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Indecorous Thinking is a study of artifice at its most conspicuous: it argues that early modern writers turned to figures of speech like simile, antithesis, and periphrasis as the instruments of a particular kind of thinking unique to the emergent field of vernacular poesie. The classical ideal of decorum described the absence of visible art as a crucial precondition for the rhetorical act of persuasion, the regulation of civilized communities, and the achievement of beauty. To speak well in early modern England, one spoke as if off-the-cuff. In readings of three major poets—Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Mary Wroth—this book argues that one of early modern literature’s richest contributions to the history of poetics is the idea that open art—artifice that rings out with the bells and whistles of ornamentation—celebrates the craft of poetry even as it expands the range of activities we tend to attribute to poetic form. Against the social and aesthetic demands of sprezzatura and celare artem, artifice at its most conspicuous asserts the value of a poetic style that does not conceal either the time or labor of its making.

Futile Pleasures examines the contradictory role that pleasure played in early modern English writers’ attempts to justify the utility and value of poetry. Drawing on the methodological resources of deconstruction and queer theory, the book offers close readings of works by William Shakespeare, Roger Ascham, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, exploring the ambivalence these writers displayed toward the possibility of poetry’s vain futility. Tracing that ambivalence forward to the modern era, the book also shows how contemporary critics have recapitulated Renaissance humanist ideals about aesthetic value. Against a longstanding tradition that defensively advocates for the redemptive utility of literature, the book both theorizes and performs the pleasures of futility. Without ever losing sight of the costs of those pleasures, the book argues that playing with futility may be one way of moving beyond the impasses that modern humanists, like their early modern counterparts, have always faced.

Death, light, figuration, and, especially, analogical expressions of figuration are the primary subjects of this book. They generate associated interests: the relation of literature and science, the methodology of thought and argument, and the processes of narrative, discovery, and interpretation. Creativity, optics, and rhetoric come into focus as well. Anderson’s book begins as an intellectual process that employs mathematical science, semantics, rhetoric, grammar, and major poems inclusively as a single culture, not as C. P. Snow’s cultural opposites. It explores the figuration of Sin and Death in Spenser, Donne, and Milton, then turns to light because of its inseparability from the figuration of life, death’s other. Accordingly, Anderson examines the history and structure of analogical figuration and the bearing of analogy on light in physics and metaphysics. Analogy, a type of metaphor also called proportion, has always been the connector of the known to the unknown, the sensible to the subsensible and infinite. The perceptual opposites of light and its intermediating forms are likewise focal: blackness, darkness, shade, twilight, and night. Traditionally, light also implies vision and imagination, light being essential to optics, creation, and the figuration of Being. Chapters on Kepler’s studies of light and optics, on Donne’s epic Anniversaries of personal death and cultural loss, and on analogy, night, and light in Paradise Lost conclude the book.

When we think of ruins and literature, we usually think of Romanticism. The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature dislodges this critical commonplace by locating European literature’s fascination with architectural decay in the aesthetic culture from Petrarch to Spenser. The Renaissance was the Ruin-naissance, the birth of the ruin as category of discourse, one that inspired voluminous poetic production. The ruin thus became the material sign—the broken cipher—that marked the rupture between the world of the humanists and their idealized classical past. In the first full-length book to document this cultural phenomenon, Hui explains how the invention of the ruin propelled poets into creating works that were self-aware of their absorption of the past as well as their own survival in the future. To make this case, Hui embraces a philological method, a venerable tradition that has recently undergone a resurgence of interest. Philology is particularly appropriate to the study of ruins, since philology and ruins are both fundamentally about imagining the whole through its parts. Specifically, the book traces three words in three authors as semantic case studies: vestigia in Petrarch, cendre in Du Bellay, and moniment in Spenser. By starting from the smallest unit of linguistic speech—the word—and enlarging our view to its larger cultural context, The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature not only revises some of our most basic ideas about early modern texts and how they came to be, but also offers a new way for understanding the fundamental theme of survival in the classical tradition at large.

Worldmaking takes many forms in early modern literature and thus challenges any single interpretive approach, including historicism. The essays in this collection investigate the material stuff of the world in Spenser, Cary and Marlowe; the sociable bonds of authorship, sexuality and sovereignty in Shakespeare and others; and the universal status of spirit, gender and empire in the worlds of Vaughan, Donne and the dastan (tale) of Chouboli, a Rajasthani princess. Together, these essays make the case that to address what it takes to make a world in the early modern period requires the kinds of thinking exemplified by theory.

