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73807 results in Boydell & Brewer

Page 1238 of 3691

A Critical Companion to John Skelton

  • Some Reflections on the Funding of English Departments

  • Edited by Robert Eaglestone, Gail Marshall
  • Book:
    English: Shared Futures
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    15 October 2019
    Print publication:
    15 November 2018, pp 73-82

  • Summary

    Why should academics in English take an interest in the funding of their discipline? The answer may be obvious. But in practice, even at quite senior level, I've observed, few follow matters to any depth. This is perhaps understandable as little effort is generally made to make this sort of information widely or accessibly known while, as a whole, we make little effort to follow it. As a result, headline issues such as student fees, or limited postgraduate funding, or ‘marketised’ higher education, consume our attention, sometimes separating them from broader patterns. The deep political and ethical resonance of such issues is naturally more interesting than quotidian income and expenditure. I have strongly held views about some of these high-level issues, which I will come to, but with the encouragement of the editors I want first to consider the bare bones of HE funding in a discipline like English.

    Though different disciplines have them in different ratios, and some (such as medicine) have supplementary sources, university departments have essentially three sources of funding: from teaching, research and other. I will reflect on each. The first is generally called ‘T’-stream funding. This derives from undergraduate and postgraduate teaching for which a fee is charged. The UK and EU undergraduate fee is notionally variable, and universities could discount it from the capped maximum (currently £9,250 in England) to reflect actual costs or gain market advantage by competing on price. In reality, however, fees cluster in thunderous numbers at the maximum. Past attempts by a small number of publicly funded universities to offer courses at a lower fee to attract more students (thus offsetting lower unit price by larger volume) failed.

    Committed to ‘driving value’ (so-called) into the provision, recent administrations have been keen to introduce ‘private’ (for-profit) providers into competition with ‘public’ (not for profit) institutions, hence establishing the market that didn't materialise voluntarily for reasons I will give below. The argument is that this will disrupt what is in effect a cartel at £9,250, thereby lowering costs for students and forcing universities to ‘drive up’ quality to compete.

    Things are often ‘driven’ in this theory, but, so far, journey times are slow with little impact except as a theoretical (and ideological) challenge.

  • English Outreach: Academics in the Classroom

  • Edited by Robert Eaglestone, Gail Marshall
  • Book:
    English: Shared Futures
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    15 October 2019
    Print publication:
    15 November 2018, pp 25-32

  • Summary

    English in Crisis: Can Outreach Help?

    In the summer of 2017, as teachers, academics and other members of the wider English community met at the ‘Shared Futures’ conference, Year 11s across the country sat their examinations for the new reformed English GCSE. Graded with a numerical system of 9–1, the new course is designed to be more demanding and to stretch able students: coursework has been abolished, all examinations are closed-book, and there is an increased emphasis on the ‘classics’ of British literature. At the same time, the introduction of the new linear A-Level requires Key Stage 5 students to sit all of their examinations at the end of a two-year course, rather than in the stages facilitated by the previous AS system, and sees a reduction in coursework. Creative Writing did not survive the A-Level reforms. Critics of these changes have argued that they risk placing English studies in crisis and, indeed, there is already evidence to suggest that some students are being put off pursuing higher-level qualifications in English. A recent study conducted by John Gordon at the University of East Anglia's School of Education revealed that many pupils find the new literature GCSE off-putting and confusing, preventing them from having the kinds of discussions that allow them to enjoy the texts they are required to study. This may well have a knock-on effect on the number of students choosing to study English at A-Level, with entries in 2017 already having dropped by 11.1% for English Language and Literature, 10.2% for English Language, and 4.7% for English Literature. Bill Watkin, chief executive of the Sixth Form Colleges Association, fears that the ‘love of the subject’ that inspires students to continue English to A-Level is in ‘danger of being overshadowed’ by the more rigid standards now expected. Against this backdrop of educational reform, we also face an increased governmentbacked emphasis on the supposed superiority of STEM subjects and the accompanying perception that the study of English is only useful if it is skills-based and relevant to ‘real life’.

    As many English departments in universities across the UK encounter a corresponding decline in applications, an increasing number of academics are considering how we can connect with younger students by offering educational outreach.

