Patronage, Poetry, and Print

Abstract

In the modern institution of literature, itself a product of democratizing tendencies that have been operating over the course of the last 500 years, the social and economic relations of authors, publishers, and readers tend to be hidden or disguised. In the pre-Modern and early-Modern periods, in which literature was more obviously implicated in immediate social relations and had not yet been separated from other forms of discourse into the supposedly autonomous realm of the aesthetic, the relationships of writers, publishers, patrons, and readers were habitually the subject of explicit negotiation. After all, everyone acknowledged that literary communication was socially positioned and socially mediated: styles and genres were arranged in hierarchies homologous with those of rank, class, and prestige. The socioliterary dynamics of manuscript culture carried over into the Gutenburg era in many ways, even as print culture began to transform the intellectual, political, and social order by which it was shaped. Responding to the heightened awareness of the culture-specific character of literary texts, recent scholarship in the Renaissance period has emphasized the importance of patronage to literary production and reception. Given the socioeconomic dependency of most writers, especially those who deliberately arranged to have their work printed, patronage was a social and financial necessity, despite the widespread complaints about the decline of such support.1 Dedicatory letters and poems indicate that writers and