Renaissance Symposium

Abstract

Renaissance Symposium Daniel Leary (bio) The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton. Richard Strier. University of Chicago Press. http://press.uchicago.edu. 328 pages; cloth, $5.00, eBook, $7.00–$36.00. Click for larger view View full resolution Detail from Cover Don’t take it unless you’re willing to sit up straight, take notes, and think. I’ve seen him in action before a group right here at City. He’s a sage on stage—like most good teachers, tends toward the histrionic, but he’s in earnest, got what he’d call “sprezzatura”—you know, with your nautical background, “yare,” takes on some of the biggies like Stephen Greenblatt on Thomas More and Stanley Fish on Milton. Strier is a big one himself: Distinguished Service Professor in the English Department and the Divinity School at Chicago and author/editor of books and articles on Renaissance texts and George Herbert’s poetry. Can that opening! My charade of advising a grad student at CUNY is unsustainable. So why did I start that way? Well, I got your attention, didn’t I? Here you are in the second paragraph already—might as well read it all. And there really is schoolroom aliveness in Strier’s give-and-take between text and footnotes—more about footnotes later. Finally, Freud would suggest my indirect approach reflects uneasiness, questioning whether I was unsure, whether I was in sympathy with what he was doing, whether I should—as they say—recuse myself. Professor Richard Strier is a cultural historian focused on “who in the when.” I’m a superannuated new critic focused on “what’s on the page.” The best use both, oriented toward one or the other critical approach, but always open to the unexpected. In Strier’s book, the surprises are in his revealing readings, not in his historical machine, his predetermined conclusions. When Strier chooses to devote a full chapter to a second-rate Shakespearean play—The Comedy of Errors—because it nicely demonstrates domestic materiality and worldliness in the English Renaissance, I’m put in mind of Horace’s Ars Poetica, in which he advises maintaining proportion between effort and result else we have “the mountain giving birth to a mouse.” Again, when Strier devotes the final chapters to the legalistic tangles of Milton’s writings on the Protestant Church and human will and penance, I note ruefully that he gives short shrift to Paradise Lost (1667), though, in fairness, Paradise Regained (1671) and Samson Agonistes (1671) earlier on were given space and attention. After wallowing through the Puritanical prose, is our reward to be Milton’s cautious suggestion that Luther/Calvin may be in error when they teach that half a world of blameless people are predestined for hell? Are we to tally this as an unrepentant’s refusal to accept humbly the dictates of ecclesiastics? This time, I’m put in mind of James Joyce’s Stephen confiding to a friend: “I’ve lost my faith,” and the friend, “You’ve become a Protestant?” and Stephen, “I’ve lost my faith, not my mind!” So that’s part of what my uneasiness is about. In the rest of the volume, Strier deals with major literary works with rich results, in spite of his history-of-ideas orientation. He outlines the five-fold schema that I am so uneasy about in the first sentences of the “Introduction”: 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…Renaissance period…. The chapters that follow treat, in order, texts that oppose [each of the above]…. That is why these texts are all, as my title suggests “unrepentant.” The texts cover a wide range of the Renaissance. Aside from the three authors in the title, we have Luther, Calvin, Herbert, Ignatius Loyola, Machiavelli, Francois de Sales, Donne, More, Montaigne, Descartes, Erasmus, and throw in these influences or commentators: Aristotle, Plato, St. Augustine and Nietzsche and Burckhardt, all of whom have multiple index citations. In...