Characters in Gascoigne’s “Adventures of Master F. J.” (1573) use reading as a pastime by which they sort out or complicate their relationships with others; the novel’s readers, for their pastime, recreate these relationships as they read the novel. These linguistic, rhetorical and social pastimes are moves in a serious game of access to power, and the “Adventures” is thus an ironic ‘institute’ for the transformation of the individual.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Billingsley, D. B., (2025), "The Pastime of Master F. J.", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Billingsley, Dale B. "The Pastime of Master F. J.." Renaissance and Reformation 29 (3): 2010. 5-18. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v29i3.11428. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.