Recent Studies in the English Renaissance.(Critical Essay)

RENAISSANCE VS. EARLY MODERN

The "Renaissance" remains a viable title not only for this review but also for many of this year's books. Despite being "regarded with suspicion in many quarters," as Alvin Snider noted in last year's exemplary SEL review (p. 171), and despite New Historicism's preference for the less honorific "early modern," the older term persists. I must begin by admitting my own attachment to it. I recently taught a survey course called "Renaissance, Reformation, and Revolution," a title reflecting not only a weakness for alliteration, but also the belief that, whatever we call it, our period of study was a very big deal, making a greater mark on English culture and society than any other era. Mark Kishlansky proudly declares in his recent Penguin history of Stuart Britain that "the seventeenth century was decisive for everything!" (p. xiii), and my only argument with that would be that the sixteenth century easily matches it. Urgent desires for renewal and reform inspired extraordinary accomplishments as well as revolu tionary upheavals, including religious struggle, civil war, and regicide. These desires remain heroic even if their consequences were often tragic or simply muddled. Lofty aims and traumatic events are, in my view, best evoked by such traditional categories as "Renaissance" rather than a tepid teleology reducing them to a mere prelude to modernity. At the same time, I realize that postmodern suspicions about the mediation of agency and cause or action and accomplishment cannot be ignored, and this year's most interesting work generally grapples with these issues.

New Historicism's twenty-year reign is examined and endorsed in two valuable anthologies, though both retain "Renaissance" in their titles. The editors of Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism Viviana Comensoli and Paul Stevens, affirm New Historicism's vitality against those who detect "signs of weariness," maintaining that such "pessimism is. ... premature" (p. ix). All their contributors are said to agree on the importance of what Louis Montrose described in his "now famous chiasmus...the historicity of texts and the textuality of history" (p. xii), but some essays suggest that such a chiasmus can become a kind of rhetorical sign of the cross, providing ritual reassurance that all bases are covered by incantation. In an impressively trenchant essay, Sylvia Brown reaffirms a suppressed "desire for historical truth" (p.9), and she rejects deconstruction because its oppressively patriarchal "cultural scripts" always "yield the expected results" (p. 13). In her new edition of a t rial transcript from the sixteenth century, Annabel Patterson turns to "a 'found' courtroom drama" to pursue "that elusive entity: historical truth" (p. 25). The Trial of Nicholas Throckmorton also defies conventional expectations by ending with an acquittal from the ordinarily lethal charge of treason as well as by encouraging impartiality in its wealth of verbatim detail. In her essay, Brown seeks to reconnect "mothers' legacies," religious counsel directed by women to their offspring, to authors like "Elizabeth Jocelin, a real historical woman" (p. 22), but a lack of textual detail renders her account somewhat sketchy. In her essay on Anne Clifford, Katherine Osler Acheson intelligently opposes "glib conflations of then and now" (p. 31), but concedes that "statements calling for...attention to fundamental difference, although easy to utter, are fraught with difficulties in practice" (p. 30). Linda Woodbridge wants, in turn, to revive a conception of literature as a relatively separate domain following "its own rules" (p. 59), but her embrace of this "enabling fiction" (p. 68) seems more wistful than methodical. Determinism is challenged more vigorously in the section on "Rethinking Subjectivity," most notably in Tracy Sedinger's account of unconscious resistance to interpellation (p. 130), but each of these essays suggests uncertainties about problems of evidence and interpretation.

Renaissance Culture and the Everyday proposes to solve these problems by exploring fresh terrain. In her introduction, Patricia Fumerton (coeditor of the volume along with Simon Hunt) promotes a "New New Historicism" broadening the horizons of the old by moving beyond the court and its hierarchies and focusing on "the low, ... the ordinary,.. . the familiar,.., the customary or typical or taken-for-granted" (p.3), and she adds that "attention to the details of everyday life, in all their plurality, complements a further interest by second-generation new historicists in materiality" (p. 5). Such a project is complicated, of course, by the fragmentary nature of material remnants of the past--things do not speak for themselves-and several contributors acknowledge that they must deal with traces or representations rather than objects or acts. Lena Orlin's fascinating discussion of women's needlework as a strategic "coverture of vertue" concerns "less historical practice than cultural myth about the role of stitc hery in gender construction, patriarchy, and domestic ideology" (p. 199). Frances Dolan astutely challenges the assumption that women were always victims of a Renaissance "culture of violence," but her evidence is drawn from tracts and drama demonstrating "a range of representations of women's violence" (p. 221). Essays by Karen Raber on horsemanship's unanticipated political implications, Judith Brown on the health benefits of convent life, and Ann Jensen Adams on money's civilizing power on prostitutes and mercenaries explore unfamiliar territory. There are also superb essays on familiar literary texts; but, while they may deal with ordinary experience, there are few breakthroughs into "materiality." Two of the most original essays in the collection actually move in opposite directions in their approach to material objects. Debora Shuger shows how mirrors in Renaissance art and literature defy conventional expectations, reflecting likeness rather than identity, but whatever is seen in the mirror has less to do with actual reflections (p. 31) than with intellectual and psychological presuppositions. By contrast, Juliet Fleming's well-illustrated essay on graffiti found in households and churches provides ample evidence of genuinely material texts that also defy expectations; rather than signs of vandalism, this handwriting on the wall records pious and edifying instruction, an excellent collective medium for the aphorism, epigram, and "worthy sentence" (p. 329).

