Transforming Work

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 Katherine C. Little demonstrates in Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Medieval Poetry , the pastoral mode is in fact indebted to medieval representations of rural labor. Little offers a new literary history for the pastoral, arguing that the authors of the first