This collection of essays argues that contemporary “critical posthumanisms,” even as they distance themselves from particular iconic representations of the Renaissance (e.g. Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man), may in fact be moving ever closer to ideas of “the human” as at once embedded and embodied in, evolving with, and de-centered amid a weird tangle of animals, environments, and vital materiality in works from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. Too often contemporary work in posthumanism presents itself as a rejection of Renaissance humanism when what it rejects is a straw man—albeit a straw Vitruvian Man—that bears little, if any, resemblance to Renaissance humanism qua the skeptical, critical, and irreverent close readings of ancient texts and cultures. Ironically what is being repressed, fantasized, and evaded in these accounts is nothing other than Renaissance humanism itself. Reducing Renaissance humanism to a handful of icons and caricatures risks diminishing its potential theoretical purchase on the past, in addition to the present and future. Renaissance Posthumanism, too, reconsiders traditional languages of humanism and the human but it does so not by nostalgically enshrining or triumphantly superseding humanism’s past but rather by revisiting and interrogating them. Seeking those patterns of thought and practice that allow us to reach beyond the pre- and post- of recent thought, the contributors to this collection focus on moments where Renaissance humanism seems to depart and differ from itself.

The Storm at Sea: Political Aesthetics in the Time of Shakespeare counters a tradition of cultural analysis that judges considerations of aesthetic autonomy in the early modern context to be either anachronistic or an index of political disengagement. The book argues that for a post-theocratic era in which the mise en forme of the social domain itself was for the first time at stake, the problem of the aesthetic lay at the very core of the political; it is precisely through its engagement with the question of aesthetic autonomy that the early modern work most profoundly explores its relation to matters of law, state, sovereignty and political subjectivity. The book forwards a case for the significance of a “creationist” political aesthetic—at once a discrete historical category and a phenomenon that troubles our familiar forms of historical accounting—and suggests that the fate of such an aesthetic is intimately bound up with the emergence of modern conceptions of the political sphere. Storm at Sea moves historically from Leonardo da Vinci to Thomas Hobbes, engaging political thinkers such as Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben, Claude Lefort and Roberto Esposito. It focuses on Shakespeare and English drama, with chapters on Hamlet, Othello, Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, as well as sustained readings of As You Like It, King Lear, Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus.

This book considers melancholy as an “assemblage,” as a network of dynamic, interpretive relationships between persons, bodies, texts, spaces, structures, and things. In doing so, it parts ways with past interpretations of melancholy. Tilting the English Renaissance against the present moment, the book argues that the basic disciplinary tension between medicine and philosophy persists within contemporary debates about emotional embodiment. To make this case, the book binds together the paintings of Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, the drama of William Shakespeare, the prose of Robert Burton, and the poetry of John Milton. Crossing borders and periods, the book combines recent theories that have—until now—been regarded as incongruous by their respective advocates. Asking fundamental questions about how the experience of emotion produces community, the book will be of interest to scholars of early modern literature, psychoanalysis, the affective turn, and continental philosophy.

Hollow Men analyzes texts and art objects from the late 14th to the late 16th centuries to show that Renaissance theories of emulating classical heroes generated a deep skepticism about representation, as these theories forced men to construct a public image that seemed fixed but could adapt to changing circumstances. The book shows that writers and their patrons appropriated objects to create a public image that would be both fixed and adaptable: a paradox deriving from ideals of exemplary imitation, which taught that an educated man must emulate the ancients to present a coherent identity and be memorialized as an example for future generations. Yet Italian intellectuals were increasingly cut off from political power; their classical models (both texts and objects) were broken and unreadable; and men had to adapt to changing political circumstances while avoiding the suspicion of “feminine” changeability. There emerged a growing distrust surrounding claims for the equivalence between exemplary external image and inner state, as self-presentation increasingly resembled deception. Chronologically-arranged analyses show that the Renaissance questioning of “interiority” derived from a visual ideal, the monument that was the basis of teachings about imitation; and that this questioning contributed to a new awareness of representation as representation. Hollow Men also demonstrates that the decline of exemplary pedagogy and the emergence of modern masculine subjectivity were well under way in the mid-15th century (much earlier than their typical 16th-century dating); and that these changes were hastened by the rapid development of the printed image, over the following century.