Abraham Fleming: - Early Music Online - Royal Holloway, University ...

John Knox (d. 1574). He also contributed to groundbreaking books like Reginald Scot’s
Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), which in effect denied the existence of witchcraft. When
Fleming did write about current affairs, such as the earthquake of 1580, he was not
committing these events to paper in order to preserve them for future generations as an
antiquary might; rather Fleming exploited events as vehicles for spiritual or moral lessons.
Antiquaries were concerned with collecting, studying and preserving old or antique objects,
often in private collections, and not readily sharing the items in their own collections. This
thesis argues that Fleming was not an antiquary and his main concern was wholly different,
namely to take Latin material and, rather than preserve it, transform the text into something
new that enabled large numbers of people to buy it and access the information therein. He
did this time and time again during his career as a writer. It must be remembered that he was
involved with over 50 printed books of which Holinshed’s Chronicles was just one: one
collaborative project (no matter how large or well-known the project may have become) does
not an antiquary make. It must also be remembered that Fleming became involved in
producing Holinshed’s Chronicles primarily because he was an excellent and diligent
corrector, editor and indexer, not because the Holinshed syndicate was in need of another
contributing antiquary.
The first modern study of Fleming was made by Dodson in 1955. 11 While Dodson gave an
overview of Fleming’s career, she drew the conclusion like Cooper that Fleming’s written
work was somewhat lacking, particularly in humour. Dodson did not, however, consider two
aspects of his writing. Firstly, whether, given his earnest beliefs and the nature of his subject
matter, was humour was an appropriate device? Secondly, as this thesis argues, Fleming did
in fact produce humorous and satirical books when appropriate. His Bushie Haire (1576), the
proverbs in his dictionaries and his willingness to work on Beehiue of the Romish Church
(1579) clearly demonstrate that Fleming used humour as a device. The value of Dodson’s
synopsis is that it was the first to place Fleming in some context and although the majority of
11 See fn 7, p. 11.
13