The English Renaissance

7 Key excerpts on "The English Renaissance"

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  A Short History of English Renaissance Drama

  • Helen Hackett(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  c. 1585–1603) and the Jacobean period (1603–25) since these produced most of the Renaissance plays that are well known today. Its aims are threefold: to convey the variety and richness of English Renaissance drama; to explore why and how this period produced this creative explosion; and to suggest why these plays continue to have such hold upon readers and audiences in the modern world.

  WHAT WAS THE RENAISSANCE?

  At the outset it is worth pausing to consider what we mean by the term ‘Renaissance’. Literally it means ‘rebirth’, and the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as ‘the revival of the arts and high culture under the influence of classical models, which began in Italy in the fourteenth century and spread throughout most of Europe by the end of the sixteenth.’6 It took a little time for these developments to reach England, and therefore the English Renaissance is usually regarded as having taken place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In English drama, the period of greatest activity and artistic achievement was from the late 1580s to the 1620s, covering the last part of the Elizabethan period (Elizabeth I reigned from 1558 to 1603) and the Jacobean period (the reign of James I, 1603–25).

  Fifteenth-century Italy saw an artistic and intellectual flowering which many of its participants regarded self-consciously as a movement of renewal and of the rediscovery of the classical arts and scholarship that had fallen into decay in the middle ages. Classicism became associated with purity, naturalism, and clarity, as opposed to the supposed gothic barbarity of intervening centuries. This attitude was crystallized in the term rinascita , or rebirth, first used by the Italian artist and critic Giorgio Vasari (1511–74) in his book The Lives of the Artists (1550) to describe how Italian painters and sculptors of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries had revived classical style and techniques. The general use of the term ‘Renaissance’ in cultural history began later, with The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) by the Swiss author Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97). For Burckhardt the cultural advances of Italy in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries were dependent upon the existence of competing independent city states ruled by despotic dynasties, who deployed artistic patronage as a means of celebrating and promoting their power. In this culture, despots and artists alike personified the triumph of the self-interested human will: ‘Despotism . . . fostered in the highest degree the individuality not only of the tyrant or condottiere himself, but also the men whom he protected or used as his tools.’ Burckhardt takes as an example Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72), an author, artist, and architect: ‘an iron will pervaded and sustained his whole personality; like all the great men of the Renaissance, he said, “Men can do all things if they will.”’ In his mastery of a wide and diverse range of intellectual interests Alberti also exemplified Burckhardt’s idea of the Renaissance man, ‘the “all-sided man” – l’uomo universale ’.7

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  Handbook of English Renaissance Literature

  • Ingo Berensmeyer(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Haekel 2017 ).

  When writing about the Renaissance in England, however defined, one has to acknowledge first of all that the British Isles were late to the table. Most of the technological, intellectual, and artistic innovations came from Italy, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. While England had been maintaining close connections with France since the later Middle Ages, including claims to French kingship that led to the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453), its geographical location on the Western margins of Europe kept it at a distance from the cultural centres of the age – from the Italian city states, from Paris or Amsterdam. The loss of England’s continental possessions in France after the war may have contributed further to a sense of isolation from the mainland. After the civil wars known as the Wars of the Roses (1455–1487), made famous through Shakespeare’s history plays (↗ 20 William Shakespeare, Richard II), there is an extended period of dynastic stability under the Tudor monarchs. The reign of Henry VII (1485–1509) ushers in a number of political and legal transformations that assert the king’s power over local feudal lords, streamline the administration, and increase revenues. As the influence of the old aristocracy is diminished, the gentry and peers take over important functions; conflicting interest groups are brought to heel by a series of political compromises (cf. Elton 1974 ). A more powerful administration further contributes to making London the political, legal, and economic centre of the Isles. London’s population grows substantially during this period, from some 40,000 inhabitants around 1500 to approximately 200,000 in 1600. As towns gain in size compared to rural areas, the total population of England and Wales doubles from c. 2.5 million in 1500 to five million in 1600. If these estimates are correct, London grows twice as quickly as the rest of the country (Finlay and Shearer 1986 , Wrigley 1987

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  The Routledge History of Literature in English

  Britain and Ireland

  • Ronald Carter, John McRae(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Paradise Lost , published after the Restoration, when the Renaissance had long finished.

  The Reformation gave cultural, philosophical, and ideological impetus to English Renaissance writing. The writers in the century following the Reformation had to explore and redefine all the concerns of humanity. In a world where old assumptions were no longer valid, where scientific discoveries questioned age-old hypotheses, and where man rather than God was the central interest, it was the writers who reflected and attempted to respond to the disintegration of former certainties. For it is when the universe is out of control that it is at its most frightening – and its most stimulating. There would never again be such an atmosphere of creative tension in the country. What was created was a language, a literature, and a national and international identity.

