M.A.R. Habib

Historical Background

The period beginning around the fourteenth century and extending midway into the seventeenth has conventionally been designated as the Renaissance, referring to a “rebirth” or rediscovery of the values, ethics and styles of classical Greece and Rome. The term was devised by Italian humanists who sought to mark their own period as reaffirming its continuity with the classical humanist heritage after an interlude of over a thousand years, a period of alleged superstition and stagnation known as the Dark Ages and Middle Ages. In this view, the Renaissance overturned the Mediaeval theological world view, replacing it with a more secular and humanist vision, promoting a newly awakened interest in the temporal world both in economic and scientific terms, and according a new importance to the individual — all inspired by a rediscovery of the classics. This view has been somewhat shaken, with even the term “Renaissance” itself becoming suspect and often replaced by the broader and more neutral term “early modern,” which tends to distance itself from the self-images of Renaissance writers.

Historians and scholars in several fields now tend to recognize that many developments in the Renaissance were in fact continuations or modifications of Mediaeval dispositions. For example, much Mediaeval thinking was characterized by a reverence for — and indeed, a knowledge of — the classics; and certain periods, such as the ninth century Carolingian Renaissance and the Renaissance of the twelfth century, were marked by humanistic tendencies. In fact, as was seen in the previous chapter, the very distinction between scholastic and humanistic modes of thought has been challenged, and scholastic thought continued to exert an influence well beyond the Mediaeval period. Moreover, the early modern period’s undoubtedly dazzling achievements in literature, art, science and religion were often unrelated, or only remotely related, to the classical past. Nonetheless, as scholars such as David Norbrook have argued, there may be a case for retaining the label “Renaissance.” The early modern usage of the word, Norbrook points out, was largely restricted to the spheres of literature and painting. It was in the nineteenth century that historians saw culture as “a unified system in which economic, social and political factors all had their influence on the arts.” While such unity was artificial and retrospectively imposed, the idea of the Renaissance may “offer a way of understanding how modernity changed the world.” Images of the Renaissance have of course been forged in conflict with one another: Jacob Burckhardt’s “highly courtly notion” of the Renaissance, as expressed in his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), has been challenged by the more populist notions of scholars such as F.J. Furnivall (1825-1910). And New Critical notions of Renaissance poetry which stress its isolatable formal qualities have been contested by New Historicists, notably Stephen Greenblatt, who have insisted on locating poetry within contexts of social power, and explaining the formation of literary canons with reference to the interests of a social elite.

Indeed, if the early modern period was not a renaissance as such, it certainly bore certain distinctive traits marking it as an era of profound transformation and even revolution. The most dominant trait of this new period has conventionally been identified as “humanism,” a term ultimately deriving from Cicero and used by Italian thinkers and writers to distinguish themselves from the Mediaeval scholastics. The term “humanism” has been very broadly used and cuts across boundaries of political affiliation and class. In general, it implies a world view and a set of values centred around the human rather than the divine, using a self-subsistent definition of human nature (rather than referring this to God), and focusing on human achievements and potential rather than theological doctrines and dilemmas; the term also retained its Ciceronian connection with the liberal arts (one of the original definitions of a humanist was a teacher of the humanities) and in general with secular and independent inquiry in all fields, as opposed to viewing these areas of study as hierarchically bound within a theological framework.

