SOURCE: Prewitt, Kendrick W. “Gabriel Harvey and the Practice of Method.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 39, no. 1 (winter 1999): 19-39.

[In the following essay, Prewitt explores Harvey's commitment to his pragmatic “Method,” based on the philosophy of Peter Ramus, despite its controversial nature and his fear that it was a liability.]

One of Gabriel Harvey's first published writings as a young scholar was the Ode Natalitia, a 1574 elegy for the French Protestant martyr and controversial logician Pierre de la Ramée (Peter Ramus). In this elegy, “Method” serves as “a heavenly virgin who directs the goddesses of the Arts” (grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, and geometry, all reformed by Ramus), and leads them, and subsequently the “studious Youth,” to the temple of Apollo.¹ “Method” plays the central role in the elegy, as a comforter of the “unreformed” arts of music, astronomy, theology, jurisprudence, and medicine, and as an apostle for Ramism. Specifically, Harvey praises Method and Ramus for enacting three dialectical reform movements: for having “eliminated the lists of authorities,” “diligently observed the laws of ‘artificial’ judgment,” and “wisely brought back the doctrine of Use.” The centrality of Method in this elegy reflects Harvey's early reverence for method, a reverence which approached a religious tenor early in his career at Cambridge. Yet, as I will argue, his attitude toward method ranged widely from religious exaltation to a more chastened and sober assessment through the 1580s and 1590s, before he retired from London to Saffron Walden. Indeed, Harvey's qualified endorsement of method was part of a larger conversation with and about method in England in the late sixteenth century, partly a reassessment of humanist pedagogy, and partly a reaction to the high claims pressed for it by Ramus and his followers.²

Harvey (1550-1631) was among the most conspicuous English proponents of method and of Ramism of his time. Today he is mostly remembered for his friendship with Edmund Spenser, for the letters that passed between the two, for his criticisms of early versions of The Faerie Queene, and for his literary flyting with Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe. But Harvey was a noteworthy figure in his own right as one of the most learned humanists of his day in England, and his treatises, letters, and marginalia constitute a rich testimony to academic life in his day. In his eighty years he pursued careers as a Cambridge don and as a courtier in Leicester's train while authoring several treatises and reading for a publishing house. He later retired to Saffron Walden to manage his lands and, according to evidence in his marginalia, “practice physic.”³ Harvey's life, however, was one distinguished by numerous frustrations and bitter disappointments—his struggle with academic politics to obtain his M. A. from Cambridge in 1573, the near loss of his Greek lectureship, the failure to win the Public Oratorship, and the attacks from Greene and Nashe, most notably in Nashe's Strange News and Have with You to Saffron-Walden.⁴

If Harvey's bearing with these frustrations and disappointments sheds any light on his character, the two qualities most in evidence are his earnestness and his ambition. By all accounts, Harvey was greatly driven to succeed, however personally unpopular he might have been. He acquired a copy of Thomas Hoby's translation of Baldassare Castiglione's Il Cortegiano in 1572 and annotated it copiously, but Castiglione's advice on presenting oneself with sprezzatura—the “diligent negligence” and “artless art” which hides its own methods of performing in highly self-conscious ways while affecting an off-hand, improvisational air—proved elusive indeed for Harvey. Harvey was often characterized as a Malvolio figure, in that he could be, to his detractors at least, smug and officious;⁵ and if we are to imagine a grain of truth in the satirical testimony of Harvey's first “biographer,” Nashe (in Have with You to Saffron-Walden), he was “distractedly enamourd of his own beautie,” and was “seditious and mutinous in conversation, picking quarrells with everie man that will not magnifie and applaud him.”⁶ To be fair, Nashe's harsh assessment must be balanced with the general esteem that others, most notably Spenser, had for Harvey. Harvey's letters, however, reveal his painful acknowledgement that his attempts to win favor with his colleagues were often thwarted.⁷

I will argue that Harvey's commitment to method was more than a pedagogical strategy; it was part and parcel with his personal and professional struggles to succeed, and with his commitment to action and experience as opposed to “theory”—method in this case having more pragmatic connotations than does theory. But beyond Harvey's embrace of pragmatic method, I will extend the argument of Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine to show that Harvey's love of method is uneasy, ambivalent, and qualified by a knowledge that Method—with a capital M—might also have its liabilities.⁸ Earlier in his career, as I have noted, Harvey treats “Method” as “a heavenly virgin who directs the goddesses of all the Arts,” which suggests a high and holy reverence for “Method” as a heavenly virgin guide. He extends the notion of method from the classroom to the wider sphere of public affairs in the Ciceronianus, his 1576 lecture on Cicero, and again conceives of method in religious terms, as endowed with “resplendent glory” [splendorum]. In his 1580 “Earthquake Letter” to Spenser, Harvey satirizes popular and academic methods of accounting for a recent earthquake and deploys the social method of sprezzatura. He retreats from this stand in his Foure Letters, in which he casts method as “addictive,” akin to what Francis Bacon would later describe as an idol of the theater. From Harvey's circumspect and disenchanted perspective, method could veer too close to theory, and serves as no substitute for practice and experience; finally it proves less than efficacious. If, as Hamlet's Polonius proposes, there might be a method in madness, then as Harvey ultimately suggests, there might also be a madness in method; that is, a danger of hewing too closely to the “Pregnant rules” and theoretical aspects of method.

