"Enabling Engagements contributes to current critical debates regarding early modern subjectivity and early modern cultural capital. In stressing the boldness of Edmund Spenser's poetics of patronage, Judith Owens shows that Elizabethans could and did excercise agency within a wide range of institutions. By consistently challenging assumptions of courtly hegemony in early modern society, Owens suggests a new appraisal of the processes of cultural commodification."--BOOK JACKET.