An Interview With Julianne Werlin

Demography, Literature, and Edward Fucking Buckler

Dear Republic,

Who on LitStack can honestly say that they haven’t had the very slightest intellectual crush on Julianne Werlin? Julianne is a professor of English at Duke specializing in early modernist literary history and writes the very erudite, and also strikingly absorbing, Life and Letters.

-ROL

AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIANNE WERLIN

1.Tell us about the joys of studying demographic approaches to early modern literary history.

As anyone who reads Substack knows, for better or worse we think about contemporary literature in demographic terms. But we don’t really apply that approach to Renaissance literary history, except in the case of women authors. There are a lot of reasons for that, but one is that we naturally perceive the contemporary literary world as a social scene made up of people rather than just of texts. We’re all talking to each other, watching each other. Reconstructing the demography and sociology of authorship is probably the most straightforward way of making past literary epochs come alive. Books, after all, are the precious life blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.

But it’s not just a question of bringing present-day concerns into the past. Looking at demographic history over the long run opens up new possibilities for understanding our own literature. Although I’m interested in class and sex, which do come up a lot in contemporary conversations, I’m also interested in age, which is only beginning to receive real attention, generations, lifespan, marriage rates, death and disease, and population dynamics. The demographic transition, when people began to live longer and have fewer children, might be the most profound shift in human history. We should all be thinking about it all the time! Especially if we’re interested in literature, which is precisely about questions of life, death, aging, marriage, reproduction, and generational change.

2.How did you choose this field?

I’ve always been interested in literature in socioeconomic history. Sixteenth and seventeenth-century England has an especially strong tradition of socioeconomic research because it’s a point of origin for capitalism and because the English Civil War—or the English Revolution—has been interpreted as a key step in the creation of a bourgeois, liberal modernity. In the decades following WWII, there were very brilliant, very bitter debates about the character and meaning of those events. They were most important in England, but they had a wider significance in light of Cold War controversies about the history and future of capitalism. Up to a point, literary history was pulled into those debates through figures like Christopher Hill and Raymond Williams, with American literary scholars later taking part as well. But from the 80s on, although elements of social and economic history remained important to the study of the literary Renaissance, research gradually became more fragmented, with lots of excellent work, but much less of a sense of orienting fault lines and clear stakes.

My book, Writing at the Origin of Capitalism, tried to revive some real controversies by drawing on the superb recent empirical work in manuscript and book history—one of the fields where we’ve made the most concrete progress in the last few decades—while showing its relevance to older debates about the transformation of the economy as a whole. How did literature become a market commodity? And how can we hope to understand its history or significance without a big theory of the transformation of the economy?

It didn’t work. There wasn’t the appetite for reviving those debates—maybe not yet, or maybe I didn’t find the right angle. But I also found myself dissatisfied with my approach for other reasons. I realized that I didn’t want to think about books, manuscripts, and material objects as the basic components of the literary system. I wanted to think about people, not things, so I became more interested in the sociology of authorship than in the economics of book and manuscript production. And I became most interested of all in questions of life and death, including aging and reproduction.

3.Did you always want to be an academic?

No, I wanted to be a poet-critic. Specifically I wanted to be an experimental verse dramatist, with shades of Eliot (of course) and Hofmannsthal and Brecht and Cocteau, and also Milton and Beddoes and so on. I assumed that entailed the reinterpretation of the whole history of literature as a matter of course. Then that project got a little bit out of hand, and here I am.

4.So if you were giving a Ted Talk based on your academic research, what would you talk about? What’s kind of the leading thesis?

With my current project, which is a prosopography of 615 early modern authors, the thesis is that early modernity was a period of profound demographic change; that this transformed how authors lived in precise, measurable ways; and in turn had big implications for literary history.

I have a chapter on authors’ social mobility and new models of authorship; a chapter on the overproduction of elites and university-inspired (baroque; metaphysical) style; a chapter on authors’ marriage rates, arguing that the European Marriage Pattern gave rise to the marriage plot; a chapter on women authors and maternity; a chapter on death, where I argue that greater longevity chipped away at the classical ideal of literary immortality (the more life you have, the less you need an afterlife).

6.Introduce us to one or two great early modern writers we may not have heard of.

Let me answer this question in two ways. First a writer that everyone in the Renaissance loves but isn’t really read outside it: Thomas Nashe. He’s one of the greatest prose stylists in English, as Mathew Lyons and Andras Kisery and I have discussed. Nashe, Bacon, Milton… and then you have to wait for Swift. People like James Elkins and HAROLD, who are interested in experimental form and difficult writers but might not have read Nashe, would be into him. There’s a place for him outside Renaissance scholarship if we can get the experimental novelists on board.

Second, a writer that basically no one knows: Edward Buckler. Edward Buckler! He’s so obscure he doesn’t have a DNB entry or a single interpretative article. Here’s what the poems in his first book sound like:

At others fun’ralls when I see a grave,

That grave shall mind me of mortalitie.

I’ll think that such a lodging I must have:

Thus in the pit my bones must scattered be;

Here one bone and there another,

Here my ribs, and there my scull,

And my mouth of earth be full.

I must call the worms my mother.

Very “School of Donne” as an older generation of scholars might have put it. I became interested in him because he’s the longest-lived writer in my database, at 96. You discover strange, wonderful characters when you slice things up with spreadsheets.