What makes these questions of Harvey and method worth our attention, I would argue, is that they illuminate not only Harvey's character, but also the wide-ranging notion of method in the late Elizabethan years. Method was not simply a topic in dialectical handbooks, but encompassed varying degrees of conformity and radicalism, pragmatism, prudence, skepticism, and Machiavellianism.⁹ While method is conformist in the sense that it concerns the institutionalization of the humanities in the sixteenth-century classroom, it was also taken, in the 1570s, as a token of radicalism. Harvey acknowledges in a long letter to John Young, Master of Pembroke Hall (21 March 1573), that one of the charges laid against him in the pursuit of his M. A. at Pembroke was that he dared to criticize Aristotle; as Harvey writes, he [Harvey] was “a great and continual patron of paradoxis and a main defender of straung opinions, and that communly against Aristotle too … thai are aferd les I shuld proove sum noble heretick like Arrius and Pelagius: and so disturb and disquiet the Church as I now do the Chappel … And yit, bycaus thai wil nedes have me do as thai do and sai as thai sai, I care not greatly if I take forth a nu lessun, and begin to do so in deed: and I wil lock Melanchthon and Ramus up in mi studdi, and bring Osorius and Omphalius in to the chappel.”¹⁰ Harvey's loaded imagery in these lines is telling. He positions himself against Aristotle and sets his attraction to Melanchthon and Ramus next to the heretical threat of Arrianism and Pelagianism. The point is that, even at Cambridge, which would develop into a stronghold for Ramism in the 1580s, method was regarded with suspicion, as something dangerous and heretical.¹¹

I

As one of Cambridge's foremost scholars in Greek and Latin, Harvey's duty as University Praelector in Rhetoric at Cambridge was to lecture to the undergraduates in Latin on rhetoric four days a week.¹² In Ciceronianus (literally, “the Ciceronian”), Harvey's homage to Cicero derived from his opening day lecture of the 1576 Easter term, he manifests his affinity for the dialectical method of the Northern humanists and for Ramus. In this case, Harvey conceives of method in two ways: as a tool for analyzing the logical and rhetorical content of orations and as a guide for training and preparation for life. Moreover, he continues to invest method with religious resonances that might lead either toward an idolatrous religiosity concerning Cicero, or toward a transforming clarity of thought and purpose.

The main point of the Ciceronianus can be simply stated: that, where before Harvey adopted the theory and practice of the imitation of Cicero at a superficial and strictly linguistic level, after the order of the Italians, he later could recognize the value of the Ciceronianuses of the Northern humanists Johannes Sturm, Johann Thomas Freigius, and Erasmus, as well as that of Ramus (p. 79).¹³ These latter treatises, he argues, propounded the idea of imitating not just Cicero's refined prose style, but his wisdom and statesmanship as well (p. 79). Harvey fashions his Ciceronianus in turn as a narrative account of his near-religious conversion from a superficial Ciceronianism—imitating Cicero's sentence structure and methods of arrangement—to a deeper and fuller version, a conversion based largely on adopting a fuller notion of imitatio. He looks back in self-reproach to having earlier used stylistic affectations and turns of phrase—“elegant phraseology and such flowers of rhetoric” (p. 65)—and to having dismissed Erasmus and his followers out of hand, simply because their Latin was not purely Ciceronian and because they did not imitate Cicero's language and thought as fanatically as he did.¹⁴

Harvey's description of his earlier use of Ciceronianism reads much like a Pauline account of unredeemed life, and he describes, as part of his conversion, being presented a copy of Ramus's Ciceronianus and devouring it overnight.¹⁵ His praise of Ramus evinces a religious adoration that borders on sensuality: “I was even then eagerly admiring his charming visage, the rest of his physical and mental elegance, and his refined lineaments; and very often my admiration was intensified into amazement” (p. 73).¹⁶ The terms that Harvey uses to describe Ramus suggest this religious awe for him, in keeping with his praise of method. But what Harvey praises most is Ramus's propensity to examine the causes as well as the effects of Ciceronian eloquence, and Ramus's willingness to apply methodical study to courses of military or political action. Just as a youth would do well to study the causes of Caesar's or Alexander's military glory (their education and training), as well as the effects (winning many battles), so must schoolboys “contemplate the genesis rather than the consummation of the Ciceronian eloquence”—that is, to study “not only his Latinity but his resources of wisdom and factual knowledge, and most of all his virtues of conduct and character; nor should he heed only Cicero's letters, speeches, lectures, and treatises, but much rather the teachers, the course of studies, the labors of memory, and the vigils of thought by which so great an orator was made” (p. 73). In other words, what Harvey values is the method—though he does not use this term—by which these soldiers and orators succeeded and attained their high standing. We know from his Letter-Book and from his Commonplace Book that Harvey strove mightily to advance himself during his university years. His Commonplace Book abounds in notes to himself, spurring him toward self-improvement, such as “A valiant lusty coorage with continual, & most vigorous Industry, dispatchith all, & workith Miracles.”¹⁷ Here, as elsewhere, Harvey invokes religious vocabulary to make his point. The idea that all this “coorage” and “Industry” might effect “Miracles” attests to Harvey's faith in method, or at least his idea that the transformation he has in mind will require religious power.

Another entry from his Commonplace Book, in which he praises the example of two illustrious politicians, Thomas, Lord Cromwell, and Lord Burleigh (“My L. Treasurer”), illustrates this conviction that method can be applied to human affairs as well as to logic and rhetoric: “The L. Cromwell, by ye only promptness of his wit, facility of speach, & A pragmatical dexterity to all purposes, overshadowed & obscured, even our greatest clarkes. My L. Treasurer, alyke singular by semblable meanes, with sum lytle more lerning, & lyke politique Method.”¹⁸ What is crucial to note in this entry is that Harvey sets “Method” in the realm of court politics. It makes good sense that Harvey frequently mentions Cromwell as a model of the pragmatic politician. A. G. Dickens characterizes Cromwell as being “in every sense one of the ‘new men’ brought to the fore by the increasingly flexible outlook of the sixteenth century,” and Harvey, whose father was a farmer and ropemaker, may well have identified with the “parvenu who rose to precarious eminence amid a court-society riddled with intrigue and snobbish pretensions.” Dickens goes on to explain that “unlike the great majority of his fellow countrymen, he [Cromwell] learned to think in terms of function and efficiency.”¹⁹ In looking to Cromwell as a role model, Harvey affirms his quest, via method, for self-improvement.

Harvey's advocacy of method operates not only in the political realm, but also in logic and rhetoric. Later in the Ciceronianus, after proclaiming his ideas of the virtues of a methodical procedure for the analysis and genesis of oratorical prose, Harvey provides a contrasting example of those who take these processes at a superficial level, who indulge in Greek rhetorical jargon for its own sake, yet who are “in all questions of politics, history, and thought … dumber than the very fish” (p. 89). Among the charges that he levies against these pedants is an insufficient attention to method: “As for the resplendent glory of Method, they either look at it with a yawn as if they were sleepy, or cannot bear its intense brightness any more than night owls the glare of sunshine, or else they parcel it into so many subdivisions that they seem to be replacing light by darkness and illumination by murk and obscurity” (p. 91). This passage suggests something very important about method: it was not something for pedants, or for those who were simply unable to comprehend the substantive content of a given discipline. In this case, “Method” is that of logical and rhetorical analysis, and is demanding and challenging to the intellect, yet he repeats the notion that those who ignore method are also likely to be inept at “politics, history, and thought.” The imagery of light reinforces earlier references to method as a source of religious illumination and clarity.²⁰ The “intense brightness” (immensam illius claritatem) of method is reminiscent of the brilliance of God, which even Moses is unable to bear, and further underscores Harvey's reverence for method.

