North, Marcy L.

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North, Marcy L.

PERSONAL:

Education: Wesleyan University, B.A.; University of Michigan, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Pennsylvania State University, Department of English, 117 Burrowes Bldg., University Park, PA 16802. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Florida State University, Tallahassee, assistant professor of English; Pennsylvania State University, University Park, associate professor of English, 2003—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, Huntington Library, and Newberry Library; research grants and fellowships from Florida State University.

WRITINGS:

The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS:

Marcy L. North is a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. Her special areas of interest include the history of the book, late medieval literature, and early modern poetry and prose, particularly satire, lyric poetry, and ecclesiastical debate. In 2003, she touched on many of these topics within the scope of her book The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England. In it, she explores the use of anonymity by writers in the early modern era of print and manuscript books.

In her study, North does not seek to assign identities to the anonymous authors of famous pieces. In fact, she believes that assigning authorship to an anonymous work can detract from the overall impact of the work, because anonymity is a powerful statement in itself. Instead, she explores the reasons why authors might have chosen to remain anonymous during the Tudor-Stuart era in England.

The Anonymous Renaissance shows that anonymity was much more than a means of merely hiding one's identity or being modest about one's writing achievement, although both of these could be motives for maintaining anonymity. Beyond that, however, anonymity "represents an activity, an ongoing negotiation of the relations between text, author, and reader, as a book or manuscript travels, is read, marked, and classified. The aim of the book is to study this process and to recover the language of anonymity as understood by Renaissance writers and readers," stated Julian Yates in a review for Albion. Discussing the thesis of her book in an interview with Scott McLemee for the Chronicle of Higher Education, North explained: "I'm not interested in who Anonymous was, but rather how Anonymous used his or her anonymity."

Books are still sometimes published anonymously, but the practice was certainly more common in the medieval and early modern periods. Its decline has been attributed to the rise of individualism and the development of a market economy for writing. North does not deny that those factors were influential, but she identifies many other reasons authors may have chosen to remain anonymous. She makes the point that much early book production involved collaborative efforts, and notes that trying to identify anonymous authors downplays the truth that many early books were not the work of just one person.

Authors might choose to remain anonymous because their works were inflammatory and would expose the writers' political views. On the other hand, authors were also known to denigrate others who hid their identity when writing provocative material—even if they had done it themselves. Another reason an author might choose anonymity would be to convey the impression that he or she spoke for a collective front of people. It could be a means of disguising the writer's gender, in the case of a woman who would not normally be permitted to express herself or who would not be taken seriously. If the writing was of an erotic or otherwise scandalous nature, anonymity afforded the author a means to protect his or her reputation. At the same time, anonymity could make a work more noteworthy because it raised questions about the author's background. North devotes two chapters to the use of anonymity in Catholic and Protestant religious controversies, with another chapter devoted exclusively to a notable Puritan controversy, that of the writing produced under the pseudonym Martin Marprelate. She discusses the ways in which anonymity was used by literary coteries when collections of their work were published. In addition to exploring the many reasons why anonymity might be the author's choice, North also looks at the many different ways anonymity was conferred on a book. Initials, pseudonyms, translations of names, and the use of anagrams were some of the methods used.

"The Anonymous Renaissance is a substantial and scholarly achievement. It depicts a diverse and lively world of early modern writers, printers, and readers. Refreshingly, it gives equal weight to marginal writers as well as to their better known peers, to Catholic polemic as well as Protestant, … to manuscript as well as print…. This is a very good book," stated McLemee in a review for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

A reviewer for Shakespeare Studies, Evelyn B. Tribble, wrote: "Carefully argued and readable throughout, North's book challenges teleological arguments about anonymity through a meticulous examination of the evidence for attribution practices in the Renaissance." Tribble emphasized the wide scope of The Anonymous Renaissance, saying: "North's work will be highly influential in the field of early modern print culture, but it also makes important contributions to studies of periodization, early modern religious discourse, authorship studies, canon formation, and gender studies. She combines strong writing and argumentation, clear methodology, fine close reading, and impressive archival work, and the reader of The Anonymous Renaissance comes away with a radically altered sense of the significance of ‘anon.’"