READING THE RENAISSANCE
Autumn Term Renaissance MA Core Course, 2013
This module will introduce you to a broad range of texts from this crucial period, and expand
your sense of what constituted the English Renaissance, as well as the problems and limitations
of precisely this concept. Each seminar focusses upon a text or cluster of texts, but also
addresses methodologies, scholarly traditions, and practical techniques for undertaking research
in the early modern period: tools which will be crucial to your dissertation and to your approach
to other modules.
The descriptions below suggest core reading for each seminar; you are welcome to read widely
beyond this list, and all tutors will be happy to make additional suggestions and discuss your
findings. Key texts will be made available electronically wherever possible. Information about
assessment and the structure of the course is available in the Graduate Handbook.
Module Convenor: Richard Rowland (richard.rowland@york.ac.uk)
Week 2: Rhetoric and Humanism
Kevin Killeen
This seminar will consider the uses of and the prestige of rhetoric in the early modern era.
Focusing in particular on ‘imitation’ as a rhetorical and pedagogic tool, the session will consider
what kind of aesthetic underlay the praise of imitation. Given that almost every post-romantic
view of creativity extols the notion of originality and the expression of the self in literature, what
did the Renaissance have in mind when it so relentlessly urged imitative techniques? The
seminar will consider both literary and historical writings of the era to explore these themes. It
will go on to think in wider terms about the role of rhetoric in relation to ideas of duplicity and
sexuality, looking at the ways in which a number of poems deploy imitation and rhetoric and
their aims in doing so.
Texts for Discussion:
Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander (available in Henry Woudhuysen and David Norbrook
(eds), The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, pp. 266-290). A selection of rhetorical theory
(including Ascham, Bacon, and Jonson) to be distributed by tutor.
Some Background Reading:
Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric
Madhavi Menon, Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama, Heinrich F.
Plett, Rhetoric and Renaissance culture
Peter Mack, Elizabethan rhetoric: theory and practice
Thomas M.Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and discovery in Renaissance Poetry
Timothy Hampton, Writing from history; the rhetoric of exemplarity
Brian Vickers (ed), English Renaissance Literary Criticism
Week 3: The Reception of Antiquity in the Renaissance
Charles Martindale
This seminar will look back to week 2 on humanism and the imitation of classical models, and
forwards to future sessions, particularly week 7, on the idea of the Renaissance. We will look in
particular at the entailments of periodization ('antiquity', 'medieval', 'Renaissance'), and at various
models of 'reception' (including imitation) and their accounts of, and assumptions about, how
texts mean. We will analyse a couple of short poems. We will conclude by looking at how
antiquity, and particularly Rome, is represented in the period, taking one of Shakespeare's
'Roman plays' as our text for discussion. Please make sure you have read at least the starred items
below.
texts for discussion
Jonson, Epigram 45 'On My First Son'*
Milton, Sonnet 20 to Lawrence 'Lawrence of virtuous father virtuous son'*
Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, first published in 1873 as Studies in the
History of the Renaissance, subsequently revised - especially 'Preface' (with opening page of 'Two
Early French Stories'), 'Pico della Mirandola', 'Winckelmann'
Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (to be read with a good commentary, e.g. Penguin, Arden,
Oxford, or Cambridge)*
preliminary reading
Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author' (1968), often reprinted*
Colin Burrow, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity, OUP 2013 (just published so not in the Library,
but now the indispensable first port of call on this topic, available in an affordable paperback)
T. S. Eliot, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' (1918), Eliot's most famous essay, often
reprinted*
R. C. Holub, 'Reception Theory: School of Constance', in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
vol 8, ed. R. Selden, CUP 1995, pp. 319-46
Charles Martindale, 'Reception', in A Companion to the Classical Tradition, ed. Craig Kallendorf,
Blackwell 2007, pp. 297-311*
John W. Velz, 'The Ancient World in Shakespeare: Authenticity or Anachronism? A Retrospect',
Shakespeare Survey 31 (1978), pp. 1-12
Week 4: The Reformation and the History of the Book
Brian Cummings
This seminar will constitute an introduction to the controversies of early modern religion
combined with a practical initiation in the history of printed books in England. The two issues
are inextricably connected. According to John Foxe, without the printed book, there could be no
Reformation; while in reverse, it is an observable fact that more than two thirds of the
production of books in the first hundred years of print is concerned with religion and its
conflicts. We will examine one of the first and most dramatic of these literary debates, between
Thomas More and William Tyndale, which ended in the death of both participants at the
instigation of Henry VIII, within a year of each other. We will also look at the representation of
these protagonists in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.