In the Ciceronianus, then, we see that Harvey, early in his career, takes the measure of two modes of methodical thought: the superficial method of linguistic imitation, as practiced by the Italians, and the more rigorous methods of logical and rhetorical analysis championed by Northern humanists. The Italian method of imitation, he claims, is executed at a superficial level, lacking in insight, and void of contact with substance, application, and action. Likewise, he suggests, the method of logical and rhetorical analysis can degenerate into mindless trope hunting, or produce writing that comes straight from elementary commonplace books, replete with verbal embellishments, synonyms, comparisons, and so forth. By contrast, he argues that, properly applied, a method of logical and rhetorical analysis can work to discover the causes, as well as the effects of eloquence. He extends the notion of method as logical and rhetorical thought to include the arena of human affairs, training for battle, and political advancement. More than that, he makes high claims for the illuminating and clarifying power of method. Its religious dimension—explicated in his reverence and high claims for its transforming power—signifies the enchanted hopes that Harvey harbored in method in 1576.

II

Almost exactly four years after the delivery of Harvey's Ciceronianus lecture, early in the evening of 6 April 1580, a minor earthquake shook buildings and towns throughout England. The damage from the quake was minimal, according to contemporary accounts such as Arthur Golding's: “it continued little above a minute of an houre, rather shaking Gods rod at us, than smiting us according to our desertes … For, although it shooke all houses, castles, churches, and buildings, everywhere as it wente, and put them in danger of ruine: yet within this Realme (praysed by our Saviour Jesus Christe for it) it overthrewe fewe or none that I have yet hearde of, saving certaine stones, chimneys, walles, and Pinacles, of highe buildings, bothe in this Cittie and in divers other places.”²¹ In a letter to Spenser, published late in 1580 as part of Three proper and wittie, familiar Letters, Harvey, who was in the middle of a card game during the quake while vacationing at the house of some friends in Essex, records his own confused reaction—that he thought someone was moving furniture upstairs—and proceeds to describe his oratorical performance of two further accounts of the quake, along with miscellaneous queries and observations. At the time, Harvey was still at Cambridge, and many of the concerns that he expressed about orderly method in the Ciceronianus recur in what has become known as the “Earthquake Letter.” But what in the Ciceronianus was presented as exhortation to undergraduates changes in the “Earthquake Letter” to satire—satire of the spate of earthquake treatises that appeared following the quake, and more pointedly, satire of the “deepe Universitie Cunning” from the “Doctors of Cambridge.”²² Harvey, in fact, was at pains as late as 1592 to smooth over ruffled feathers at Cambridge concerning the letter, and explains in the third of the Foure Letters that he was, at the time of the earthquake, “yong in yeares, fresh in courage, greene in experience, and as the manner is, somewhat overweening in conceit: and for varietie of study, and some deeper intelligence in the affayres of the world, otherwhiles reading invectives, and Satyres, artificially amplifyed in the most exaggerate and hyperbolicall kinde, I coulde hardlye refraine from discoveringe some little part of my reading: I had curiously laboured some exact, and exquisite poyntes of studie and practice, and greatly misliked the preposterous and untowerd courses of divers good wits, ill directed.”²³ The youthful indiscretion of publishing these letters, he explains, followed closely on the heels of his being snubbed at the time in his pursuit of the Oratorship of Cambridge. He had also, as he notes, been reading a good deal of satire; the “untowerd courses of divers good wits” refer to the wayward analyses of others, as opposed to his own “exquisite poyntes of studie and practice.”²⁴

In the “Earthquake Letter” Harvey concerns himself with the codified ways of presenting and examining information, as well as with the ways by which method can light the way toward distinctions between what is natural and what is supernatural. The letter raises questions about method indirectly on two levels: first, it implicitly examines sprezzatura as a “methodless method,” an art that labors mightily to conceal its own artifice; and second, it raises questions of how method accommodates, or fails to accommodate, the epistemological difficulties of understanding the ways and means of God. The deployment of method, we will see, evinces a skepticism about human access to knowledge of miracles.

The “Earthquake Letter” manifests Harvey's intense efforts at self-fashioning, as the circumstances of the letter, a card party, are clearly contrived. Of crucial importance in this accounting of Harvey and method is the fact that he sets this performance at a card party—just the sort of occasion on which he might deploy his method of sprezzatura. The lengths to which Harvey goes to pull this act off betray his planning and self-awareness. Whether the card party actually happened seems, in the final sense, irrelevant. But experiencing an earthquake—surely a frightening episode for all involved—only to follow it with an oratorical performance, off the cuff, of two explanations for it, is rather too planned to be plausible. Harvey's setting his oration in a card party in Essex, in fact, sets it firmly in the tradition of Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, in which the wealthy and privileged while away the hours with conversation and parlor games. This connection is even more striking in light of the copious marginalia that Harvey left in his copy of The Book of the Courtier. Though he acquired the book in 1572 (the date he wrote alongside his name on the title-page), an 118-word summation of the book's argument is signed “G. H. 1580,” the same year he wrote the “Earthquake Letter.”²⁵

Harvey's self-representation in the act of idle card playing as a frame for a treatise on treatises has a further ring of irony about it—in his letters to John Young and others during his trying early years (1570-73) at Pembroke Hall, he complains about how others criticized him for lacking social grace. He recounts one conversation with a superior in the college thus: “He laid against me mi commun behaviur, that I was not familiar like a fellow, and that I did disdain everi mans cumpani.”²⁶ Thus, Harvey's painful self-consciousness of a perceived lack of savoir faire haunts him, and his labored effort to present his methodical explanation of the earthquake in the context of a leisurely card game—sprezzatura—appears designed to compensate for the sense of a clumsy social persona.