In this broad sense, humanism was indeed characteristic of much Renaissance thought. However, humanism itself was only one manifestation of a more profound shift in sensibility which encompassed other areas. This shift might be aptly characterized as moving from a broadly “other-worldly” disposition — viewing this earthly life as a merely transitory phase, as a preparation for the life hereafter — to a “this-worldly” attitude which saw actions and events in this world as significant in their own right without referring them to any ultimate divine meaning and purpose. This shift from “other-worldliness” to “this-worldliness” both underlies and reflects the major transformations of the early modern period. The most fundamental of these changes were economic and political: the fundamental institutions of the later Middle Ages — the feudal system, the universal authority of the Pope, the Holy Roman Empire, and the system of trade regulated by Mediaeval guilds — were all undermined. As a result of large-scale investment of capital, booming manufacture, and expanding trade and commerce, the focus of economic life increasingly shifted away from the manorial estates of the feudal nobility to the newly emerging cities such as Florence, Milan, Venice and Rome, whose affluence enabled their prominence as centers of cultural efflorescence. This “renaissance” extended to several other European cities such as Paris, London, Antwerp and Augsberg, which also contributed to humanist culture. Many factors contributed to the decline of feudalism: the rise of monarchies and centralized governments; the ability of serfs and villeins (helped by the absence of their warrior overlords during the crusades) to free themselves from the land and to find work in the expanding cities, which were increasingly emancipated from the control of feudal lords. All of these developments went hand in hand with the weakening of the feudal nobility and the rise of an increasingly powerful and rich middle class. The decline of the Holy Roman Empire and the power and prestige of the papacy resulted in the increasing independence of states in Italy and elsewhere. Indeed, our modern conception of the state — fundamental to the social, religious and literary currents of the Renaissance — derives from this period: the rulers of the most powerful Italian states such as Florence, Milan and Venice rejected any religious conception of the state and stressed its independent and secular nature, promoting a new “civic consciousness” as to the responsibility of the citizen, patriotism, and the pursuit of the economic and political interests of the state as an end in itself. Like so many other innovative notions in the Renaissance, this political modernity was born of a return to classical political ideals of civic humanism and devotion to the common welfare.

It was these broad economic and political transformations that enabled the development of other features of the early modern period such as a more this-worldly orientation, the growth of humanism, the development of a secular political philosophy, the beginnings of a systematic examination of the world of nature as well as of the human body and mind. Other characteristics include the increasing importance of vernacular languages (and literatures) as opposed to, and alongside, Latin; a more pronounced focus on style and aesthetics, as opposed to theology or logic. Indeed, most of the literary and artistic accomplishments of this period were achieved by laymen rather than clergy, and the patrons of art, such as the Medici rulers of Florence, were increasingly secular rather than ecclesiastical.

Elsewhere, in Northern and Western Europe, Feudalism underwent a similar decline, giving way before the centralized authority of monarchs and absolute rulers who, with the help of the upwardly moving middle classes, eroded the power of the nobles and of the feudal guilds. The Tudor dynasty was established in England by Henry VII in 1485. The Hundred Years War between France and England (1337-1453) enabled the French monarchs to establish their rule; Louis XI’s kingdom extended over nearly all of France; and Spain was united in 1469 by the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. All of these states experienced a rapid upsurge of national consciousness; only Italy, still torn by factional strife, and Germany, still part of the Holy Roman Empire did not become national states during this period. The Empire itself, however, was virtually a relic by this time, with real power not in the hands of the Emperor but the princes of the various states.

These struggles were decisive both in fostering the growth of humanism and shaping the literature and criticism of the period. With the consolidation of a centralized monarchy, the composition of the aristocracy changed from the landed nobility as a warrior class to a newly rising and expanding court aristocracy. Status and social advancement were no longer determined solely by military power and service or by inheritance of birth and rank; increasingly important were the humanist values of rhetorical skill, literary accomplishment, and various kinds of administrative and ideological service to the court. The circle of court patronage was expanded and the fortunes of major literary figures were indissolubly tied to court politics. The rise of vernacular languages was moulded by poetic, rhetorical and ideological theories which stood in reciprocal relation to the growth of national consciousness. Nearly all of the poets of this era were actively involved in the political process, and formed an important constituent of the _public sphere,_ the arena of public debate and discourse which began to emerge during the later Renaissance. English poets, for example, wrote vehemently in favor of both Royalist and Parliamentary sides during the English Civil War; Milton (1608-1674) was the leading literary advocate of the Puritan Revolution, and his epic Paradise Lost celebrated the Protestant notion of the individual’s moral responsibility, while his Areopagitica (1644) was a passionate defence of free speech and critique of dogmatic traditionalism in the interests of civic humanism.

