A Doctor of Another Facultie: Robert Aylett and Early Modern Interdisciplinary Poetics
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Despite having written hundreds of Spenserian stanzas, appearing in multiple volumes of divine poetry throughout the mid-seventeenth century, ecclesiastical lawyer Robert Aylett has been little remarked by Spenser scholars. His poems, it is widely agreed by his few commentators, are not very good. Aylett’s own texts and paratexts, however, plead indulgence of their readers on the grounds that their writer is neither a poet nor a divine—but a lawyer, meddling amateurishly, with Kate Narveson’s “bible readers and lay writers,” in both. As well as one of the period’s overlooked Spenserians, then, Aylett is also useful as a figure for disrupting Richard Helgerson’s “literary system” of professional, amateur and laureate poets, to find a space instead for the committed interdisciplinarian who commits his interdisciplinarity chiefly by way of poetics. This article sets Aylett’s writing in the light of current and contemporary critical approaches to interdisciplinarity, to consider the motives and mechanics of borrowing rhymes to speak devotion.
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1475-6757