  • 1 - John Skelton (?1460–1529): A Life in Writing

    • By John Scattergood, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Emeritus) at Trinity College, Dublin.
  • Edited by Sebastian Sobecki, John Scattergood
  • Book:
    A Critical Companion to John Skelton
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 July 2019
    Print publication:
    15 November 2018, pp 5-25

  • Summary

    In a judgment which has been much admired and widely endorsed C. S. Lewis wrote of John Skelton: ‘He has no real predecessors and no important disciples; he stands out of the streamy historical process, an unmistakable individual’ (Lewis 1954: 134). His writings are highly distinctive and individualistic, but most of what is known factually about Skelton as an individual comes from official records. These tell what universities he attended and what degrees he received, what positions he held in the Church and at court, what he was paid, where he lived for some of the time, what legal cases, both ecclesiastical and civil, he was involved in, when he died and where he was buried (Edwards 1949: 287–304). We know that some of his contemporaries admired him and that he quarrelled with others. We also know who owned some of the manuscripts in which some of his works were copied and who printed others (Kinsman and Yonge 1967: 1–80). There is a collection of fifteen amusing stories about him – the so-called Merie Tales of Master Skelton (1567) – but these, for the most part, were not current in his lifetime and have not been found to be entirely reliable, though they do indicate how he was perceived by some, and provide hints about his lifestyle (Dyce 1844: I, pp. lxxi–xci, nos. i–xv). In fact, the most valuable information about Skelton's attitudes, his likes and dislikes, his political preferences and how, generally, he reacted to the world in which he lived is provided by his writings themselves. So it is possible to trace the contours of Skelton's peripatetic, somewhat erratic and very controversial career with a fair degree of confidence (Edwards 1949; Gray 2012: 3–99; Nelson 1939; Pollet 1971; Scattergood 2004; Scattergood 2014).

    John Skelton is usually thought to have been born around 1460 or a little later, probably of a northern, possibly a Yorkshire, family (Pollet 1971: 6–9; Scattergood 2014: 53–4), though Greg Waite has argued, on the basis of some dialectal features of Skelton's language, that ‘both his origins and schooling’ may have been in ‘East Anglia or the Central to NE Midlands’ (Waite 2008: 128).

  • 5 - Democratic Religion

  • Chris Barker
  • Book:
    Educating Liberty
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 July 2019
    Print publication:
    15 November 2018, pp 155-192

  • Summary

    Earlier chapters of this book explain Mill's theory of education, which he believes is a lifelong endeavor that begins at home and with the cultivating effects of small-group association. These small-scale, more or less intimate associations prepare individuals for a life of freedom and equality rather than passivity and dependence. As chapters 3 and 4 argued, Mill is particularly concerned with avoiding entrenching existing social hierarchies as well as creating new hierarchies of knowledge and expertise. This chapter deals with the religious humanitarianism of the Three Essays on Religion and explains how Mill's theory of education applies not to small-scale cooperation or political participation but to the species as a whole.

    Readers of Utilitarianism have long debated Mill's argument that Utilitarianism can and should be taught like a religion. Some have concluded that Mill's liberalism is an antidote to the self-created problem of oppressive Utilitarianism. Others argue that Mill is a thorough secularist whose “religion” does not even qualify as a civil religion because it is so transparently nontheistic. Some of Mill's Victorian readers thought that he was an atheistic and utopian thinker, whereas others thought that his religious writings supported emotional theism. In fact, Mill's religion of humanity gained few positive notices, although the great diversity in interpreting Mill is heartening. Perhaps underneath the competing criticisms we can find something complicated and worthy of interpretation.

    When they are interpreted properly, Mill's writings on religion reveal his persistent respect for existing traditions of religious belief. Most important, these writings aim at strengthening the educational resources available to liberalism. One friendly critic of Mill argues that the “pervasive weakness” of Mill's mature liberalism lies in Mill's failure to anticipate that “widespread manipulation of opinion in democracies might undermine and possibly negate the educative role elites … had necessarily to play in reforming society.” This is the problem that Mill's writings on religion address.

    Mill's adopted daughter, Helen Taylor, published the Three Essays on Religion after Mill's death. “Nature,” “The Utility of Religion,” and “Theism” were at least partially edited by Mill before his death. “Nature” was finished in February 1854. “Utility of Religion” was completed in early April 1854. According to Helen Taylor, Mill wrote “Theism” between 1868 and 1870.