  At the same time there occurred the growth, some historians would say the birth, of modern science, mathematics and astronomy. In the fourth decade of the sixteenth century Copernicus replaced Aristotle’s system with the sun, rather than the Earth, at the centre of the universe. In anatomy, Harvey discovered (1628) the circulation of the blood, building on sixteenth-century work in Italy. There was a similar explosion from the start of the seventeenth century in the discovery, development and use of clocks, telescopes, thermometers, compasses, microscopes – all instruments designed to measure and investigate more closely the visible and invisible world.

  The writing of the era was the most extensive exploration of human freedom since the classical period. This led English literature to a new religious, social and moral identity which it maintained until the mid-nineteenth century. English became one of the richest and most varied of world literatures, and is still the object of interest and study in places and times distant from its origin. The Reformation and the century of cultural adjustment and conflict which followed are crucial keys in understanding English literature’s many identities.

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  Interpreting Early Modern Europe

  • C. Scott Dixon, Beat Kümin(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4    Renaissance Edward Muir The interpretive challenge for Renaissance studies began in the nineteenth century, not the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth, the age of the Renaissance. Unlike the Enlightenment, no one living during the Renaissance knew about it. An ardent anti-clerical republican, Jules Michelet (1798–1874), popularised the term Renaissance (rebirth), and hence the French word still prevails in the English-speaking world in place of the Italian Rinascimento. A whiff of Michelet’s secular prejudices still lingers over the idea of the Renaissance. During the same period the Swiss Protestant, Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) wrote The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, which introduced art and cultural history as a pre-eminent means for understanding the period. Burckhardt’s innovative approach of Kulturgeschichte has been especially attractive because of his evocative portrait of how political illegitimacy produced artistic and intellectual vitality, epitomised by his famous phrase, ‘the state as a work of art’ (1958, 21). The Prussian Georg Voigt (1827–1891) added to the interpretive mix the term ‘humanism’, designating a movement that began with Francesco Petrarca [Petrarch] (1304–1374), who popularised among intellectuals methods of critical philology rooted in classical Antiquity. From this influential trio, none Italian, came a remarkably tenacious paradigm that defined the Renaissance as a period that began in the fourteenth century in Italy in reaction to the alleged clerical domination of the Middle Ages and that was characterised by secularism, artistic and cultural creativity, and humanism (defined as the critical, historical methods of philology)

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  The Problem with Multiculturalism

  The Uniqueness and Universality of Western Civilization

  • John M. Headley(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  New Meanings for the Renaissance and the Reformation    

  To explain my awarding of new meanings to the Renaissance and the Reformation, I must describe how I arrived at them—even though recent interpretations consider it absurd to treat these two as discrete movements. Thus I ask the reader to indulge me in recounting the wayward workings of my own mind, for the new meanings I have come to ascribe to both these movements owe more to personal experience than to any intricate philosophical argument arising from the historical material itself.

  It all began a few years ago when a leading Renaissance scholar sent me an offprint of his latest article. Its title suggested the subject with which I had first entered the profession fifty years ago—namely, should the Renaissance be understood as being medieval or modern?1 With the most intricate assemblage of evidence and arguments, all admirably set forth, my colleague’s article represented the Renaissance as the fulfillment of an earlier, medieval period and its practices, and maintained that the development of medieval rhetoric culminated during the Renaissance. Thus it seems that, certainly from the study of anything so central as rhetoric and the world of Classical culture that it brought into being, the Renaissance concluded an era rather than opening up a new age.

  By confirming the link between something so apparently obscure and remote as the Middle Ages, this association of the Renaissance with the medieval past could serve to commit the Renaissance itself, in the perception of the general public, to an appropriate oblivion. In its close association with the Middle Ages, the Renaissance could be properly ignored or forgotten in the great trampling forth of history. Real history must begin much later, with the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, or even the dreadful convulsions of the Third Reich. Thus, during the period of the world’s European dominance, the nineteenth century, the West could stand forth in all its horrid nakedness, the mother of oppression and racism, of colonialism and imperialism—a veritable feast for the multiculturalists.

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  The Routledge History of the Renaissance

  • William Caferro(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Introduction The Renaissance question William Caferro

  The Renaissance has had a unique ability to make scholars uncomfortable. George Sarton described the period label as “a kind of weasel” on account of its uncertain geographical and temporal locus and its lack of clear applicability to the study of his subfield (history of science).1 Mixing metaphors, Sarton declared that the Renaissance “reshuffled the cards” of a largely “old deck,” while the Scientific Revolution involved a deck with mostly “new cards.”2 Nevertheless, Sarton used the Renaissance label in the title of his book on the emergence of modern science.

