Sir Thomas Elyot as A Maker of Bokes

Elyot is usually only remembered as the author of The Boke Named the Governour; assessments of his career that are confined to estimating the importance of his pioneering contribution to English courtesy literature overlook the range of his output, the ambition that fueled the attempt single-handedly to develop a vernacular literary culture. This dissertation aims to uncover the imperatives that underlie the undertaking of such diverse projects as a medical self-help book and the first comprehensive Latin-English lexicon. Elyot deploys his considerable erudition through the late 1530s and early 40s to produce extra-political, encyclopedic texts. The encyclopedic impulse was not a fortuitous invention of Elyot's; the example of Erasmus' career was available to him. The trajectory of Erasmus' career, involving the self-orchestrated promotion of intellectual authority, came to represent for Elyot an attractive model to which he could aspire: Elyot wanted to be an English Erasmus. For Elyot, Erasmus was not just a humanist whose vast erudition he admired, but a scholar who had made a career of scholarship, whose public identity, indeed fame, was founded on his learning. Elyot appropriates the promise offered by the cultural clout of the scholar as a figure of socio-cultural authority. Such an author(ity) figure appealed to Elyot because he failed to make headway in a career in Henrician administration, and had to find an alternative identity that would afford him compensatory psycho-social solace. Personal ambition mingles with a nationalist agenda in Elyot to produce an author who cultivates the charisma of erudition to achieve the status of a cultural authority in the vernacular. Through his encyclopedic projects, he attempts to fashion a national identity founded on a literary culture in the vernacular; in doing so, Elyot's projects proleptically mirror the Elizabethan cultivation of a truly national literature.