Bourgeois Ethics Again:

Abstract

This essay focuses on the interrelationship of the romances and the conduct poems contained in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61 (ca. 1500). Drawing on the work of Felicity Riddy, it examines the contrasting ways in which these texts articulate a particular bourgeois ethos. Tensions that arise from their different approaches to this phenomenon are read as evidence of an attitude towards the matter of good conduct that is at once more searching and more provisional than that which has typically been attributed to the milieu in which Ashmole 61 was copied and read.

Form, Time, and the “First English Sonnet”

“…It transmits conventional ideas about love, marriage and civic affairs, ideas typical of its patronage and probable audience. 60 Amoryus and Cleopes are pagans who play out the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, but then are resurrected, convert to Christianity, and live conventionally successful lives, eventually passing away and being memorialized in ways which flatter Metham's patrons by analogy (2080-107). Due to these conventionalizing instincts, the positively-presented novelty in Amoryus and Cleopes, the novelty which emerges victorious, narratively speaking, is a particular one: Christianity.…”