This session will take place in York Minster Library. During the seminar we will be examining
the following early printed books:
William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man [1528] in a copy of 1548
Thomas More, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies [1529] in The English Workes (1557)
John Bale, Illustrium maioris Britanniae scriptorum (1548)
John Foxe, Actes and Monuments [1563] in a copy of the 6th and 7th editions
Other books will be consulted using EEBO:
W. Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528)
T. More, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529)
W. Tyndale, Answer to More (1530)
A. Askew, The Examinations (1546)
[all of these texts in EEBO; consult also modern editions, esp. The Complete Works of
Thomas More, vol. 6, and Askew, ed. E. Beilin]
M. Roper, letter to A. Allington, in English Workes, or in More, Correspondence, ed. Rogers, No.206
If we have time, we will look at accounts of the deaths of Bilney, Tyndale, and Askew in Foxe,
Actes and Monuments (1570) [in EEBO] and of More in W. Roper’s and N. Harpsfield’s Life of
More.
Secondary reading:
J. Guy, The Public Career of Sir Thomas More (1981), ch.8
G. Elton, Policy and Police (1972), ch 5, 6 and 9
A. Fox, Thomas More: History and Providence (1982), ch.4-6
R. Marius, Thomas More (1985), chs 25-9
D. Daniell, William Tyndale (1994)
B. Gregory, Salvation at Stake (1998)
B. Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation (2002), ch.5
Week 5: Editing
Richard Rowland
This seminar will explore the kinds of choices editors have to make when editing early modern
texts. We will examine issues such as punctuation, spelling, and the wider issues of what
interpretative work an editor does in choosing particular styles of presentation. There will be
some practical exercises in which you will be asked to make – and explain – editorial decisions of
your own.
Required Reading:
Extracts from Ewan Fernie et al (eds,) Reconceiving the Renaissance.
D. C. Greetham, Textual Scholarship (chapter 9, ‘Scholarly Editing).
Extracts from Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance.
W. Speed Hill, ‘Editing Nondramatic Texts of the English Renaissance: A Field Guide with
Illustrations’.
Week 6: Reading Week
Week 7: Thinking with Interdisciplinarity
Brian Cummings
The Renaissance is an idea that is less than a hundred and fifty years old but has had a pervasive
influence in the formation of cultural history past and present, west and east, high and low. It is
poised around a notion of cultural change which is nonetheless notoriously difficult to date,
around a geographical exclusivity which is nonetheless assumed to be of universal significance,
and around an idea of artistic purity which is nonetheless bound up with the central processes of
political power and patronage. This week’s topic is both an introduction to the ideas and myths
of the Renaissance and also an opportunity to consider the practice, place and value of cultural
history as an inter-disciplinary study.
Holbein’s The Ambassadors, now in the National Gallery, is one of the most familiar paintings of
the Renaissance , but it, too, has been known to the general public for only just over a hundred
years. Its subject is both precise and highly mysterious: two French gentlemen, one courtly, one a
bishop, stand squarely before the viewer. Behind them is a table on two levels, which contains a
series of objects which for us sum up the age of intellectual discovery and cultural change:
mathematical instruments, astronomical aids, globes, books. At their feet, in an extravagant trick
of perspective, is a skull.
In this class, we will discuss what the painting means. This will involve some detective work. I
would like each member of the group to undertake one aspect each of this detective work: to
find out what the occasion of the painting was, who the artist was, and who commissioned the
painting; who the human figures are in the double portrait; what the scientific objects are and
what they might mean; what the books and musical instruments are doing there; and finally what
the skull means (and perhaps also the crucifix, which is half hiding behind a curtain).
In the process, we will also discuss the extraordinary place the painting has had in the formation
of Renaissance cultural history. Two interpretations will be central to us: those of Stephen
Greenblatt, in his seminal Renaissance Self-Fashioning, and Lisa Jardine, in Worldly Goods. We will
also discuss the psychoanalytic reading of Jacques Lacan; and at the other end of the spectrum,
the careful scholarly study of the painting by art historians such as Susan Foister.
What I also hope will be central to our discussion is what we think the study of the past means
to us, how and why we do it, and what we think it means to get it right (or even wrong).
Preliminary reading:
Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors
S. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980)
L. Jardine, Worldly Goods (1996)
S. Foister, ed., Holbein’s Ambassadors: Making and Meaning (1997)
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1994)
K. Bomford, ‘Friendship and immortality: Holbein's Ambassadors revisited’ Renaissance Studies,
18 /4 (2004), 544–581
D. Thornton, The scholar in his study : ownership and experience in Renaissance Italy (1997)
www.nationalgallery.org.uk/. ../june/feature6.htm
Week 8: Page and Stage
Richard Rowland
This seminar will explore the relationship between early modern dramatic texts and the ways in
which they were – and may be in the future – realized in performance. We shall look at how
editorial decisions can determine staged interpretations, and at the range of features beyond the
textual that governed the composition and reception of a Renaissance play.