Harvey's posturing as an idle card player ready to extemporize a pair of explanations for the quake contrasts sharply with the harrowing nature of the quake. His audience for the two explanations consisted of the master of the house and two women, “a coople of shrewde wittie new marryed Gentlewomen, which were more Inquisitive, than Capable of Natures works,” whom he calls “Mystresse Inquisitiva” and “Madame Incredula” (p. 40). Harvey uses these women as a device for periodically punctuating the mock treatise with derision, to make sure the reader gets the point: if Mystresse Inquisitiva and Madame Incredula are not taken in by the Cambridge explanation, then neither should we. The women's first impulse after the quake is to pray, but the master of the house enters and entreats “Master H” to explain the cause of the quake: “May there not be some sensible Naturall cause thereof, in the concavities of the Earth itself, as some forcible and violent Eruption of wynde, or the like?” (p. 43). Harvey's immediate response is that the recent heavy rains had so swollen the earth that it simply needed to exhaust itself. But his audience at this point requests a more elaborate explanation: “learned Syr, try our wittes a little, and let us heare a peece of your deepe Universitie Cunning” (p. 44). The satire, of course, is already proceeding apace. Harvey obliges; in the ironic solemnity of his own words, he “very solemnly pawsing a whyle, most gravely, and doctorally proceeded” (p. 44). In what follows, he uses alehouse imagery to posit an earth that is a “very great store of substantiall matter, and sundry Accidental humours, & fumes, and spirites, either good, or bad, or mixte” (pp. 44-5). He surmises that the sundry humours and fumes are mixed in nature, between evil and good, and that these parts “forcibly tosseth, and cruelly disturbeth the whole,” making the conditions favorable for an earthquake (p. 45). The satire in this case lies not in the point about the mechanics of the quake but rather in the unsavory imagery and in the haphazard arrangement of the points; this explanation is not substantively different from Aristotle's account in the second book of Meteors, nor is it markedly different in substance from his own Ramist account which follows.

At this juncture, it should be clear that the simple common sensibilities of the women serve to deflate the pretensions of the Cambridge University cunning. Harvey steps back to explain that many of his university colleagues argue in such terms “when their Alebench Rhetorick comes upon them, & specially the mooving Patheticall figure Pottyposis” (p. 48). They argue, for instance, that the earth “having taken in too much drinke, & as it were over lavish Cups … now staggereth, & reeleth, & tottereth, this way and that way, up & downe, like a drunken man, or wooman” (p. 48). Such statements in the alehouse vein keep the party entertained, but at length drive the women to exasperation: “No more Ands or Ifs, for Gods sake, quoth the Madame, and this be your great Doctorly learning. Wee have even Enoughe alreadie for our Money: and if you should goe a little farther, I feare me, you would make us nyghe as cunning as yourself: and that would be a great disgrace to the Universitie” (p. 50). The card party, as Harvey has constructed it, has a good laugh all around at this first explanation of the earthquake.

Entertained as the auditors are by this description (as Harvey narrates it), the women press for a more serious explanation. The Gentleman of the house congratulates Harvey on his showmanship—“now you have playde your part so cunningly with the Gentlewoman”—and asks him again to explain whether the earthquake was of natural or supernatural provenance (p. 51). It is important to remember that this conversation is largely, if not entirely, a construct of Harvey's imagination, and even if this exchange did occur, the recounting of it is all Harvey's own. At this point he produces his own explanation, “Master H's short, but sharpe, and learned Judgement of Earthquakes” (p. 51). The chief difference between Harvey's “short, but sharpe” explanation and the previous one is not substantive as much as organizational and presentational. The latter, more deliberate account of the causes contrasts sharply with the preceding breathless, undignified, haphazard rehearsal of possible explanations. This latter explanation has none of the derisive interjections from the women, and proceeds largely without interruption. Gerald Snare argues that Harvey frames this second explanation in Ramist fashion (though Harvey never mentions Ramus), using the topical logic format for invention that Ramus prescribes in the Dialectical Institutiones.²⁷ Accordingly, Harvey arranges the efficient causes into their Ramistic categories and does the same with the final causes. He begins with a consideration of the two internal causes (the material and the formal), and then proceeds to declare that “The Earthquakes themselves I would saye are Naturall,” under which heading he categorizes the “Materiall” and “formall” causes (p. 51). The material cause denotes matter, the “stuff” that was heaved around in the quake, and the formal cause denotes the “form” in which the quake occurred (“the shaking of the Earth without: and the violent kinde of striving, and wrastling of the windes” [p. 52]). Turning to the external causes (the efficient and formal), he considers the efficient cause, and states that the primary efficient cause, “out of all Question,” is “God himselfe, the Creatour, and Continuer, and Corrector of Nature” (p. 53). Harvey is careful, however, to allow for secondary efficient causes of earthquakes as well, such as the sun, planets, and stars. Hence, he posits both natural and supernatural final causes of earthquakes: the “wynde shoulde recover his Naturall place,” though at the same time, Harvey holds, God uses natural means “to the accomplishment of his Divine and incomprehensible determination” (pp. 53, 54).

Having explored these causes, Harvey's position on the provenance of the quake is fideistic—that no one can presume “definitively to give sentence of his Majesties secret and inscrutable purposes” (pp. 56-7), and that while at certain times in history earthquakes did carry out the special purposes of God in Heaven, there existed yet enough “Ordinarie” and “Naturall” causes to account for many of them. He then proceeds to criticize what he perceives as knee-jerk first-cause explanations of it: “As if they had a key for all the lockes in Heaven, or as if it were as cleare and resolute a case, as the Eclipse of the Sunne, that darkened all the Earth” (p. 57). The Gentleman of the house echoes Harvey's opinion of the matter, that “an Earthquake might as well be supposed a Naturall Motion of the Earth, as a preternaturall, or supernaturall ominous work of God: and that [it was] hard, and almost impossible, for any man, either by Philosophie, or Divinitie, evermore to determine flatly the very certaintie either way” (p. 59). What this tells us is that no one is sure that the earthquake was indeed of supernatural provenance, and moreover, that the engine of method occasionally proves ambiguous in the pursuit of truth. Not only is divine nature questioned, but our access to knowledge of divinity, via method, is also in doubt. No amount of method, in other words, might fully account for God's purposes.

