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Drawing on a variety of psychoanalytic approaches, ten critics engage in exciting discussions of the ways the "inner life" is depicted in the Renaissance and the ways it is shown to interact with the "external" social and economic spheres. Spurred by the rise of capitalism and the nuclear family, Renaissance anxieties over changes in identity emerged in the period's unconscious--or, as Freud would have it, in its literature. Hence, much of Renaissance literature represents themes that have been prominent in the discourse of psychoanalysis: mistaken identity, incest, voyeurism, mourning, and the uncanny. The essays in this volume range from Spenser and Milton to Machiavelli and Ariosto, and focus on the fluidity of gender, the economics of sexual and sibling rivalry, the power of the visual, and the cultural echoes of the uncanny. The discussion of each topic highlights language as the medium of desire, transgression, or oppression. The section "Faking It: Sex, Class, and Gender Mobility" contains essays by Marjorie Garber (Middleton), Natasha Korda (Castiglione), and Valeria Finucci (Ariosto). The contributors to "Ogling: The Circulation of Power" include Harry Berger (Spenser), Lynn Enterline (Petrarch), and Regina Schwartz (Milton). "Loving and Loathing: The Economics of Subjection" includes Juliana Schiesari (Machia-velli) and William Kerrigan (Shakespeare). "Dreaming On: Uncanny Encounters" contains essays by Elizabeth J. Bellamy (Tasso) and David Lee Miller (Jonson).
Dreaming the English Renaissance examines ideas about dreams, actual dreams people had and recorded, and the many ways dreams were used in the culture and politics of the Tutor/Stuart age in order to provide a window into the mental life and the most profound beliefs of people of the time.
Studies on gender and sexuality have proliferated in the last decades, covering a wide spectrum of disciplines. This collection of essays offers a metanarrative of sexuality as it has been recently embedded in the art historical discourse of the European Renaissance. It revisits ‘canonical’ forms of visual culture, such as painting, sculpture and a number of emblematic manuscripts. The contributors focus on one image—either actual or thematic—and examine it against its historiographic assumptions. Through the use of interdisciplinary approaches, the essays propose to unmask the ideology(ies) of representation of sexuality and suggest a richer image of the ever-shifting identities of gender. The collection focuses on the Italian Renaissance, but also includes case studies from Germany and France.
An examination of how bodies and sexualities have been constructed, categorised, represented, diagnosed, experienced and subverted from the fifteenth to the early twenty-first century. It draws attention to continuities in thinking about bodies and sex: concept may have changed, but hey nevertheless draw on older ideas and language.
Contributions from the most influential cultural materialist theorists working on the English Renaissance Work on gender, sexuality and identity is at the heart of current teaching on the Renaissance and in cultural studies Coverage is the entire Renaissance stage, not just Shakespeare
Do angels make love? Will the souls of ordinary people feel sexual pleasure in the next world? Is the aspiration to spiritual salvation helped or hindered by sexual experience? In Heaven and the Flesh Clive Hart and Kay Stevenson explore the opinions of poets and painters on such questions, from the high Renaissance to the birth of romanticism. Hart and Stevenson analyse the work not only of canonical writers and artists, such as Milton and Michelangelo, but also of lesser-known figures such as John Gore and Richard Tompson, and the sometimes anguished speculations of philosophers and theologians. As the evidence of witty pornographic poems and drawings demonstrates, the relationship between sexual desire and spiritual ascension was not always treated with full seriousness. This wide-ranging survey offers sometimes surprising insights into material both familiar and unfamiliar.
The readings gathered here include many rare texts that have not been reprinted for centuries, excerpted from biblical commentary, legal writings, medical and scientific writings, popular encyclopedias, and literature, as well as continental vernacular and Latin sources never before available in English translation. The selections are assembled in ten chapters addressing particular discursive fields - Theology, Law, Medicine, Astrology, Physiognomics, Encyclopedias and Reference Works, Prodigious Monstrosities, Love and Friendship, the Sapphic Renaissance, and Erotica. Each chapter includes a substantial introduction summarizing its topic and its relation to early modern homoeroticism. The volume also poignantly addresses key issues in Renaissance thinking about sexual identity, and newly clarifies central problems and debates in the historiography of same-sex love.
Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry examines the limits of embodiment, knowledge, and representation at a disregarded nexus: the erotic carpe diem poem in early modern England. These macabre seductions offer no compliments or promises, but instead focus on the lovers' anticipated decline, and—quite stunningly given the Reformation context—humanity's relegation not to a Christian afterlife but to a Marvellian 'desert of vast Eternity.' In this way, a poetic trope whose classical form was an expression of pragmatic Epicureanism became, during the religious upheaval of the Reformation, an unlikely but effective vehicle for articulating religious doubt. Its ambitions were thus largely philosophical, and came to incorporate investigations into the nature of matter, time, and poetic representation. Renaissance seduction poets invited their auditors to participate in a dangerous intellectual game, one whose primary interest was expanding the limits of knowledge. The book theorizes how Renaissance lyric's own fragile relationship to materiality and time, and its self-conscious relationship to making, positioned it to grapple with these 'impossible' metaphysical and representational problems. Although attentive to poetics, the book also challenges the commonplace view that the erotic invitation is exclusively a lyrical mode. Carpe diem's revival in post-Reformation Europe portends its radicalization, as debates between man and maid are dramatized in disputes between abstractions like chastity and material facts like death. Offered here is thus a theoretical reconsideration of the generic parameters and aspirations of the carpe diem trope, wherein questions about embodiment and knowledge are also investigations into the potentialities of literary form.
Queering the Renaissance offers a major reassessment of the field of Renaissance studies. Gathering essays by sixteen critics working within the perspective of gay and lesbian studies, this collection redraws the map of sexuality and gender studies in the Renaissance. Taken together, these essays move beyond limiting notions of identity politics by locating historically forms of same-sex desire that are not organized in terms of modern definitions of homosexual and heterosexual. The presence of contemporary history can be felt throughout the volume, beginning with an investigation of the uses of Renaissance precedents in the 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision Bowers v. Hardwick, to a piece on the foundations of 'our' national imaginary, and an afterword that addresses how identity politics has shaped the work of early modern historians. The volume examines canonical and noncanonical texts, including highly coded poems of the fifteenth-century Italian poet Burchiello, a tale from Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron, and Erasmus's letters to a young male acolyte. English texts provide a central focus, including works by Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, Donne, Beaumont and Fletcher, Crashaw, and Dryden. Broad suveys of the complex terrains of friendship and sodomy are explored in one essay, while another offers a cross-cultural reading of the discursive sites of lesbian desire. Contributors. Alan Bray, Marcie Frank, Carla Freccero, Jonathan Goldberg, Janet Halley, Graham Hammill, Margaret Hunt, Donald N. Mager, Jeff Masten, Elizabeth Pittenger, Richard Rambuss, Alan K. Smith, Dorothy Stephens, Forrest Tyler Stevens, Valerie Traub, Michael Warner