take their chances in these various social settings, because the alternative was
untenable for them. Steven Greenblatt in his recent bookThe Swervecontrasts
the humanist desire for sociality with the radical isolation associated with
the church’s saints and doctors.^25 Think of portrayals of Saint Jerome with the
argumentative openness and social circumstances of classical authors and
their circles and thus of the humanists who sought to revive these earlier
contexts and practices.‘Perverse customs’, says one speaker inUtopia,‘cannot
dissuade humanist thinkers from being active in the world and especially at
court’, for then Christ’s commandment is ignored that‘[w]hat he whispered to
his disciples should be preached openly from the housetops’.^26
As we did earlier in the case of imitation, we once again see here the
humanist movement and its mission framed in apostolic terms. Likewise,
the chronicler of Protestant martyrs, John Foxe, in presenting hisActs and
Monumentsto the young Queen Elizabeth, hopefully frames himself as a new
Eusebius presenting his own church history. In Elizabeth, Foxe had hoped to
find a new female Constantine intent on restoring, protecting, and spreading
the true church. He and his fellow Protestants, having suffered under Eliza-
beth’s Catholic sister Mary I, and, if they were fortunate, having escaped into
exile on the Continent, considered themselves a strong Christian community
indeed. According to their self-image, their social bond was forged by the trials
of persecution and they were doing their scholarly and polemical work with
instruments like the God-appointed printing press for the sake of sustaining
and preserving as much as was possible for England’s embattled believers of
the gospel. Indeed, doing battle humanist style may even involve collaboration
with opponents. I’ve always loved the fact that one of the great Catholic
nemeses in the Elizabethan period is a brilliant prose writer himself, Edmund
Campion. In Foxe’s papers there is a copy, an early clear copy, of Campion’s
Brag, which, of course, Foxe, in writing his history of the martyrs, was going to
engage with. Thus wefind the central humanist desire for collaboration within
a humanist discursive contest extended even to collaboration with opponents.
We conclude our section on collaboration with establishing the Christian
context for this central desire and practice among Renaissance humanists. The
linguistic inspiration and expressive power that imitation makes possible, the
collaboration that imitation represents between the living and the dead, and
the collaboration among the living to serve as an advocate or an audience for
words old and new—all of these themesfind their biblical origin and sanc-
tioning narrative in Acts 2, with an earlier group of embattled believers. The
title of my contribution to this book was chosen with this biblical reference in
mind. For in William Tyndale’s 1526 version, the second chapter of Acts
begins with the words,
(^25) Stephen Greenblatt.“The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.”New York: W.W.
Norton, 2011.
(^26) More,Utopia, 36.
182 Brett Foster