Dialogue in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, c. 1400–1680

This book is the first major study of dialogue in England from the fifteenth to the late seventeenth century: a 'golden age' of dialogue, and a crucial period for its development. The spread of humanist education placed a premium on classical forms (including dialogue), whilst the discourse of commonweal had natural affinities with a literary model that evoked, at least on paper, a sense of polyvocality and participation. The arrival of the printing press and increasing levels of literacy also impacted on dialogue, altering expectations about the audience addressed and the forms dialogue took. The book thus traces significant evolutions, including the influence of culturally prominent texts, such as Baldassare Castiglione's Courtier and More's Utopia, and the ways in which Reformation and Counter-Reformation and the political turmoil of the mid-seventeenth century fuelled controversial and satirical modes of dialogue.

Exploring a wide variety of dialogic types, from instructional manuals and civil conversations to political and religious dialogues, it places English dialogue within its wider European contexts, providing powerful testimony to the sustained influence of non-Anglophone material and the intertwining of European literary and intellectual traditions. It asks why writers of this period turned so recurrently to dialogue. What advantages does the form hold over monologic genres? How do writers exploit its formal conventions? What are the resonances and assumptions that cluster around the form and lend it cultural authority? How does dialogue interact and intersect with other genres (dream poetry, familiar letters, drama, prose fiction)? How do dialogic habits of thinking shape the literature and drama of this period? And, in an age in which silence was seen as a female virtue, what place do women have in this conversational form?

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