Intellectual Background

(a) Humanism and the Classics

While classical writers had been influential through much of the Middle Ages, the revival of the classics in the early modern period took an entirely different character and scope. To begin with, in the Middle Ages, scholarship was undertaken largely by the clergy, usually monks, and later by scholars in the Cathedral schools. One of the major persisting endeavors throughout the Middle Ages was to reconcile classical philosophy and literature with the teachings of Christian scripture. The early modern period witnessed the growth of a new secular class of educated people and a more secular employment of the classics in fields such as rhetoric and law. The most distinguished humanists and classicists of this period fostered the revival of classical literary forms in poetry and rhetoric. These figures included Albertino Mussato who is credited with writing the first tragedy of this period; and, even more important, Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) who outlined a curriculum of classical studies, focusing on the study of classical languages and the traditional grammatical requirement of imitating the classical authors. Eloquence, based on a study of classical models, was important for Petrarch, since it inspired people to virtue. Petrarch’s program, based on a combination of moral philosophy and rhetoric, inspired others such as Leonardo Bruni, to formulate curricula for the study of the humanities, deriving in part from the liberal arts curriculum recommended by Cicero and Quintilian.

These new curricula overlapped to some extent with the Mediaeval trivium (rhetoric, grammar, logic) and quadrivium (music, astronomy, algebra, geometry) but laid a renewed emphasis on rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy. Another major difference between Mediaeval and humanist attitudes to the classics was that the latter insisted upon a thorough knowledge of the classical languages, not only Latin but Greek, which began to be studied at the end of the fourteenth century. In the Middle Ages, the classics had been studied largely through Latin translations. Moreover, the humanists attempted to return to the pure Latin of the ancient authors as opposed to the Mediaeval Latin of the Church. The humanists also insisted on the direct study of ancient texts, unencumbered by the constraining framework of Mediaeval glosses and commentaries. Another difference was that in the early modern period, the classical texts were far more widely disseminated, partly for the pedagogical reasons just outlined and partly because of the development of printing. Finally, the monopoly of Latin as the language of learned discourse and literature was undermined, and in the works of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and many humanists, the rules of grammar and composition were adapted to theorize about vernacular tongues. Hence the humanists created a set of techniques and a framework of interpretation for both classical and vernacular texts. In general, the humanists supplanted the Scholastic aversion to poetry and rhetoric with an emphasis upon the moral value of these disciplines and upon worldly achievement in general. David Norbrook has stated that humanism originated in a defence of rhetoric against scholastic philosophy, effectively reviving the “ancient quarrel” between philosophy and rhetoric (PBRV, 8, 53). In this process the humanists reaffirmed both the classical emphasis on style and the logical or rational and rhetorical or persuasive components of literature, thereby combining the disciplines of rhetoric, logic and poetics which the Middle Ages had kept somewhat separate.

These poets not only theorized about the vernacular but wrote in it and cultivated its elegant expression. Petrarch’s friend Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) adapted classical forms to the vernacular, developing literary forms such as the pastoral, idyll and romance. Through his best known work such as the Decameron, Boccaccio provided models of Italian prose which influenced both Italian writers such as Tasso and writers in other countries such as Chaucer. The cultivation of prose — in narratives, epistles and dialogues — was an important achievement of the humanists. A renowned example is Baldassare Castiglione’s treatise entitled The Courtier, a discussion of attitudes toward love, and of the courtly behavior and education appropriate for a gentleman. This text is often seen as an embodiment of Renaissance ideals and had a far-reaching influence throughout Europe. Later Italian writers developed other literary forms: the epic reached its height in the Orlando Furioso of Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533), which departs from the idealistic and moralistic nature of Mediaeval epics. Historiography and political writing also achieved a new level of realism: Machiaevlli wrote a history of Florence that was free of theological explanations and based upon “natural” laws. Machiavelli’s political writings entirely undermined Mediaeval notions of government:in his treatise The Prince (1513), he treated politics as an autonomous domain, free of the incursions of morality or religious doctrine. He saw the state as an independent entity, whose prime goal was the promotion of civic rather than religious virtue, and self-preservation at any cost. An even more important figure in historiography was Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540) whose History of Italy is characterized by realistic, detailed analysis of character, motive and events. Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457) applied critical methods of scholarship and analysis to Biblical texts, and he challenged the authenticity of certain authoritative documents, opening the way for later attacks upon Christian doctrine.

