The Beginning of Now: Contemporaneity in Early Modern Writing

The 2012 MLA saw the advent of special areas set aside for blogging and tweeting, recognizing a basic fact of twenty-first century life in the developed world: we are obsessed with the present and increasingly aware of the way social networks inflect our understanding of it.  When did this happen?  We may find a clue in Harry Berger Jr.’s insight that during the early modern period “changing conceptions of self and experience at some time penetrated the practice of lyric poetry so that the poem was conceived not merely as a report of prior experience but as the unfolding of experience itself” (Revisionary Play, 135).  

I've organized a special session for this year's Modern Languages Association (MLA) conference in Boston, with papers that address the social networks, epistolary practices, and lyric structures that drive this development, which they identify across various genres of seventeenth century writing.

The panel, on "The Beginning of Now: Contemporaneity in Early Modern Writing," will take place 8.30-9.45 am, Sunday Jan. 6, in Back Bay D, at the Sheraton Hotel.  I'm looking forward to fantastic papers by Barbara K. Lewalski (Harvard), Daniel Shore (Georgetown), Christopher Warren (Carnegie Mellon), and Rachael Scarborough-King (NYU). 

These three papers expand our concepts of contemporaneity and the ways it was formed and represented in early modern writing.  Together, they both address this issue in a very specific and focused moment, from 1640-1674, and open up larger questions about the way we define literature, influence, and context.

I've posted the abstracts below:

Barbara K. Lewalski, Current Political Events as Literary Subject: Sidney to Milton

After a brief account of the intense interest in, and some vehicles for, conveying news in Early Modern England, I pose the question, could current news be used as a literary subject?  Noting  theoretical statements by Sidney and Tasso discouraging such use. I then consider briefly some literary genres that traditionally deal with contemporary matter if not precisely with news--encomiastic odes, poems celebrating royal events, satire—and some literary kinds (pastoral, allegory, roman a clef) that wererecognized as means to treat contemporary matters seen as liable to censorship or punishment.  Some examples include:Sidney’s Old Arcadia, Spenser’s Mother Hubbard’s Tale,  and the May and July Eclogues in his Shepheard’s Calender, Wroth’s Urania.  Allegory in Spenser’s epic-romance, the Faerie Queene, allowed him to present Queen Elizabeth under several personae and to include real as well as fictional personages and events of her reign and times.

       
But my principal focus is on eight of Milton’s 23 sonnets, those written during the Civil War and Interregnum (1642-1660) that take contemporary events as subject without the cover of pastoral or allegory.  This is new in itself, as well as marking a new and radical transformation of the small sonnet genre, normally concerned to analyze private love or religious devotion.   These eight poems bear titles in Milton’s Trinity Manuscript that point to their specific occasions:  Sonnet VIII deals with the threatened royalist assault on London, Sonnets XI and XII satirize those who attacked Milton’s Divorce tracts, a sonetto caudato denounces  the persecuting Presbyterians, the Sonnets to Fairfax, Cromwell, and Vane urge their attention to securing religious liberty, and the magnificent sonnet on the Waldensian Massacre conjoins imagery from contemporary news accounts with biblical prophecy.  I suggest that Milton’s strategy for turning the usually intimate sonnet genre to these new public purposes was to dramatize his speaker’s very personal response to the particular event or crisis, often  making that event a lens through which to read public danger.   Yet Milton evidently decided not to tie these sonnets permanently to the current events that evoked them   In his published volumes of poetry (1645 abd 1673) he titled them (except for the Waldensian sonnet) by numbers only, thereby allowing them to speak to new circumstances.  Poetry, he seems to signal by this gesture, can give the  “news” much wider application.

 

Rachael Scarborough King ‘I take up my pen to write’: Writing to the Moment in Early Modern Letters

 

This paper explores the development of the epistolary technique of “writing to the moment” as a model for a discourse of contemporaneity in seventeenth-century news periodicals. The new genres of printed news that developed in the seventeenth century were fundamentally epistolary in nature; they used letters and the postal system to obtain news for publication, format texts, and circulate documents to readers. Readers expected to see real and fictional letters constantly appearing in newsbooks and pamphlets, especially during periods of political upheaval. At the same time, “familiar” letter-writing was becoming a widespread social practice. Individual authors and pedagogical texts adopted a less formal style that stressed letters’ “conversational” nature. Dorothy Osborne’s letters to Sir William Temple, dating from 1652-54, offer an early example of the convention of writing to the moment, a move in which the writer figures letter-writing as an ongoing part of everyday life. “Just now I was interrupted”; “I have been called away twenty times since I sat down to write”; “my eyes are so heavy that I hardly see what I write”: in these and many other examples, Osborne creates a metadiscourse on her own writing that fuses communication with timeliness. Each letter is precisely located in time and unfolds over time, allowing Osborne to depict her correspondent as a constant presence. In this paper, I will read Osborne’s letters alongside contemporary newsbooks and pamphlets to argue that the conventions of letter-writing—particularly that of writing to the moment—developing in manuscript and print offered ways to depict the contemporaneous unfolding of news events. Writing to the moment allowed printers to figure their news as constituting the “freshest advices”; simultaneously, the epistolary status of printed news affected the style and content of personal, handwritten letters and the ways people represented their everyday activities in writing.

Christopher Warren and Daniel Shore, Locality and Contemporaneity in the Early Modern Social Network

Our paper will argue that mapping out the associations that composed the early modern social network forces us to rethink many of our basic assumptions. More specifically, it will revise the concepts of “the local” and “the contemporary.” In the early 1980s, New Historicism established the primacy of these concepts as the measures of contextual relevance. We may think here of Clifford Geertz’s “local knowledge,” or Steven Greenblatt’s “particular and local pressures.” The New Historicism did not merely assert the local as the most relevant context of understanding but implicitly defined context as the local and the contemporaneous, such that “to historicize,” or “to contextualize” means to reinsert a work into its most proximate time and place. When more distant contexts become relevant, they do so only through the mediation of local ones. Historicists of all stripes have generally deployed an unreflective notion of “the local” and “the contemporaneous,” such that relevance can be thought of as a rough product of proximity: as a set of progressively larger circles centered on a spatiotemporal point. We contend, by contrast, that the local and contemporaneous are not merely given by mapped space or clock time, but are instead produced by social networks. Information, objects, and persons travel along a network’s edges, generating the local and the contemporary in the process. While this reversal is especially manifest with digital networks like Facebook, it has been true for as long as it has been possible to communicate through signs at a distance. Reconstructing the early modern social network can thus allow us to revisit and revise our understanding of a work’s context. Networks that stretch across epochs, nations, and continents show how relevant context breaks free of an unreflective notion of the local or the contemporary, redefining the terms so as to include, respectively, the trans-epochal and the trans-national.


For the purposes of this paper, our examples will primarily be concerned with John Milton and his associates, and our theory of networks will be primarily drawn from the work of Bruno Latour.

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