  • 3 - Law and Politics

    • By Sebastian Sobecki, Professor of Medieval English Literature and Culture at the University of Groningen.
  • Edited by Sebastian Sobecki, John Scattergood
  • Book:
    A Critical Companion to John Skelton
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 July 2019
    Print publication:
    15 November 2018, pp 37-51

  • Summary

    It would appear that little can be gained by parsing Skelton's writings for traces of the law. Among the works securely attributed to him there is no discourse on legal thought or treatise on jurisprudence. Yet the law is never truly absent from Skelton's writings. Legal references appear in a number of his works, including Magnyfycence, A Replycacion Agaynst Certayne Yong Scolers Abjured of Late, and the three Wolsey satires. The religious bile of the Replycacion and its investments in the persecution of heterodox beliefs has been treated by Vincent Gillespie (1997), and Bradin Cormack has expounded the substantial implications of Skelton's ideas in Magnyfycence about the juridical role of the Household (Cormack 2007: 47–84). Cormack's argument that Skelton's views echo the thought of the fifteenth-century jurist John Fortescue is significant, and, I argue, also holds true for other areas of the poet's oeuvre. As for politics, Skelton's three scathing Wolsey satires – Speke Parott, Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? – reveal the poet's intimate familiarity with the workings of the Chancery and the policies of its controversial incumbent, Thomas Wolsey, while the topical poems Howe the Douty Duke of Albany and A Ballade of the Scottysshe Kynge (as well as its revision, Agaynst the Scottes) rely on the audience's ability to pinpoint and contextualise the circumstances surrounding specific political events. Whether in or out of royal grace, Skelton has been thoroughly studied as a politically situated figure (Walker 1988; Scattergood 2014; Hadfield 2009), but no one has yet attempted to distil Skelton's idea of politics from his works and to scrutinise (in senses 2 and 4 of the OED's definition) his ‘theory or practice of government or administration’, his ‘political ideas’ and ‘beliefs’, and ‘the assumptions or principles relating to or underlying any activity … when concerned with questions of power and status in a society’.

    This chapter examines Skelton's grasp of legal practice and of the law as a public institution, while teasing out his underlying political ideas and principles.

  • 4 - Classical Literature

    • By John Scattergood, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Emeritus) at Trinity College, Dublin.
  • Edited by Sebastian Sobecki, John Scattergood
  • Book:
    A Critical Companion to John Skelton
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 July 2019
    Print publication:
    15 November 2018, pp 52-70

  • Summary

    Though John Skelton is commonly regarded as a quintessentially English poet, one of his earliest appearances in the literary record (in 1490) involves him with traditions of classical writing and with the act of translation – both narrowly, in the sense of rendering classical texts into English, and more generally, with the ‘carrying over’ of classical culture into England. These associations are significant, and in one way or another would stay with him, in terms mainly of Latin literature, for the rest of his life (Carlson 2016).

    William Caxton, who had been translating and printing since about 1473/4, expresses some perplexity as to what linguistic register to choose for his English version of the Aeneid, based on a French translation that he had among his papers. What attracted him to the French version were ‘the fayr and honest termes and wordes in Frenshe, whyche I never sawe tofore lyke ne none so playsaunt ne so wel ordred’ (Caxton 1973: 78–81). He thought that a translation would appeal to ‘noble men … as wel for the eloquence as the hystoryes’, but when he looked over the first few pages of his version he became aware that he had adopted some of the ornate vocabulary from the French – he calls them ‘fayr and straunge termes’ – and realised that this gave him a problem with his potential readers: ‘I doubted that it sholde not please some gentylmen whiche late blamed me saying that in my translacyons I had over-curyous termes whiche coude not be understand of comyn peple and desired me to use olde and homely termes in my translacyons.’ Caxton, dutifully, looked at older documents but ‘the Englysshe was so rude and brood that I coude not wel understand it’. It was ‘more lyke to Dutche [German] than Englysshe’.

