In this chapter Kinch Hoekstra analyses the particular understanding of time and history characteristic of ‘politic history’, identified by scholars as a distinctive genre in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, where it flourished as a historiographical version of ‘reason of state’. At its heart, Hoekstra argues, was an epistemic question: whether it is possible to derive political lessons from empirical, historical truths. Influenced by Italian discussions of how political knowledge could be drawn from historical experience, politic historians looked in particular to Machiavelli and Guicciardini. It was Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poetry, who posed the epistemic question most sharply, and Francis Bacon who offered the fullest response. In turn, Hoekstra suggests, a Guicciardinian and Baconian conception of the value of history informs Hobbes’ preface to his translation of Thucydides, whom he famously characterised as ‘the most politique historiographer that ever writ’. Hoekstra ends by rejecting the scholarly consensus that Hobbes’ turn to ‘civil science’ marked his repudiation of a historical politics.

This chapter argues that Thomas Nashe created a novel role for the urban writer that also assumed an innovative set of aesthetic principles that we associate with the metaphysical and that was directly antagonistic to humanist ideals. The dissatisfaction that Nashe felt at his lack of advancement as a member of the supposed intellectual elite contributed to his deeply skeptical outlook on reality and on the efficacy of humanist writing more specifically. As I newly detail in this chapter, the precise quotidian realities of Nashe’s existence in London in the 1590s pushed him to formulate a novel advocacy of contention even as he pushed away the noisiness of the urban public world, an entirely ambivalent stance towards the city embodied in Nashe’s obsession with corners. In formulating a writing approach that corresponded with his objections to Philip Sidney and Gabriel Harvey and to his urban reality, Nashe innovated his prose style into something less mimetic than affective, a style that foregrounded a speedy aimlessness, as well as a heterogeneous mixture of materialist images. Nashe’s prose thus takes up the very features that we now call the metaphysical.

This chapter explores how the concept of sympathy is explored and interrogated in three Elizabethan prose texts: John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578); Sidney’s The Old Arcadia (c. 1580); and Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590). Lyly’s Euphues represents an important transitional moment in the history of the concept, as it employs both the earlier Latin form sympathia and the newer English word sympathy to describe the ‘sympathy of manners’ between two male friends: Euphues and Philautus. It is argued that the pair share each other’s emotions because of a common set of circumstances, rather than sympathetic magic or humanist models of friendship. The chapter reads these three prose fictions in the context of other works that reproduce or complicate the notion of a ‘sympathy of affections’ between friends or lovers. Within this discourse we can see the term sympathy increasingly used to describe a correspondence of woe, or what the narrator of Anthony Munday’s translation of Palmerin (1588), in a suggestive modification of the trope, refers to as a ‘sympathy of afflictions’.

Chapter 2 explores how Sidney uses literary form for passionate experimentation and develops a sophisticated affective vocabulary that intersects with the reformation of contentment. Neither The Old Arcadia nor the revised New Arcadia reproduce Protestant concepts of contentedness or proselytize an idealized Christian psychology. Instead, in The Old Arcadia Sidney pursues the strategies of romance, including the “wandering,” “error,” and “trial” described by Patricia Parker, and arrives at counter-intuitive and potentially scandalizing conclusions about the emotion. More specifically, Sidney aligns both sexual satisfaction and virtuous endurance with contentment, and he makes the character Pyrocles’s erotic fulfillment in Books 3 and 4 instrumental to his pious suffering in Book 5. However, in The New Arcadia, Sidney displaces the most extreme manifestations of desire from the four young lovers onto their antagonists, and he disentangles contentment and constancy in the face of adversity. By pushing contentment to the pastoral peripheries to emphasize the revised work’s more chivalric tenor, Sidney recoils from his most innovative contribution to the Renaissance discourse.

The ‘Sidney psalter’ has attracted critical attention for the extraordinary metrical versatility displayed by Philip and (mostly) Mary Sidney in their complete set of psalm paraphrases in English. Ithas not however been discussed in the context of the neo-Latin metrical usage and experiment of the latter sixteenth century described in Chapter 2, although the Sidney psalter precisely reproduces in English the literary achievement in Latin of the major Protestant psalm paraphrases by George Buchanan and Theodore de Bèze (Beza). Of great devotional and literary importance for Protestants throughout Europe, these two collections were recognized immediately by contemporaries for their literary achievement, and Buchanan’s, in particular, was routinely cited until well into the eighteenth century. Taken together, they are crucial landmarks in the development of a Protestant Latin poetics, combining the literary achievement of humanism with a distinctively Protestant emphasis upon the literal meaning of the Hebrew Bible. This chapter describes theachievement and influence of these Latin works and sets out the evidence for their direct influence upon Mary Sidney in particular.

This chapter brings print and manuscript commonplace books into dialogue with anti-theatrical diatribes and defences of poetry in order to establish that literary taste, usually dated to the eighteenth century, emerges much earlier in the humanist trope of the reader as bee, using the sense of taste to discriminate between rhetorical ‘flowers’. Through a reading of Anne Southwell's commonplace book, I claim that in the context of humoral psychology, this trope possessed a literal dimension: contemporary sensitivity to the flavour of gall ink corresponds to the suggestion that literary judgement is exercised through actual acts of tasting. Focusing on Ben Jonson’s paratexts, I submit that this has implications for how we understand the politics of taste: locating judgement at the bottom of the sensory hierarchy, ‘taste’ democratises critical authority.

This chapter turns to Propertius and Philip Sidney and, taking its cue from from Cynthia as the eroticised muse of Propertian poetry, and the scornful muse of Astrophil and Stella 1, explores metaliterary themes of poetic practice. Reading the muse as a figure for ideas of inspiration and creativity, for authority and canonicity, we consider how the selected texts negotiate, articulate and configure ideas about the nature, identity and cultural function of poetry in Augustan Rome and Elizabethan England.