Although there is no equivalent term for ‘essay’ in either Greek or Latin, ancient literature was instrumental to the development of the English essay in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in three principal ways. First, some classical prose works provided stylistic models for early English essayists. Second, some ancient authors (Seneca in particular) processed information in a way that resonated with later essay writers; even if there were not ancient essayists, there were ancient ways of reading and writing that were fundamentally essayistic. And finally, the essay became one of the principal ways that readers gained access to ancient texts and ideas.

In addition to serving as instruments of pedagogy and moral instruction, commonplace books helped readers assert control over an ever-increasing quantity of printed material. During the eighteenth century, they were a perfect tool for making reading truly “useful.” Inherently idiosyncratic, the evidence from commonplace books is difficult to generalize; nevertheless, they capture the moment when readers appropriated Enlightenment ideas to address their own concerns. This chapter focuses on Thomas Thistlewood’s commonplace books to track his thinking about race and slavery as well as religion. Initially motivated by the need to learn about plantation management, his reading expanded from planters manuals to works that both promoted and challenged theories of racial difference, urged reform of the institution of slavery, and contained dire warnings of slave rebellions. Thistlewood’s readings on religion combined a deep skepticism of Christian orthodoxy with anxieties about divine justice and a search for personal transcendence, which culminated in his enthusiastic approval of the deism expressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Savoyard vicar.

Presents a history of the theatre closures of 1642, describing its effects on the production, reception, and conceptions of drama across the eighteen-year prohibition and tracing its influence in modern dramatic criticism. The Introduction unpacks the pervasive metaphor of the "death" of theatre after 1642, and the understanding of playbooks as the treasured remains of a theatrical culture now extinct. Demonstrates how the theatrical prohibition spurred theatrical nostalgia, print publication, and play reading, all crucial factors in English drama’s acquisition of a literary status. Takes the reader on an imaginary walking tour around London during the theatrical prohibition, attending to signs of theatre’s demise and printed drama’s endurance. Describes the emergence of three printed dramatic forms in the 1650s: the serial play collection, the all-drama commonplace book, and comprehensive catalogues of English printed drama, texts in which we see an emerging sense of what we now call “early modern drama” as a coherent genre and critical field. Demonstrates that the pre-1642 period came to be understood as a distinct cultural moment (the “last age”) associated with a discrete collection of plays (“old plays”), arguing that this conception paved the way for a coherent system of critical study and disciplinary analysis.

This chapter looks at the transmission history of Catullus and the elegists into the Renaissance and their surprising presence, given their reputation as ‘lascivious’ and ‘wanton’ , on the early modern humanist school curriculum. We consider florilegia and printed common-place books as the site where English school-boys, and some girls, first meet Latin elegy, and the institutionalised nature of imitatio as a foundational practice of writing. We then go on to look at the broad receptions of Catullus, Propertius, Ovid and Sulpicia across Renaissance Europe as a context for the close readings which follow.