    In about 1505, Skelton, through the persona of Jane Scrope, expresses something of the same disquiet about English: ‘Our natural tong is rude’, she says, and she uses adjectives such as ‘rusty’, ‘cankered’ and ‘dull’ to describe it. She says that if she were to attempt to write ‘ornatly’ she would not know where to find ‘termes to serve my mynd’ – because she has no knowledge of classical writing: ‘These poetes of auncynte …

  • 9 - Literary Tradition

    • By Jane Griffiths, Associate Professor in English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wadham College.
  • Edited by Sebastian Sobecki, John Scattergood
  • Book:
    A Critical Companion to John Skelton
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 July 2019
    Print publication:
    15 November 2018, pp 127-138

  • Summary

    Skelton's writing has long been understood as a mix of conventional and idiosyncratic elements. It draws on numerous established motifs, genres and poetic traditions: his earliest known works show him experimenting with lyric, with elegy and with an aureate style derived from Lydgate; his many invectives draw on the conventions of the flyting; his surviving dramatic work shows him adapting the form of the morality play to secular ends; the satires of the 1520s fuse bitter Juvenalian satire with native complaint; his dream visions place him in a Chaucerian tradition; his impassioned claim to divine inspiration in his final poem, A Replycacion (1528), can be linked to earlier Continental defences of poetry, most notably Boccaccio's in his De genealogia deorum gentilium. Even the most ostentatiously peculiar aspect of his writing, the skeltonic verse form, with its short lines and irregular rhyme leashes, has demonstrable connections to existing genres, among them alliterative Latin prose and Middle English lyric. Taking as its starting-point the neglected poem Against Venemous Tongues (c. 1516), this chapter will explore a range of ways in which literary traditions manifest in Skelton's work, ranging from playful allusion and rhetorical self-fashioning to fully assimilated and internalised influence on Skelton's composition techniques.

    Against Venemous Tongues is a relatively short and strikingly odd poem. Whilst it is clearly an attack on slanderers, its occasion remains obscure: Skelton defends himself against a charge which is never fully specified, but which may have been that he criticised one or more lords for the number of servants wearing their liveries at a ceremonial meeting between Henry VIII and his sister Margaret in the spring of 1516; since a household livery was a kind of uniform, a visual statement of the household to which someone belonged, a display of numbers amounted to an assertion of power. The crux of Skelton's defence, that the accusation levelled against him is untrue, occupies a very few lines, and is notably slippery:

    For before on your brest, and behind on your back

    In Romaine letters I never founde lack.

    (16–17)

    Although the primary sense of to ‘find lack’ is ‘to find fault with’, there is a pun on the sense ‘to find wanting’ or ‘to find to be too few’; even as he claims not to have said that there were too many people in livery, Skelton implies that there were plenty of them, nonetheless.

  • 7 - Lyrics and Short Poems

    • By Julia Boffey, Professor of Medieval Studies at the Department of English, Queen Mary, University of London.
  • Edited by Sebastian Sobecki, John Scattergood
  • Book:
    A Critical Companion to John Skelton
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 July 2019
    Print publication:
    15 November 2018, pp 102-113

  • Summary

    Although the body of Skelton's surviving independent lyrics is not a large one, his interest in short verse forms and their potential is evident in many aspects of his writing, infiltrating longer poems in a variety of ways – sometimes simply in the form of quoted titles or snatches of song, like those of Hervy Hafter and Ryotte in The Bowge of Courte (235–59, 360–71; for discussion of these and the songs mentioned by Skelton elsewhere see Carpenter 1955). His interest in short forms reflects knowledge of both Latin and English traditions, and some of the works which might invite consideration as part of his lyric corpus are either in Latin or in combinations of Latin and English (see for example the ‘elegy’ in Phyllyp Sparowe, 826–43; and the mixed English and Latin of Epitaphe and Against Dundas). One major challenge in discussing Skelton's lyrics is simply deciding what they are, since they are not always easily separable from their surroundings. Some are interpolated in longer works, such as the Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell, others sewn together in loosely connected strings, as in Agenst Garnesche, a series of ‘flytyngs’ from the years 1513–19, retrospectively assembled in one manuscript booklet (CEP: XIII; and see LW). A ‘creed’ for noblemen, consisting of a burden and two stanzas of skeltonics, is printed as an independent lyric in Certayne bokes compyled by Mayster Skelton (printed by Lant, c. 1545; STC 22615), and in Stow's 1568 edition of the Pithy pleasaunt and profitable workes of maister Skelton (printed by Marshe; STC 22608), where it has its own title in the list of contents (‘The relucent mirror’); but it appears in other witnesses attached to the start of Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?. These are just some of the kinds of textual uncertainty which can stand in the way of identifying Skelton's lyrics.

