This two-day interdisciplinary symposium will invite scholars to re-consider practical texts written between c. 1558 and 1642 as productive sources for literary criticism. In a period best known today for its poetry and drama, practical texts such as Gervase Markham’s The English Husbandman were ‘almost literally read to pieces’, Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry ‘led the market’ as ‘a Tudor best-seller’, and cookery books enjoyed a staggering 70% reprint rate. That these texts occupied such a prominent position in the publishing industry is testament to their importance in early modern life. Yet despite this, literary criticism has been slow to embrace such texts as more than merely contextual sources for canonical texts by poets and dramatists such as Shakespeare and Spenser. Critics continue to frame Tusser’s work as an agricultural manual or almanack rather than a book of poetry, for example, while literary scholars tend to note his significance in the same breath as they denigrate the quality of his verse: an ‘agrarian book of jingles’ or ‘collection of doggerel’. Other practical texts such as receipt books and surveying texts have been interrogated primarily as a means of understanding early modern culture and society. Less common are studies of practical texts as works of literature, studies that centre the practical text rather than positioning it as context for the work of more canonical writers. This symposium seeks to address this gap, and invites contributors to consider how studying non-traditionally canonical texts can help scholars to reassess established positions. It is designed to lead to an edited collection, provisionally aimed at Routledge’s Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge series, so speakers are encouraged to propose papers suitable for extension into a 6000-8000 word chapter.

Recent scholarship by Katarzyna Lecky, Jessica Rosenberg, and Kyla Tompkins has begun to demonstrate the fruitfulness of considering practical and instructional texts as sources for and influences on early modern dramatic and poetic texts. This symposium, however, recentres the practical text. It encourages readings of this underrepresented and understudied corpus of literature as more than texts that inform our understanding of the period or more canonical Renaissance writers. It aims to demonstrate the value of reading practical and instructional texts as legitimate objects, worthy of literary analysis in their own right.

The keynote speakers will be Natalya Din-Kariuki (Warwick) and Laurence Publicover (Bristol).

DATES: 16 April 2026 - 17 April 2026

LOCATION: University of Sheffield, UK