John of Gaunt's celebrated speech about “this scepter’d isle” in Richard II, along with other Shakespearean forays into the arena of “nationalism,” have long been problematic for scholars. In the first instance, they challenge our understanding of when and how the English came first to embrace “national” sentiments. Second, liberal academics have had to struggle at various times with the aggressive militarism that often attaches to it, and which resonates negatively in a contemporary world polarized over the foreign policy of a more recent superpower. Meanwhile, modern social science theory has in the past two decades posed significant challenges to our usage of terms like “nation” and “nationalism,” which to Benedict Anderson are defined principally within and by “imagined communities” (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [London, 1983]).

The debate on the origins of nationalism is one that Cathy Shrank, in the book under review, treads through lightly, and perhaps wisely, though the key modern and postmodern theorists (Anthony D. Smith, Craig Calhoun, Elie Kedourie, and Ernest Gellner) and a few historians (Eric Hobsbawm, Anderson) appear incidentally in her work. Most significantly, Shrank operates in the long shadow cast by a couple of recent literary titles, Richard Helgerson's Forms of Nationhood (1992) and Andrew Hadfield's Literature, Politics and National Identity (1994). Shrank's book, however, has a distinct focus, namely, the question of how it was possible to constitute a nation, textually speaking, in a partly literate society still rather manuscript oriented and not yet fully confident of its own language.

This is potentially a huge subject, and the evolution of language is of course part of another long-standing tradition of literary and historical scholarship. Rather than attempt another survey, Shrank chooses several representative writers from the late-Henrician to mid-Elizabethan period. She is clear that this is not the only such selection that could be made (one could equally well include John Bale, Robert Crowley, or John Foxe; the absence of William Tyndale, by her own admission, is unfortunate given the influence of the Tyndale Bible). This is, moreover, a literary study, and the author is concerned to explicate and understand her various writers as writers, rather than simply use them as evidence in support of a narrative of change. The authors selected include both the well known (Thomas Smith, Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser), the moderately familiar (John Leland and Thomas Wilson), and two much less-studied figures, William Thomas and Andrew Borde, or Boorde.

The last mentioned, first in Shrank's account, is more familiar as an early Tudor dietician—a Carthusian monk turned physician. Borde's connections to that rigorously traditionalist religious order made him at first sight an unlikely candidate as an emancipator of English from papal sway, and he went to some pains to protest his loyalty to the Henrician reform and to repudiate old ties. Apart from his ventures into the subject of health, Borde was the author of a work called the First Book of the Introduction of Knowledge (written ca. 1542, published 1549). His spirited defense of English and Englishness through the “Introduction” and various other vocabulary expanding writings was, Shrank suggests, at least in part a gambit to persuade readers not to doubt the sincerity of his own emancipation from Rome. Like Borde, the great antiquary Leland, trained neo-Latinist that he was, could not entirely escape Roman influence, and both writers endeavored to define England as culturally new-Rome at the very time that it was becoming religiously non-Rome.

It would fall to the later generation studied in the second part of the book, Thomas, Smith, and Wilson, to develop the English language more fully as an independent vehicle for cultural discussion. In Thomas's case, he also had to contend with his own knowledge of a minority tongue, Welsh, and with a foreign but nonclassical volgare, Italian. No champion of Welsh independence, Thomas “epitomizes the integration of Wales with England” (24); his writings, coming after the high tide of erasmian humanism, first establish English as a suitable vehicle for the conduct of scholarship, including history in its nonannalistic, neoclassical form. This extension of the vernacular—the island's equivalent of a dominant Tuscan admired by Thomas in Machiavelli—was continued in the early Elizabethan period by both Smith and Wilson. The former deployed the humanist dialogue, now in English, in the service of policy formulation. Like some other members of Shrank's group, Smith saw the manuscript rather than the printed book as his vehicle, and select influential magnates rather than the general reading public as his audience. This offers an appropriate caution against eliding the difference between the advancement of the English language during the period and its popular dissemination in the output of Tudor presses, two movements often conflated. Wilson, following Smith, created the first vernacular literature of regulation. Wilson's admiration of central power, and his insistence on the need for royal authority to glue together a complex commonwealth, gave rise to the idea of the “king's English,” a concept here used to reject as socially disintegrative various forms of jargon and cant. The book concludes with an examination of how some of the themes identified in these chapters play out in two major “canonical” works, Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar and Sidney's Old Arcadia. It thus ends short of the mature Elizabethan literary output of the post-1580 period, which has been studied extensively elsewhere.

This book at one level tells the tale of how English writers were able to domesticate continental and especially Italian humanist learning, both classical and vernacular, by conducting it in English, and in the context of an England now progressively differentiating itself from Catholic Europe. On another level, it is an account that reinforces a point made by Colin Kidd and others, that early modern nationalism cannot be defined either exclusively along ethnic lines or in comparison with a post-1848 nation-state. Finally, for those readers disinclined to look further back than the late Elizabethan era, and beyond the works of the triumvirate of Shakespeare and the mature Spenser and Sidney, the book makes a compelling pitch for the placing Shakespeare in the middle rather than at the beginning of the story of how the realm of English would become an empire.