    Even more than is the case with Skelton's other works, uncertain attributions in surviving witnesses mean that the canon of short poems is hard to define.

  • Practice at Large: How Creative Writing can Enhance University Research Environments

  • Edited by Robert Eaglestone, Gail Marshall
  • Book:
    English: Shared Futures
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    15 October 2019
    Print publication:
    15 November 2018, pp 171-179

  • Summary

    ‘I don't at all favour the institution known as the “creative writer on the campus”,’ opined F. R. Leavis in 1967. ‘What next?’ linguist Roman Jakobson remarked, when he heard Vladimir Nabokov had been offered a Harvard professorship, ‘shall we appoint an elephant to teach zoology?’ Like King Cnut, their helplessly raised hands failed to hold back the tide. Creative writing (hereafter CW) maintains an uneasy relationship with its academic mother subject, English, ‘rather like welcoming Heathcliff into the family’, in Nicholas Royle's British ‘elephant’ equivalent. Beyond this uncomfortable duality as academic sub-discipline and object of study, however, Royle recognizes that CW attracts students, connecting its rapid expansion in many minds to the marketization of Higher Education.

    A success story, yet often eyed still with suspicion then, CW has gradually carved out a distinct academic identity for itself. This essay outlines the subject's genesis within English Studies, and describes the ways it has come to describe its own research paradigms. It considers how the subject is currently securing its future in Higher Education. We discuss how the University of Leicester's CW research centre, the Centre for New Writing, has adapted to the wider academic research environment. Notwithstanding the subject's business value to institutional managers, we show how it provides many opportunities, both to serve the wider writing community, and to design innovative research projects with colleagues from other disciplines. Archaeologists, archivists, historians, geographers and medical researchers are awakening to the power of imaginative writing and beginning to understand its potential for delivering considerable public benefits.

    Understanding ‘Creative Practice’

    Sociologist Laurel Richardson ‘was taught … not to write until I knew what I wanted to say’; instead, she finds ‘I write in order to learn something that I did not know before I wrote it.’ The late author and screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet believed the

    function of art is never to illustrate a truth – even an interrogation – known in advance, but to bring into the world certain interrogations not yet known to themselves… When we ask [the writer] why he has written his book, he has only one answer: ‘To try and find out why I wanted to write it.’

  • Exquisite Tensions – Narrating the BAME ECA Experience

  • Edited by Robert Eaglestone, Gail Marshall
  • Book:
    English: Shared Futures
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    15 October 2019
    Print publication:
    15 November 2018, pp 51-56

  • Summary

    Recent events have initiated both a re-evaluation and, consequently, a re-write of what would otherwise have been a straightforward précis of an uplifting panel session where four academics – at very different stages of our careers – who fall under the BAME (Black and Minority Ethnic) category discussed our experiences. The thread binding us together was – despite our divergent journeys leading there – our work within British universities and, broadly speaking, within English departments. Aside from these commonalities, and the shared experiences and connections once inside the UK academy, we could arguably, present ourselves as a manifesto repudiating the idea of a monolithic BAME experience.

    In fact, any conclusion from our initial presentations could be summarised thus:

  • The BAME experience is not a monolithic one;

  • The ECA experience is not a monolithic one;

  • We're all interdisciplinarians now.

    • To briefly address these points, it is salient to note that the panel was composed of four people, born in three different continents, from different ethnic backgrounds, educational backgrounds, genders, social classes, and, ultimately, different initial experiences of teaching within higher education institutions. If only more English departments were to boast such diversity in their employment practices!

    As loosely defined ‘Early Career Academics’, a range of previous employment, including teaching roles, had also preceded our presences on the faculty payroll. And on this note, our wealth of experience meant that we continued to cross disciplines once inside the academy.

    The idea of a permanent, secure job within academia is increasingly rare and, as such, expertise has widened. This phenomenon is not limited to BAME staff, of course, but it is also worth taking into account the large subset of BAME staff whose experience of living and being educated outside of the UK has enabled them to more easily reach beyond their immediate areas of expertise within English.

    Here I shall divulge further my own peripatetic existence: as a British-educated PhD candidate, sat between the Creative Writing Department at one institution, on the one hand, and the Religions and Philosophies department at a neighbouring institution, on the other, my practice-led research comprising of fiction, Caribbean Pentecostalism and migration straddles disciplines in an atypical manner.

