Construing Literary Texts, Constructing Linguistic History

T his journal and its founding editor, Arthur F. Kinney, have presided over fifty brilliant years of scholarship focused on the English literary Renaissance. While the word “history” has no part in the journal’s title, the overall impetus has been to “historicize”—and not in any single or onedimensional way. If we were to imagine a triumphal procession of the histories that English Literary Renaissance has brought forth, the New Historicism would have the most elaborate chariot, but what a range of other wondrous exhibitions would pass in review—Histories of Genre, Book and Manuscript Culture, Women’s History, Bodies and Passions, Religion and Religious Wars, Cabinets of Curiosity, Politics and Social Class, Gender and Sexuality, Race and Colonialism, Material Culture, even “Things.” I personally would cheer loudest forELR’s Triumph of Women Writers, given that for my generation bred on an all-male canon ELR’s championing of this emergent field was a truly transformative development. The journal and the discipline’s cultural and historical orientation has fostered a seemingly unending emergence of fresh topics and materials for discovery, and there’s little sign of any slowing down: early modern literary scholars today continue to find the historical seeds for animal studies, evocations of climate change, and a deepening engagement with globalism and diversity. The one key “history,” however, that I find without a significant monument in the journal’s past or the discipline’s projections for the future is the history of language. Mymodest proposal in the optative mood for the future of early modern literary studies is for a more innovative and deeply informed engagement with historical linguistics.