  Sarton’s reservations and ultimate acceptance of the Renaissance are representative of the broader course of the historiography. Few historical labels have produced more disagreement, but have proved more enduring than the Renaissance. In the middle years of the twentieth century, when Sarton was writing, historians spoke of a “golden age” of Renaissance studies, during which the subject was a basic and popular part of university curricula, stimulated in the anglophone academy by the work of émigré scholars such as Hans Baron, Erwin Panofsky, Paul Oskar Kristeller, Ernst Kantorowicz, Felix Gilbert, and Robert Lopez, who had fled fascism prior to World War II. Already in the 1970s, however, the Renaissance label became problematic. Scholars denounced it as the epitome of a chauvinistic “grand narrative of history with a single plot,” whose purpose was to demonstrate the superiority of Western culture, most notably male Western culture. By the later years of the decade, one prominent scholar judged the discipline to be “on the point of collapse.”

  3

  The virulence of the rejection of the Renaissance was proportional to the enthusiasm of its prior acceptance. But in reality the field was always a contested one. When Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) published his seminal Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy in 1860, he took care to call it “ein Versuch” (an attempt/essay), underscoring its speculative nature. Burckhardt’s famous contemporary John Ruskin (1819–1900) expressed dislike for the Renaissance on account of its interest in the classical past – the central feature of the period as he saw it – which substituted pagan values for Christian ones.4 Meanwhile, Walter Pater (1839–1894) accepted the Renaissance as a “complex, many-sided movement,” representing, as in Burckhardt, the “outbreak of human spirit.” But in his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) he added the very anti-Burckhardtian qualification that this spirit could “be traced far into the Middle Ages.”5 Pater’s medieval component anticipated the famous assessment of Charles Homer Haskins, whose The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927) touched off the so-called “revolt of medievalists,” who found – and continue to find – many of the same features in their own era and have accordingly sought a similar priority for their field.

  6

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  Frame, Glass, Verse

  The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance

  • Rayna Kalas(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cornell University Press

    (Publisher)

  Before the emergence of the alienable frame, when most frames were continuous with the surface of the painting, there was a material continuity between the frame and the painted image. The fabrication of the picture frame would have revealed that the painted panel with its engaged frame was a “tempered” image, in that it mingled ground pigment with egg, gilt with wood. In its mixture of “simples,” it seemed to recall, if not to embody, the divine tempering of spirit with matter, essence with substance. In iconic devotional images, once the wood had been tempered with gilt, the image ceased to be material and was instead recognized as an incarnation of divinity—its particular mingling of substances recalling the human frame itself as a mingling of bone with flesh and blood, and a mingling of spirit with substance. With linear perspective, painting on canvas, and the trade in art, however, the function of the frame shifted: instead of merging with the design, the frame now contained and ornamented it. Frames became alienable, interchangeable, and more uniform in shape; the frame became a principle of design for the work of art. Over the centuries this modern quadrilateral frame would come to structure ideas of art (picture frame), history (world picture), and even the very idea of context and contingency (frame of reference).

  Rather than squaring off a view of the Renaissance—as one might a world picture or an object of study—I propose to “frame” The English Renaissance according to an older sense of the word frame . Remembering that the word frame was first used in the context of language and only later in reference to images, I take my cues principally from poetic language, the medium that has most clearly defined the Renaissance in England. Though my claims are geared mostly to The English Renaissance, it is not my intention to isolate those claims from broader claims about the continental Renaissance. On the contrary, my hope is that the particular example of the Renaissance in England will modify perceptions of the Renaissance that derive largely from the example of the visual arts in Italy, not by supplanting those perceptions but by adjusting them. My aim is to reinvigorate a sense that the temporality of the Renaissance accommodated the poetic sensibility that certain universals or general principles abide in particularities, and thus that the particularities of English poetry can and should inform our overall sense of the Renaissance.

  I continue to use the period designation Renaissance, albeit not exclusively, in this book. I do so not to conserve an aesthetic view of the period, but to sustain nonetheless an emphasis on imaginative practice, and to bring technology under the rubric of imaginative practice. I use Renaissance also to avoid the teleological implications of early modern, for one of my underlying claims is that the work of the imagination is historically material, but not necessarily as an instrument of progress. The term Renaissance connotes novelty, but only as the rebirth of what is old: English Renaissance writers spoke of the present in relation to the past as much as the future. They spoke of temporal change as both recurrence and novelty. And the capacity to apprehend time by turning forward to the future while also turning backward to the past is one of the distinctive techniques of poetic conceits and tropes. That temporal imagination is codified in older meanings of frame just as it is writ large in a notion of the Renaissance as both backward-looking and forward-facing. Though it was specifically an English phenomenon to name the poetic conceit “a frame of words,” I would argue that the Renaissance frame, even as a material apparatus, was inflected with this poietic sensibility, just as the modern frame would later come to be inflected by a visual concept. As the following pages will show, this modern aesthetically oriented mode of “picturing” has eclipsed the role of the poetic—and the poietic

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