  • From A-Level to HE: Working Towards a Shared Future?

  • Edited by Robert Eaglestone, Gail Marshall
  • Book:
    English: Shared Futures
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    15 October 2019
    Print publication:
    15 November 2018, pp 16-24

  • Summary

    Student transition from post-16 to higher education is a well-established and active area of research, engaging education specialists as well as those working within university and, more rarely, secondary English departments. It is also an issue that has prompted several cross-sector initiatives, many of which serve to put schools and universities in direct touch with one another. My own interest in the interface between the two sectors came from observing the frustrations of a colleague who spent half of her week teaching A-Level English Literature and the other half teaching undergraduates at a pre-92 university: a dual role that was, and still is, highly unusual. Her accounts of some of the misunderstandings, misinformation and mythologizing that persisted on both sides of the divide, prompted me to form the English Association's University Transition Special Interest Group with the aim of fostering and sustaining dialogue between A-Level and university teachers.

    I was fully aware when I initiated the group back in 2007 that we were entering potentially choppy waters. Carol Atherton, one of the leading schoolteacher-figures in transition, spoke for many in the teaching profession when she remarked: ‘I get very twitchy about the issue of transition. I am uneasy with the deficit model that it seems to set up: the assumption that students are not adequately prepared for degree level study and that this is because teachers aren't doing their jobs properly.’ Such wariness is not without justification. In the Foreword to David Ellis's illuminating report In at the Deep End? (2008), Jonathan Gibson observes:

    In the past, English departments seem, on occasion, almost to have relished the discomfort of new students, seeking to induce a kind of existential trauma. Freshers were told that doing English literature at university would involve a radically new approach to texts, disturbingly different from the old-fashioned nonsense they had been taught at school: it was time to grow up.

    Nowadays, with undergraduate recruitment and retention high on most universities’ list of priorities, adopting the de haute en bas attitude noted above would seem more than a little unwise and, while there are doubtless some academics who hold fast to the belief that students arrive stuffed with ‘old-fashioned nonsense’, most manage to hold back from issuing what used to be fairly standard advice to new undergraduates: ‘Unlearn everything they taught you at A-Level.’

  • Introduction

    • By Sebastian Sobecki, Professor of Medieval English Literature and Culture at the University of Groningen.
  • Edited by Sebastian Sobecki, John Scattergood
  • Book:
    A Critical Companion to John Skelton
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 July 2019
    Print publication:
    15 November 2018, pp 1-4

  • Summary

    John Skelton remains challenging for modern audiences. Filled with contradictions, he is a poet in need of a critical introduction. His deep erudition can be daunting: his fondness for Latin interpolations and interjections often produces macaronic lines with a distinctly bookish and even pedantic appearance. Yet Skelton's learned content is often couched in a verse form more readily associated with levity: skeltonics, a convention which he helped to create and, rather eccentrically, also name. This trademark style is characterised by rhyming couplets and short lines, often carrying only two or three stresses, that give his poetry its typically fast pace.

    His surviving oeuvre may be modest in size, but his English and Latin poems span a broad gamut of topics, themes and occasions. For a (self-designated) court poet there is remarkably little flattery in his work. Instead, Skelton is perhaps best known for his complex moral allegory, The Bowge of Courte, and his three scathing satires of Henry VIII's despised Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey: Speke Parott, Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? The Bowge of Courte is a biting satire of court life, built around the fashionable allegory of the ship-of-state. Skelton's caustic view of life in the immediate orbit of Henry VIII remains one of the most powerful critiques of the arbitrariness of late medieval and early modern court politics. It is as if The Bowge of Courte had been written to anticipate the tumultuous careers of such Tudor courtiers as Sir Thomas Wyatt or, indeed, Skelton himself. The Wolsey satires, on the other hand, mark a milestone in the history of political satire in Britain. With irreverent wit and unmitigated vitriol these three poems unleashed an attack on England's second-most powerful man that caused Skelton to fear for his own life and to seek refuge in the sanctuary of Westminster. Few satirists in English history have dared to match Skelton's radical commitment to this genre. But Skelton's surviving works also include occasional verse, advice literature and even a play, Magnyfycence. Then there is the specific historical and political context in which almost all of his work is embedded, making some of his poems only fully accessible with the firm support of editorial footnotes. A companion volume to Skelton, therefore, has been long overdue.

