Richard strier the unrepentant renaissance from petrarch to shakespeare to milton 2011

The Unrepentant Renaissance



The Unrepentant
Renaissance
from petrarch
to shakespeare
to m i lto n

Richard Strier

The University of Chicago Pressâ•… c h i c a g o & l o n d o n


r i c h a r d s t r i e r is the Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor in the
Department of English and in the College at the University of Chicago. He has coedited
several interdisciplinary essay collections and is the author of many articles and two books,
Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts and Love Known:
Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry, the latter published by the University
of Chicago Press.
The University ofâ•› Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2011 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2011.
Printed in the United States of America
20╇ 19╇ 18╇ 17╇ 16╇ 15╇ 14╇ 13╇ 12╇ 11╅╅╅ 1╇ 2╇ 3╇ 4╇ 5
isbn-13: 978-0-226-77751-1 (cloth)
isbn-10: 0-226-77751-0 (cloth)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Strier, Richard.
â•… The unrepentant Renaissance : from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton / Richard Strier.
â•…â•… p.â•…â•… cm.
â•… Includes bibliographical references and index.
â•… isbn-13: 978-0-226-77751-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
â•… isbn-10: 0-226-77751-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)â•… 1. European literature—Renaissance,
1450–1600—History and criticism.╇ 2. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—
History and criticism.╇ 3. Petrarca, Francesco, 1304–1374—Criticism and interpretation.╇
4. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism and interpretation.â•… I. Title.
â•… PN721.s835 2011
â•… 809'.89409024—dc22
2010050570
a This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).


To my students, over the years, in
“Renaissance Intellectual Texts” at the University of Chicago



contents

Acknowledgments ix


Introduction: Back to Burckhardt (Plus the Reformations)

1

pa r t 1 ╇ In Defense of Passion and the Body

1Against the Rule of Reason: Praise of Passion from Petrarch to Luther
to Shakespeare to Herbert

29

2Against Judgment: Petrarch and Shakespeare at Sonnets

59

3Against Morality: From Richard III to Antony and Cleopatra
a p p e n d i x 1 ╇ Shakespearean Seduction
a p p e n d i x 2 ╇ Morality and the Happy Infant: The Case of Macbeth

98
125
132

pa r t 2 ╇ In Defense of Worldliness
4Sanctifying the Bourgeoisie: The Cultural Work of The Comedy of Errors
a p p e n d i x ╇ Sanctifying the Aristocracy: From Ignatius Loyola to
François de Sales (and then to Donne and Herbert)

153
187

pa r t 3 ╇ In Defense of Pride
5Self-Revelation and Self-Satisfaction in Montaigne and Descartes

207

6Milton against Humility
a p p e n d i x ╇ “Lordly Command?”

248
283

Index╇ 295



acknowledgments

It was with the help of the students in my graduate seminar, “Renaissance Intellectual Texts,” given periodically at the University of Chicago since the late
1970s, that I developed the courage to wander beyond the bounds of English
literature into the wider world of Renaissance texts and ideas. My experience
with these students—some of whom are now famous professors (you know
who you are!)—allowed me to feel at home enough in texts by Petrarch, Erasmus, Loyola, Descartes, and other Continental figures to write about them in
detail. I could not have embarked on this project without the experience and
support of our shared endeavor. This is truly a significant debt, and one that I
am delighted to be able to acknowledge in the dedication of this book.
But of course that is not the end of my debts. There is a small group of
friends and colleagues whose voices and points of view I have internalized so
deeply that I feel I am in dialogue with them even if I am not (as I often am) literally so. This group has long included Stephen Greenblatt, Frank Whigham,
and Michael Murrin. Kathy Eden has recently entered the circle. My Renaissance colleagues in the English department have long been a source of inspiration and instruction: David Bevington, Joshua Scodel, Michael Murrin
(again), and my newest and extremely shrewd and generous colleague, Bradin
Cormack. Janel Mueller cotaught the original version of the course that led
to this book. William Veeder sat through and responded sagely to accounts of
various chapters and readings through many a sacred Wednesday lunch over
the years.
Other friends and colleagues responded helpfully to particular chapters.

