In the later nineteenth century, British scholars were ambivalent about their nation’s state as part of Europe, but they were certain that it had participated in one of the staging-posts of European civilization’s history, the Renaissance. In the early modern period, something closer to the opposite was the case. Those earlier authors did not have recourse to the term ‘Renaissance’ and they talked more specifically of a revival of good letters, meaning being able to write Latin and Greek as the best ancient authors did; to those studies they also added knowledge of Hebrew. In Italy, this revival was sometimes seen as a local phenomenon, which they had to export to the rest of Europe, including far-off Britons. In England in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, John Leland constructed a different vision in which compatriots from the preceding hundred years were instrumental in the revival’s success. There were, then, competing models, one of centre and periphery, another of collaboration diffused across Europe. Both these models, however, came under extreme strain when faced with the divisions created by the Reformation.

Chapter 5 explores the distinct dynamics of Plutarch reception in England prior to the famous 1579–1603 translations of Thomas North (1535–1604). In England at this time, Plutarch’s work was read largely through a Ciceronian lens. I reflect on the vernacular translations of Plutarch’s moral essays by Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542), Thomas Elyot (1490–1546), Thomas Blundeville (1522–1606), Richard Taverner and Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) as well as explore the place of Plutarch in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). I argue that prior to the translations of Thomas North, Plutarch was read predominantly in England as a thinker whose political insights were secondary to his moral ones. While the increasing precariousness of the English realm into the latter sixteenth century changed the tone of political thought, the English never read their Plutarch in the vernacular with the same attention to the nature of public office and the public realm in the way prevalent in France earlier in the century.

Poetry and Bondage begins in the late sixteenth century, with a new reading of Thomas Wyatt’s lyric poems in the context of his multiple experiences of imprisonment and surveillance. Wyatt is often regarded as a key figure in the initiation of an ‘inward turn’ or lyric interiority, and of modern English lyric. While such readings are problematic, they tell us something about what we think lyric is. Wyatt’s poetry demonstrates the importance of prisons for developing English-language lyric habits of address, intimacy and conceptualisations of power and selfhood. The chapter focuses on the various nets, chains, clogs and fetters in Wyatt’s poems, in relation to the conditions of amorous and political servitude they depict. It discusses how that servitude is enacted and challenged through formal constraints, such as the rondeau or the sonnet. It relates Wyatt’s tropes of bondage to the depiction of human and animal life in his poems and to the akratic subject’s obedience and resistance to sovereignty. It includes close readings of two of his most famous poems, ‘They flee…’ and ‘Whoso list to hunt’.

This chapter concentrates on how the concerns of Catullus’ texts inform the erotic and cultural dynamics of Wyatt’s love poetry. Focusing on gendered images of speech – the impotent or unreliable tongue, verbal duplicity, broken oaths and overt lies – it examines how issues of speaking are turned into ethical markers which can be mapped onto the spectrum of gender. Contextualising the poetry from the two periods against, respectively, one of Cicero’s forensic speeches, and Henry VIII’s love letters, it investigates how modes of speaking are used to contest and uphold the idea of masculinity as a moral state, not just a gender position: what it might mean to ’speak like a man’ in Republican Rome and Henrician England.