7.What’s your theory about what happened in the Elizabethan Era in England — or maybe in the Renaissance more broadly? Why was there this sudden crystallization of these flourishing literary and artistic societies? Is it possible to find an answer through demographics and economics, or at the end of the day, is something like the emergence of Shakespeare just a freakish black swan kind of an event?

I think it’s all completely intelligible. Beginning in late medieval Italy, and then moving northward, there was rapid economic development as a result of new markets and technologies and early globalization. With it came vastly increased literacy, which print (a labor-saving technology spurred by Black Death demographics) pushed further. For a time, there was comparatively high social mobility into literate occupations, with young men becoming merchants, clergymen, notaries, lawyers, government bureaucrats. These required literate skills and, in many cases, could only be achieved through formal education, which was literary and classical. Schoolboys were spending eleven hours a day learning to write pristine prose and polished verse in Latin, within systems that, at very low rates and in a modest way, rewarded literary accomplishment. I don’t think we can reverse engineer a Renaissance, but I do think that if we were to make the study of the humanities the only game in town, and to pursue it with the deranged obsessiveness of the Renaissance humanists, we would have incredible writers too.

There were also a few other interconnected elements, which different scholars might weight differently: because the vernaculars were only slowly being standardized, there was incredible plasticity across the modern languages. There was a radical sense of experimentation, of limits being traversed, as a result of the age of discovery and, in a different way, the Reformation. There were the cross-cultural influences that came from global contact, with their incredible imaginative possibilities. And so on.

8.We were on a podcast together and you really shocked both me and the host with what you said about the state of the English department in higher ed. Want to repeat what you said there here?

Just what everyone knows: English departments are dying. We can’t fill lecture halls; it’s all small seminars, with rare exceptions. We teach a mix of classes on very conventional subjects and authors and more topical courses. But there’s no easy answer: neither going traditional nor going topical will fill a large lecture hall.

9.So what’s going on? Is it just that students are making a practical decision that an English major isn’t the best money-making path for them? Or is it deeper than that? Are we kind of fading out of the whole era of literacy?

Those two things are connected, unfortunately, and I’m afraid the answer to both may be “yes.”

10.What went into your decision to start writing on Substack?

I just wanted to find more people to talk with! The immediate impetus was that I felt there was a lack of real debate in my field. Scholarship has to be slow and careful. But it also has to be animated by exciting debates and conversations, preferably in real life, or we lose any sense of the stakes of what we’re doing. Post-pandemic, post crisis of the humanities, it felt like the whole social basis of intellectual and scholarly life was eroding. Admittedly, the internet is the problem as well as one (limited) solution. But I feel like we have to explore every avenue.

11.I have to say I’m really struck at how few academics — those that haven’t burnt all their bridges — are doing what you’re doing. It seems like you’re reaching more people through Life and Letters than I imagine you do through academic journals. Do you think more academics will catch on or is there still enough of a taboo about this in the academic world?

There was an aversion to Substack for political reasons, but that seems to have vanished with the vibe shift. People may still be thinking it, but no one is really talking about it. That said, I wonder if the platform itself isn’t becoming less receptive to what academics would like to do with it as its algorithms prioritize paid subscriptions. Few academics will want to use Substack that way.

12.I keep having this fantasy about academic exchange moving to a Goldiard-ish pre-university model in the digital age, where academics build followings and debate with each other in online space and have a lot of fun and fights along the way. Is that possible or is it the university model for the foreseeable future?

You and I have argued in the past about whether that’s possible, but I don’t know how deeply we actually disagree. My position is just that research and scholarship is slow, it works over the course of many years and must be taught; it requires resources. Without institutions where that can happen, it just won’t. A lot of public debate is predicated on knowledge acquired in that way—you read a lot of history and biography, you know that! One of the things I admire about your writing is how well informed it is by a sense of history! I want wider debates and creative interpretations; scholars aren’t specially privileged to determine the meaning of history or art or politics or whatever. But we do also need someone who can translate Greek and understands the archeological basis of our knowledge of Greek theaters, or who knows how to navigate the Medici financial records or the Venetian state papers, or who has a good idea of how early modern London periodicals circulated! How does that happen purely online? By the way, I’m not talking about my own work here: I’ve just been in this environment long enough to have an admiration verging on awe for the truly great, truly methodical scholars who enable so much else.

That said, there are also things you can’t do in academia. The most pressing questions need collective answers. What’s the meaning of literary writing and reading in a world where literature has lost any plausible claim to cultural centrality? What is a truly peripheral intellectual sphere actually for? What are we actually doing with these vestiges of an almost lost culture? Those questions are structurally impossible to answer within the university, where our roles are predicated on a model that places intellectual life at the center of society.

To be clear, I think it’s tragic that we have to ask a lot of these questions. But whatever is going on, and whatever way there might be forward, we need to work it out together. Maybe this is one place to do it. Sometimes it feels like the place to do it.

14.What do you for fun? Who is Julianne Werlin outside of Duke and Substack?

Pretty much exactly the same, sorry. Long time IRL friends Andras Kisery and Alan Horn can correct me if I’m wrong, not to mention James Tussing, who knew me at 19. There’s one other thing I spend a lot of time on: my children, who are 3 and 6. But even that isn’t really “outside.” Raising a child makes you understand in a new way that human beings are developing creatures. Youth isn’t a trajectory toward completion; change and transformation are the condition of the self. We move through life and grow and age and die. It’s the ultimate mystery. Literature exists to explain it and render it meaningful to consciousness. But life itself is the force that drives the green fuse through the flower.

Interview conducted by Sam Kahn.