Renaissance Studies with a Difference?

Abstract

W ORK on the Renaissance can be conducted in a variety of ways. Let me therefore single out a few approaches one may encounter in the field today in order to indicate the main directions of Renaissance scholarship as I see them. For the sake of convenience, they could perhaps best be divided into four separate categories. First, there is, above all in studies of a broader scope, a tendency to view the Renaissance as a kind of usable past when tracing long-range developments. Under this perspective, which more often than not is a presentistic or even a futuristic one, the Renaissance appears as an epoch of transition and suffers reduction to a mere chronological phase adumbrating what seems most desirable to the literary or cultural historian interested in long vistas. Over against this approach, we may identify a second category that comprises works treating the Renaissance as an epoch in its own right and trying to do justice to its specific episteme. Such an approach surely is grounded in genuine historicism, even if its problematic aspects cannot be overlooked in an age of hermeneutical sophistication. Next and third in order, we find an ever-increasing stress on interdisciplinarity in contemporary Renaissance studies. Books and articles no longer pile readings upon readings but place the texts they wish to interpret in contextual frameworks, both literary and historical, so that through mutual illumination of the various interrelated spheres of endeavor our picture of the Renaissance has by now become far more complex than it ever was. This can legitimately be maintained, notwithstanding the fourth and last fact that traditional positivistic approaches whose pragmatic value no one would be entitled to deny still continue, albeit at times under the guise of a slightly modernized terminology. It goes without saying that the approaches specified here reflect basic attitudes on the part of scholars or critics devoting themselves to the Renaissance rather than concrete methods of research. In fact,