For comments on what became the first chapter, I am grateful to James Turner,


  Acknowledgments

and to audiences at Vanderbilt (especially Deak Nabers), CCNY, Hope Col�
lege€(especially John Cox), and Emory University (especially Rick Rambuss), to
the members of the Chicago-area faculty Renaissance Seminar, and to the gradu�
ate workshop on the history of political and social thought at the University
of Chicago. A request from Michael Schoenfeldt provided the happy occasion
for me to work on Petrarch and Shakespeare. For comments (not always agreeing, but always helpful) on this material, especially with regard to Petrarch’s
Rime, I am grateful to my colleagues in Italian literature, Justin Steinberg and
Armando Maggi, to the members of the Western Mediterranean workshop at
the university, and to Gordon Braden, Michael Murrin, David Quint, Leonard
Barkan, William West, and Robert von Hallberg. For further comments, I am
grateful to Frank Whigham and Lars Engle. The third and central chapter of
this book began as a paper for a terrific conference on Renaissance ethics organized by the late Marshall Grossman at the University of Maryland. The
argument benefited from comments (at various times) by Stephen Greenblatt,
Glenn Most, Loy D. Martin, and Robert David Cohen, as well as from discussion at the Renaissance workshop at the University of Chicago (where Steven Pincus, Joshua Scodel, and Jeffrey Collins were especially helpful), at the
Shakespeare Association of America (SAA), and at the Heyman Center for the
Humanities at Columbia University, where comments from Akeel Bilgrami,
Kathy Eden, and Ed Mendelson were bracing. The appendix on seduction
was for an SAA seminar on that fine topic. John Kerrigan commented and
disagreed helpfully on the appendix on Macbeth.
The chapter on The Comedy of Errors began in another excellent SAA seminar. I am greatly indebted to that group, especially to the papers and comments
of Matthew Steggle and Kent Cartwright. I received helpful responses to later
versions from David Bevington and Ted Leinwand, and also at the Waterloo
conference on Elizabethan religion and theater, at the University of Chicago€So�
ciety of Fellows draft group, at the Vanderbilt group on early modern cultural
studies, at the Columbia University Shakespeare Seminar (especially from my

respondent, Rich McCoy), at the CUNY Graduate Center, and at the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (where I particularly
profited from remarks by Jonathan Arac).
I accumulated many debts in working on the chapter on Montaigne and
Descartes. My experience has been that Montaigne scholars are an especially
generous group. I am deeply indebted to my colleague Philippe Desan (not
least for lending me books from his amazing library), and to my friend and
fellow wine fanatic George Hoffmann, who corresponded with me about this


Acknowledgments  xi

material over a number of years. Kevin Hart and Charles Larmore also gave me
the benefit of their views on Montaigne, and Charles directed me to highly relevant work of his that I might not otherwise have discovered. Kathy Eden read
the chapter with her eagle eye and superb knowledge of Renaissance rhetoric
and philology. The chapter began as a keynote address for a Renaissance prose
conference at Purdue organized by Charles Ross and Angelica Duran, and I
am grateful to the lively audience there, at Carnegie Mellon, and at the early
modern workshop at the University of Chicago. Lisa Ruddick and Dr. Jeffrey
Stern, two friends who are not Montaigne or Descartes scholars but who are
deeply interested in questions of selfhood and identity, also read the chapter closely; they both made extraordinarily helpful comments (I wish I knew
enough about Kohutian self-psychology to follow up on Jeffrey’s).
The chapter on Milton began in the East Coast Milton Seminar. I am grateful to Regina Schwartz for that invitation and for leading an exceptionally
probing discussion spearheaded by Michael Lieb. For written comments and
lively conversation about the revised version of that piece (and much else), I
am grateful to Victoria Kahn. The appendix on The Reason of Church-Government began in a session on discipline at the Renaissance Society of America
organized by Kenneth Graham, who is working on that topic, and who made
valuable comments at and after that session and shared some of his own relevant work with me. The paper was also helpfully and penetratingly discussed
at a meeting of the Northwestern University British Studies group.
Finally, I want to thank Alan G. Thomas, my editor at the University of Chicago Press, for his belief in this project and for finding me excellent readers for
both the partial and the whole manuscript. The first reader of the whole was

wonderfully appreciative and described the aims and structure of the book better, I think, than I could have myself. The second reader was extremely useful
to me by virtue of loving only “90 percent” of the manuscript. This reader had
shrewd comments throughout, but I especially profited from the comments
on the baneful 10 percent. This included the appendix on devout humanism,
which indeed needed to be rescued from its earlier alliance with the Pascal of
The Provincial Letters, and the introduction, which has been overhauled from
its original state. In these revisions I benefited from the generosity of many
friends who offered commentary: Bradin Cormack (most detailed of all!), William West, Edward Muir, Joshua Scodel, and again, Lisa Ruddick, and Robert
von Hallberg. Though I may be “unrepentant,” I hope not to be ungrateful.
As always, I have benefited from the steady intelligence, good judgment,
and unflagging support of my wife, Camille Bennett.