  • 4 - Mass and Elite Politics

  • Chris Barker
  • Book:
    Educating Liberty
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 July 2019
    Print publication:
    15 November 2018, pp 116-154

  • Summary

    The preceding chapters have focused on cooperation in the production of children, the production of goods, and the production of knowledge. In each area, creating subordination in cooperative relationships for the sake of greater efficiency and rationality is a danger. For example, Mill argues that even educational paternalism would “probably” lead to a worse form of government than military dictatorships or economic oligarchies. It is ironic that we see a practical example of this paternalism in British India, where Mill thinks that the law of stages justifies the East India Company's despotism despite evidence that the company's rule was in some respects more oppressive than any indigenous equivalent.

    This chapter and the next examine the production of obedience and loyalty in the domains of representative government and civic religion. In these areas, the challenge is not the eighteenth century problem with the few (the adult male in the household, the owner and manager, the expert and scientist) but the power of the many. As noted in the introduction, Mill believes that in the late modern social state, the power of masses is starting to predominate over that of individuals and elite groups. Although mass participation may typically advance mass cultivation and Mill's “principles of individual freedom and political and social equality,” artificial means of balancing the powers of masses and elites are needed. The answer is representative government, albeit of an unusual and challenging sort.

    In Mill's description, representative government is a system where the “whole people, or some numerous portion of them, exercise through deputies periodically elected by themselves, the ultimate controlling power, which, in every constitution, must reside somewhere.” Mill's theory is not only a mechanical theory of checks and balances but also a dynamic theory that adjusts a constitution to keep up with a changing and evolving society. Thus, Mill's theory is neither wholly conservative nor wholly progressive, just as it is neither wholly popular nor aristocratic, nor entirely normative nor descriptive. What Mill seeks is not a mixed constitutionalism, or popular constitutionalism, or even (as he is sometimes misunderstood to favor) elite constitutionalism, but balance. In a balanced political association, political participation is an education in moderation, compromise, and reasonableness.

  • Pedagogic Criticism: An Introduction

  • Edited by Robert Eaglestone, Gail Marshall
  • Book:
    English: Shared Futures
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    15 October 2019
    Print publication:
    15 November 2018, pp 40-50

  • Summary

    Pedagogic criticism involves reading texts through teaching, and teaching through texts. In so doing its aim is to bring into focus the transactions between the study and interpretation of texts and the social forms and rituals of pedagogy. It is a way of articulating a process through which an educational subject is talked into being. Literary studies is a form of cultural production, a collaborative process of making, carried out through a specialised form of dialogue: this form of conversation starts with what may look like confusion and moves towards a provisional order. Thus critical discourse – an intensified version of the meta-linguistic and interpretative conversations that constitute social living – is fashioned in the teaching relationship. Reciprocally, texts frequently prefigure the acts of pedagogy and politics of interpretation.

    In exploring this interaction, pedagogic criticism borrows a leaf from New Historicism. Arguing that social energy is stored in literature not only in paper form, but in ongoing social exchange and transactions, Stephen Greenblatt proposes that ‘we begin by taking seriously the collective production of literary pleasure and interest’. In pedagogic criticism I attempt to re-submerge printed criticism in the oral pedagogic dialogues from which it has emerged, reading the history of the discipline as a history of practices as much as a history of ideas. While so much of pedagogy obeys invisible rules, this approach seeks to locate and listen to pedagogic voices within a discipline whose history can best be understood as being a history of practices as much as of the evolution of ‘subject knowledge’ arguing for a kind of isomorphism between the tropes of text and those of pedagogy.

    The thick description of the discipline draws heavily on the work of the UK English Subject Centre between 2001 and 2011.2 The subject ‘English’ (in both secondary and tertiary education), while subject to enormous and in many ways conflicting political and social pressures, may be at a moment of radical reformation from within. Pedagogic criticism seeks to contribute to that transformation by raising the level of visibility of largely unspoken assumptions about teaching and learning. Education is a formal process for enlarging the repertoire of individual and social choices: pedagogic criticism suggests that the study of literary and cultural texts is a potent stage for the development of ideas about learning – ideas that are frequently at odds with the ‘evidence-based’ shibboleths that dominate current educational policy.

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