Early modern English pastoral has been all too frequently studied in a curious vacuum, as a genre that sprang almost fully formed from the rediscovery of Virgil’s Eclogues in the early sixteenth century or, alternately, from the printing of the eclogues of Mantuan at the very end of the fifteenth, but with little or no connection to the medieval poetry about labor that most immediately preceded it. Katherine Little’s compelling and richly textured study seeks fundamentally to revise the story by attending to the “traces” (3) of the medieval that “haunt” (82) the pastoral from its first emergence in the eclogues of Alexander Barclay through the Faerie Queene of Edmund Spenser (and, as the afterword suggests, even Shakespeare’s As You Like It).

After an introduction that reviews how the study of Renaissance pastoral to date has turned a blind eye toward the medieval texts with which early modern pastoral poets were familiar and against which they had to define their own work, Little lays the groundwork for the rest of her study by exploring medieval writing on rural labor (the shepherd plays of Chester and Towneley, sermon texts, and Piers Plowman) in greater detail in chapter 1. For Little, what is most significant about these texts is the ideological work they perform with and through the labor of the shepherd or plowman. All medieval writing on rural labor, Little suggests, carries a “reformist, even radical, potential” (47), and it is that potential that early modern pastoral must actively repress in order to become itself. A second, rather fast-paced chapter on the “transitional” (81) pastoral poetry of Alexander Barclay and Barnabe Googe is followed by the true high points of the study in chapters 3 and 4. In chapter 3, Little provides a thought-provoking analysis of the way the phenomenon of enclosure aligned sheep-keeping with the nobility in the cultural imaginary and therefore, for the first time, with those who did not labor; in the process, she reveals the way that pastoral, with its focus on the pleasures of individual otium rather than the hardships of communal labor, is in fact “a document of disruption” that “rewrites the transition to agrarian capitalism” (101).

This linking of pastoral’s emergence to historical realities against which it has rarely if ever been considered continues in chapter 4, which eloquently reads the way the Protestant insistence on the importance of faith over works (charitable acts and penance) redefined and restricted the symbolic value of work (manual labor). Yet in the sixteenth-century complaint literature inspired by and modeled upon Piers Plowman, Little nevertheless finds echoes of the spiritual import of medieval rural labor in the Catholic tradition, echoes that speak (or whisper) back to the massive political and ecclesiastical attempts to break from that symbolic mode. These two central chapters on enclosure and the Reformation pave the way for Little’s interesting rereadings, in chapters 5 and 6, of truly canonical pastoral — Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar and book 6 of the Faerie Queene. The figures of Piers and Diggon Davy in the May and September eclogues of the Calendar are convincingly read in chapter 5 as “a kind of historical unconscious”; they are “what needs to be repressed and rewritten for the newly rediscovered pastoral to function” (145), while rural work itself, no longer a figure for reform, becomes instead a figure for literary production: for Spenser, it is no longer the shepherd, but rather the poet, who works. It is the dark side of this shift in the meaning of work that is detailed in chapter 6’s reading of the knight Calidore’s pastoral episode, which ends with the wholesale massacre of a shepherd community. As Little puts it, “Spenser demonstrates that the logical consequence of embracing the idealized pastoral is, paradoxically, the end of the ‘real’ pastoral world — that is, the life of the free laborer in the English countryside” (173–74). The logical consequence of Little’s study, by contrast, is a new beginning for the study of early modern pastoral. Transforming Work is a valuable contribution not just to the study of premodern poetry and its multivalent representations of labor, but also to the growing body of work attesting to the urgent necessity of reading across the artificial medieval–early modern divide.