Humanism flourished also in other parts of Europe. The Dutch thinker Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) was the most renowned humanist of his time and his works were widely read. His strong humanistic convictions in reason, naturalism, tolerance, and the inherent goodness of man, led him to oppose dogmatic theology and scholasticism, and to propound instead a rational religion of simple piety based on the example of Christ. His Colloquia (1519), criticizing the abuses of the Catholic Church, has often been viewed as paving the way for the Lutheran Reformation; but Erasmus himself was also opposed to the dogmatism and violence of some of the Lutherans. His most famous work, Encomium moriae (The Praise of Folly, 1509), satirized theological dogmatism and the gullibility of the masses. France also produced notable figures such as Francois Rabelais (1490-1553), whose Gargantua and Pantagruel expounded a naturalistic and secular philosophy glorifying humanity and ridiculing Scholastic theology, Church abuses and all forms of bigotry. In England, the most renowned humanist was Sir Thomas More whose Utopia (1516) was a thinly veiled condemnation of the social and economic defects of his time: religious intolerance, financial greed, the glaring discrepancy between rich and poor, the notions of conquest, imperialism and war. The creation of such fictive worlds, as theorized by writers such as Sidney, allowed a measure of critical and moral distance from political reality. According to Norbrook, such Utopian realms created by the literary imagination were ironically an integral part of the public sphere, facilitating a measure of intellectual independence from the “everyday discourses of public life” (PBRV, 13).

The humanist tradition was richly expressed in the rise of English vernacular literature of this period. Even Chaucer, often treated as a Mediaeval writer, expressed a somewhat secular humanistic vision in his Canterbury Tales, which tends to bypass simple moralism in the interest of broader stylistic ends such as verisimilitude and realistic portrayal of character, situation and motive. English drama achieved unprecedented heights in the work of Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), Ben Jonson ((1573?-1637) and William Shakespeare (1564-1616). Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus expresses an overwhelming craving for experience and a humanistic desire to subjugate the world to human intellection and ingenuity. Shakespeare’s plays expressed not only a profound analysis of human character and emotion but embodied the vast struggle between the values of a declining feudal system and an emerging bourgeois structure of values. As Chris Fitter has shown, the Shakespearian stage illustrates precisely the truth of Norbrook’s claim that Renaissance theatre provided a forum for public dialogue and demystified the rituals of power (PBRV, 24). The rise of national consciousness in many countries during this period was reflected in the growth of vernacular literatures in Italy, England, France, Germany and Spain.

(b) Philosophy and Science

In general, the humanists tended to turn away from Scholastic philosophy with its emphasis upon logic and theology and its Aristotelian basis. Poets such as Sidney and Milton argued, as against Plato (though adducing his own style in support of their claims), for the elevation of poetry above the languages of prose such as philosophy and history. The humanists, concerned more with the material aspects of language, the achievement of eloquence and with the ennobling, moral impact of discourse, turned to classical rhetoricians such as Cicero, and promoted the revival of other ancient philosophies such as Platonism. In fact, the major philosophers of this period, such as Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) and Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) were neo-Platonists, affiliated with the Platonic Academy in Florence founded by Cosimo de’ Medici. Other thinkers revived the ancient movements of Stoicism, Epicureanism and Scepticism. They included Lorenzo Valla who, in addition to his historical writing, wrote a Dialogue of Free Will and a sympathetic examination of Epicurean ethics; and of course the political philosopher Machiavelli who, also informed by the philosophy of Epicurus, condemned asceticism and other-worldliness. In France, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) expounded a philosophy of scepticism which held that the deliverances of the senses are often deceptive and that even reason can misguide us. We should recognize, he held, that there is no absolute truth, and it is the humble acknowledgment of uncertainty alone that can free us from superstition and bigotry. Like the later sceptical thinker David Hume, Montaigne saw religious, philosophical and moral systems as ultimately the product of custom. The most renowned English philosopher of this period was Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), whose most significant contributions were contained in his Novum Organon and The Advancement of Learning. Bacon was the forerunner of the empiricist tradition in Britain, urging the use of the inductive method and direct observation as against scholastic reliance upon authority, faith and deductive reasoning.