xii  Acknowledgments

*
Some material in this book appeared previously and in different form in the
following publications and is used by permission of the publishers: a version
of chapter 1 appeared in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary
Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), copyright © 2004 by University of Pennsylvania Press; part of chapter 2 appeared in
Blackwell’s Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Michael Schoenfeldt (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); a version of chapter 3 appeared in Reading Renaissance
Ethics, ed. Marshall Grossman (New York: Routledge, 2007); part of chapter 4
appeared in Shakespeare and Religious Change, ed. Kenneth J. E. Graham and
Philip D. Collington (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan; some material in the appendix to chapter 4 appeared in Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism,
and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), copyright © 1995 by the Regents of the University of California; a version of chapter
5 appeared in Prose Studies 29 (Fall 2007); a version of chapter 6 appeared in
Religion and Culture in the English Renaissance, ed. Claire McEachern and
Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

introduction

Back to Burckhardt
(Plus the Reformations)

va l u e s a n d c o u n t e r va l u e s
Reason, patience, and moderation of anger; a proper understanding of the
inferiority of the physical to the spiritual; ordinary decency and morality;
a rejection of materialism and worldliness; an assertion of the need for humility—these are certainly recognized and widely voiced values in the early
modern or “Renaissance” period. Such values are part of the inherited and
continuous Christian tradition, and some were reinforced by key aspects of
the classical revival, especially by certain aspects of Stoicism and Platonism.
Who could possibly have seriously opposed them? This book is dedicated to
discussing some of the movements and texts of the period that, in fact, did so.
The Unrepentant Renaissance tries to make apparent, through careful readings
of particular texts—mostly but not only literary ones—that it was possible in
the period to praise the opposites of the worthy qualities listed in my opening
sentence. The chapters that follow treat, in order, texts that oppose (or at least
do not accept as unquestioned values) reason, patience, and moderation of
anger; a proper understanding of the inferiority of the physical to the spiritual;
ordinary decency and morality; a rejection of materialism and worldliness; an
assertion of the need for humility. That is why these texts are all, as my title
suggests, “unrepentant.”
The works treated span the period in Europe from the early fourteenth
to the late seventeenth centuries; they include texts in Latin, but many more
in some of the major vernaculars: Italian, Spanish, French, and English. My
argument, therefore, is that opposition to the most commonly voiced values
and virtues of the period was not only possible but also continuous and important throughout Europe and throughout the period. I do not wish to contest

  Introduction

the predominance of the widely voiced (one might say “official”) values and
virtues, but I do mean to suggest that alternatives to them were fully and perhaps surprisingly available. What I hope will emerge from all this is a sense of
the period as more bumptious, full-throated, and perhaps perverse than that
which has prevailed in a good deal of recent literary scholarship, especially
with regard to England.
It might be said, therefore, that this book represents something like a “return to Burckhardt.” There is a sense in which this is true, and I am happy to
proclaim it. But where Burckhardt’s great book basically ends its story at the
beginning of the sixteenth century and treats only Italy, this study includes the
Reformation as well as, let’s call it, the Renaissance, and continues its story
well into the period when the two movements are interacting. I argue that the
Reformation and the Counter- or Catholic Reformation, as well as the Renaissance, contributed to the opposition to certain elements of the Christian-StoicPlatonic synthesis that produced the “official” and, one might wrongly think,
unquestioned values of the period. From the perspective of European history
as a whole, the Renaissance and the Reformations can all be seen as contributing to the creation of a culture that was no longer, as Burckhardt said of the
previous period, “essentially clerical” (1:211).
As my mention of the Reformations is intended to suggest, this does not
mean that the new culture was therefore fundamentally secular. It does, however, mean that from the early fourteenth to the seventeenth century, the status
of the ordinary layperson (to adopt a contested term) was elevated and shifted
. It should be said that the problem I am addressing in the scholarship does not, by and
large, exist with regard to a figure like Machiavelli. But I do note that Mark Hulliung, in Citizen
Machiavelli (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), felt that he had to attempt to rescue
Machiavelli from overly respectable readings.
. The reference is to Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, intro.
Benjamin Nelson and Charles Trinkaus, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore, 2 vols. (New York: Harper
and Row, 1958). Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch appeared in 1860.
. I prefer to refer to “the Renaissance” rather than the “early modern” period since the
former term captures the period’s own ideology about itself, and the latter term seems horribly
Whiggish. On the Renaissance’s sense of itself as such, and the importance of this, see Herbert
Weisinger, “The Self-Awareness of the Renaissance as a Criterion of the Renaissance,” Papers

of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Literature 29 (1944): 561–67, and Erwin Panofsky,
“â•›‘Renaissance’—Self-Definition or Self-Deception?,” in Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (1960; New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 1–41 (see also chap. 2, “Renaissance and Renascences”). On “Renaissance” versus “early modern,” see inter alia, the “Forum” in American
Historical Review 103 (1998): 51–124.


