When Sir Thomas Bodley founded the Bodleian Library, he sought to keep “baggage books,” “riff-raff books,” and distasteful literature off the shelves. The question of keeping literature in or out of a library or canon is never simply about literature; it is also about class-based criticism and notions of defending culture and taste against unauthorized popular versions. Teaching dangerously opens the early modern classroom, theorizing it as a type of literary fandom that is both personally engaging and socially conscious: this type of teaching does not forget academic rigor; it remembers human impact, by enfolding scholarship and theory. Putting early modern texts into play alongside contemporary literature and social issues moves learning in unscripted, surprising, and dangerous directions. This article models these dangerous practices by interfacing affect theory with the fandom of Thomas Cromwell as he appears in Michael Drayton’s poem The Legend of Thomas Cromwell, the apocryphal “W.S.” drama The Life and Death of Thomas Cromwell, and Hilary Mantel’s novels Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies. This type of ‘magic’ is not so far removed from J.K. Rowling’s wizardry, and teaching dangerously with affect theory empowers classroom fandom that engages and changes the world as we know it
