Auctoritas redux: an extra territorial report on the ‘New Historicist’ current in Renaissance literary criticism

Abstract

Recent ‘new historicist’ writings on Renaissance literature and culture are located at an intersection of conventional, modern literacy criticism;‘Post-structuralist’ cultural hermeneutics; and the frequently discounted tradition of philological scholarship. Criticism of their attempts to use these ‘Post-structualist’ developments in the human sciences as a way of renovating literary critical activity is followed by and attempt to advertise possible theoretical (as distinct from erudite) virtues of philological investigations for literary-cultural studies. In particular, elements of Ernst Kantorowicz's work on the concept of kingship are shown to have a critical bearing on how relationships between Renaissance ‘literary’ authorship and authority might be conceived.