Back to Burckhardt (Plus the Reformations)  

from the periphery to the center of European culture. As we will see, all three
movements—Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation—either
celebrated or acknowledged this development. Burckhardt’s emphasis on ReÂ�
naissance individualism is justly famous, but his recognition of the importance
of civic life to the phenomenon he is describing has not been widely seen. This
recognition is why he begins his book with a series of chapters on the Italian
“states,” meaning city-states “whether,” as he says, “republics or despotisms.”
He insisted that “the fact that nobles and burghers dwelt together within the
walls of the cities” was a fact of “vital importance,” and even more so was the
fact of their relatively fluid interaction (2:353). To make this interaction possible was, for Burckhardt, the fundamental role of Renaissance values and of
the revival of the classics (not exactly the same for him).
So, with the larger chronological, geographical, and religious scope in mind,
let me now specify the ways in which this book indeed represents a return to
. The first ten chapters of Civilization of the Renaissance are on the Italian states. The
quotation is from 1:143, where Burckhardt attributes the “chief reason” of the phenomena he is
describing to “the character of these states, whether republics or despotisms.” This sentence suggests that while Hans Baron was certainly right to suggest the importance of republican ideology
to the Italian Renaissance, Burckhardt, despite his focus on the great princes, was not entirely
unaware of this. For Baron, see The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and
Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). For current thinking about the “Baron thesis,” see Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004). For Baron on Burckhardt, see “The Limits of the Notion of ‘Renaissance Individualism’:
Burckhardt after a Century,” in In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 2:155–81.
. See also, for instance, Civilization of the Renaissance, 1:143, 180 and 2:401. This emphasis seriously throws into question David Norbrook’s insistence on Burckhardt’s elitism and
(supposed) interest in “legitimating inequalities” (see “Life and Death of Renaissance Man,”

Raritan€8 [Spring 1989]: 99). This emphasis also provides me with a way to respond to a
worry raised by Edward Muir as to whether Burckhardt’s analysis of fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury Italy can be applied to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Patrick Collinson’s
emphasis on the amount of local civic participation (and ideology) in England in the period,
amounting to seeing the English polity as a “monarchical republic,” helps make the connection
to Burckhardt plausible. Collinson’s essay, “The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I,”
appeared in Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 69 (1987): 394–24; it is reprinted in his Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon, 1994), 31–58. For responses to and further developments of
Collinson’s thesis, see The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response
to Patrick Collinson, ed. John F. McDiarmid (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2007).
. For the complexity of Burckhardt’s view of the revival of the classics, see Civilization of
the Renaissance, 1:175 (and the whole chapter which begins there).


  Introduction

Burckhardt. Aside from believing that there was a major shift in European culture (or “civilization”) beginning in Italy in the late thirteenth century, I accept
the view that there were many persons in the period who “knew little of false
[or any] modesty” (1:144) and were committed to being recognized as—dare
I say it?—“individuals.” Obviously there have always been individuals, but
there has not always been individualism—an ideology that placed a value on
distinctiveness and personality. Burckhardt notes unico and singolare becoming, in the relevant period, terms of praise (1:143n). And he accepts the moral
neutrality of this. In commenting on Cellini’s autobiography, Burckhardt remarks, “It does not spoil the impression when the reader often detects him
bragging or lying; the stamp of a mighty, energetic, and thoroughly developed
nature remains” (2:330). Burckhardt recognizes that one form of individuality
was a deliberate amorality or immorality; he points to “Werner von Urslingen,
whose silver hauberk bore the inscription, ‘The enemy of God, of pity, and of
mercy’â•›” (2:441). Burckhardt may not quite share the delight of his colleague
and admirer, Nietzsche, in such figures—Nietzsche asserts that “in the days
of the Renaissance, the criminal was a flourishing species of humanity”—but
Burckhardt does see such figures as tapping into something central in the period, and he does not see them merely as “appalling” (2:441). He spends very
little time condemning them; he sees their existence as a historical necessity;

and he notes, very coolly, that “we shall be more reserved in our judgment of
them when we remember that the worst part of their guilt—in the estimate of
those who record it—lay in their defiance of spiritual threats and penalties,
and that to this fact is due that air of horror with which they are represented as
surrounded” (2:441).
. On the Hegelian background to this, see William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea
of the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 11. I am happy to say that
Kerrigan and Braden share my sense of the continuing relevance of Burckhardt.
. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (sec. 740), quoted and translated in Wallace K.
Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1948), 207–8. For Burckhardt on individuality and wickedness, and on€NietzÂ�
sche, see Richard Sigurdson, Jacob Burckhardt’s Social and Political Thought (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2004), 213. William N. West, in “Jacob Burckhardt’s Untimely Observations,” Modern Language Quarterly 68 (2007): 27–50, cites Nietzsche calling Burckhardt
“my great, my greatest teacher” (41–42). This seems to me quite important, and I would posit a
more substantive connection between the two thinkers than that of the “full irony” with which
West sees them both occupying their positions (50), though I would deny the political affinity
that Norbrook asserts (see note 5 above). Sigurdson’s chapter on Burckhardt and Nietzsche
seems to me an excellent account of their intellectual affinities and political differences.


