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Description
Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England By Patricia Fumerton Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006
A seventeenth-century mariner named Edward Barlow figures largely in Patricia Fumerton's fascinating new book, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England. Fumerton's book is ambitious, wide-ranging, and compelling, in part because she builds up to a detailed consideration of Barlow's life through a meticulous analysis of the conditions of the working poor in early modern England. The scope of her argument takes in many topics in early modern studies, as we will see.
Fumerton's book is divided into two related parts. The first half--"Unsettled Subjects"--stakes out a clear place among the recent studies of poverty and vagrancy in early modern England. Much of this resurgent interest in literary studies can be traced back to A. L. Beier's 1985 study, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560-1640 (London: Methuen), a scrupulously careful historical work that crossed over numerous disciplinary boundaries. (1) In the wake of, and dependent on, Beier, a number of literary-oriented studies followed in the past two decades. (2) Fumerton's first three chapters intelligently and usefully engage with these studies, marking her own positions and carefully framing the strengths and limitations of her predecessors. Among Fumerton's most trenchant points is the predisposition of these earlier studies to fall back on, or end up in, the trope of "theatricality," inevitably heading toward analyses of the early modern theater itself, or plays staged in it: "The problem is that the term 'theatrical' implies a level of disguise or fakery not necessarily a part of everyday role-playing," hence in trying "to focus on the shifting T of actual vagabonds and their laboring fellow itinerants, the notion of theatricality proves dangerously misleading" (52).
The first half of the book, instead, traces the slowly developing official consciousness... |
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