Removed from the immediate circumstances of the card party and ensuing earthquake explanations, Harvey asks of Immerito (Spenser, the addressee) if some “learned, and well advized Universitie man” would undertake to write a treatise on earthquakes. In so doing, he writes an apt prescription for the format of such a treatise: “The generall Nature of Earthquakes by definition, and the speciall diversitie of them by division, beyng perfectly knowen (a thing soone done) and a complete Induction of many credible and autenticall, both olde and newe, divine and prophane, Greeke, Lattine, and other Examples, (with discretion, and judgement, compyled and compared togither) being considerately and exactly made, (a thing not so easily done) much no doubt myght be alledged too or fro, to terrifie or pacifie us, more or lesse” (p. 62). Harvey's prescription depends on categorizing things well among various causes. He maintains the independence of the two “Naturall” causes, the material and formal, irrespective of whether the quake was ultimately of natural or supernatural origin. The point, he concludes, is to undertake such considerations in a methodical way, that is, to account for the circumstances, using “Naturall” considerations such as the time and place of the quakes, and the situations of the victims, rather than assume a first-cause provenance. Taken as such, Harvey's method was a tool of skepticism.²⁸ Harvey terms this a “Historicall Induction of particulars,” and it is clear, then, that the first step of method is to arrive at a general knowledge of the issue at hand, “(a thing soone done)” (p. 62); the more difficult procedure is to dispose, or organize the knowledge methodically. When Harvey considers the differing results that follow attention to either the natural causes (material and formal) or supernatural (efficient and final), he implies that the final end of method is to settle the minds of people. Absolute truth about the nature of the earthquake then becomes less important, or less attainable, than the cause of mollifying the people's fears.

Harvey's “Earthquake Letter,” then, offers a test case of the utility of method. First, it raises the question of sprezzatura as method. As we have seen in Harvey's letters and in Nashe's satire, the notion of courtly behavior, of sprezzatura, was an elusive one for Harvey. His attempt at sprezzatura in this letter to Spenser is fascinating, therefore, because he elects to couch it in the aftermath of an earthquake. This timing implies an ironic detachment toward the quake, a nonchalance that is essential to sprezzatura. But it also indicates a detachment toward the points about discursive method that he attempts to convey in the satire. Harvey certainly appears to take his “short, but sharpe, and learned Judgement of Earthquakes” seriously, at least until the end, when he wonders aloud about how remarkable it was that the earth stopped shaking after the earthquake. The Gentleman of the house turns to the women in the party, declares Harvey's point a “schoole poynt,” and calls for supper (pp. 60-1). On the one hand, this “schoole poynt” allegation might be a bit of mocking self-abasement, in which the attempt at sprezzatura simply stands at odds with the more serious points Harvey wishes to make about the discourse of natural science. On the other hand, Harvey may simply be a bore, bending the ears of Mystresse Inquisitiva and Madame Incredula with a performance of academic discourse when they would otherwise be playing cards or simply discussing the quake. Harvey implies the former, of course, by the assumption of his authorial control over this account, but the element of sprezzatura leaves a good deal of ambiguity.

More ambiguity about method haunts a second issue, the examination of cause. The letter highlights the arbitrary nature of assigning a natural or a supernatural cause to such phenomena, and the conclusion that Harvey reaches about the provenance of the quake betrays a thoroughgoing skepticism about human access to knowledge of divine actions, regardless of method.

III

The significance of Harvey's Foure Letters and Certeine Sonnets, Especially Touching Robert Greene (1592) in this accounting of method is that Harvey takes the opportunity in the fourth of these occasional letters to express his views on method and its various shadings with and between experience, theory, and practice. His commentary on method in these letters both complicates and synthesizes the religious awe that he held for method in the Ciceronianus and the satirical and prescriptive points that he made in the “Earthquake Letter.” These philosophical points on theory and practice are not mere abstractions for Harvey; they reflect one of the crucial dilemmas of his experience, that of reconciling his middling-sort pedigree with his loftier aspirations. The core issues that he has discussed earlier about method—about its value in literary composition and dialectical discourse, and about its applicability to one's personal and political affairs—come into focus in the fourth of these letters. Where in the Ciceronianus he writes in robust terms about the effectiveness of method, and where in the “Earthquake Letter” he still demonstrates a hearty confidence, or willingness to pursue the ends of method both in dialectical discourse and in social situations, by 1592 his tone of writing is chastened and defensive, and his assessment of method is likewise less buoyant than before.

The occasion for Harvey's writing the Foure Letters is intimately bound up in his literary scuffling with Greene and Nashe.²⁹ While no one is sure how the flyting began, or precisely what was at stake, R. B. McKerrow hypothesizes that Nashe and Harvey “must have represented to the other the class or the type which he most detested,” and goes on to speculate more specifically that it was “that ancient opposition between the old and the new, between servility and independence, between prejudice and the right of a man to that consideration which his abilities and achievements deserved. And it was the Harveys who stood for the future and Nashe for the past.”³⁰ This view is contrary to what McKerrow perceives as the orthodox view of the battle (at the time in which McKerrow was writing, the end of Victoria's reign) as “one between the brilliant young wit and the dull conceited pedant.”³¹ Indeed, the point of this contrast for my purposes is that though Nashe has been taken as a gadfly journalist, his cultural affiliations were more traditional than Harvey's; Harvey expressed reservations about certain tenets of Aristotelianism (as noted in his early struggles for his M. A. at Pembroke Hall) and embraced Ramism and new ideas about method, while Nashe was far more traditionally Aristotelian in his leanings, especially in his decidedly conservative early writing, The Anatomy of Absurdity.

A brief look at the first three letters of this collection gives us a sense of the state of Harvey's affairs in the late summer of 1592: contentious, struggling to present himself in a favorable light (at the expense others), and beginning to despair of court preferment. His life, judging by his apologias and defenses of his family, was a painfully frustrated one. Part of this frustration transmuted, I have argued, into an engagement with method as a means of social climbing (as manifested in the “Earthquake Letter”); but by 1592 his mild disenchantment with method—method as the pathway to academic and court preferment (to cast it in the terms of the Ciceronianus, a social miracle), as well as the epistemological challenges that method attempted to hurdle—was becoming evident.