Back to Burckhardt (Plus the Reformations)  

I also agree with Burckhardt in seeing the period as one in which it was possible to regard enjoyment of the things of this world as something not clearly
negative and even, at times, as praiseworthy. In his chapter “The Outward
Refinement of Life,” Burckhardt speaks of “the well-paved streets of the Italian cities” and notes that “we read in the novelists of soft, elastic beds, of costly
carpets and bedroom furniture .€.€. of the abundance and beauty of the linen”
(2:370). But again, what is important is not so much the fact of these things
as the ideology concerning them. In his book on the family, Alberti asserts
(through his spokesperson, Lionardo) that “intellect, judgment, memory, appetite, anger, reason, and discretion” are among other “divine forces [divine
forze e virtú], by which man outdoes all other animals in strength, in speed,

and in ferocity [velocità e ferocità],” and that these are “capacities given to us
to be amply used.” It is very much worth noting, I would argue, that appetite
(though l’apetito dell’animo), anger, and ferocity appear on this list along with
the more familiar virtues and capacities. Alberti’s basic view is that “[m]an
is by nature suited and able to make good use of the world, and he is born to
be happy” (136/161). Leonardo Bruni sees the city of Florence as admirable
not only in its public spaces and buildings but in the homes of its private citizens.10 Personal pride and civic pride, public and private, went together. Bruni
praises the Florentines (in another fascinating list) for being “eager for glory,
brilliant in giving advice, industrious, generous, magnificent, pleasant, affable,
and, above all civilized” (glorie avide, pollentes consilio, industrii, liberales,
magnifici, jocundi, affabiles, maximeque urbani).11 One of Burckhardt’s main
examples of a Renaissance figure who lived and articulated the ideal of the full
life—in this particular case, without crime—is the “philosopher of practical
life,” Luigi Cornaro. Burckhardt quotes passages of total self-satisfaction from
Cornaro. His friends “are wise, learned, and distinguished people of good positions”; his city house “is beautiful” and comfortable, as are his villas in the
hills and on the plain (from which he has drained the marshes); and his life,
. Leon Battista Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, trans. Renée Neu Watkins
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), 133; I Libri della Famigilia, ed. Ruggiero
Romano and Alberto Tenenti (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 158. In subsequent citations of this work,
I give first the page numbers of the translation and then of the Italian edition.
10. Leonardo Bruni, Panegyric to the City of Florence, in The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society, ed. Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 140.
11. Ibid., 174 (translation slightly altered). For the Latin, see the edition in Hans Baron, From
Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni: Studies in Humanistic and Political Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 263.


  Introduction

up to and through advanced old age, is filled with pleasure and thoroughly
worldly enjoyment (2:332–33).

whence the gloom?
The picture of the Renaissance and Reformations that I have sketched is
deeply at odds with the picture that has characterized a great deal of literary
study of the period, certainly with regard to England, for the past few decades,
and indeed for decades before that. One doesn’t hear much, in this scholarship
and criticism, of man being “born to be happy” in this world. Being “civilized”
is equated with being repressed rather than being “jocund,” “affable,” or “liberal.”12 One might think that this is because, in England, the Renaissance and
the Reformation are temporally and culturally coincident, but I have already
suggested that the two great movements need not and should not be seen, in
large cultural effect, as in opposition (though certainly they were in opposition in some important respects).13 There are signs that the dour picture may
be changing—one critic has risked “being a messenger of good news”—but I
believe (though I would be jocund to be wrong about this) that the dark view
still largely predominates.14
But where does the dour picture come from, the picture of the period as
conservative (dedicated to law and order, reason and moderation, and so forth)
12. Here the influence, along with Foucault (see note 18 below), is Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 2 vols. (1939; New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
13. Nietzsche saw the Renaissance and the Reformation as “born of related impulses.” See
section 93 of The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), 57.
14. Leonard Barkan, Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 3. Barkan’s work points to two (often conjoined) fields in
which the view of the period tends to be less dour than it is in the work of the New Historicists:
in the work of scholars of English literature who are deeply involved with Renaissance art history, and (sometimes) in the field of gay and queer studies. Stephen Orgel’s Impersonations:
The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996) generally treats English culture in the period as less anxious about sexual and gender issues than it is usually taken to be, especially given the period’s own condemnations of the dread
practice of “sodomy” and our period’s insistence on the power and pervasiveness of patriarchy.
Jonathan Goldberg’s The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance
Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009) asserts the presence in English
Renaissance (not, I note, “early modern”) literature of non-normative (Lucretian) ontology and
of non-normative conceptions of sexuality—pleasure oriented and nonprocreative.

