A poetics of indenture: 'Cases peculiar' in English Renaissance literature

This project delineates the textual conventions within unfamiliar but important social registers in a period spanning the sixteenth-century and situates them within the wider context of the European Reformation. In seeking to situate a range of literary and curricular materials within the historical institutional settings of their production and reception, it undertakes to examine how subordinate status was negotiated in prescriptive media of print and manuscript. The major text of the dissertation's four chapters is a particular copy of John Harington of Kelston's A New Discourse of a Stale Subject Called the Metamorphosis of A IAX which was printed by Richard Field in 1596. This text has recently achieved the unusual status of being both site and countersite for literary historiographic narratives assessing the history of civil society. Outside of a courtly context, its reception and transmission as a printed book has not been previously studied in any depth in spite of an abundance of documentary evidence. Through a microhistorical study of the chronological, rhetorical, stylistic, and material tactics that were put into play in the publication and distribution of A New Discourse in the summer of 1596, this thesis begins by demonstrating the status and duties---both discursive and material---performed by Harington's servant Thomas Combe in giving the book its physical shape. Chapter 2 takes up the mercantile projects informing subscriptive style within a printed letter that described events surrounding Queen Elizabeth's reception at Kenilworth Castle in 1575. Chapter 3 evaluates the sequence of volumes contained within the tripartite book of A New Discourse and considers how it operated to articulate changes in Harington's estate. The final chapter focuses on a document connected with a collegiate initiation ceremony at Cambridge in 1600. This work gave its own impatient spin to issues pertaining to the ecclesiastical authority after the Reformation and thereby reconfigured its very different memorialization in The Metamorphosis of A IAX.