ABSTRACT
In their call for papers, the organizers of the 1998 conference 'Expertise Constructed: Didactic Literature in the British Atlantic World, 1500-1800' offered a list of works considered 'didactic literature': 'from vade-mecums of bee-keeping to grammars, from "compleat" cookery courses to universal manuals on arithmetic.' Although this list sketches a range of labours that might be described and prescribed by early modern didactic works, the list also offers examples where early modern and current assumptions about 'didactic literature' overlap; early modern authors, stationers, and readers and twenty-first-century scholars might all agree that these works are 'didactic'. But because of historically-specific pressures on early modern texts and practices, the boundary was not always so clear between what we now call 'didactic literature' and what we call simply 'literature', between books for practical use and books for aesthetic appreciation. In mid-seventeenth-century England, the lasting influence of humanist pedagogy, the emerging conventions of literary authorship, and the anxiety about the material stability of print all make the distinction between 'didactic literature' and 'literature' more complex than a list of didactic works implies. Volumes that now seem most clearly literary were in fact immediately practical works for some seventeenth-century readers, and volumes that seem clearly didactic were in fact often literary exercises. Specifically, one seventeenth-century reader's response to an influential single-author book of poetry suggests how a volume's signs of aesthetic quality can enhance its practical utility, and collections of posies published in the mid-seventeenth century suggest how a volume's signs of practical utility enhance its aesthetic quality. Together, these case studies begin to map the didactic potential of apparently literary books and the literary potential of apparently didactic books in the middle decades of the seventeenth century.