Back to Burckhardt (Plus the Reformations)  

and dominated by various kinds of anxieties and repressions? I would see it as
coming from both “Old” and New Historicism, and from the surprising resurgence of Old Historicism in what might be called “the new humoralism.” The
conservatism of works like Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture (1943)
and Shakespeare’s History Plays (1946) or Lily Bess Campbell’s Shakespeare’s
Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (1952) hardly needs, at this point, to be demonstrated. These works are simply not in play—in their own names at least—at
this point. Much more important, and still relevant as an influence and model,
is the picture of the period put forth by the scholars and critics whose work
constitutes the New Historicism.15
Preeminent among these, of course, is Stephen Greenblatt, whose most
important book explicitly announces itself as a retreat from Burckhardt’s picture of the period. The title Renaissance Self-Fashioning has caused a good
deal of confusion—with Greenblatt often taken to be expounding the position that he is critiquing—but there is no doubt that he meant to ironize the
notion that self- (or any other) “fashioning” is something that an agent can
do.16 Burckhardt took the project of treating selves, states, and all activities “as
works of art” to be the hallmark of the period.17 Greenblatt claims, and I see
no reason not to believe him, to have begun his project from a Burckhardtian
point of view. He had intended to study “the role of human autonomy in the
construction of identity” in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England.
He found, however, that in all the texts and documents he examined carefully, the human subject “began to seem remarkably unfree” (RSF, 256). The
Foucault of Discipline and Punish, in tandem with Clifford Geertz, displaced
the Burckhardtian framework.18 A culture is seen, borrowing from Geertz, as
15. In this paragraph and elsewhere, I take “New Historicism” to be contrasted with Old
Historicism, not with New Criticism. On this ambiguity, see Richard Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995), 67–68.
16. Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980; reissued with a new preface, 2005). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as
RSF.
17. The opening section of Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance is entitled “The

State as a Work of Art”; it includes a subsection on “war as a work of art.” For courtly and public
social life as “a matter of art,” see 2:377; for domestic life as “a matter of deliberate contrivance,”
2:397.
18. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: Random House, 1979).


  Introduction

“a set of control mechanisms”; self-fashioning became “in effect the Renaissance version of these mechanisms” (RSF, 3).19 It became something done to
the self rather than something the self does; the self is the object rather than the
agent of such “fashioning.”
My aim in this section of the introduction is to propose a way of reading
the texts of the period that allows for the genuine existence and affirmation
of the things that Burckhardt saw in the period, and even of those that Nietz�
sche did. I will contrast this way of reading, which shows such things to be
present without being undermined or ironized, with ways of reading that either insist on such ironies or deny the historical existence of such features. I
will consider Renaissance and Reformation texts. In relation to New Historicism, the Renaissance work that I will examine is one of the most “apparently”
(as Greenblatt would say) radical of humanist texts, Thomas More’s Utopia
(1516); Reformation values will be considered with regard to William Tyndale
(1494–1536) and to Shakespeare’s Othello (1603–4). For the “new humoralism,”
I will consider the readings in Michael Schoenfeldt’s Bodies and Selves in Early
Modern England.20 The issue here is not so much the interpretation of particular texts—though that is the acid test—as it is of contrasting ways of reading. As my title suggests, this book argues that expressions of self-assertion,
perversity, and worldly contentment can be truly “unrepentant” in the period,
and that the texts expressing such attitudes need not be fissured, anxious, or
self-contradictory.
Greenblatt does not describe himself as a deconstructive reader or as a
reader “against the grain”; his approach to every figure and text in the period
is, rather, “resolutely dialectical”: “If we say that there is a new stress on the
executive power of the will, we must say that there is the most sustained and

relentless assault upon the will; if we say that there is a new social mobility,
19. The phrase is taken from Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York:
Basic Books), 44. It might be said that in Greenblatt’s account, Geertz’s views are darkened
in much the same way that the figures and texts of the Renaissance are. Geertz’s conception of
cultural “control mechanisms” is intended to explain the development of individuals, through
choices, not to deny their self-fashioning ability. Geertz is trying to defend the study of particular
cultures and individuals against generalized norms. He sees cultural constraints, as opposed
to biological ones, as leaving the objects of them “much less precisely regulated.” Becoming
human, says Geertz, “is becoming individual, and we become individual under the guidance
of cultural patterns” (52). “Guidance” is a much less determining notion than “control mechanisms” originally suggested, and than Greenblatt’s use of the phrase suggests.
20. Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).


Back to Burckhardt (Plus the Reformations)  

we must say that there is a new assertion of power by both family and state
to determine all movement within the society; if we say that there is a heightened awareness of the existence of alternative modes of social, theological, and
psychological organization, we must say that that is a new dedication to the
imposition of control upon those modes and ultimately to the destruction of
alternatives” (RSF, 1–2). In each of these formulations, the clauses that represent what “we say” (or are likely or tempted to say) represent versions of what
might fairly be called the Burckhardtian view of the period; the clauses that
sternly represent what we “must” say represent the corrective view (or opposing forces). This does represent a more complex picture of the period than
Burckhardt’s, and may indeed highlight post-fifteenth-century developments
(centralized monarchies, the Council of Trent, etc.). But what is notable about
Greenblatt’s presentation of this “dialectic” is that in each case he is committed to demonstrating the triumph of the right-hand (negative, coercive) clauses
in each of the pairings over the left-hand (affirmative) ones. The picture is less
of a dialectic than an undermining. His effort is not simply to show that these
forces coexist in the period, but to show that they coexist in such a way that the
Burckhardtian positive features can never be seen as existing, within a text or
an individual, in a non-undermined way.