In the fourth letter, dated 11 and 12 September 1592, Harvey articulates his fullest statement of his philosophy of practicality and action. As he presents himself, he has “wedded my selfe to private study, and devoted my mind to publike quietnesse” (p. 222), and has been prevailed upon and dragged into the fray by Nashe and Greene, whom he describes as grasshoppers, hardly worth dignifying as opponents.³² The immediate irony is that, later in the letter, Harvey presents himself as committed to the life of action and practice, not this contemplative retirement from public affairs. He casts himself in this letter as an innocent sufferer, the pilot of a ship making a treacherous passage through the slings and arrows of libelous journalists, and consoles himself with thoughts of his patience and constancy. Harvey, of course, was hardly the innocent sufferer that he claims to be—his defamatory attacks on the recently deceased Greene's character and morals incriminate himself thoroughly, and his offer of magnanimous amnesty and charity to the author of Pierce Pennilesse must have been patronizing gall to Nashe.³³ Midway through this four-thousand-word treatise, he begins a self-exculpatory homily that marks out much of his personal philosophy on the differences between appearance and reality and between precept and practice.

At the root of much of this discourse is the difficulty Harvey encountered in reconciling his modest pedigree with his higher ambitions. His father was a farmer and ropemaker, the latter of which was a modest calling, and one for which Nashe satirized him mercilessly, starting in the section on Wrath in Pierce Pennilesse.³⁴ If Nashe's subsequent writings are any indication, then these taunts must have found their target: Nashe bends his wit on Harvey's father's occupation repeatedly in Have with You to Saffron-Walden, noting that the hangman was the ropemaker's best customer, making jokes about all the hair required in ropemaking, and so forth.³⁵

In the following passage from the fourth letter, Harvey puts these concerns about birth and merit on a theoretical plane, alongside the difference between appearance and reality, and plaintively suggests that those who are born into favorable circumstances do not always deserve the high social standing that is theirs: “Fortune is a favorable Lady to some forward adventurers: they may easely swim, that are holden up by the chinne; such, & such have lived in estimation, & purchased landes; but what did they ever effectuate of any worthe; or wherein appeared ther sufficiency, to discharg any weighty function, or to performe any notable act?” (p. 227). This passage clearly shows the anxiety that Harvey must have felt that propelled him to conceive of his attempts at social advancement as method, with more than a nod back to the passages in the Ciceronianus that stressed training and practice for success in battle.³⁶

In the following passages, which come sentences after the one about Fortune quoted above, Harvey affirms his adherence to method, but qualifies this allegiance by contrasting it to practice and experience. Harvey's emphasis, clearly, is on examples and action, not method's “Pregnant rules” and precepts: “Pregnant rules avail much; but visible Examples amount incredibly: Experience the only life of perfection, and only perfection of life. Whatsoever occasion causeth me to be mistaken, as over-much addicted to Theory, without respect of action: (for that is one of the especiallest points, which I am importuned to resolve:) I never made account of any study, meditation, conference, or Exercise that importeth not effectual use, & that aymeth not altogether at action: as the singular marke, whereat every Arte, & every vertue is to levell” (p. 227). Harvey's fear that an “over-much” addiction to “Theory” might be pernicious is of a piece with what Victoria Kahn describes as the “humanist resistance to theory” in the sixteenth century.³⁷ She argues that the humanists objected to “theory” (as speculative thought) on the grounds of utility and skepticism, that such thought concerned things that were ultimately unknowable, and that such a preoccupation was too far removed from practical utility. Harvey's allegation that theory can be “addictive” then raises serious questions about the validity and legitimacy of speculative thought, and hence about certain types of method. As we saw in the “Earthquake Letter,” the workings of method did not arrive at any degree of certainty—in fact the selection of causes to be considered all but dictated the result of the inquiry.

Harvey then rephrases himself and proceeds to distinguish between method and practice, and in so doing, implies that method might serve as a midpoint between theory and practice: “I love Method: but honour Practice: must I show the difference? Either Arte is obscure, or the quickest capacity dull: and needeth Methode, as it were the bright Moone, to illumine the darksome night: but Practice is the bright Sun, that shineth in the day, & the sovereign Planet that governeth the world: as elsewhere I have copiously declared. To excell, ther is no way but one: to marry studious Arte to diligent Exercise: but where they must be unmarried, or divorced, give me rather Exercise without Arte, then Arte without Exercise” (pp. 227-8). In this tangle of abstractions, which carries the sense of Harvey's trying to come to terms with his own “Experience” of jostling with academic preferment committees and the likes of Greene and Nashe, he sets method alongside theory and implies that method, like theory, might be addictive and pernicious. He further juxtaposes method, theory, and art against the more pragmatic concepts of experience, practice, and exercise. These two camps must ultimately be joined together, he asserts, but if he had to choose one, it would be that of action—experience, practice, and exercise—rather than method, theory, and art. Harvey's commitment to the more active modes of Experience, Practice, and Exercise, we see, qualifies his advocacy of Method.

Harvey's likening of Method to the “bright Moone” in this passage suggests a further qualifying of his commitment to method. He has in the preceding two pages referred to the moon in other contexts. First, he has described the cunning of those writers who “can imaginatively cast beyonde the Moone,” whereby Harvey establishes the moon as a remote and faraway planet (and already one commonly associated with lunacy) (p. 226). Second, in discussing the difference between appearance and reality, he invokes the familiar axiom, “Fortune as changeable as the Moone,” to which he appends, “no counterfeit, or pretended commendation endureth long” (p. 227). Moreover, while Method can serve to light the way out of complete darkness, the implication is that only practice, as the bright sun, can take over and light the way closer to perfection. Previously, of course, Harvey has likened Method to the bright sunshine (in the Ciceronianus), which again suggests a qualifying of his allegiance to method. Practice, in effect, eclipses Method. So aligning method with the changeable moon, and suggesting that method, as theory, might be addictive, casts new light (or shade) on Method. Thus incomplete and ineffectual is method without practice, as he continues: “A world without a Sunne: a Boddy without a Soule: Nature without Arte: Arte without Exercise: sory creatures” (p. 228). So just as Harvey questions the earthquake's supernatural status (as well as method's epistemological validity) in the “Earthquake Letter,” so in this letter he revises his earlier religious estimation of method.

