness. This study of The Faerie Queene and the Complaints volume demonstrates that Spenser privileges a situational contentment. In Book I, neither Red Cross nor Una can maintain contentment at all times, but the emotion punctuates experiences like productive sadness and pious anger, and it protects against overly destructive passions. While Book I presents contentedness coexisting with other emotions, Mother Hubberds Tale imagines an uneasy alliance between contentment and complaint. Finally, through the character of Melibee in Book VI, Spenser makes his most explicit case for contentment, yet it is embedded in an episode that emphasizes the sway of sexual desire and the intense threat it can pose when unrestrained. In his last concerted representation of contentment, Spenser emphasizes its appeal and fragility. Thus, Chapter 3 highlights the affective continuities between the 1590 and 1596 Faerie Queene, and between Spenser’s major and minor works.

In “Lucretian Materialism,” Brent Dawson examines how Lucretius’ first-century BCE epic poem The Nature of Things, which was lost and then rediscovered in the fifteenth century by Poggio Bracciolini, influenced the development literature and philosophy in the early modern period and beyond. Dawson contends that the poem supplies a model for thinking about plurality and universality, two of modern nature’s essential features. The chapter includes detailed definitions of key concepts from Lucretius’ poem including matter, void, swerve, image, and soul, and examines how these concepts influenced subsequent authors and philosophers like Milton, Hobbes, and Bacon. Dawson ends the chapter with a Lucretian interpretation of one of nature’s most important appearances in early modern English literature: Edmund Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos. He argues that the most Lucretian feature of Spenser’s deity Nature is her indeterminate character – she is universal insofar as she persists in mutability.

Chapter 2 shows how two Elizabethan and Jacobean engagements with problematic multitudes undermined the body politic as a framework for managing multitudes in a context of rapid population growth, economic change and political challenges beyond England. Turning first to growing anxieties about poverty and vagrancy in England, it examines how rogue literature constructed vagrants as a foreign and inherently idle counter-polity, rather than a displaced and degenerated multitude; it then shows how municipal ordinances, surveys and poor laws came to treat the mobile poor as inherently idle of quantification as well as regulation, for whom systematic intervention and routine management was necessary to instill the virtues of industry. Second, it follows late Tudor and early Stuart efforts to undo the degeneration (through mixture with the Irish) of the Old English in Ireland, and to civilize – through projects of plantation, conquest or legal reform – the putatively barbaric Gaelic Irish themselves. In both cases, problematic groups were no longer seen as displaced organs of a body politic but rather as populations that must be made governable in the first instance through policy.

After performing ritual gestures of mourning, Job’s friends sat with him in silence for seven days and seven nights. They ‘thoght that he wolde not have hearkened to their counsel’, the annotators of the Geneva Bible explained.1 Early modern English culture acknowledged bereavement as a harrowing experience and recognised the challenges consolers faced when trying to offer solace. Overwhelmed by the loss of a loved one, grief-stricken mourners might, like Job, be reluctant to accept the remedies of religion and philosophy. To be sure, those who indulged in excessive sorrow were castigated, but so were consolers when their insistence on faith and reason was felt to betray a lack of sympathy for the bereaved. The fictitious author of an answer letter included in Angel Day’s The English Secretorie, a letter-writing manual published in 1586, pointed out the inefficiency of the consolatory epistle sent to him by his ‘brother’, whose severity, he implied, was ill advised: ‘Follie were it for mee to thinke or you to beleeue, that the pensiue imagination of a thing so neere … coulde with the vehemencie of a fewe specches (more of zeale then equitie deliuered) be sodenly remooued’.2 The multiplication of formal templates for such replies shows that in England as well as on the Continent, consolation came to be perceived as a dialogic exchange.3 Epistolary practice and friendly ‘conversation’ opened up a conceptual space for debating the ethical and rhetorical limits of consolation.4

Seamus Heaney had a complex relationship with English poetry. While Heaney’s essays on the canon of English poetry have preoccupied critics, this chapter looks at the ways in which his poems engage with English places and poets, as settings and exemplars. It then shows how he presents himself as both inheritor of a tradition and critical outsider, especially in his translation of Beowulf, and argues that his example has been central to similar translation projects by younger generations of English poets, including Simon Armitage and Alice Oswald. The chapter concludes by looking at the more global, cosmopolitan context Heaney envisages for his England-set later poems like ‘District and Circle’ and ‘Eelworks’.