So let me proceed now to my first test case in what might be called affirmative rather than undermining reading: More’s Utopia. For Greenblatt, More’s
aim in book 2 of Utopia—the detailed account of the imagined society—is to
construct a society in which “modern individuality,” in fact all individuality
and inwardness, becomes impossible (RSF, 37). In abolishing private property, the Utopians are eliminating private selves—indeed, they are eliminating selves: Utopia is “a society designed to reduce the scope of the inner life”
(RSF, 53). The first thing that should be said is that this is a very odd way to
understand the goal of Utopian communism. More (or his imaginary narrator,
Hythlodaeus) goes out of his way to stress the elimination of material scarcity
and of the pervasive and devastating moral, psychological, and sociological
effects of such scarcity.21 But Greenblatt is constantly in the position of arguing against the text. He acknowledges that the Utopian workday of no more
21. See Thomas More, Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz, S.J. (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1964), 77, 147, et passim. This is the paperback edition. For the Latin, I have used The Complete
Works of St. Thomas More (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), vol. 4, Utopia, ed. Edward
Surtz, S. J., and J. H. Hexter. Page numbers to the Latin refer to this text. The English translation
is the same in the paperback and in the Complete Works. In citing the translation, I give the page
number in the paperback followed by the page number in the Complete Works volume.


10  Introduction

(“often” less [75, 135]) than six hours—an astonishing idea in the early modern
period—could be seen as “far from discouraging individuation .€.€. but rather
designed to permit its greatest flourishing” (40). But he quickly goes on to
discount this possibility. He notes that some Utopians end up working a longer
day. What he does not mention is that those who do this choose to do so (“if
anyone should prefer to devote himself to his trade” [70]; si quis arte suae
malit insumere [128]). And these people too, like all the Utopians, enjoy the
sumptuous communal meals with music, fancy desserts, and so forth. Greenblatt emphasizes the limitations on Utopian choice in leisure activities, but the
text states that the Utopians spend their (universally distributed) leisure time
according to individual choice (suo cuiusque arbitri [126]). The main entertainments offered to them are indeed public lectures, but the text emphasizes,
again, that there are many different sorts of lectures precisely to accommodate differences in taste and “natural inclination” in different persons (â•›prout

cuiusque fert natura [128]). Throughout this passage on leisure, the variety of
preferences and natural inclinations among individuals is highlighted (note the
repetition of cuius).22
In the society imagined, freedom of choice, on the basis of individual preference or capacity, is accommodated not only with regard to leisure activities (which include games, conversation, and music as well as lectures), but
also with regard to occupations (69/127); travel (82/147); possession of fools
(113/193); farming (where everyone is required to do some, but those who by
nature enjoy it [natura delectat (114)] can stay longer [62/115]); health care
(home or hospital [78/141]); the end of life (suicide in extremis is an option
[108/187]); marriage (110/188); and religious beliefs and practices (133/221,
142/233). From this point of view, what is striking about the imagined society
is how deeply—within its multifarious rules and structures—individual choice
and respect for individual “natures” is built into it.23
22. For a brilliant discussion of the way in which the word cui works in Utopia as contrasted
with the way in which it works in Cicero (particularly, in De Officiis), see Bradin Cormack, A
Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 107–9.
23. Humanist pedagogy might be seen as having this same mixture of set structures and
respect for individual difference. See, for instance, Erasmus, De Pueris Instituendis, in William
Harrison Woodward, Desiderius Erasmus Concerning the Aim and Method of Education (New
York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1964), 195–96; Erasme, Declamatio de Pueris
Statim a Liberaliter Instituendis, ed. and trans. Jean-Claude Margolin (Geneva: Droz, 1966),
409, 411 (in French). For an overview, see Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), chap. 3.


Back to Burckhardt (Plus the Reformations)  11

But where the Greenblattian (New Historicist) approach is even more misleading—and characteristically so—in darkening the text is with regard to the
“theoretical celebration of pleasure” in Utopia (RSF, 52). Along with communism, the commitment to pleasure is a central feature of the society presented.
Like Alberti, the Utopians believe that the soul is “born for happiness” (Utopia, 92/161–63). This might be seen as a distinctly “Renaissance” orientation
from a Burckhardtian perspective. It cannot be allowed to stand. Greenblatt