There can be no doubt that a major distinction between the Mediaeval and early modern periods lies in a momentous transformation in scientific outlook. Mediaeval cosmology and scholastic theology were premised on a Ptolemaic geocentric view of the earth as being at the centre of the universe, surrounded by a series of seven concentric spheres (the orbits of the planets), beyond which was the Empyrean and the throne of God, who was the “unmoved Mover” and the “First Cause” of all things. The universe was thought to be composed of four elements, earth, air, fire and water combined in varying proportions; and human beings were constituted by four “humors.” The earth, as in Dante’s Divine Comedy, was thought to be populated only in its Northern hemisphere which was composed of Asia, Africa and Europe. This world-view, based largely on the physics and metaphysics of Aristotle, was shattered in the early modern era by the heliocentric theory of Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543), whose truth was demonstrated by Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), and thus paved the way for modern mechanistic (rather than spiritual) conceptions of the universe. Even much of this humanistic scientific revolution returned to neglected ancient sources in Greek science and astronomy, such as the third century B.C. Hellenistic astronomer Aristarchus who had first propounded a heliocentric theory. Great advances were made also in mathematical theory and in medicine; Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) produced a description of the human body based on careful observation. A particularly significant invention of this time was that of printing, developed in Germany by Johannes Gutenberg and spreading quickly through Europe. Needless to say, the transformations engendered in every area of communication were profound and far-reaching, enabling vast and rapid dissemination not only of information but of all forms of ideology.

(c) Religion

One of the most profound and large scale transformations in the early modern period was the Protestant Reformation, erupting in 1517 and resulting in a major schism in the Christian world. Most of Northern Europe broke away from Roman Catholicism and the authority of the Pope. There also occurred the Catholic Reformation (sometimes known as the Counter-Reformation) which reached its most fervent intensity in the mid-sixteenth century, changing the shape of Catholicism considerably from its Mediaeval character. Indeed, these Reformations embodied a sharper break from Mediaeval thinking and institutions than many of the changes wrought by the other currents of humanism. National consciousness played an even more integral role in the Reformation since the Protestant cause was affiliated with reaction against a system of ecclesiastical control at whose apex sat the Pope.

While it may have been immediately incited by abuses within the Catholic Church — such as the amassing of wealth for private self-interests, the sale of indulgences and the veneration of material objects as holy relics — the Protestant Reformation was directed in essence against some of the cardinal tenets of Mediaeval theology, such as its theory of the sacraments, its elaborate ecclesiastical hierarchy of intermediation between God and human beings, and its insistence that religious faith must be complemented by good deeds. As seen earlier, Mediaeval theology had been broadly propagated through two systems: the theology of the early Middle Ages had been based on the teachings of St. Augustine that man is fallen (through original sin), his will is depraved, and that only those whom God has so predestined can attain eternal salvation. This largely fatalistic system, whereby man was entirely and mysteriously dependent on God was largely supplanted in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by the theologies of Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas, which acknowledged man’s free will, but urged that he needed divine grace to attain salvation. Such grace was furnished to man through the sacraments, such as baptism, penance and the eucharist or mass. It was the ecclesiastical hierarchy, tracing its authority all the way through the Pope to the apostle Peter, which had the power to administer these sacraments and hence to gain access to divine grace.

The Protestant Reformers such as Martin Luther reacted against this complex system of intermediation between God and man, advocating a return to the actual doctrines of the Scriptures and the writings of the Church Fathers such as Augustine. They rejected the theory of the priesthood as well as worship of the Virgin, the intermediation of the saints, and the reverence for sacred relics. In general, they returned to the Augustinian visions of original sin, the depraved state of man’s will and, in the case of Calvinism, a strong belief in predestination. The causes of the Protestant Reformation were multifold and complex. The papacy’s decline in power and prestige reached a nadir in the “Great Schism,” a division into two conflicting claims to the papacy, contested by Popes in Rome and Avignon. Many movements had helped prepare the way for the Reformation, including mystics and the fourteenth century English reformer John Wyclif, who attacked the abuses of the Catholic Church. Many of the humanist thinkers mentioned earlier, such as Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, had contributed to a renaissance in religion, associated with the “Brethren of Common Life,” a group of laymen who established schools in Germany and the Low Countries. They professed a religion of simple piety based on the model of Christ, as expressed in Thomas a Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ. This book enjoyed a wide readership, and inspired Ignatius of Loyola to found the Society of Jesus. In the writings of these thinkers, known as Christian humanists, Christianity was freed from its superstitious and ritualistic elements, the absolute authority of the Pope was rejected, and the need for a rational and reasonable faith was urged. The growth of national consciousness, affiliated with the increasing power of absolute rulers, was another factor. Perhaps the most fundamental causes were economic: not merely the desire of rulers to appropriate Church wealth but more significantly the growth and increasing power and wealth of the middle class, whose commercial interests clashed with both feudalism and the ideals of Catholic Christianity, which, as in the writings of Aquinas, condemned profit-making and usury.

