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27 ‘For This is True or Els i do Lye’: Thomas Smith, William Bullein, and Mid-Tudor Dialogue
Get accessPhil Withington is a Research Fellow of the Economic and Social Research Council and Lecturer in Social and Economic History at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2005), co-edited Communities in Early Modern England (Manchester University Press, 2000), and has written articles on the social history of citizenship for Past and Present, Historical Journal, English Historical Review, and American Historical Review. He is currently completing a book about early modernity and society and researching the history of intoxicants and intoxication during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
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Published:18 September 2012
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Abstract
Sir Thomas Smith and William Bullein were the most accomplished dialogue writers of their generation. Both men were humanists and moralists, who used dialogue in innovative and stylistically striking ways. They were also proponents of ‘commonwealth’ who examined the limits and possibilities of ‘counsel’ in their respective fields of expertise. Furthermore, while Smith affirmed the potential of ‘discourse’ and ‘counsel’ to resolve dissension and establish an acceptable truth among self-interested parties, Bullein came to suggest the opposite: that eloquence and knowledge were dangerous tools to be manipulated for private interest and profit. In this way, their work illustrates the contrasting scribal and commercial audiences to which dialogues could be directed as well as the different kinds of knowledge the form could bear. Perhaps most importantly, they suggest two trajectories of the English humanist project as it had developed by 1560: the idealistic faith in the power of rhetoric to identify and serve the public good; and the more pessimistic intimation that not only was the ‘new learning’ socially ineffectual, but in the wrong hands it actively corroded commonwealth.
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