Literature, Learning, and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern Europe

Neil Kenny is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Professor of French at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy, where he is involved in language policy work as Lead Fellow for Languages. His publications include The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany (2004), Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France (2015), and Born to Write: Literary Families and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern France (2021), all with Oxford University Press.

The volume places the subject of learning firmly at the heart of the history of European societies and their evolution.

• List of FiguresNotes on ContributorsAcknowledgements1: NEIL KENNY: IntroductionLanguage, Social Literacy, and Social Status2: WARREN BOUTCHER: 'Noble ambition': New Social Literacies and Traditional Hierarchies in Early Modern European Literature and History3: HELENA SANSON: Women's Social Status and their Access to Learning in Multilingual Early Modern Italy4: CHRISTINE STEVENSON: English Builders in TranslationRoles of Cultural Production in Social Status5: IAN MACLEAN: The Social Status of Publishers of Learned Texts in Europe 1560-16306: SARAH GWYNETH ROSS: Literary Collaboration and Social Legitimacy in an Actor's Oeuvre: The Peculiar Case of Francesco Andreini (d.1624)7: JANE STEVENSON: Marta Marchina, Poetry and Social Mobility in Baroque RomeRepresenting Social Status: Genres and Discourses8: RICHARD OOSTERHOFF: The Idiota's Authority: Fifteenth-Century Hierarchies in Dialogue9: SUSAN WISEMAN: Making 'Gypsies' in the English Reformation? Laws, Words and Texts (1530-1621)10: JONATHAN PATTERSON: 'Greatness going off' in Renaissance Antony and Cleopatra Tragedies11: RICHARD MCCABE: Tragedy, or the Fall of Middle-Class MenA Two-Way Relation12: SIMON PARK: The Scribes of the Old Pillory: Hired Hands and their Customers in Sixteenth-Century Lisbon13: COLIN BURROW: Authorship and Social Status in Early Modern EnglandIndex