Martin Luther effectively initiated the Reformation in 1517 by drawing up ninety five theses against indulgences and nailing them to the door of the Church in Wittenberg. In his published writings, he called upon the German princes to reform the Church themselves, independently of the Pope. He rejected the Roman Catholic interpretation of the Eucharist as well as the notion that the Church held supremacy over the State. His central doctrine was “justification by faith:” man’s sins are remitted and his salvation achieved through faith alone, not through good works. In effect, Luther emphasized the primacy of individual conscience, and the directness of man’s relation with God, unmediated by priests, saints, relics or pilgrimages to shrines. Luther’s views were denounced as heretical and in 1521 he was excommunicated. Germany was swept by a series of uprisings culminating in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1524-1525. A Protestant Revolution in Switzerland was incited by Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) and the Frenchman John Calvin (1509-1564); the latter strongly reaffirmed the Augustinian doctrine of predestination, whereby God has already predestined his elect for salvation, and the remainder to damnation. However, rather than this doctrine fostering an indifference to life on earth, Calvin taught that, while none can know whether he is of the elect or damned, a “sign” of election is a life of piety, good works and abstinence. Ironically, as Max Weber was to argue, the influence of Calvin’s world view and the “Protestant ethic” — which could be used to sanction the worldly activities of disciplined trading and commerce — played an integral role in the rise of capitalism. Indeed, Calvinism spread in communities and countries where the new capitalist ethic was growing, taking root among the English Puritans, the Scottish Presbyterians, the French Huguenots and the Church in Holland.

The Catholic Reformation, which was to some degree independent of the Protestant Revolution, resulted eventually in a redefinition of Catholic doctrines at the Council of Trent (1545-1563), convened by Pope Paul III. The doctrines challenged by the Protestants were reaffirmed: the necessity for good works to attain salvation; the theory of the sacraments as the only means of attaining divine grace; papal supremacy over the entire ecclesiastical system; and the Bible and the teachings of the apostles were accorded equal authority. A large part of the work of the Catholic Reformation was accomplished by the Jesuits, members of the Society of Jesus founded by Ignatius of Loyola in 1534, and operating through missionary activities, colleges and seminaries.

These momentous religious transformations induced a vast schism in the Christian world: Northern Germany and Scandanavia became Lutheran; England adopted a compromise, integrating Catholic doctrine with allegiance to the English Crown; Calvinism held sway in Scotland, Holland and French Switzerland. The countries still expressing allegiance to the Pope now numbered only Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Ireland and Southern Germany. The Protestant Reformation promoted not only individualism but nationalism (as coextensive with independence from the Church at Rome), increased sanction for bourgeois thought and practice, as well as a broader education accessible to more of the masses. Many of the values of Protestantism and humanism overlapped or reinforced each other: these included self-discipline, industry and intellectual achievement.

(d) Literary Criticism

Just as many of our own institutions are descended from the early modern period, much of our own literary criticism, and indeed the very notion of criticism as a relatively autonomous domain, derive from this era. In particular, the rise of the independent state and of a liberal bourgeoisie enabled the pervasive growth of humanist culture and indeed of national sentiment; the literature and criticism of the period tends to reflect civic values, a sense of national identity, and a sense of place in history, especially as gauged in relation to the classics. The technology of the period, such as the development and dissemination of printing, transformed the conditions of reading, facilitating the process of editing (of especially classical texts), and vastly extending the sphere of the reading public. Some of the innovative characteristics of Renaissance literary criticism, as Glyn P. Norton has noted, include reappraisals of the nature and function of language, moving away from the scholastic fourfold allegorical structure — grounded on a literal, referential, view of meaning — to a view of language as dialogic and as subject to historical evolution. Such a shift entailed new approaches to reading, interpretation, and an increasing recognition that all literary criticism is intrinsically tied to specific social contexts.2