discounts it by pointing out that the Utopians believe in a hierarchy€of€plea�
sures.€He states correctly that they place sexual intercourse in the same
category as defecation and scratching an itch, and he quotes the narrator’s rhetorical question about a life devoted to such pleasures: “Who does not see that
such a life is not only disgusting but wretched?” (RSF, 43; Utopia, 101/177). But
what Greenblatt does not and perhaps cannot note, and what I would stress,
is that a few lines later this passage takes a turn. The narrator adds, “yet they
enjoy even these pleasures and gratefully acknowledge the kindness of mother
nature who, with alluring sweetness [blandissima suavitate (176)] coaxes her
offspring to that which of necessity they must constantly do” (101/177). And,
as to sex in Utopia, Greenblatt does not mention the most striking custom: the
“strictly observed” practice (illi serio ac severe observant [188]) of having both
partners of a potential marriage inspect the other naked to make sure that each
of them finds the potential spouse physically appealing (110/189). So obviously
the fact that certain pleasures are “lower” than others does not mean that these
“lower” pleasures are unimportant or to be disregarded or renounced.24 The
clergy who do choose to renounce such pleasures—they are not required to—
are considered quite irrational, though very holy (Utopia, 138/227).25

24. Greenblatt revisits the topic of Utopian pleasure in a recent essay by that title in Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, ed. Brian Cummings and
James Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 305–320. He here acknowledges the
place of pleasure in Utopia somewhat more fully—“The Utopians certainly do not condemn
the pleasure of the flesh—on the contrary, they recognize and enjoy the satisfaction that comes
with eating or excreting or scratching an itch” (312). Even this, however, is rather muted, and
the pleasures of sex are notably missing from this list (as is, still, any reference to the premarital
nude inspections).
25. Comparing the ascetic to the non-ascetic clergy, Hythlodaeus says that Hos [the latter]
Utopiani prudentiores, at illos [the former] sanctiores reputant, and he goes on to note that if the
ascetics purported to be relying on reason they would be laughed to scorn (si rationibus niterentur irriderent [226]). My friend Richard G. Stern objected to an earlier formulation in which I
had said that More/Hythlodaeus presented the ascetic priests as “very holy, but quite insane.”

12  Introduction

To say that the Utopians only “profess to value pleasure” is therefore a
major misrepresentation (RSF, 44).26 And there is another such, of the same
darkening kind. Along with communism and hedonism, the most salient feature of Utopia is its commitment to religious toleration: “[T]hey count this
principle among their most ancient institutions, that no one should suffer for
his religion” (Utopia, 133/219). This commitment too must be undermined;
it suggests a too strongly “Renaissance” perspective.27 Greenblatt points to
the existence of excommunication in Utopia. He rightly notes that it is highly
dreaded and, moreover, “reinforced by the threat of physical punishment”
(RSF, 56). If excommunicated persons do not demonstrate repentance, they
are “seized and punished by the senate for their impiety” (Utopia, 140/229).
This concern for repentance hardly betokens an indifference to the inner life,
but that is passed over here. Greenblatt has found his “dialectic”: “It is here, in
this crushing of impiety, that all the coercive powers of Utopian society” come
together; moreover, “the form of their union, in this commonwealth celebrated
for its tolerance, is the precise form of the operation of the Holy Inquisition:
excommunication, public shaming, the attempt to waken guilt, the grim transfer of the unrepentant sinner from the religious to the secular arm” (RSF, 56).

It is true that the text does not exactly say this, but it comes pretty close (and Surtz accepts
“saner” as a translation of prudentiores).
26. Richard Halpern’s more Marxist-inflected account of Utopia (and Utopia) is similarly
committed to showing the Utopian commitment to pleasure not to be what it seems; he claims
that it is “mostly defined negatively” and that it is actually a “rejection” of bodily pleasures.
See The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of
Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 172. Halpern’s chapter is odd in that it begins
with a brilliant critique of the reading of Utopia as a “totalitarian” state, and of the “conservative
tradition of Utopia criticism” that has exaggerated the unpleasantness of the society described,
but he then goes on to state, quite accurately, that he too intends to “explore the ‘unpleasantness’ of Utopia” (140–41). He insists that Utopia secretly values what it pretends to despise

(gold—see 146 and 168), and that the economy described is actually one of potential scarcity
rather than realized abundance (168–69). Halpern states more explicitly than Greenblatt does
that any proper reading of book 2 “has as its prerequisite the disruption of Utopia’s discursive
self-sufficiency” (151).
27. See Burckhardt’s chapter “Religion and the Spirit of the Renaissance” (2:473–83), and
the very end of his study (2:513–16); Roland H. Bainton, “Man, God, and the Church in the Age
of the Renaissance,” in The Renaissance: Six Essays (1953; New York: Harper and Row, 1962),
77–96; and George Huntston Williams, “Erasmus and the Reformers on Non-Christian Religions and Salus Extra Ecclesiam,” in Action and Conviction in Early Modern Europe, ed. Theodore K. Rabb and Jerrold E. Seigel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 319–70.