But Harvey does not dilate long in his praise of practice, and works to recuperate the value and utility of method, divesting it of strictly theoretical connotations. Only paragraphs later he cites four Humanist reformers of scholastic logic whose efforts on behalf of “that pretious Trainement” (logic, or method) still have not finally withstood inevitable corruption:

Rodolph Agricola, Philip Melanchthon, Ludovike Vives, Peter Ramus, and divers excellent scholars, have earnestly complained of Artes corrupted, and notably reformed many absurdities: and still corruption ingendreth one vermin or other: and still that pretious Trainement is miserably abused, which should be the fountain of skill, the root of vertue, the seminary of government, the foundation of all private and public good. The Methodist, & Discourser might be more material: the Theorist, and Practitioner more formal: all fower more effectuall: or how commeth it to pass, that much more is professed, but much less performed, then in former ages?

(p. 229)

The claims that Harvey makes for “that pretious Trainement,” reminiscent of the claims that Ramus made for “the single method” of all the arts, include education for a wide variety of skills (logical and rhetorical, civic, and military) as well as “vertue” and government. And his diagnosis of the problems faced by these four “types” of arts course students (Methodist, Discourser, Theorist, Practitioner), however murky in both terminology and syntax, indicates an abiding interest in the relations between method, theory, and practice.

IV

Harvey's letters and marginalia have prompted considerable attention to the phenomenon of “literary personality”; James Nielson has identified the critical tendency to ascribe “a kind of everpresent intentional self-characterization” to Harvey, and much of the impetus behind Grafton's and Jardine's work on Harvey derives from the fact that he failed so conspicuously to achieve the aims for which he strove.³⁸ In her presentation of him as an “exemplary Ramist and pragmatic humanist,” Jardine emphasizes how “Harvey's Ramism manifests itself in a confident, and self-conscious refocusing of the liberal arts training as a pragmatic training, a training for material success and public position.”³⁹ My assessment of Harvey's engagement with method builds on this view: in “method,” broadly construed, Harvey hoped to find a means for this material and professional advancement, but, buffeted by setbacks, he became progressively more aware of the limits of method. In his writings of 1574, 1576, 1580, and 1592, Harvey both praises and complicates prevailing concepts of method. In the early writings, he invests method with religious imagery that manifests the sense of seriousness with which he embraces it. In the Ciceronianus, Harvey criticizes a merely linguistic method and extends the conception of method to encompass a much wider range of experience. His application of method to the sphere of public affairs in this case borders on a religious faith. In the “Earthquake Letter,” Harvey implicitly poses another dual discourse of method. On one level he parodies both popular and academic discourse about the earthquake (and about natural phenomena in general) and then provides his own alternative Ramist account of it. But on another level, in claiming that he delivered these two speeches extemporaneously while playing cards on vacation, he casts this parody in the coy manner of sprezzatura, a “method” itself. One form of method, in this case, controls the deployment of another. And in the Foure Letters, Harvey publishes in extended form his conflicted ruminations about the utility and value of method, declaring “I love Method: but honour Practice.” This dichotomy epitomizes much of the earlier ambivalence and misgivings that he has entertained about method; his arguing for a conception of method that goes beyond simple composition and analysis of orations, but that prepares one for worldly affairs (in the Ciceronianus), and his parodying the methods of earthquake treatises while earnestly affecting the nonchalance of sprezzatura (in the “Earthquake Letter”).

What we see emerging in Harvey's writings about method is not simply the strident advocacy for method and Ramism—though that message is certainly there—but also a growing acknowledgment of the limits and liabilities of method. Moreover, Harvey's disenchantment with method was more than his retrenching over the distinctions between method and practice or over the arrangement of discursive prose, and more than his ax to grind about the difficulty of overcoming middling birth to attain academic or court preferment. It represents in fine what many Renaissance writers struggled with, the agon between concept, order, and plan on the one hand and praxis, action, and performance on the other. When Polonius observes of Hamlet's behavior that “Though this be madness, yet there is method in't,” when Bacon both condemns and praises aspects of Ramist method in The Advancement of Learning (1605), when Samuel Purchas confesses the “vanity” of his method in ordering his massive Historie of Man in 1619, and when Robert Burton decries his “want of good method” in compiling The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621, each is re-inflecting in his own respective way this uneasy tension over method in Renaissance thought.

Notes

1. Warren B. Austin, “Gabriel Harvey's ‘Lost’ Ode on Ramus,” MLN 61, 4 (April 1946): 242-6, 245.

2. For general overviews of “method” in the sixteenth century, see Neal Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1960), Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Princeton NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1956), and Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958). For a provocative argument about the institutionalization of the humanities, see Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Gerald Duckworth and Co., 1986).

3. Gabriel Harvey's later years are not as richly documented as his earlier years are. For a discussion of his last years, see Virginia Stern, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia, and Library (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 130-4. This is the most recent biography of Harvey.

4. These struggles are recounted in exhaustive detail in Harvey's letters from the period. See The Letter-Book of Gabriel Harvey, A. D. 1573-1580, ed. Edward John Long Scott (London: Camden Society, 1884). All references to The Letter-Book will be to this edition.

5. For an extended discussion of the connections between Harvey and Malvolio, and of William Shakespeare's use of Thomas Nashe's pamphlet prose concerning Harvey in the composition of Twelfth Night, see J. J. M. Tobin, “Gabriel Harvey in Illyria,” ES 61, 4 (August 1980): 318-28. While Tobin's point is that Shakespeare's Malvolio draws on Nashe's representation of Harvey in Have with You to Saffron-Walden, some of Harvey's own complaints in the Letter-Book of Gabriel Harvey bear striking resemblance to those of Malvolio.

6. Nashe, The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5 vols., ed. R. B. McKerrow (London, 1904; rprt. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), 3:68. Further references to Nashe's works will be from this edition. I have silently modernized the u's and v's in quoting from McKerrow's edition of Nashe's works.

7. My reading of Harvey's life agrees with that of Grafton and Jardine, though I also argue that Harvey gradually grew to see the limits of method. They argue that Harvey transformed for himself a Ciceronian humanism focusing on eloquence into a more pragmatic humanism, all in hopes of obtaining academic and court preferment. This argument is part of their larger theses that Ramus, in his emphasis on utility, severed the ethical component from oratorical training. Moreover, the emergence of humanism in place of scholasticism, and the institutionalization of the humanities were developments that, far from their professed ideals of inducing better living, served largely to train the elite for powerful positions. See Grafton and Jardine, pp. 184-96.

