Divulging Utopia: Radical Humanism in Sixteenth-Century England.

David Weil Baker, Divulging Utopia: Radical Humanism in Sixteenth-Century England (Massachusetts Studies in Early Modern Culture.) Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. x + 221 pp. $35. ISBN: 1-55849-198-8.

For David Weil Baker, "humanist 'radicalism' refers to the tendency of early modern literati to demolish existing [social] structures and then build perfect worlds ...on the printed page, even as they remained unsure of who they wanted to have access to these .... [C]ommunism, whether as an ideal of social justice or the perversion of such an ideal, is ... generally an issue for such texts" (14). These sentences take some unpacking. Baker means that a communist socio-economic order was a live possibility in English Humanist thought from More forward. He also means it was a possibility about which Humanists were dubious in various ways. But it is also crucially important for him that they exposed this possibility in print.

Baker believes Humanists perceived printing, and other phases of "divulgating" such as translations and popularizations, as communicating to "a mixed readership, one whose limits authors did not set." As such, "divulgating" could entail a "loss of control of audience and meaning" (3), indeed an opening to a "communism" of a different sort than the economic, a "communism of interpretive property" (19), the possibility that readers might draw their own conclusions from texts Humanists set forth. One conclusion common readers might draw is that they should rise up against the real world hierarchical structures within which they lived and instate a communist social order in their place. Humanists generally contemplated such readings with dread. They made "preemptive authorial strikes against" them (6), such as the commentary attached to the 1515 edition of the The Praise of Folly to preclude subversive readings of it. They retrospectively clarified their positions, as when Gabriel Harvey in 1593 emphatically dis owned "social leveling" (141) in the face of Lyly's imputation of subversiveness to the Spenser/Harvey letters (1580). They barred broader divulgation of their writings at times when "misconstruction" was likely, as More in 1532 said he would burn works of his own if anyone would translate them into English in "'these days in which men... misconstrue ... the very scripture of god'" (50). Baker's assembling of sixteenth-century authors' negotiations with the possibility of misconstruction is a strength of his book. Despite them, however, the engagement in "divulgating" itself was continuous. Humanists had an approach/avoid relationship to the possibility of a "communism of interpretive property" as to socio-economic communism, nei unequivocally embracing it nor separating themselves from it.

This is a very different picture, and Baker means it to be, from that someti presented by Stephen Greenblatt, who has seen what we might take to be subver possibilities as actually entirely "contained," effectively nullified in sixteenth-century texts. Baker also takes issue with Mary Thomas Crane's Framing Authority: Sayings, Self and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1993). Crane emphasizes schools as the locus of English Humanism; Baker rightly sees a Humanist "emphasis on printed divulgation" (11) also. Crane sees Humanist teachers as gearing their students towards careers of upward mobility; for her and other recent scholars, Humanists contemplated less the displacement of social hierarchy than revision of the existing one to allow the rise of those with Humanistic training. Baker wants to give Humanism a more radical shading, but his case here is sometimes questionable. In fact, the possibility of a communist social order is indeed raised only to be disowned by many of the writers he cit es, from Elyot through Morison, Cheke, and it would seem Spenser, who instead valorize a society in which men of talent can gain more rewards and higher social station than others. Baker might have conceded the strength of this line more systematically without fatally disabling his argument that Humanism had some radical potential. Finally, his book invites comparison with David Norbrook's Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (Routledge, 1984), where the sense of Humanists' "radicalism" is less nuanced, at times better grounded.

Baker has chapters on Erasmus, More, Elyot, the mid-century translations of The Praise of Folly by Chaloner and Utopia by Robinson, and Spenser. He writes gracefully, and his analysis of Humanist discourse is subtle and rich. There are other strengths and weaknesses and questions to be asked of this original, provocative book, but it has seemed most important to sketch and contextualize its main argument, particularly its way of connecting Humanists' relations to social radicalism and to the world of print.