ABSTRACT
Dominant current readings of Thomas Nashe's Lenten Stuffe take it as a genuine panegyric of the Great Yarmouth fishing trade, yet the work can just as credibly be read as a mock encomium. This chapter examines numerous internal references to and hints at the genre of mock encomium as well as local and national contexts that expose Nashe's hyperbolic rhetorical copia as sarcastic. Standing readings of Lenten Stuffe share basic assumptions with Lorna Hutson's argument that Nashe contrasts the "uninhibited commerce" of the Great Yarmouth herring fair favorably to monopolistic London. The final inversion of Lenten Stuffe's many molehills turned into mountains that the chapter examines Nashe's deployment of the symbolism of Lent. Nashe develops traditional customs and symbolism associated with Lent to suggest that a debased version of the penitential ritual is offered under Elizabeth's regime. The chapter considers some popular and polemical literary uses of the imagery of Lent and Carnival to understand Nashe's appropriation of the trope.