8. See Caroline Ruutz-Rees, “Some Notes of Gabriel Harvey's in Hoby's Translation of Castigilone's Courtier (1561),” PMLA 25 (1910): 608-39. Despite the length of this treatment, its tone is condescending and dismissive; Harvey's copy of the book is “too abundantly” annotated, and Ruutz-Rees has few kind words for Harvey.

9. For an excellent study of this nexus of issues, see Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985).

10. Harvey, The Letter-Book, pp. 10-1.

11. For a discussion of humanism and Ramism at Oxford and Cambridge at the time, see Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 53-95. For a more focused account of the Ramist debate at Cambridge in the 1580s, see Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press), pp. 59-65.

12. Harold S. Wilson provides a full account of these responsibilities in his edition of the Ciceronianus. See Harold S. Wilson, “Gabriel Harvey's Ciceronianus,” University of Nebraska Studies in the Humanities 4 (November 1945), with an English translation by Clarence E. Forbes. All further references to the Ciceronianus will be to this edition and will hereafter be cited parenthetically.

13. Ong (pp. 48-9) theorizes that Ramus's anti-Italian bias was the result of the rhetorically-centered culture of the Italians as opposed to the dialectically-centered culture of Northern Europe.

14. Harvey later clarifies this in the Ciceronianus, and continues to figure method in religious terms: “I found in Erasmus a Ciceronian not of the sort that those refined fellows foolishly imagine, a fowler after Ciceronian words, religiously following him in all the tiniest details, and childishly gathering a few posies from Cicero like pebbles on a beach, while trampling under foot the most precious gems of argument and pearls of philosophy” (p. 77).

15. On the title page of his edition of Ramus's Ciceronianus, in fact, is inscribed “I redd over this Ciceronianus twice in twoo dayes, Being then Sophister in Christes College. [1568-69] Gabriel Harvey” (quoted in Stern, p. 232). Harvey neatly summarizes his conversion to the imitative method of the Cisalpines (the three Germans Johannes Sturm, Johann Thomas Freigius, and Erasmus and Frenchman Ramus) thus: “the true, genuine, most ancient mimesis is a tradition given us by the profound judgment of the Cisalpines; the Romans, failing to describe the proper method of imitating, have contrived a sort of misguided imitation founded on an erroneous opinion” (p. 81).

16. The original Latin translation of this passage reads as follows: Ita tamen, ut os interim illud suauissimum, reliquasque corporis, atque animi elegantias, & perpolitissima lineamenta, non solum exoscularer iam tum cupidissime, sed etiam frequentissime eodem illo temporis puncto obstupescerem.

17. Harvey, “Commonplace Book,” in Gabriel Harvey's Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1913), p. 90.

18. Harvey, “Commonplace Book,” p. 91.

19. A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (New York: Schoken Books, 1964), pp. 109, 110.

20. Referring to Cicero's Topica and de Inventione, Harvey casts arrangement and method as clarifying and illuminating in the following passage: “In his arrangement and method let us attentively observe the clarity which fills and illumines everything with its light” (p. 85).

21. Arthur Golding, A discourse upon the earthquake (London: Henry Binneman, 1580), [pp. 23-4]. I have silently modernized the u's and v's in quoting from Golding's treatise.

22. Harvey, “Earthquake Letter,” in The Works of Gabriel Harvey, 3 vols., ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London: privately printed, 1884), 1:31-74, 1:44, 47. Hereafter all references to the “Earthquake Letter” will be made parenthetically in the text. I have silently modernized the u's and v's in quoting from Grosart's edition of Harvey's works.

23. Harvey, Foure Letters, in The Works of Gabriel Harvey, 1:151-254, 1:178-9.

24. Harvey, Foure Letters, 1:179, 178.

25. See Ruutz-Rees, pp. 634-5.

26. Harvey, Letter-Book, p. 4.

27. Gerald Snare, “Satire, Logic, and Rhetoric in Harvey's Earthquake Letter to Spenser,” Tulane Studies in English 18 (1970): 17-33.

28. Harvey's method of accounting for the quake in worldly and divine terms will be repeated in his 1593 assessment of Nashe's offer of apology in A New Letter of Notable Contents. Harvey concludes with great skepticism that the apology is bogus, a trap.

29. The Nashe-Harvey flyting has been the subject of frequent recountings. The seminal genealogy is McKerrow's edition of The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5:65-110. See also Lorna Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 197-214.

30. McKerrow, p. 67.

31. McKerrow, p. 65.

32. For the argument that Harvey only fabricates his given pretense for the Foure Letters, see Hutson, pp. 197-214.

33. Scholars, especially Harvey's Victorian editor, Grosart, have treated him harshly for this.

34. Nashe, 1:195.

35. Nashe, 3:3, 7-8, 56, 57.

36. Frank Whigham describes this social tension in Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984). The Foure Letters manifests the commitment to action and pragmatism that Mario Praz, in discussing Niccolo Machiavelli's influence on Bacon, has identified thus: “The teaching of Machiavelli elicited such an extreme doctrine of action from another Englishman, the humanist Gabriel Harvey (born c. 1550), that in a sense he appears as a forerunner of Nietzsche's superman.” Harvey's attraction to Machiavelli's pragmatic ideals is evident in his frequent citations of Machiavelli in his “Commonplace Book” and other writings. This association of method with Machiavelli provides darker shade of method. (Praz, The Flaming Heart [Gloucester MA: Peter Smith, 1966], p. 101 n. 21). We have information that Harvey was a close reader of Machiavelli's The Arte of Warre. See Grafton and Jardine, “Studied for Action: How Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present 129 (November 1990): 30-78, 69.

37. See Kahn, “The Humanist Resistance to Theory,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. David Quint and Patricia Parker (Baltimore MD and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 373-96.

38. James Nielson, “Reading Between the Lines: Manuscript Personality and Gabriel Harvey's Drafts,” SEL 33, 1 (Winter 1993): 43-82, 77.

39. Jardine, “Gabriel Harvey: Exemplary Ramist and Pragmatic Humanist,” Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Theologiques 70 (1986): 36-48, 47.