It is clear also that the general transformation in Europe from feudal power to the absolutist state engendered profound changes in the conditions of production of literature and criticism. Scholars such as Robert Matz have argued that, whereas a number of different forms of power — economic, social and judicial — were merged in the authority of the feudal lord, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed an increasing separation of these spheres. An important literary and literary-critical consequence was that the artist exercised a greater autonomy, in a number of ways: his support came less from “personal patronage” and more from the “anonymous market;” there was an increasing “separation of art from the church and the sacred;” and, perhaps above all, the emergence of the absolutist state as “a locus of authority to some degree distinct from and opposed to that of the feudal lord…this separation created the opportunity for the social assertion of secular-bourgeois intellectuals who gained power within the expanding bureaucratic state and whose identity lay in their humanist language skills and disciplined conduct rather than warrior function or traditional landed status.” These cultural transformations, which wore the countenance of humanism, were associated not only with the emerging bourgeoisie but with the transformation of the aristocracy itself from a “warrior elite into a civil elite.”3 Matz argues that this transformation generated different views of appropriate aristocratic conduct, and a struggle within factions of the aristocracy itself, which were both reflected in, and shaped, some of the major defences and definitions of poetry during this period.

In our own day, and especially in Western culture, where poetry and good literature have been marginalized, it is easy to forget how deeply poetry and literary criticism were embroiled in the political process during the Renaissance. In a number of groundbreaking studies, David Norbrook has extrapolated Jurgen Habermas’ notion of “bourgeois public sphere, a realm of debate in which citizens could participate as equals, independently of pressure from monopolies of power.” Habermas saw this public sphere as emerging fully around 1695. Norbrook traces its emergence somewhat earlier on the English scene, attributing its growth to a number of factors such as an educational revolution, the Reformers’ campaign for widely available public education, relaxed censorship of Protestant writings, the rise of a literary market which allowed greater independence from court patronage, increased circulation of newspapers and the size of the electorate in public life, and of course the growth of a wider reading public (PBRV, 18, 24, 28, 32). The important point made by Norbrook is the poet’s involvement in this sphere: the poet was a public figure, and all of the English Renaissance poets “tried to influence public affairs through their writings.”4 After the rise of monarchies and the decline of the feudal nobility, many poets could entertain career prospects only in serving the Crown. While this of course entailed compromise with courtly discourse, the expansion of the public sphere and the other factors mentioned above enabled the poet to create fictive and Utopian worlds, to mould the image of public events (as in Marvell’s Horatian Ode), and to assert some degree of individualism. Moreover, textual criticism was charged with a potent political potential to demystify the power and language of corrupt institutions: the exposure by humanist scholarship of the “Donation of Constantine” as a forgery helped undermine the power of the papacy, and the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages shifted the privilege of interpretative authority away from the clergy to the individual reader. In such a climate, poets and critics inevitably placed emphasis on the practical and social functions of poetry and its dependence on rhetorical strategies (PBRV, 9, 11, 13-15).

Indeed, much Renaissance criticism was forged in the struggle to defend poetry and literature from charges — brought within both clerical and secular circles — of immorality, triviality and irrelevance to practical and political life. The types of criticism proliferating in the early modern period also included a large body of humanist commentary and scholarship on classical texts. The most influential classical treatises during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Ars Poetica. A third important body of criticism in this period is comprised of commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics and debates between the relative virtues of the Aristotelian and Horatian texts as well as attempts to harmonize their insights. Alongside Aristotle and Horace, the influential rhetorical voices of Cicero and Quintilian were recovered in the early fifteenth century: Renaissance critics tended to adapt, and even distort, these voices to their own needs.

Almost all of these defences, commentaries and debates concern a number of fundamental notions: imitation (of both the external world and of the tradition of classical authors), which Glyn Norton characterizes as “arguably the predominant poetic issue of the entire period” (CHCL, V. III, 4); the truth-value and didactic role of literature; the classical “unities”; the notion of verisimilitude; the use of the vernacular; the definition of poetic genres such as narrative and drama; the invention of new, mixed genres such as the romantic epic and the tragicomedy; the use of rhyme in poetry; the relative values of quantitative and qualitative verse; and the place of literature and poetry in relation to other disciplines such as moral philosophy and history.