My current research (based on my dissertation, Hardly Working: Fruitless Labor in Premodern English Literature) claims that premodern authors turned to a range of alternative forms of labor as a strategy for navigating the status of authorship and the changing economy.  I look at texts such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Galatea, Arden of Faversham, The Sheapardes Calender and The Amoretti, all of which depict work that functions outside of work’s usual parameters by characterizing it as invisible, impossible, botched, or fruitless. Using these moment as my entry point, I argue that these texts manipulate the terms of labor in order to re-imagine what we define as labor in the first place.

My work bridges the medieval/early modern divide and thinks broadly across a continuous (but not homogenous) premodern England. Hardly Working begins in the mid fourteenth century, when the first bouts of labor legislation were enacted, and traces the engagement with variant forms of labor through the final decades of the sixteenth century, which were characterized by apprenticeship riots and an influx of idle, or unemployed, persons into the city of London. I emphasize variety—temporally, generically (pastoral, romance, epic, eclogue, comedy, tragedy), formally (long and lyric poetry, drama), contextually (courtly poems, patronage poems, popular drama and children’s theater), of authorship (anonymous poets and playwright(s), collaborative authors, canonical writers, and those whose contemporary fame has long since faded)—in order to both demonstrate the thoroughness with which these subverted forms of labor pervaded premodern society and to showcase the multitude of ways in which this manifested.