With a focus on Edmund Spenser, this chapter explores representations of ruined monasteries within (New) English protestant writing of c.1590-1642. Monastic ruins are visible mnemonics of British-Irish reformation, and Protestants express surprisingly broad motivations for their remembrance, from sorrow for, to celebration of, monastic dissolution – a breadth of opinion reflecting the breadth of beliefs and practices within the Elizabethan/early Stuart church. Recognition of this confessional latitude is leading to reappraisal of Spenser’s own ‘puritan’ credentials, and to realisation that Spenser was as anti-Presbyterian as he was anti-Catholic. The chapter is the first to translate Spenser’s Presbyterian anxieties to a Scottish context, arguing that Spenser’s famously fractious relationship with James VI was prompted as much by Spenser’s anxieties over James’s seeming support for Scottish Presbyterians as by Spenser’s attack on James’s Catholic mother. The chapter shows how, in Faerie Queene VI, Spenser evokes memories of monastic ruins to warn his generation against the prospect of further, Presbyterian-led ruination in England and Ireland under a future Scottish king. This perspective on monastic ruins – as memories of past, and monitories against future, reformation – serves as a salutary reminder that ‘reformation’ was a protracted and by no means universally popular process for Spenser’s generation.

Chapter Two studies how Rome figures in shifting conceptions of the problem of the self. The chapter’semphasis is on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers and texts, ranging from Edmund Spenser and John Donne to Sir Thomas Wilson and John Milton. English perspectives on Rome, however, were mediated to a significant extent by continental writers such as Petrarch, Joachim Du Bellay, and Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. Writers trained within (and in Petrarch’s case, actively forging) the traditions of humanist inquiry celebrated their commitment to returning ad fontes. In practice, however, their engagements with a ‘text’ as complex and ramified as Rome risked leaving them endlessly navigating tributary brooks, creeks, streams, and rivers rather than reposing comfortably at the source. The chapter brings together scenes of schooling, staring, and travel in order to study tensions between understandings of the self as being an immured condition of metaphysical finitude, on the one hand, and as being formed via the absorption of capabilities that arrive from the outside, on the other.

This chapter examines the latticework of links between Shakespeare and Spenser, telling a tale of two writers. One goes to London to become poet and playwright, the other to Dublin with dreams of a dramatic career, where he finds his theatre of worldlings is a theatre of war. If Spenser’s influence on Shakespeare, especially early Shakespeare, is seldom discussed, Shakespeare’s influence on Spenser remains an even more neglected topic. Spenser is crucial here, since that poet’s Irish residence necessitates a broadening of horizons, and he is viewed as part of a recognizable circle. Shakespeare, a lifelong co-author and collaborator influenced by several of Spenser’s Irish contemporaries, is too often viewed in isolation. From the Spenser–Harvey correspondence and the early histories onwards, this study tracks the collaborative underpinnings of both writers’ work, charting their influences from a shared reliance on Holinshed to a common concern with innovation in form and genre.

Where do we start when thinking about literature in transition? This chapter uses the volume’s start date, 1700, as the basis for interrogating both the ideas of ‘literature in transition’ and ‘early modern’. Taking Edmund Spenser’s ruminations on change and permanence in the ‘Mutabilitie Cantos’ as its own point of departure, the chapter shows how the paradigm of transition is illuminated by writing in Irish, Latin, and English produced in the century or so preceding 1700. If political turmoil, linguistic contestation, and ethnic strife are the drivers of narrative and self-articulation, of literary resilience, innovation, consolidation, and decline, then the crucible of early modern Ireland has an arresting claim to the concept of transition. Writing in a period of irreversible change generates genealogical firsts – precursors of what is to follow – but also genres specific to their own time. The chapter probes the relationship of literature with transition: as representing change, as its written record, as the document of response to a new world taking shape, or of self-assertion in that world. Finally, it considers questions of perspective, arguing that scholarship is immersed in its own moment and that this directs us to the determining role of the end point in identifying beginnings.

This chapter discusses Chaucer’s reputation in the English Renaissance. This was marked by a fundamental ambivalence: while humanist scholars may have sought to reject earlier writing in favour of a return to antique models of cultural production, Chaucer remained the most substantial example of literary achievement in the vernacular before the sixteenth century. Medieval Chaucer thus represented everything that the newest tendencies of the age aspired towards. The chapter discusses the principal motifs that channelled praise of the Renaissance Chaucer (a living Chaucer, fatherhood); early editions of Chaucer’s collected works; and literary adaptations of Chaucer by the likes of Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare.

However well-regarded Chaucer’s works were during his lifetime, it was his immediate successors who fashioned him into the ‘father of English poetry’ they then bequeathed to the subsequent English literary tradition. In particular, the poets Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate not only represented Chaucer in this manner in their own, widely disseminated works, they were also instrumental in the broad dissemination of Chaucer’s works. Importantly, these activities were motivated not just by admiration but also by a politico-literary context in which Hoccleve and Lydgate, unlike Chaucer, were asked to produce works that spoke both for a prince and to a prince. Their invention of Chaucer’s literary authority cannot then be separated from their intervention into politics, and this conflation they also bequeathed to the English literary tradition, where it remained plainly visible in the works of their own successors, and where it persists, more obscurely, to the present.