CULTURE HEROES

A few exceptional figures still loom large in Renaissance studies. Though no longer imbued with the magisterial autonomy of Jacob Burckhardt's "Renaissance Man," these more agonized or ambivalent figures exert extraordinary influence on European culture, for better or for worse. Two of this year's most engrossing books show how Francesco Petrarch and Martin Luther profoundly altered psychological attitudes and religious beliefs. Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance, the first volume of Gordon Braden's projected two-part study of Petrarch's life and works, is a learned and cogent survey of his impact on the Continent and the New World; the next will consider his importance in England. Braden sharply defines its anomalous character, conceding that, while "Petrarch's influence has long seemed almost indistinguishable from the Renaissance itself," nevertheless, "as founding figures go, he proves a light presence" (p. 61). Braden attributes this partly to the poet's "disengagement from republican polit ics" as well as "humanism's sense of itself as a progressive enterprise" (p. 62) in which predecessors are inevitably superseded. He also sees Petrarch's chronic ambivalence as a source of his paradoxical authority. Petrarch was a writer so prolific that he wore out his scribe (p.6), yet, though he pursued and found glory through the profession of letters, he remained uneasy about his renown. Guilt about his emotions and eloquence pervades Petrarch's more personal works, most notably the Secretum and Rime Sparse. Such ambivalence gave rise to a capacious poetic tradition of platonic moralizing, bitter frustration, and "a failure of reciprocity" (p. 161) that still permits an anguished intimacy and even acceptance. Braden's judicious assessment of Petrarch's importance shows how the poet surpassed all his predecessors "in linking love to the power of the poetic imagination" while still recognizing a higher, "objective truth as an urgent and inclusive contradiction of that love" (p.60). Braden thus succinctly d efines the contradiction at the heart of Western romantic literature from Shakespeare to Freud.

According to the late Richard Marius, Martin Luther's efforts to control the reformation he launched are repeatedly thwarted. In Martin Luther. The Christian between God and Death, Luther remains a titanic figure, but his effect on European history represents "a catastrophe in the history of Western civilization" (p. xii). Lutheranism's failure is attributed to its elitist emphasis on preaching over ritual and the sacraments: "the ultimate result of the Lutheran reformation among the common people was to take away from them many of their common practices and to leave them in religious ignorance and indifference" (p. 435). This view is countered by Auke Jelsma, who argues in Frontiers of the Reformation: Dissidence and Orthodoxy in Sixteenth-Century Europe that pervasive anticlericalism "testifies rather to a growing involvement with the church than to indifference or superficiality" (p. 3); the essays edited by Susan Wabuda and Caroline Litzenberger in Belief and Practice in Reformation England: A Tribute to Patrick Collinson from His Students also depict a reformation "from below" (p. 1). Marius is less interested in institutional consequences than the personal origins of Luther's struggle. Prey to radical doubts which he considered tantamount to blasphemy, Luther tried to purge himself and all of Christendom through a ferocious assertion of human inadequacy, redemptive faith, and bilious vitriol. Luther's doubts, Marius says, derived from an acute fear of death, and his desperate reaction created a cure worse than the disease by identifying God with death: "He loves God less than himself, even hates, him, who hates or does not love death (that is the will of God)" Luther declares (p. 153). Marius's account is nuanced, scrupulous, and solidly informed, but his explanation of the central doctrines, including faith as a lived experience and justification as catharsis, remains rather opaque (pp. 210-2). Marius's acknowledged aversion to his subject's "ferocious vehemence" sometimes prompts him to reduce Luther's r eligious ardor to an emotional "cry of pain" (p. 307), and Marius imagines various counterfactual scenarios in which Luther and his adversaries sit "down over a good cask of wine to have a long talk about God" (p. 454). However, Marius knows the limits of common-room moderation in understanding religious zeal (pp.463-4), and his book conveys a powerful sense of its urgency.