Required Reading:
Introduction, Lukas Erne & M.J. Kidnie (eds.), Textual Performances.
Extracts from Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist.
Extracts from Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England.
Extracts from Simon Palfrey & Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts.
Week 9: Body, Soul, and Spirit
Freya Sierhuis
This seminar combines perspectives from intellectual history and the history of philosophy to
approach one of the most fascinating problems in early modern literature: the passions and the
connection between the body and the mind. Until the late-seventeenth century, early modern
people understood the human person as a compound being, made up of a mortal body, an
immortal soul and a complex network of subtle bodies or ‘spirits’ that mediated between the
two. Within this framework, the passions (roughly comparable to what we would call emotions),
generated in the soul, as well as operating on the body, fulfilled a crucial role as boundary
patrollers, connecting our bodies to our minds, and our minds to the outside world. Such ideas
had important implications for early modern understanding of identity, both in terms of what it
is like to inhabit a body, and what it is like to be or have a self, which we will discover to be
radically different from our modern beliefs.
In this seminar, we will study the philosophical, theological and medical contexts of these ideas
in order to see how they shaped early modern thinking on topics such as melancholy and lovesickness, witchcraft and the immortality of the soul. We will look at the way these ideas figure in
the second book of Spenser’s Faerie Queene and in Milton’sParadise Lost. We conclude by looking
at the work of John Donne, asking ourselves how recurrent questions about embodiment and
the relation between body and soul shape Donne’s self-understanding as a writer and as a
devotional subject.
Texts for Discussion:
John Donne, Songs and Sonnets and Deaths’ Duel in John Donne, The Major Works ed. John Carey,
Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford OUP, 1990)
Susan James, ‘Reason, the Passions and the Good Life’ in: The Cambridge Handbook ofSeventeenth
Century Philosophy, ed. Daniel Garber & Michael Ayers,vol II (Cambridge: CUP, 1998) pp.
Richard Serjeantson, ‘The Soul’ in:The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Early ModernEurope, ed.
Desmond M. Clarke & Catherine Wilson (Oxford: OUP, 2011) pp. 119-141.
Ramie Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)
Some further reading:
Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton (Harlow: Longman, 2007) Book III
Brian Cummings, ‘Soft Selves: Adam & Eve and the Art of Embodiment, Dürer to Milton’ in:
Brian Cummings, Mortal Thoughts, Religion, Secularity & Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern
Culture (Oxford: OUP, 2013) pp. 278-326
Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions. The Rise of a Secular Psychology Category (Cambridge: CUP
2006)
Gail Paster et al (eds) Reading the Early Modern Passions. Essays in the Cultural History of the Emotions
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)
Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser,
Shakespeare, Herbert and Milton (Cambridge, CUP, 1999)
Christopher Tilmouth, Passions Triumph over Reason. A History of the Moral Imagination from Spenser to
Rochester (Oxford: OUP, 2007)
Week 10: The Political Bible
Kevin Killeen
This session will attend to the pervasive presence of the Bible in all aspects of early modern
thought, that its influence was by no means confined to what we might suppose the remit of
‘religion’ to be. It will also look at how pliable the scriptures were deemed, and how writers of
every political stripe made use of its exemplary tales and its many interpretative possibilities. For
all that the post-reformation world is associated with its literal interpretation of the Bible, the
scope of the literal did not equate with the mere lexical shell of the text, as later fundamentalisms
came to see it. On the contrary, the scriptures were seen as the generative motor of early modern
thought, and this class will explore this via some of the poetic transpositions of the biblical to
early modern circumstances. We will look at John Milton’s Samson Agonistes, John Dryden’s
Absalom and Achitophel, alongside manuscript poetry by Anne Southwell and Mary Roper.
Required Reading
John Milton, Samson Agonistes (pdf)
John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (pdf)
Manuscript poetry by Anne Southwell and Mary Roper (pdf)
Recommended reading
Philip Almond, Adam and Eve in Seventeenth Century Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999.
Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge, 2004)
Hannibal Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2013)
Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution (Penguin, 1993)
Carol V. Kaske, Spenser and biblical poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999)
Kate Narveson, Bible Readers and Lay Writers: Gender and Self-definition in an Emergent Writing
Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2012;
Michele Osherow, Biblical Women's Voices in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate Press,
2009).
John Reedy, ‘John Dryden’ in Rebecca Lemon, et al., The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English
Literature. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) pp. 297-309
Richard Serjeantson, ‘Samson Agonistes and “Single Rebellion”’, in The Oxford Handbook of Milton,
ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 613–31.
Debora Kuller Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: scholarship, sacrifice, and subjectivity (Berkeley : University
of California Press, 1994)
Naomi Tadmor, The Social Universe of the English Bible: Scripture, Society and Culture in Early Modern
England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.