| Summary: | Pastoral poetry has long been considered a signature Renaissance mode: originating in late sixteenth-century England via a rediscovery of classical texts, it is concerned with self-fashioning and celebrating the court. But, as the author demonstrates in this book, the pastoral mode is in fact indebted to medieval representations of rural labor. The author offers a literary history for the pastoral, arguing that the authors of the first English pastorals used rural laborers familiar from medieval texts -- plowmen and shepherds -- to reflect on the social, economic, and religious disruptions of the sixteenth century.
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